INTERVIEW: Vikki Thorn launches solo career as ThornBird and releases self-titled debut album: "I'm not used to being a solo artist...I thought it would come naturally and it didn't"

Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Toni Wilkinson

Vikki Thorn is one of Australia’s most accomplished and successful musicians, and today she launches a new chapter in her illustrious career with a new stage name - ThornBird - and the release of her self-titled debut album.

As a founding member of folk-rock trio The Waifs, Thorn was part of one of the most successful bands in Australia in the early 2000s. Forming in 1992 originally as the Colours, the band released their debut album in 1996 and made a major breakthrough in 2003 when their fourth album Up All Night peaked at number three on the Australian music charts. Four consecutive top 5 albums, three ARIA Awards, and performing as a support act for Bob Dylan on his 2003 Australian and North American tour followed, culminating with their 2017 album Ironbark peaking at number 1.

With 30 years experience under her belt, and a collection of unrecorded songs “sitting around in a box [and] unlabelled voice memos”, Thorn decided now was the time to find a new project to fully realise these songs. “I wanted to make an album that has its own sway and swagger, untethered from a musical past that was defined by a couple of hippy kids traveling in a camper van and went on to have a hit song and win a couple of ARIAs,” she says.

The album is a remarkable collection of music. Produced by Thorn and Dan Carroll, it has a soundscape that will be familiar in parts to fans of The Waifs but also casts its net wide to encompass a number of genres. Opening track ‘That Kinda Man’ is a dirty blues track which Thorn says is not ‘nice or popular’, while album highlight ‘All The Things’ is an addictive, slinky track that trades on country with hints of 1970s pop-rock. ‘Bullets and Heartache’ is a funky rock track, ‘Calling All Cowgirls’ dials the mood back to stripped back balladry perfection, and ‘Utah Skyline’ dips into breezy pop.

ThornBird is shaping up to be one of the most accomplished and intriguing era of Thorn’s career. Her music is warm, relatable and all-encompassing, making you want to revisit it over and over again. We recently caught up with her to chat more about her career and the creation of the album.

Hi Vikki, so lovely to talk to you today. Your debut solo album ThornBird is out today and what a glorious creature it is, congratulations. This is obviously a different ballgame for you because it is your first solo album. Can you talk me through a little bit about what you wanted to do going into this album?
It was an idea that I've had for a long time. The Waifs have been an all encompassing career, which has been great, but in the back of my mind, outside of The Waifs, I was writing a lot of songs that spoke more than just my own personal story. Over 10 years or so you have this collection of songs and you want to give them voice, and send them out into the world somehow. When you're a musician and an artist, it doesn't seem enough sometimes to just leave them in the lounge room on scraps of paper. The goal was just to get them down, just to do something where I was at the helm and directing a particular sound or a song in the way that I wanted to, without having to bounce ideas off people all the time.

Do you find the confidence to do that came from your background of being in a very successful group and having that support network around you?
Actually, it was the opposite. Yes, initially, having a measure of success behind you give some confidence that people enjoy hearing what you have to say. But when I got in the studio, and started recording those songs, I wasn't quite as confident as I thought, because I was used to having other people around me to bounce ideas off. And not having that support network actually in the studio, and in the creation of the album, it threw me a little bit. So I thought, ‘okay, it really is me here, what do I want this to sound like? What do I want to say?’ I had to dig a little deeper and go in a little blindly in some places and just go, ‘okay, focus on what you feel, focus on the song’ and coax myself through.

That’s incredible and I'm pleased to hear it, because a lot of people are always like, ‘if you've had that career before, you should be fine’, but have never thought of reversing that because there's that added pressure as well.
Yeah, I wasn't used to being a solo artist. That was something I thought would come naturally, and it didn't, and that surprised me and threw me a little bit, particularly because I've worked with Donna and Josh and Ben and Dave for almost 30 years. There's so much that’s just intuitive about that. So walking into the studio with a group of people I don't know very well, and who don't know me very well, with the exception of Ben Franz who's also in The Waifs, I thought, ‘I have to step up and be a leader in this situation because they're here to serve my material and my songs and they're looking to me for direction’. It was a process I had to go through to shut down some of the insecurities that rose up.

You recorded most of the record live, can you talk me through that, and your decision to do that?
I just don't know how else to record. There's particular artists that are visionary, and they have a very clear idea of what they want the end product to sound like and I'm supposing in that process they build in layers in a studio, but that's never been my experience as an artist. First and foremost, I see myself as a vocalist and a live performer, and so when I go into a studio I am trying to replicate what might happen live. There's something in that that excites me and I like to listen back to the essence of a live performance. That was the other thing about recording this album is that I learned there’s so much layering you can do to colour a recording that you can't in a live setting. And that was really through working with Dan Carroll who brought that element. We'd record the songs live and then I'd leave the studio and while I was gone he’d add some piano and trumpet and other things while I wasn't there! I realised now that there's a whole new level of artistry you can explore in a studio that I'm not as familiar with doing. My comfort zone is to go in, write a song, and then try and capture the essence of that song in the moment. About half of these songs were live vocals, but a few of them I went back in the studio to record just the vocal tracks on without the band. And that again was, surprisingly, very challenging. Not having the band there with me, playing live and singing to a track was difficult.

