The Big Read: Kimbra

The many faces of kiwi singer Kimbra. Photo / Thom Kerr

Bringing you our favourite features from 2014. If you missed them the first time around, now’s the perfect time to catch up. And remember to come back tomorrow for the next instalment.

Between writing music for Tim Burton, performing at festivals around the world and inspiring French designer Franck Sorbier, Kimbra has been working away on a new album influenced by Salvador Dali. Lydia Jenkin talks to the Hamilton-born star.

You're about as likely to find a simple term that describes the personality of Kimbra Johnson as you are to find a single genre into which her music fits. In fact, if there is one characteristic that defines Kimbra, it's that she consistently defies categorisation.

Her chatter is peppered with enthusiastic exclamations of "dude" and "man", sporadic fist pumps, and the occasional Americanism. But she also speaks fluent French, and when a five minute break opens up during a day of press interviews for her new album, she's pulling a slim volume entitled The Sacrament Of The Present, by a 17th-century Jesuit priest, from her bag, for a moment of quiet and reflection.

She loves heavy rock like The Dillinger Escape Plan, Mew, and The Mars Volta, as much as she loves the future soul sounds of Erykah Badu and Flying Lotus, or the old recordings of Nina Simone, Miles Davis, Michael Jackson and Prince. In fact, ask her about any genre and she'll likely school you on it pretty quickly.

At the age of 24, she works just as happily alongside 71-year-old super-composer Van Dyke Parks as she does with 35-year-old crooner John Legend, and psychedelic RnB artist Janelle Monae (who she planned to do a double-headline tour with earlier this year before Monae got ill and had to cancel). Not to mention her 20-something Kiwi bandmates Stevie Cat jnr and Timon Martin.

And she is equally open-minded when it comes to what she wears - thrift shopping, retro pieces, Kiwi labels like Stolen Girlfriends Club, original creations for her stage show involving a bodice lit with EL lights. She will throw them together over her petite doll-like frame with a colourful sense of confidence that somehow makes animal prints on top of floral patterns work.

"I think my approach is often about juxtaposition, and trying to find things that could co-exist together that maybe shouldn't," she says with a smile as we talk in an Auckland hotel during her recent brief visit to New Zealand to launch her new album, The Golden Echo.

What does all this juxtaposition and eclecticism have to do with success? Well, doing something in a way that no one yet has without totally befuddling or alienating people is a rare talent in the world of art and music, and Kimbra seems to have nailed it. ...

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- nzherald.co.nz