Georgia Lines is a singer with her career on the rise. Photo / Frances Carter
Georgia Lines is a singer with her career on the rise. Photo / Frances Carter
Georgia Lines has had a hell of a last couple of months.
Fresh off being named Best Pop Artist at the Aotearoa Music Awards, the Tauranga singer-songwriter released her debut album The Rose of Jericho to strong reviews.
She then opened Brooke Fraser’s one-off show at Auckland’s Spark Arena in front of 12,000 fans, before being shortlisted for an APRA Silver Scroll for her single The Letter.
“This year has felt in particular quite big, and the last few months have felt even bigger,” Lines told Newstalk ZB’s Real Life with John Cowan, in an interview that aired on Sunday night.
“It’s been going really well. The most exciting and affirming thing for me is hearing the stories and responses from people. It has felt very different with this record compared to previous work.
“When you release things, people are like, ‘great job, you’re doing awesome, love what you’re doing’, and that’s always affirming. But I’ve had a lot of very specific stories of how songs have spoken directly into people’s journey, and that’s been really lovely.”
Lines says the way people have connected with The Rose of Jericho has confirmed that music is what she wants to do with her life.
“Like, I don’t want to create noise for the sake of creating noise,” she told Real Life.
“I want to make art and bodies of work that mean something deeply to me, that capture points in my journey or things I’ve learnt along the way – and hopefully that then means something to someone else.”
Amid the chaos of being a pop artist in 2024, Lines says she’s committed to ensuring the demands of her music career never become unsustainable.
Georgia Lines was the winner of Best Pop Artist at the Aotearoa Music Awards 2024. Photo / Stijl, James Ensing-Trussell
“My goal has always been about how to create a career that is here for a long time and not just burning out within five years,” she said.
“I’m trying to keep that perspective at the forefront. Sometimes it means going ‘actually, we need to say no to this’, even though it feels like a big thing to say no to, because it’s way more important that I am doing this or that the capacity is spent for this next thing coming up.”
Lines credits much of her present-day success as a solo artist to her “formative years” as a songwriter and musician at Curate, the church she grew up in in Tauranga.
“My first experience of the stage and performing, although it’s very different, was being a part of the team there, singing on Sundays and songwriting,” she said.
“I look back at that time and I learned so much about songwriting and performing and engaging with people and communicating, and although it’s a very different context, I use a lot of that now.”
Her faith remains a strong part of her identity and influences her songwriting, but Lines says it’s a “natural output of who I am”, rather than something she deliberately infuses into her music.
“My faith has played and still continues to play a really important part in who I am, and is something that I will continue to cling to,” she told Real Life.
“Everything I create is just a natural representation of who I am, what I’m navigating, and how I’m navigating those things.
“I’ve never been super intentional about going, ‘I need to make sure I’m writing in a certain way and bringing that [my faith] into what I’m doing’. I’m just creating and making music, and of course that’s going to influence how I think and process.”
Lines says she wants to one day be able to look back on her career with pride at how she stayed herself the whole way through.
“I think at the end of the day, going ‘who was the person that I was?’ Was I a great daughter, friend, wife? Because I think those things are way more important than your job,” she said.
“I really hope I help people and encourage other artists. That’s something I’ve been really passionate about and hopefully will continue to do for the rest of my life - find ways to equip artists and help them with the things I’ve learnt along the way.
“I hope I’m really present in all of the excitement and the fun shows and the albums and the songwriting and the travel, and all the things that feel really big.”
Real Life is a weekly interview show where John Cowan speaks with prominent guests about their life, upbringing, and the way they see the world. Tune in Sundays from 7.30pm on Newstalk ZB or listen to the latest full interview here.
