Our Chat with Kimberly

Written by Fred Carlyle

Photo Credit: Jack Doust

On the day that we caught up with Naarm based singer/songwriter Kimberly Atkinson, it felt to be a perfect winter’s day (even though it was technically late Autumn). The cloudless weather and pale blue sky that reigned over Federation Square that afternoon made it so that the slightly chilly temperature and the odd gust of a breeze proved to be charming and favourable rather than overpowering and oppressive. It was the kind of weather that you’d imagine Britain to refer to as a ‘hot summer’s day’. 

And so it was with this setting on a Thursday afternoon where we caught up with Kim. Our pre-interview walk and talk down the yarra river lead us to Fed Square Park, on a hill which overlooked the river. The interview spot would’ve been much more scenic and picturesque if it wasn’t for the nearby construction site, nearby picnic goers who started singing mid way through our interview and the grass that, despite seeming dry at first, managed to soak both our backsides by the end of our interview. Despite all this, Kim and I managed to take everything in good humour for these slight inconveniences resulted in future inside jokes rather than mood killers. Altogether, the interview felt more like two old friends catching up rather than a formal sit down. 

One of the reasons that Kimberly’s chat with us felt as smooth and natural as it was is due to the fact that Kimberly is no stranger to not only myself but to the rest of the Couchdog family. Thanks to her role as frontwoman of Naarm’s dreamy indie folk rock act, Aunty Blue, we over here have been in cahoots with Kim for a while now. Our fondness towards the band and their sonics has resulted in us covering Kimberly and the gang’s work for about two years now. However, what separates this experience from the past encounters is that this is the first time we’ve had her to herself. Which brings us to the appropriate question, ‘Why are we interviewing Kimberly’? 

Being a work in progress over the last few years now, Kimberly’s debut solo album, ‘Keeping Promises’, lies in wait just around the corner now. Created within her home’s shared office

space-turned D.I.Y home studio (whose sound panels she made herself via egg cartons painted black, timber frames and towels) and sonically centring around a midi keyboard with “a lot of plugins”; Keeping Promises is the sonic and lyrical result of how Kim puts it, ‘Me jamming with myself’. 

Unlike that of her group effort in Aunty Blue, the creation of ‘Keeping Promises’ was a standalone adventure that consisted of Kim and Kim only. This solo escapade of hers is an experience that, if putting it honestly, Kim confided to being “a little self indulgent and self obsessed.” However ‘self indulgence’ -as Kim put it oh so self-deprecatingly- can have its pros as she discussed how she primarily used the challenge of doing a solo project as an opportunity to learn what she truly likes… to lean into and to discover what resonates with her regardless of external approval or disapproval. In regards to the process of creating an instrumental soundscape for her solo album - a process which involved figuring out her personal likes, dislikes and how this differs from that of the works found within Aunty Blue- Kimberly started this discussion off by labelling ‘Keeping Promises’ as ‘a little bit weird’. To add on to that, Kim remarked that she doesn’t see this album as a very ‘mainstream’ album at least in comparison to that of her other works.

A facet of Kim’s artistry that comes on full display within both of her projects is the emotional evocation of her singing. In other words, Kim knows how to move someone, making even the most stoic or resolute individual primed to have a sob and a cigarette with just her voice. In the case of Aunty Blue, the band levels out Kim’s voice by keeping up a balance of melancholia and grooviness. Their stock and trade of cushioning the impact of Kim’s emotionally devastating vocals and lyricism via fluid guitar solos that’ll make you swoon and straight-man acting bass lines that serve to catch you when you fall exemplifies the band’s promise to ‘caress your soul while simultaneously grooving your socks off’. 

On the flip side of the coin however, ‘Keeping Promises’ has no intention to balance Kimberly’s melancholia with any upsides or any intentions to ‘groove your socks off’. Instead, we’re forced to be confronted head on by the sobering sorrowfulness that’s channeled by Kim’s voice, for we’re given contrasting distractions from the gravity of her raw vocals and bare-backed lyrics. 

