Gin Wigmore packs a whole lot of living into her life. As an artist, she’s had one heck of a career – releasing multi-platinum albums, winning six New Zealand Music Awards and building a large global audience. Her songs have featured on TV like Grey’s Anatomy and Orange Is the New Black. Just last week Prime Video released the new series Ride or Die (starring Octavia Spencer, Hannah Waddingham and Bill Nighy) – the theme song is Gin’s Kill of the Night.
Besides music though, Gin’s continued to challenge herself by throwing herself into other projects – from opening a hotel in Palm Springs, to a new deli in Auckland’s Kingsland. She’s spent much of the last decade and a half based in the States, but fairly recently moved back home to Auckland a little more permanently. She’s home with her two young sons after going through a heartbreaking divorce.
Last week – eight years after her last album – Gin released her brand new offering, Beautiful Mess. It’s her most vulnerable, raw and personal piece of work yet. Here, we had a chat with Gin about the new album, life, love, motherhood and more.
In our story series ‘How Are You Today?’, we have a meandering, mental-health focused chat with some of our most well-known New Zealanders. Check out previous chats with people such as Hayley Holt, Kiri Allan and Dame Jacinda Ardern.
Here at Capsule we believe in having good mental health chats and as part of that, we like to check in with each other to see how we’re each doing – and we hope to encourage our readers to do the same. ‘How are you today?’ can be such a small question, but if we take a moment to really check in with ourselves and be honest in our reply – and, if we’re the one asking the question, be willing to really listen – it can lead to a much bigger conversation.
So, having said that, Gin, how are you today?
Wow, you’re so right with that being a big question! I like to actually respond in a way that’s real – and then to be received. That question often falls on deaf ears! Today… I am a whole bundle of feelings. To be honest, it’s like I’ve given birth to another child. It feels like Christmas. It feels like all parts exciting, terrifying, nerve-wracking, like a relief and like a huge part of my last five years has been like given up and surrendered to the world to now live and breathe.
Damn, that’s quite the cocktail of feelings! I’ve been listening to your new album – Beautiful Mess – all morning, and heck, it’s amazing. As soon as your voice came on in that first track, Country Diamond, I literally got goosebumps. It’s so beautiful. Congratulations.
Oh my god, thank you so much!
I love the duality of this album, that you literally have a side A, called Beautiful, and your side B, Mess. How did that all come about?
To be honest, it was sort of like I had two albums to start with that I merged and became one. I’d written a complete album and then didn’t know how it would work.
Then I made another record up in the desert over seven days, which was just sort of a challenge to myself to just see if I could make an album in seven days. I’m forever trying to find things that keep me interested and curious and excited about music, and so that was sort of a challenge, a personal challenge. I shelved that record too though because I didn’t feel it was the right time to release it. I was in a really dark headspace after leaving Los Angeles after 14 years. I left in a way that felt like I left in the middle of the night with my two kids, and I split from my husband and we went back to New Zealand. I was just in a really dark, untethered, scary space to be able to make decisions like how to release an album.
It wasn’t until six months later that my guitarist was like, “When are you gonna release some of this music? You’re kind of sitting on two albums at this point,” and I said, “Well, yeah, but they both need to come out. But if I did, I don’t want to just overwhelm everybody with two albums out the gate”. And he was like, “Why don’t you just cherry pick the best parts that tell the story of the last five years and have like it treated like a side A and side B? Merge the two!” And so that was that! That was the idea from my guitarist and long-time friend Dave Goodison to sort of make it a side A and side B, it combines the beautiful mess. When I wrote that track, Beautiful Mess, it just embodied the whole feeling of what this album needed to say – it just snowballed from that basically.
I did read a summary of what has gone on in your life in the last decade and, sh*t, a lot has happened in a short space of time! Marriage, two babies, divorce, a few different businesses – hotels in the States, a new sandwich business in Kingsland, a bunch of touring… It’s a hell of a lot. How are you doing? How has this decade really shaped you?
It’s totally been all the ingredients for who I am today. It’s been a huge amount of self-reflection and looking at old patterns that don’t serve me anymore – and gaining a lot of wisdom and peace, just sitting with those feelings and not always running away from everything.
My go-to was always escapism and running away and hoping that my problems wouldn’t catch up to me, or, you know, thinking the patterns I was repeating and the habits that I was getting myself into were everybody else’s problem and not mine. I think I’m finally getting to a place where I’m able to stand, sure footed and just look at what really serves me going forward, what I can leave behind, what I don’t need anymore in my life, being careful and mindful of my energy and where I put it, being a really true, raw, vulnerable, peaceful person moving through the world – all these things, and raising kids along the way!
