Accidently Kellie Anne

Over the past year, singer, songwriter and frontwoman for WA alt.country combo Ruby Boots, Bex Chilcott, has taken the odd opportunity to take herself off to the US to soak up firsthand some of the places that have been instrumental in the creation of the music she loves: Memphis, New Orleans, Nashville… and Utah?

“Yeah, I'm going back to Utah at the end of this tour actually,” she explains. “Utah's kind of a special aspect of the States. [Fellow former Sandgroper] Vicki [Thorne] from The Waifs lives on a ranch over there and I slept my jetlag off there last time, and we started doing a little songwriting. We write together pretty well, so we're just going to give it another go, spend a bit longer there… It'll be colder,” she laughs. “It's gonna be really good weather to bunker down.”

Originally coming together in 2010, the six-piece Ruby Boots have put out two EPs – a self-titled release and 2012's At Last – picking up WA's equivalent of the ARIAs for Best Country Act along the way. Next on the list is the debut album, for which Chilcott has already written a stack of material that Ruby Boots will be recording in May with Australian producer Tony Buchen (Tim Finn, John Butler Trio, Blue King Brown). But first, a new single, Kellie Anne, was unexpectedly recorded in Nashville, which wasn't part of the plan.

“I'd probably been thinking about going to the States for about nine months, as a holiday, and then Ashwin [Subramaniam, drums] had just been, so I was like, 'I'm going',” she laughs. “I kind of really wanted to do the South and just walk through that history. I'd applied for a grant for a three-month residency in Nashville, which I didn't get, but through that it opened up a bunch of opportunities that I wanted to explore. So a bit of both – bit of work, bit of holiday.”

Meanwhile, the band's manager had a couple of contacts in the States, including Mike Dixon, who manages Ron Sexsmith, and through him, Chilcott was put in touch with Nashville-based songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Robin Eaton, who's probably best known here for co-writing Jill Sobule's 1995 hit, I Kissed A Girl.

“I'd wanted to start co-writing to just learn how other people write – I have my own set ways and it's kind of dangerous getting stuck in ways – you don't learn anything – and so I wanted to go and write with people that do it all the time, just see what they had to offer my brain, what lock they can unlock.

“Robin was great, a really lovely guy and I'm still in contact with him all the time. We got together and wrote two songs in two days, and that's how Kellie Anne came about. He had a bit of a melody, I had a great chorus, we started writing verses and it was really strange – he didn't know what the chorus was about but we were still writing the same song. It was kind of magical, you know.”

All of a sudden they were in the studio, the songs totally fresh, and Ruby Boots had a new single. Even then there was the odd surprise: “I was sitting on my laptop on my bed at home about midnight, and I get this email from Robin saying, 'Hey, what do you think of the steel?'” she laughs again, unaware that Eaton had called in an old friend, Paul Neihaus from Calexico, to drop some pedal steel on the track.

Ruby Boots will be playing the following dates:

Thursday 31 January - Transit Bar, Canberra ACT
Friday 1 February - FBi Social, Kings Cross Hotel, Sydney NSW
Saturday 2 February - The Clarendon Guesthouse & Theatre, Katoomba NSW
Sunday 3 February - Lizotte's, Newcastle NSW
Thursday 7 February - Beav's Bar, Geelong VIC
Friday 8 February - Baha Tacos, Rye VIC
Saturday 9 February - Workers Club, Melbourne VIC