In regards to the sonic landscapes of Keeping Promises, Kimberly creates atmosphere in ways that are relatively less conventional. If you delve into the singles at hand you will see how she utilizes background chatter, sizzles, pops and the absence of sound or layers of sound to create these ambiances that seem eerily nostalgic and dense yet hazy, like you’re enveloped by a thick fog. 

Amongst the abundance of artists and bands that serve as an inspiration towards Kimberly’s album, one of the most dominant mainstays amongst her idols and influences is the works of Los Angeles based singer/songwriter and Indie rock legend, Sharon Von Etten, with a focused lens on her 2019 album ‘Remind me Tomorrow’. The atmospherics and sonic landscapes on this album in particular, and their “untraditional” nature as Kim puts it, is a factor that had an

obvious impact on the creation of this album - for you can see the lingering remnants of Sharon Von Etten’s influence in the eerie and nostalgic outro of ‘Secrets’ and intro of ‘Reservoir Road’. 

By having a very ‘lyrical and spacial mind’-in which she owes to her daytime job as an architect Kimberly described the process of making the soundscape of each of the tracks as trying to create a little world within each song that then falls into the bigger world of the album. To paint a picture, if her album were to be a house, each track within would serve as it’s own room. So, while each song is given the freedom to delve into it’s own themes, mood or whatnot, there’s an overarching through line that ties all these tracks together, resulting in each song seeming to come across as cohesive and part of a larger set. So what is the through-line in question? Well let’s get into that right now. 

When discussing the process of her songwriting, it wasn’t long until we found ourselves looking at her writing at it’s most sentimental capacity for, with all the bittersweetness in which this entails, Kimberly discussed how her writing ‘Takes her back home’.

While Kim has been living in Naarm for just about eleven years now, her family and birthplace remain in South Africa which, given the hustle and bustle of one’s adult life, she remarked that she returns back home around once a year if she’s lucky. If you notice a thread of homesickness or nostalgia induced memories to be weaved within the upcoming album, you can credit Kim crafting many of these tracks as a tool to return home to her family for that throughline. 

 Discussing that writing about her original home is her own way of time travelling back to those memories, Kim told us that “(Songwriting) is a way for me to return home and be with my family and to reflect on my family”. At the end of the day, the process of songwriting for Kim is her way of processing feelings… and as she put it candidly to us, “I have a lot of big feelings”. 

When it comes to songwriting, I find the case of Kimberly and Aunty Blue to be a bit funny: In most cases a solo project conveys a much softer or vulnerable side to an artist as opposed to the filtered, audience friendly work they may provide in their band or group project. If you look at the work of her band however and the lyrics embedded within their groovy work, you may at first find it hard to comprehend how Kimberly could get even more vulnerable or tender in regards to her story telling. As it turns out however, Kimberly can get even more melancholic. If we’re comparing the songwriting between both of Kim’s projects, we can initiate that discussion by first saying that her solo project is ‘more personal’. 

When writing the lyricism for Aunty Blue, Kim will harness personal stories or emotional scenarios that are relatable feelings and experiences for her audience. On top of that, the themes in which the outfit explores lyrically will tend to reflect not only Kim’s but also the rest of the band members’ mindsets for it is a group project afterall. In comparison however, Kim’s solo work is purely and unflinchingly just her and her alone.

The stories and emotions conveyed in this album delves completely into self-exploration. In regards to the bare-backed, unfiltered approach of her lyricism on this album, there’s no better example to offer you than her single ‘When the coffee wears off’. I could describe this track for you but really, it speaks for itself. So make a mental note to check that track out once you’re done reading this, for it’s a personal favourite of mine.

Kimberly is far from being a fledgling to the craft of writing music as she has been delving into the art for the past 19 years now. So, it begs the question, what caused Keeping Promises to come into being and why now out of all possible times? 

‘School of Song’, an online library of songwriting courses has been a resource that Kim has been popping her head into over the past few years with the simple motive and explanation of ‘wanting to get better at the craft’ of writing music and always being ‘hungry to learn more’. Amongst a variety of courses she has taken via this website - including a class by Adrianne Lenker of Big Thief fame’- it was precisely the teachings of Brooklyn based producer Phillip Weinrobe that not only changed Kim’s entire perspective towards songwriting, it’s also credited by Kim as being that final push for creating her own album. 

