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‘It’s a pretty lonely life’ … Kimbra. Photograph: Cybele Malinowski/The Guardian



KIMBRA ON THE UPS AND DOWNS OF FAME: ‘ALWAYS HAVING TO LOOK LIKE A POP STAR IS
EXHAUSTING’

‘It’s a pretty lonely life’ … Kimbra. Photograph: Cybele Malinowski/The Guardian




At just 21, the New Zealand musician became famous for her part in smash-hit
song Somebody That I Used to Know. So what happened next?

by Katie Cunningham

Fri 6 Jan 2023 19.00 GMTLast modified on Thu 19 Jan 2023 13.56 GMT
 * 
 * 
 * 



Lately, Kimbra has been thinking about her anxiety. It’s something she’s long
struggled with but has begun to take more seriously as an adult. “I have a
really challenging career, so sometimes I [feel like], why me? Then I’m like,
well, it makes sense,” she says, her native Kiwi accent dulled by years of
living in the US. “Any young woman who was thrown into the spotlight young, who
has to think every day about how they appear, to be scrutinised, and has a lot
of people putting money into their career – obviously, I’m going to be
susceptible to anxiety.”

Kimbra Lee Johnson, who you probably know mononymously, has been in the public
eye for most of her life. She began performing and making music at 11 (see the
adorable clip of her declaring “one day, I’d love to be a pop star” on a New
Zealand children’s show). At 17 she signed a management deal with financing,
part of a long game plan to get her ready to launch as an artist, “which is a
huge privilege but fucking pressure as well”. By the time she was 21, she had
achieved the sort of success most musicians can only dream of when she appeared
on the 2011 Gotye hit Somebody That I Used to Know, which topped the charts in
23 countries, was awarded two Grammys and now ranks among the bestselling
digital singles of all time. Her debut album, released soon after, went platinum
in Australia and New Zealand and proved her flair for creating interesting,
left-of-centre pop songs that are more Björk than Britney Spears.



Now 32, Kimbra is preparing to share her fourth album, A Reckoning. It’s her
first release as an independent artist, which feels significant given her early
years as a major label darling. She got her childhood wish to become a pop star
but can now reflect on both the good and bad that it brought. The Hamilton-born
artist loves performing and feels music is her purpose. But success has also
meant challenge and sacrifice.


‘I don’t like how narcissistic fame is. I spend so much time looking at myself;
it’s really boring’ … Kimbra. Photograph: Cybele Malinowski/The Guardian


“It’s a pretty lonely life,” Kimbra says, before sitting in one of the many long
pauses she will take during our conversation, choosing her words carefully. “Not
a lot of people can really understand the pressures that you’re under. And I
think loneliness is responsible for a lot of things. When you’re lonely, then
you get more in your head and then your mental health goes out [the window].”

> I don’t like the transactional part of fame, where I exist to be an accessory
> for your Instagram photo

Kimbra

Of course, Kimbra couldn’t have known what she was signing up for when this all
began. At 17, as soon as she finished high school, she moved from New Zealand to
Melbourne to begin work on her debut album, expanding on tracks she wrote when
she was 15, including Settle Down and The Build Up. Suddenly she went from a
“pretty normal” teenager with lots of friends and hobbies to being alone in a
new city, her life revolving around work. It was a difficult transition but in
2010 the hard work paid off and she signed with Warner. The deal was brokered by
her then-manager Mark Richardson, an industry veteran who had flown to Auckland
to meet Kimbra and her parents after hearing a demo on her MySpace page.

Richardson had put her in the studio with a producer, François Tétaz, to work on
the album. At the time, Tétaz was also working on the next album from
singer-songwriter Wally de Backer, AKA Gotye. The pair asked Kimbra if she would
be interested in singing on an offbeat, spacey Gotye song that they were trying
to find the right guest vocalist for – Somebody That I Used to Know.

“She laid that vocal down in her bedroom with Wally and the rest is history,”
Richardson remembers. “It just blew up.”



Kimbra was everywhere. Vows, the debut album the 21-year-old had been working on
quietly for years, was released a month later. But the success of Somebody That
I Used to Know was “challenging” for Kimbra, Richardson thinks.

Ladyhawke: ‘I feel lucky to be alive and making music’
Read more


“It’s like a massive adrenaline shot,” he describes. They were in the process of
developing Kimbra as an artist, which had been moving at a nice pace pre-Gotye.
“And then the next minute, she’s on stage getting a Grammy from Prince … It’s
difficult to handle that. Because suddenly you get given everything, rather than
slowly, progressively, earning everything.”

Kimbra wishes she could have enjoyed or even remembered that time more, instead
of constantly thinking about the next thing. “But this is stuff that you don’t
really know when you’re 20,” she says. She learned how nonstop touring and her
“all-consuming” focus on music could disconnect her from friends, and that fame
could be a double-edged sword.


