Independent Woman

Don't expect Kate Miller-Heidke's fourth album to be the same as 2012's Nightflight. Instead, O Vertigo! is a release that experiments with sonic palettes and vocal melodies, and is different to its predecessor in more ways than one. Firstly, it's the first album Miller-Heidke has released independently, out from under the watchful eye of her former label, Sony.

“I just felt as though it was time,” Miller-Heidke says. “It wasn't working really well for me, I was miserable, and the way that my career's developed is very much as a sort of niche artist. I've got a small little kind of cottage industry and a relatively small yet devoted fanbase. I just felt that it wasn't being handled as well as it could've been. I didn't need that big huge machine behind me, I didn't want the pressure of people wanting me to write a radio song or a single. I wanted to be able to make whatever music came out.”

Miller-Heidke was also able to approach the album in a different way; the aesthetic has changed to a more eclectic mix of songs, each distinctive and different to the next.

“I think that I didn't care too much about making a coherent statement, or having a particular colour palette or aesthetic. That was something I was very focused on in Nightflight and this time I wanted it to feel more like just a release or an escape and for each song to be its own universe. I do think listening through it now that there are threads that run through it, but I didn't care so much about that.

“I felt it was too constrictive for me the other way. Even though I think Nightflight is a beautiful record and it's very cohesive, it was a bit dark and very introspective and I wanted this album to represent complete freedom, y'know. I'm independent now and I wasn't working with my collaborator, Keir Nuttall; for the first time ever, I wrote nearly everything myself without a collaborator. I guess I just wanted to break free of all of those constraints.”

So not only was she free of the demands of her record label and the constrictions of an album-album format, but also of the pressures of collaboration with her husband and long-time creative partner, Keir Nuttall. As such it is less heavy on the metaphor for than her previous releases, and “sounds like more of a reflection of me than anything I've done before. I feel like it's got more personality.

“For a start, vocally, there's a bit more experimentation, there's more character in the vocals. I think the lyrics are a lot more direct. There's a lot less metaphor on this record and a bit more vulnerability, in a way. I think my style is lyric-writing is more direct than Keir's and part of that is because I wanted the melodies to be really married to the vocals, the lyrics to be really married to the melodies, so it had to be lyrics that would sing beautifully, not just sound good.

“It required a bit of a leap of faith in myself, but it was the same thing with going independent. I don't know, it was kind of time for me to step up, and Keir and I were sending each other insane last time towards the end of the touring cycle and both of us needed a break. I had the really strong sense that I had to make it myself, and sometimes I did fall into those old habits of needing reassurance from him, or wanting to ask him what he thought of something, but ultimately it all just came down to what I thought about the stuff, which once I let go, was really freeing.”

But that doesn't mean Miller-Heidke did it all on her own. On O Vertigo! she was also able to record with Washington in the studio, and collaborate long-distance with Passenger and Drapht.

“It was such a lovely thing for all those guys to just agree to be involved. I had a dream for this album a year ago that I wanted Passenger, Drapht and Washo on the record and I thought, 'Look, even if I can just get two out of three or whatever, I'll be doing well'. Just that act of reaching out and asking, it's not easy for me, I'm quite an introvert and I'm pretty scared of rejection, but they all said yes and I think that helped me get more confidence again.”

It's an album that ended up having the same production values as something put out by a major label, thanks to the great success of her independent PledgeMusic crowdfunding campaign. Her fanbase can't be so small after all. Despite the backlash unleashed on other singers who have taken the crowdfunding route, Miller-Heidke was not discouraged, even enlisting fellow crowdfunder, Amanda Palmer, for her campaign video.

“You're always going to get backlash proportionate to how well you do. I feel actually quite lucky that I seem to have escaped too much criticism over it. I think there are still a lot of misconceptions around of what crowdfunding actually means but in my case, through Pledge, it really is a case of just buying things, or pre-ordering things that hopefully you were going to buy anyway, just paying for them a few months in advance. There's no aspect of it that's like begging or asking people to pay for things twice, it's just almost like an online store, an extension of that.”

And then when she raised 214% of her goal, she was surprised and overwhelmed. Its success has meant not only increased funds to go towards videos, photos, artwork and other promotion, but the establishment of a different type of connection with her fans. The rewards for the campaign included t-shirts, copies of the record, a songbook, Happy Birthday phone calls, acoustic house gigs, and even the piano on which she wrote the album. But the process of enacting all these rewards is more time-consuming than Miller-Heidke imagined.

“It's been amazing and a new experience for me, but very rewarding. It's really cool to get to speak to people and they're all lovely and I don't know, it just gives an extra dimension of meaning to what I do, I guess, to be able to talk to people on the phone, and they usually want to share a story about one of my songs or gigs or whatever, and I feel quite lucky actually. It doesn't feel like a job, it feels like an exchange, I'm getting a lot back from it.

“I've only done one house concert and we've got quite a few more of them coming up and I've been writing out lots of lyric sheets everyday, there's a lot of things. It's actually a lot of work; it's easy to think up reward. And the pressure to make sure everybody gets it on time, because I would hate to disappoint anyone by being late.”

The Happy Birthday calls are an especially enjoyable experience where she discovers a lot about her fans, often when they're a little bit drunk at their parties. “One guy told me that he'd named his prize cow after me, but it's like a prize heifer that lives with Freddie Mercury and Prince, the other cows. In pretty good company there, it was quite flattering.”

Five per cent of the total funds raised from what was, at the time of writing, 2629 pledges, will go to the WWF and their work trying to save the World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef. Miller-Heidke is adamantly against the now-approved dumping of dredge soil. “All that money will go through to the WWF on the day of album release, so the 14th. It might make some small difference, that'd be incredible, who knows?”

Luckily, Miller-Heidke and Nuttall are not driving each other insane anymore, and are prepared to head on an epic Australian tour together again; Miller-Heidke couldn't see it any other way.

“The thing is that we've got such a musical affinity that he's not replaceable, he's just not. We're in a much better place now and we've got another musician with us on the road now as well, our dear friend John Rodgers; he's a violinist and multi-instrumentalist. We've got our tour manager and sound guy and lighting person so it's kind of a gang of us, it's not just like me and Keir on the road in America for three months.

“On stage you can see that we have a really deep connection, so if anything, even if we've just had a major fucking argument, on stage it's a way to sort of cement that connection. It can be a different way of communicating with one another.

“Keir's been doing this comedy thing, Franky Walnut, and he's been getting more and more commitments now, like he's opening for The Beards during July. He's played the Tamworth Country Music Festival and stuff like that, so I'm starting to have to book his time way in advance, which is a little bit annoying…”