DISCOVERY: Part 1 - The Meeting

You now know ‘3’ for what she has been to you and how she’s filled your life. But I want to reaaaally start telling you about her as only a parent knows their child better than anyone else. Over the next few weeks I’m going to tell you her life story and how she was conceived. We’re going to go beyond what I’ve already shared in interviews and it’s going to be in ‘3’ parts - discovery, creation, and reflection. And we’re gonna go deep. Deeper than I have with any of my albums as this one’s shown me things I never took the time to properly see on my own accord. So here is where we will start - the discovery period. I’m going to rewind a ways back as I think it’s important that you first get a handle on the arc of me and Jack Grace’s relationship leading up to ‘3’. I don’t think we could have made this album together without the life that transpired collectively and individually for us prior and it certainly wouldn’t have been the same album had I made it with anyone else. 

Photo by Dan Segal. Old Fashions probably. Before playing a festival whose power went out the majority of our set.

It was 2016. Making another album was furthest from my mind at the time when Jack suggested the idea of it. I was enjoying the success that my single ‘Once’ and the album it came off, Blastoma, had brought. ‘Once’ had charted on Triple J’s Hottest 100, and Blastoma on the ARIA album charts (Australia’s equivalent of the Billboards). I was orbiting in a world where I got to tour with people like Sufjan Stevens, Anderson .Paak, Leon Bridges and Flume. People like Grimes were sliding into my DMs and I was bumping into legends like Shirley Manson at radio interviews.

(L-R) Backstage with Anderson .Paak (Photo by Daniel Knot), Listen Out Festival, cute notes on the Sufjan tour, with Flume and the gang at Splendour In the Grass.

I was loving being on the road with my band and inhaled every minute of the adrenalin, the early mornings, the skillfully toasted cheese toasties in the Virgin Lounge, the throttling of festival subs as you rolled in on site for your set, the hunt for missing bottles of whiskey on the rider, the makeshift makeup rooms in ill sufficiently lit green rooms, everyone pretending to be cooler than they were, the front rowers who always mouthed the words at you then try to sneak backstage for your autograph.

(L-R) Post show back stage in Brisbane, Maroochy Festival, Makeup at accommodation, Post a set at Listen Out Festival on our way back to Melbourne for a really loose Pizza.

I reveled in it all as after the period I had had prior, being dumped by my boyfriend the day he picked me up from the airport after Glastonbury - I. WAS. THRIVING. I apologise if you’re hearing this story again but looking back though brutal, it was entirely necessary for where we currently are.

Thus was the Winter (or Summer) of 2014 -  in my friend Billie’s guest room (which I’m pretty sure was just her hallway), a suitcase that never made it home to Camperdown, a heart full of hurt and a bottle of cherry vodka Billie’s mum had made that she fed to me like bottled milk whilst handing me tissues. Cue ‘Never Dreamed You’d Leave In Summer’ by Stevie Wonder.

Fast forward to 2016 - I had found my feet, and would have been happy to ride that fun train into an eternal abyss had it not  been for that coffee meeting (or in my case, tea) that Jack and I had one fateful Chippendale morning. 

Backstage at The Zoo, Brisbane. From Right - Billie, Melaine, Summer and me.

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Jack, Jack Grace, Jack Britten, Jacko or JB - however you know him, had been a member of my band for a few years. I met him and his girlfriend at the time, Charmian, at a gig in the city probably in 2012 or 2013. They were both in a band called Hello Vera and had just moved down from Lismore on the North Coast after studying music at Southern Cross University.

Tour van with then drummer James Jennings.

I’d also moved from Lismore a few years before them and my first band, The Rent, was entirely made up of SCU music students so it was like this unspoken comradery between musicians who had moved from the Northcoast to the big smoke. For overseas readers, the North Coast (or the Northern Rivers specifically) is built on Aborginal Bundjalung land but in modern times has been known for its Hippie Dippie culture hence also being called the ‘Rainbow Region’. It was where my parents settled my siblings and I when we immigrated from PNG. Due to the nature of the area and its people, it was quite honestly the softest landing we could have possibly hoped for as kids grappling with culture shock.

With my siblings in Ocean Shores. A few years after we moved to the North Coast.

When I met Jack and Charms, I almost saw them as human artefacts from this adopted home I missed and was secretly desperate to be best friends with them but also completely weirded out by my own motivation. 

Soon after our meeting though, they asked me and my friend L.A. if we could lay down some backing vocals on some of their music which Jack recorded in their tiny bedroom in the Eastern Suburbs somewhere. They were disgustingly cute with a good serve of country and fiercely talented keyboardists who were making really exciting music that I hadn’t heard in Sydney or even Australia. Charms was like the most radiant spring flower you’d ever seen -  effervescent, like she’d descended from some fern gully type fairy clan and learned to live among normies yet seemingly hadn’t learned how to be mean to anyone. Jack was always measured and careful not to offend anyone but with the most heavily flourishing beard that made him look like he could bear grylls his way through any apocalypse if he needed to. I also couldn’t understand a word that came out of his beard as he spoke with the slow drawl of someone who may have been cut off from human contact for some time. I am amazed that I can understand him at all now. 

After that session, they had a live performance on Fbi Radio that L.A. and I helped out on as well but then I didn’t really see them again for awhile. That was until I was in need of a keyboardist as I was using a guy called Niall Anderson who often went away on fancy holidays with his very smart Professor girlfriend Kari. (Random fun fact: Both Niall and I have a very odd fear of buttons and so does his brother. Much to unpack here). Charms had scored the keyboardist spot in Lisa Micthel’s band and my aforementioned ex boyfriend Tim was also playing bass for Lisa. He suggested I give Charmian a call - I did and she soon was playing in my band. We even formed a little all girl trio for the briefest of moments. 