As she puts it, Phillip Weinrobe “Completely changed my whole view of the recording process and production (of making music). It gave me this energy and this idea to write and record my own album”. In regards to the key takeaways of this online tutor’s teachings, it’s his value of ‘anti-perfectionism’ that has had an immense effect on Kim’s musical journey. 

“(Phillip’s recording process is) all about capturing the moment of the emotion rather than getting the perfect take”. To emphasise the importance of Phillip’s teaching, Kim explained that “I wanted to challenge myself and teach myself and wanted to lean into capturing that sort of magic of writing a song and recording it in a timeframe where it’s really raw. It’s not polished.” 

To get an even better idea of what Kim’s tryna tell us here, she gives us the following example, “Say there’s a car that goes by or a bird that goes by your room - it’s capturing that moment of that space you were in when recording the song rather than something super polished and removed from that authentic connection”. 

If you’re an artist of any calibre, you’ve likely got a project - whether it be an unfinished painting, a song forever trapped in it’s demo phase or even just some unused poetry in an unlabelled folder on your phone’s notes app- you slapped with the mental sticky note of ‘I’ll finish this one day’. However, as time passes on, It stays on your top shelf, unfinished and gathering dust and forever tormenting the back of your mind.

'Being a good song mum’ was a phrase I hadn’t heard prior to this interview and It’s stuck with me since. Kimberly used this phrase to convey the responsibility that she feels as though she owes to all the songs she’s made in the past and yet never saw through to releasing.

“Perfectionism is such a block. It’s taken me so long to allow myself to fuck it up.”

Alongside finding ways to diminish the need for perfectionism, Kim also discussed how she “learnt ways for the internal editor in me to quiet down a bit so that I can be a good song mother.”

With her album now on standby and awaiting release, we took the opportunity to sit back and to observe Keeping Promises as Kim’s soon-to-be first published example of her solo work. And so with that in mind, I was curious as to how she would compare this newfound experience of working by herself to her now familiar experience of working in a group setting. To summarise the answer to this question, Kim and I essentially found ourselves weighing the pros and cons of self isolation as, while solo work was a good learning curve to do everything by herself, it was, comparatively, “a bit lonely”. 

However, ‘loneliness’ as we put it can have it’s positive quirks. The experience of working by herself gave her the opportunity to go ever inwards on herself, to ‘delve into your own world and really lean into that, to build that landscape a bit’. To add on to this train of thought, Kimberly told us that “It was lovely to really get into my own head and to craft this little world. That’s what I feel (this album is), it’s a little world and it was really amazing to allow myself to do that, it was really beautiful.” 

Photo Credit: Jack Doust

If there’s one thing Kim and I want you to get out of reading this piece (aside from checking out her music that is!), it’s to not be a perfectionist. To bring the interview to an end and to finally let our damp pants dry out in the sun, I asked Kim the same question I asked Aunty Blue almost three years prior… that is, ‘what do you want your audience to get out fo your music’. The answer I got was something in which she deemed to be a babble for a response and thus expressed how she hopes I can (with my humble writing prowess) make it sound as eloquent as possible, so here goes.

The short answer, Kim wants you “To release from the holds of perfection and to follow your heart”.

The long answer is this: 

The creation of ‘Keeping Promises’ has been no simple task for Kim. In fact, having the gall to go through with this solo project and to be a good song mum has been something that has required a crazy amount of courage (this courage she also credits to her support network of friends and family). So, when it comes down to it, if there was one thing that Kim wants you to extract and apply to yourself from listening to her music, it’s to motivate you to do what it took Kim all this time to figure out. That being, to ‘make that thing that’s inside of you’, to ‘be the person you’re supposed to be’ and to be the good mother that your unfinished projects deserve to have.

Find Kim on Instagram here

Listen to her latest single 'Slow Down' here

You can see Kim play live on the 12 September here