Far out, congratulations Gin, because that’s such a brave thing to do. No one wants to stop running and actually sit down and examine difficult feelings, because that means feeling extremely uncomfortable. No one wants to sit in all that uncomfortableness. It’s confronting!
It’s so uncomfortable. And you never want to be the problem! You never want to be the reason that your life is going to hell and back, but sometimes, well, you are! And it’ll be because of sh*t that you haven’t worked out – often it goes right back to when you were little and you’ve just formulated these pathways that are no good for you, but you keep travelling down them. It does require you to get familiar with the unfamiliar and that can be really uncomfortable. But when you do get out of it you are rewarded by way of… the word peace keeps coming up a lot. Just being able to zoom out and go, aha! Okay, I’ve been through it now and I can just see things for what they are a bit clearer now.
It must be pretty cathartic being able to do some of that work through music too. Do you ever write a song, and then go, whoa, I hadn’t realised that I had those feelings – like you get to learn things about yourself or feelings throughout the songwriting process?
Oh my God, totally. That’s when you’re really going to those pain points or those places where you’re really affected – that is the power of music.
I often find when I’m playing the piano or something and I’ll play a chord – I’m not trained musically, I just muddle around and find stuff I like. I’ll be playing piano and strike a chord – there will be something deep in my psyche and heart and soul and it will conjure up things where I’m often brought to tears or to happiness – but mainly tears. It will bring up something that I haven’t quite wanted to figure out yet or realise, but music has this amazing way of unearthing feelings you’ve buried and all of a sudden you’re purging this emotional work.
Is it okay for us to talk about your divorce?
Yes.
Okay good, because we run this really popular series, The Divorce Diaries, and I think part of its popularity is just down to the fact that it’s not something talked about too often. It’s deeply personal. I have spent hours – probably days and weeks now – talking to women about their divorces and what often comes up, besides the heartache of it all, is the loneliness of it. So, the hope is that the series lets everyone feel a little less alone. What was your experience of divorce like?
Ah, you know what? It’s heartbreaking to be honest. It really is. For me, I wasn’t that little kid who dreamed of a white wedding and thought, f**king oh my god, my life’s gonna be complete when I get married. I wasn’t that. I wasn’t that bitch, you know.
So when I did get married, and I decided to do these very traditional things that I didn’t think were going to be for me… but, I found my person. He was my soulmate. He still is a soulmate. We just couldn’t figure it out to make it last a lifetime in this lifetime, but there was so, well there is so much love there. So it’s really heartbreaking when that whole idea of what you thought you had planned out for you, doesn’t work anymore.
That’s the most painful point of it, is actually having that thought for the first time and going, ‘Oh f**k! I don’t think I’m happy. I’m really deeply unhappy, and I’m lonely, and I’m not seen, and I’m not able to provide longevity in that relationship anymore’. It’s having those thoughts – and particularly for me, because as soon as I have a thought, I kind of don’t get off that train, I have to see it through – and the writing’s on the wall at that point. It’s just a matter of time and it was a done deal as soon as I had that thought. Which was so sad because then you go to survival mode and you go, ‘oh no no no, but it’s gonna be all right. Maybe this is fine and maybe I can just carry on like this and this sort of mediocrity of marriage’, and then you come to and you’re just like, ‘Nah, f**k that, life’s short. I’m not doing that.’
But it’s tough saying those words out loud to the person that you’ve loved so deeply, and then staying with that decision when it would be so much easier to just go back to the devil you know. But you’ve got to keep really in the forefront, why you’re doing this, and you’re doing this for like happiness, true happiness. Life shouldn’t just be getting by, it shouldn’t just be surviving, it should be thriving all the time. And if you’ve got any way to action your life to be different, where you are thriving the majority of your time, you should always do it.
God, what a hell of a process it is. What I’ve heard so many women say is how difficult it is that so much of the grief is about something that doesn’t actually exist – it’s this future world you had in your head of how your life was going to be, all these milestones with this person and growing old with them. So much of the grief is having to let go of this future you used to be able to see so clearly – the grief of something that didn’t get to exist.
Absolutely and it doesn’t help that we’re so conditioned in society to this idea that a nuclear family is what provides you total happiness. People don’t like messiness. When I came back and my life was just a f**king sh*t show – you find out who is down to ride with you through the messy and who goes, ‘oh no, that’s too much, I don’t want to be associated with that’. I get why people don’t want to get into that though because it shines a light on their own life.
