Ruby FieldsTalking to Ruby Fields is like having a yarn with an old friend.
She is sitting in her car, phone propped up against the windshield (internet trouble). The scene is very reminiscent of P Plates, her beloved 2018 single. “Which is so funny because you’re on your P Plates when you’re 17, and I’m literally 28 now,” she jokes.
If Fields is 28 now, that means 11 years have passed since she burst onto the scene with her debut single I Want. Success and acclaim followed. She was hailed as the Next Big Thing, a new Australian voice characterised by wry self-awareness and gritty honesty.
She charted on the triple j Hottest 100, played The Plot in 2017, South by Southwest in 2018, and then went on to support Ball Park Music and San Cisco on tour in 2018 before playing Laneway in 2019.
Then came her triumphant single Dinosaurs – the anthem of disaffected teenagers everywhere – and her celebrated debut album Been Doin’ It For A Bit. A whirlwind handful of years.
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It was then that she took a step back and ensconced herself in the rugged beauty of the Northern Rivers, navigating a pandemic, intense floods, breakups, death, and career ups-and-downs. And now she is set to release her long-awaited sophomore album, Small Achievements.
The latest single from the upcoming album, Muscle, is unequivocally her: introspective but catchy, raw and pulsating. “Overpriced tobacco, everywhere that you go,” she croons, and again, she could simply be a friend venting about the cost-of-living crisis.
“I think it’s a great representation of the feeling of the album, a summation of all of the album’s parts,” she says of the single. Going on to discuss the album as a whole, she speaks in breathless run-on sentences.
“It’s all about the Northern Rivers, it’s about the job I had up there, my partner and my dog, it’s about how scared I am. I still have this intrinsic fear that I’m not letting go of as an adult – how I don’t think I’m ever going to be a fully-formed person. But I’m just going to try.”
What does she think it is that she is scared of?
“It’s funny, I was trying to identify it the other day,” she says, hiking up her left knee to her chest. “I was driving, and I was like, ‘Why am I so full of fear?’”
She hypothesises that the fear helps to keep her alive, helps to keep her guessing, helps to keep her asking questions. Whatever it is, though, it is starting to dissipate.
“Maybe you just go through periods of your life where you’re more scared than other periods,” she muses. “I mean, there’s things I used to do as a kid that I would never consider doing now as an adult, that I used to not be scared of.”
Part of her fear, she realised, came from the possibility that her album would be considered a failure. “And then I was like, ‘Am I really going to let that stop me from putting an album out?’ No. Then why am I wasting all this energy on it, why am I letting this fear take over?”
Every song on Small Achievements was written after she moved up to the Northern Rivers five years ago. The title was inspired by one of the locals at the pub. “He got a trophy for playing golf and everyone treated it like it was the biggest celebration in the world, and for him it was,” she says. “And that’s all that matters.”
The idea was to allow – indeed, to encourage – the celebration of small achievements. “Those achievements can be anything from having a hard conversation with someone to writing an album to getting a promotion to meal-prepping for the week,” Fields notes.
“Anything that you can do that supports a happier version of yourself is an achievement and should be celebrated.”
Celebrating the small achievements, however, is not something that comes naturally to her. But amidst indulging in what she calls her “grandma hobbies” – which include doing punchcards, vision-boards, and learning how to sew – she is finally learning to do so.
“I definitely need a reminder that putting an album together is a big deal,” she explains. “This time around I’m trying to be a bit easier on myself, I think.”
A debut album like Been Doin’ It For A Bit – which debuted at number one on the ARIA charts – is surely not an easy project to follow up.
“I definitely do feel the pressure. I don’t think we’ll ever nab a No. 9 spot on the Hottest 100 again,” she says referring to the stellar performance of Dinosaurs. The year that followed was “humbling” she admits, with admirable honesty.
“I think that’s something that a lot of people outside of the music industry don’t know,” she explains. “To get a number one spot at anything, you have to campaign behind it.
“It’s not just a completely organic thing, you know – it comes from advertisement and shameless self-promotion.”