I must say that you doing what you know, and what you feel comfortable with, but also allowing people to add that expertise on something that's very personal, is probably what makes the album's such a good standalone album. It's quite eclectic, while still being very much yours. One of my favourite tracks on there is ‘Big Girl Pants’, the intro to that alone is so good. It's such a beautiful fun and stompy and lovely song, can you talk me through this one? Because it's just great.
It started out as a mantra for myself. I'd moved my family out to Australia [after living in Utah, USA for 12 years] and the pandemic happened and the world was changing, and I really wasn't holding up emotionally as well as I needed to for my family and just to function well. A good friend of mine said, ‘you just have to pull on your big girl pants and get through the day’. And sometimes it's just a phrase like that hits you like a punch in the gut, and it struck me in that moment she’s so right, this is so simple. You’ve just got to hold your head up and walk on through and carry it. Know that you can and tell yourself you can. This phrase just kept going over and over in my head. I had fun writing the song, putting it a literal sense, you know, get this pair of pants, stretch them, hang them up, wash them and squeeze into them. It's funny to me personally, because I'd put on some weight, and actually none of my pants were fitting me! I initially thought I would have a bunch of women singing this with me, but when we got in the studio the dichotomy of having this male chorus line, singing that phrase to me, I loved it. I got a lot of enjoyment out of having the boys sing that and it's a lot of fun to play on stage.

I was gonna say there was something very Leonard Cohen-esque about it, just having that voice ‘pulling on my big girl pants’. With regards to bringing all the women in you also have the absolutely deliciously cinematic ‘Calling All Cowgirls’, I'm completely, utterly transported elsewhere when I listen to that song, can you talk me through that track as well?
I'm so glad! It comes from a very real place. I had such a great, fantastic, incredible group of women around me where I lived in Utah, they're all exceptional. They're exceptional people, but they're exceptionally skilled women. They were literally cowgirls some of them, that's what they did for a living. They challenged me in a lot of ways, because I went to this place where I didn't know anyone, and I've always had this idea of who I was, I was a singer in a band, and none of that mattered, where I lived in Utah, no one cared about that. I had to reach out to people in a way that I hadn't had to do before. I had to be willing to be a bit more vulnerable, and just say ‘I'm new here, I'm a foreigner, I'm lonely’ and reach out and make friendships. These women stepped up and took me under their wing and taught me how to live out there in this isolated wild environment. How to grow food, how to can peaches, how to literally hunt and kill deer, it was all very primitive. I miss them. I love them, they really build me up. It was just expressing this absolute love for this support network that I was so fortunate to have, and I still have and I think all women need. When we're there for each other, when we step up and just hold each other up.

It's gorgeous. And I think so much of the album does read like a love letter to other women, which I think is beautiful. You've been in the industry for a very long time now, very successful in quite a male dominated sector of it. Now coming out as a soloist, have you ever felt you needed to be that much louder, better, smarter, stronger, more savage in your fragility in order to be heard in a very white, male saturated environment?
That's an interesting question, and I think my answer is no. I've always felt empowered as a person. I've been fortunate, and I guess that's to do with upbringing and role models. It's been interesting to read the conversation around this industry about women because I haven't really felt that personally, as a woman in this industry. I've always felt respected and heard and whether that was because internally I projected that. Donna and I, we always felt supported in that, and we're pretty strong and empowered women generally. I didn't feel like it was a fight. Ever. I've always felt accepted, and welcomed.

I've had to look inward a lot and really dig into has that been because I've been unaware, and I've accepted certain things as being the norm? Was I ignorant, or was I not paying attention? I can't say more than I've had a great experience and I've got to think about it more. I’m getting older, and when you get older you've got more wisdom and insight and a little more empathy. This blind confidence that you have when you're young, when you're stepping out, you don't have that as much anymore because you're paying more attention to what's going on around you.

It's really great to look inward and I imagine it’s confronting - I got out unscathed, but hold on a second, was it still okay?
Yeah, and I can pinpoint a couple of experiences where it wasn't, but I had a place for those experiences at the time. I didn't internalise it as much as just sort of go, ‘that happened, that sucked, but it's not anything to do with who I am.

Beautiful. Talking of supporting the girls, you are also a part of the gorgeous all female Wildflower festival. Can you talk me a little bit about that?
Yeah, that's really very exciting! We've got Missy Higgins, Kate Miller-Heidke…I was incredibly honoured to be asked to be part of that. It covers a broad spectrum of women of different ages and different genres of music and it's really going to showcase what's going on in Australia, in women in music in a broad and diverse way.

It's very cool. Also, there's some tours coming up with your glorious album. What can we expect from that?
You know, I'm gonna be frank here - this is why publicists hate me! - but it sort of is a strange time to be stepping out and promoting things. I'm trying to find a place in all this, in light of what's going on in the world and the news. I'm hoping that people come out to see live music in the hope that we're all looking for a bit of connection and respite. Maybe they hear something that helps them get them through like when I heard ‘big girl pants’, that one phrase that stuck with me to help me deal with everything that was going on. So I'm in two minds. There's so much going on right now that people are dealing with, why should they be coming out? Why should we be celebrating right now? Isn't there something else we should be doing? With festivals, like Wildflower, we can come together and share and communicate and find some joy that hopefully we can take home, and into our lives and pay it forward in some way.

ThornBird is out now. You can download and stream here.

To keep up with all things ThornBird you can follow her on Instagram and Facebook.