Oh absolutely, it holds a mirror up to their own life and a lot of people aren’t ready – maybe they’re never ready – to take a look at that mirror.
No way, it’s too much! Because it’s a brave and courageous thing to get a divorce and then to also do it in a way that is kind and loving. I think it’s a testament to my ex and I and our love, because we were both so kind to each other. We sorted out the agreement of our divorce sitting on a sofa having a soda together. You do it like that for the kids as well. You have to think about those little humans. We’re role modelling how to cope with conflict and how to rationally and kindly move through conflict. Jason and I are always really mindful of that as well, for their future relationships.
Congratulations – that really is such an important part of it, but definitely not an easy part of it to pull off. Do you have any tools in your mental health toolkit now that you bring out when the sh*t hits the fan? How do you take care of yourself?
Therapy. I’ve been going to therapy for nine years – I talk to my therapist every two weeks, without fail. I remember my therapist saying people go to the gym for their bodies – therapy is like gym for your mind, your brain and your heart and soul. I truly believe it’s really important to have a person that’s not your friend who is going to take on that mental load and is qualified to take on that mental load. Someone who can ask the right questions to get to the root of the problem, then give you the tools to get out of it in a healthy way.
I totally agree – everyone should go. Now, do you have two boys? I have two boys – it’s madness.
YES! Oh my gosh, I was with my friend who has girls and they have the ability to sit down and play for an hour on their own. Imagine?!
Boys are chaos! How has motherhood been for you?
Oh man, I think motherhood is, well, it’s one of the most important roles on earth. We hold a superpower – the ability to change the future by how we raise our children. It’s a huge responsibility.
I do think it makes you so much better at what you do in terms of like, my work. My experience at least, has been I’ve had to work so much smarter. I’ve had to work faster. I’ve had to really fine tune the ability to write a song in just a few hours, you know, before school pickup and all these things. You just get really gnarly at time management and at being your best self in the fastest possible way and then also showing up for your children. You’re not so self-indulgent – you prioritise their needs. I found that I’ve got a lot more patience. I used to be very impatient, but now I’ve got a lot of grace and compassion and patience, because you just need to be like that as a mum, otherwise you go mental. You get a lot of new skills!
It’s a lot of fun, but it’s exhausting as well. And it’s hard having that mirror – like, I found particularly when the boys were younger and they’d say back the things that I say, and when you hear them out of your babe’s mouth, you’re just like, ‘oh god!’, it so doesn’t land. I’ve got to be mindful now about judgements and opinions I make – I’m still pretty blunt, but I think there’s a way to be a little more diplomatic which is definitely something my children have taught me.
Are you enjoying being back in New Zealand?
Yeah, I’m actually really loving it. I’ve been flying around the world for the last three weeks, non-stop, across everywhere and there was something so good about just coming home. I really have got in my head that New Zealand is the sanctuary for me at this point in my life, it’s home. My kids were really wanting a home that we stayed in for a while and they feel like this is it. I’m content for the first time in my life. I don’t miss for anything, I don’t want for anything else. I think I’ve got a really nice balance of being able to travel still and get out and experience the world and feel globally connected and then come back to a very supportive environment. I feel like there’s just this mindset in New Zealand where we care about things – like nature, and being kind to one another and our communities and supporting one another. I feel like I’m very in alignment with that way of thinking at this point in my life and New Zealand supports that really well.
It’s just nice to not be fighting your environment too. Like living in Los Angeles for a long time, it’s a great place to live, but you are at war with your environment, you know what I mean? Just the population and size of the city and it’s loud, so many different smells – it’s just a sensory overload all the time and it wreaks havoc with your nervous system.
I guess finally, your album Beautiful Mess is out now – what do you hope people take away from it?
I hope that people just let it really let it wash over them and allow it into their lives in a way where they feel like maybe there’s a shared experience there, or maybe if they’re going through it, they can feel not so alone. Maybe they’ll go, ‘okay, I’ve had some of these feelings as well!’ It’s not so scary when I know someone else has been through it and shared themselves in a really vulnerable way. I think a call to action for vulnerability is sort of what this album invokes and asks of the listener, and so if that’s something that the listener is open to, then they’re going to get so much more out of this album.
That’s beautiful Gin, it feels like just what the world needs a bit more of at the moment. Again, big congrats on the album and heck it has been such a treat to talk with you.
Thank you mama! You have a good day and let’s go raise these boys – we’ve got a big responsibility right now, but it’s beautiful and we’re in it together, you and me!
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