Not that she begrudges anyone for campaigning hard. “Everyone’s just trying to make a living and trying to promote something they’re proud of. But it is a lot of money and a lot of work.
“So I think there’s a part of me that’s trying to be really realistic and ask myself, ‘How much energy do you want to pour into this? Are you happy with it not being number one?’”
At the end of the day, she explains, numbers don’t matter. What matters is how the music personally impacts people. That being said, she smiles sweetly as she admits “it would be very cool and nice if it got number one.”
But she has picked up enough wisdom from cutting her teeth in the business when she was still a teenager to allow herself to go with the flow.
The way Fields was living back then was not sustainable and “very 18,” she says, laughing affectionately at her former self. “I was sleeping in, I wasn’t very healthy, I was drinking a lot because it was new and cool. I was an absolute mess, but I look back on it all fondly.”
Now, however, she is firmly a self-described Boring Adult. “I like to think that I spend a lot of time nurturing myself and my relationships and my emotions. And there is so much value in that that you just don’t understand when you’re young.
“Mind you,” she snorts, “it’s ten years later and I’m doing an interview in my car because I couldn’t make my internet work. So there are still parts of me that are the same and underprepared.”
Ahead of the release of Small Achievements, Fields is now officially making her way as an independent artist – a feat that is equal parts challenging and rewarding.
“I love having the creative freedom and knowing what’s going on, having total honesty and transparency in my relationships with all of the people who work with me,” she explains. “I feel very in control of it. I can proudly say that everyone feels valued. It’s a really beautiful system, and I wish it could be more like that for other artists.”
What denotes a Ruby Fields song is honesty, wit, and an Australian accent. “I heard Courtney Barnett sing, and I thought it still sounded beautiful even with an Australian accent,” she explains. “And then that made me want to shift the ideas or feelings we have towards accents, I suppose.
“We all usually sing in an American accent, that’s what everybody does. But I wanted to sing in the voice that I speak in. And it used to be a conscious decision to sing that way, but after about a year I couldn’t imagine singing with any other accent.”
Fields is, quite frankly, sick of the cultural cringe attached to Australian art. “It’s something that is such a focal point of my life right now, and is at the crux of a lot of conversations I’ve been having with artists, people in the industry, friends, family. I think, as Australians, we need to really pull our socks up.”
She was having a conversation along these lines with an American friend of hers recently. “I think Aussie artists definitely have this idea that to love what you do and to really shamelessly promote it is cringe, and American artists don’t have that,” she muses.
“Or maybe they just have the understanding that if you want to be a performer of music, you are an entertainer, and therefore you have to entertain. Australian artists don’t want to accept that.”
She sighs, “It would be cool if Australians could accept what they do, see that it means something to people, it matters, and it’s okay to acknowledge that. It’s good to not think everything is lame or cringe. I mean, there’s definitely a way to go about it so that it doesn’t feel conceited, but I think Australian artists need to be more proud of what they’re doing.”
It isn’t surprising that she craves this openness from other Australian artists, given that she herself deals in such unguarded emotion in her music.
“I started out writing these rat-baggy little songs about drinking and not caring about my ATAR. I still talk about funny things in my songs, but now I’m so much more open to being vulnerable about who I am.”
Music is how she shares what is inside her “All my songs feel like a diary entry. I don’t think there’s a single song about something that I haven’t lived.”
Being open about one’s emotions, she says, is “cool and necessary,” something that she feels lucky to be able to do. “I’m a sensitive person.” She admits she cries constantly – but specifies, importantly, that these days, there are lots of happy tears too.
Ruby Fields’ Small Achievements releases on Friday, April 24th. Tickets to her accompanying launch tour are on sale now.
Ruby Fields – Small Achievements Tour
Supported by Mac The Knife, Platonic Sex* & Smol Fish**
Friday, April 24th – The Croxton, Melbourne, VIC*
Saturday, May 2nd – Manning Bar, Sydney, NSW*
Saturday, May 9th – Princess Theatre, Brisbane, QLD*
Thursday, May 14th – The Gov, Adelaide, SA*
Saturday, May 16th – Freo Social, Fremantle, WA**
This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body