The trio! Rosie and Charms were both amazing. I was barley keeping up.

Sharing a keyboardist with Lisa finally started to become problematic schedule wise . Charms couldn’t make one of my tours because it clashed with one of Lisa’s and Niall was off on another one of his romantic frolickings looking at the Northern Lights possibly. I sound salty but I was just ever so jealous of him and Kari’s grand leisurely times that always took precedence over gigs which I later came to realise was completely 100% acceptable because music isn’t real life.

I was pushed for options so I thought - maybe Jack would be up for it. Up until then I hadn’t really interacted with Jack much since the  Hello Vera sessions so he kinda just became Charm’s boyfriend to me. That being said,  I was really apprehensive as 1. -  I hate talking on the phone and 2. -  I was sure that what I was offering him to be a part wasn’t nearly as cool as what he was already doing. Thankfully he was really down with the idea and that was the start of the Ngaiire x Jack collaboratorship.

In Style Awards. I could hardly move in that dress but it was by the incredible Amelia Vivash.

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Jack slotted into my band no problems and soon we had a few shows under our belt to warrant him taking precedence as a primary keyboardist. But I still didn’t quite know him well. Having a partner as the music director and bassist of the band was complex and meant there was always a bit of disconnect between me and the rest of the crew. I’d broken the one rule I’d always sworn I’d never do, which was don’t date someone in your own band and it inevitably became a breeding ground for disaster.

Then one day I got an invitation to play Glastonbury in the UK. Unfortunately the fee was rubbish and I had to make the hard decision to either not take the gig or cull the band right down to a bite sized ensemble that could translate as close to what the full band sounded like. I chose the latter which worked out to Jack on Prophet keys and tracks and me on vocals and whatever little I could play on the mini Korg.

London was a hard slog when Jack and I finally got there. We lugged our gear all over  the old city on the tube. Sometimes taxis. Budget was super tight and I couldn’t afford a hire car till we needed to get to Glastonbury. The shows were completely terrifying and amazing as was the whole entire experience. I was on the other side of the world with no publicity campaign, no management, no boyfriend, very little money, and a member of my band I still hardly knew. And even though we were playing to an audience who’d never heard of me. they were eating up what we dished out to them and that was completely exhilarating.

First Row: Photo by Jack. In some woodland on the way to Glastonbury, our enthusiastic crowd for our first Glasto show, Jack in our tent. It was always wet there so you either stayed inside or braved the elements and the crowds which wasn’t always pleasant.

Second Row: Lianne La Havas and I waiting out the Glastonbury rain, our airbnb in Shoreditch, the tents.

Third Row: Stayed with some new friends in Bristol who loved vintage cars, looking towards the main stage, muddy festival shoes that went to bin heaven.

What we didn’t expect was that both our relationships would disintegrate at the same time whilst we were galavanting around the UK. I think we both tried to put on a brave front for the sake of getting the job done and not burdening each other with our personal problems but it all came to a head when we got back from Glastonbury. Two days after Tim tapped out on me, Charms called it quits on Jack and there we were - having just played one of the biggest festivals in the world only to be welcomed home with two shit filled vomit pies to the faces. 

As tragedy goes, this not only became the turning point for us to find the people we truly deserved but for me, this was where I feel Jack and I properly became friends and I witnessed what the next couple of years of collaboration with him would look like. If there’s one thing I’ve come to know about Jack is that he exercises a level of care and authenticity with the music he works on and the people he works with that you don’t find with a lot of musicians or even in the general music industry. I witnessed this in Glastonbury with how he filled in the gaps without being asked and supported me like a teammate where I actually felt like we could make the trip a success despite the undeniable crumbling of walls around us. Jack is a forward thinker. Always deconstructing and observing the playing field. He’s also one of the most intuitive people I know and this was true even during our meeting in Chippendale.

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It had been nearly 2 years since Glastonbury, my new album Blastoma, forged in the fires of Mordor, was out and we were heavily touring it. Jack had taken over the helm as music director and had helped me form a new band post Tim. He had also reignited a romance with a childhood flame from France named Soraya, I myself had also jumped head first into a very passionate relationship with a Jewish designer named Daniel. 2 years later Dan and I were sharing a loft apartment in Chippendale above a cafe called ‘Something For Jess’ where I had all my work meetings and where Jack and I had ours. 

The loft Dan and I shared above ‘Something For Jess’ Cafe.

It was the morning when we met up and I had no idea what Jack wanted to chat about. He proceeded to tell me that he’d been thinking about where things were heading. Blastoma was doing so well and the tours were killing it. Everything looked great but he was noticing that there was still a disconnect in people’s minds about me as an artist and their understanding of my heritage and how it informed who I was on and off stage. Why were people always getting it wrong? He suggested that maybe we should start thinking about writing the next album and visually represent it in a way that addresses the nuances that so often get missed about me.

This was all news to me. I was having the time of my life so I hadn’t been noticing how true that might be. Could the pain of rejection that I had felt with Tim been so traumatising that I’d started compromising on certain things in myself  just so I didn’t have to feel the same rejection from an industry I’d always wanted to be accepted in? Did the pain go further than that to my estranged father who stopped calling for 16 years after  my siblings and I moved to Australia? Did it even surpass that to when I was bullied as a 5 year old for not having any hair because of chemo? What transpired the next couple of years after that meeting answered some of these questions and many others that arose through the making of ‘3’.