Gotye, Kimbra and Prince onstage during the 55th Grammy awards in 2013 in Los
Angeles. Photograph: Kevin Winter/WireImage

“I don’t like the transactional part of fame, where I exist to be an accessory
for your Instagram photo,” she says. “I don’t like feeling like a product. I
don’t like having to uphold a fantasy all the time.



“The expectation of always having to look like a pop star is exhausting. And I
don’t like how narcissistic fame is. I spend so much time looking at myself;
it’s really boring – in the mirror, approving promo photos, making things on
social media. There’s a self-absorbed part of fame where you have to always be
on watch. It’s a price I’m willing to pay … I just wish it wasn’t so ‘me, me,
me’. Because I truly mean it – it truly is boring to only think about yourself,
and fame does that. It just creates an echo chamber.”

By 2014 Kimbra pulled the brakes. She began to work on her second album, The
Golden Echo, in Los Angeles. It was the turning point in her career. Richardson
says the pressure was on from her label after Vows and the Gotye track to
deliver a big follow-up album; a desire that was sometimes at odds with Kimbra’s
vision. “She was trying to push the bounds of music,” Richardson says. “She
didn’t want to be moulded into the next Katy Perry.”

Excited by her new access to artists whose work she’d long admired, Kimbra
crammed the record with big ideas and big collaborations with the likes of John
Legend, Daniel Johns and Thundercat. “There was no organic flow with it … and I
think that it just got a bit lost, to be honest,” Richardson says.


‘I want to make shit that’s going to matter when I die’ … Kimbra. Photograph:
Cybele Malinowski/The Guardian


The Golden Echo divided critical opinion and did not replicate the commercial
success of her debut. Kimbra was happy in her decision to “go weird” with the
album, and is nonchalant about how it fared. “It probably wasn’t a smart
commercial move, but, oh well. I like it.”

Richardson and Kimbra parted ways after that. She moved to New York and four
years later she released her third album, Primal Heart. There were “always the
hopes that I would have more pop success”, Kimbra says. But it didn’t chart
well, and soon after she exited her record deal with Warner, feeling she and the
label were no longer on the same page.

“I was on a six-album deal and they wanted to extend it to eight albums and
choose my next producer. Nope,” she says. “They want to sign SoundCloud rappers
– it just wasn’t the right fit any more.”

In the years since that split Kimbra has been through an intense period of
personal challenges that include the sudden death of her best friend, breakups
and navigating New York during the apocalyptic early days of the pandemic. She
had to confront the way she processes big, heavy emotions and the “scary stuff”
that lives inside her, including the destructive ways she says her anxiety can
sometimes manifest. She began thinking about the afterlife more, delved deeper
into spirituality. All of this was poured into her fourth album – one that is
sonically more pared back than her previous work, with plenty of darker, more
introspective tracks, such as the haunting lead single Save Me. Writing it was a
salve.



“I’m just so grateful to God that I have music because I don’t know how else I
would get out that tension, that chaos,” she says. “I have a lot of interior
dialogues, and they’re not always kind.”

When she’s at home in New York, Kimbra enjoys simple pleasures: yoga, painting
watercolours, walking her dog and watching “shitty reality TV like everyone
else”. And now she’s an independent artist, she feels “liberated” in her work;
no longer having to deal with expectations from a label about how her music
should sound.



“I just want to make music I like,” she says. “I can’t go and sell something
that I don’t believe in … I’m leaving behind a legacy. I want to make shit
that’s going to matter when I die.”

The enigmatic Aldous Harding: ‘I’m like the Jim Carrey of the indie world’
Read more

Having been through the major label machine and come out the other side, Kimbra
sees positives and negatives. The music industry can be exploitative,
patriarchal and “very shady in the way it’s set up”, she says. But she also
knows she owes a lot of her success to people in the industry who believe in
her. She has begun producing for other musicians – something that offers her a
healthy sense of detachment – and wants to mentor more young female musicians.

Looking back, “it’s crazy to think of how ambitious I was as a kid”, she says of
those early days of her career when she threw her everything into music. But
everything that happened along the way feels as though it was leading her here.

“[Without it], I wouldn’t be able to help other young women through anxiety and
the pressures of the music industry. I wouldn’t have all these things to offer.
You know how if someone has been married to the same person all their life, and
they’re trying to give you relationship advice – you’re like, well, you don’t
really know,” she says. “So I wouldn’t change anything.”

 * A Reckoning is out on 27 January. Kimbra is touring Europe throughout
   January, and North America in February and March

Topics
 * Gotye
 * New Zealand
 * Pop and rock
 * Anxiety
 * interviews

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