Tiny Ruins. Photo / Frances Carter
We’re talking about marriage and miscarriages, births and bereavements, new puppies and old anxieties when Hollie Fullbrook says, “It’s been the most formative five years of my life. Even more so than my early 20s and all of that. Break-ups, you know.”
A flash of emotion flickers across her face and I can’t tell whether she’s going to laugh or cry when she says, “A break-up album seems so …”
Trite? Indulgent? Banal? Prosaic? I wonder. But she doesn’t finish the thought. Instead, she flops her head back on the pillows of her bed and sighs, “I yearn for the days of a break-up.”
And like honey
Deep in the hive
It stings to be there
But I go there all the time
Dogs Dreaming - Tiny Ruins
There’s a lot of life on Ceremony, the new album from Fullbrook’s group Tiny Ruins.
Musically, it’s the most lively the band has ever been. Most songs bounce along with a sense of joie de vivre. Bass queen Cass Basil’s funk influence bops away as it slinks around the loose grooves of drummer Alex Freer and plays with guitarist Tom Healy’s inventive licks and ornate instrumentation.
In contrast to the music, Fullbrook lyrically exposes her life in a way she hasn’t before. Her words are far too beautiful, too moving and affecting to ever be called raw, but the emotion behind that beauty is visceral. A song detailing a simple walk along the beach and flipping a flailing upturned crab back on to its legs so it can scuttle away into the sea becomes an emotional powerhouse capable of leaving you a blubbering mess.
“These songs feel the most personal that I’ve written. It was difficult, intimate, sad material,” Fullbrook says. “They came from a place of introspection and solitude and quietness. I remember saying to Alex, our drummer, ‘I’ve written a lot of material but I don’t know how I feel about it becoming an album. It might be too … you know. It might just be for me.’”
She started writing five years ago with the material beginning life not as songs but as a coping mechanism. During the day she was working on the widescreen splendour of Olympic Girls, the group’s 2019, award-nominated album, before returning home to her notebooks to pour her heartbreak and grief on to their small pages.
“I was going through a really difficult time,” she says quietly. “We’d lost a baby. I was processing that through writing these poems. I just didn’t have the reserves to put them to music.”
How to write or sing of the state I’m in?
Something frightful
So another night falls
In Light of Everything - Tiny Ruins
It was during the Covid lockdowns that Fullbrook found the time and space to grapple with what she was going through. Alongside her grief and the uncertainty of the pandemic, she found pockets of joy. She got married. The newlyweds adopted two dogs. She reconnected with her environment, finding peace in long walks around her neighbourhood. As the days passed the concerns and thoughts she was putting to paper began to change. She describes this as “the next phase” of writing for the album.
She found herself facing difficult life questions as she worked through what many women have to deal with. She was in her late 30s making another shot at pregnancy exponentially more risky. It would be devastating if something went wrong. It could be harmful to her career if it went right. Did she want to put her work on hold for a minimum of 18 months? Could she?
“I had got to the stage of having two dogs and being really settled and feeling so happy with everything. It was like, ‘Do we roll the dice or is this going to end in tragedy again, and it’s going to be so hard to recover? Do I want to be a mum still? What is life?’ It was a real philosophical, existential dilemma. I’m a whole and happy person right now. Do I want to threaten that? I was processing all of these things walking around these bays with the dogs.”
Spun out and prone, the crab lay there reaching
Casting off his hardened shell
I said, ‘Dude, I think I know how you’re feeling’
The Crab/Waterbaby - Tiny Ruins
When the group assembled around two years ago to begin work on the follow-up to Olympic Girls, Fullbrook found herself full of self-doubt. She didn’t know if her grief should be the genesis of the album. She was uncomfortable with putting herself out there this much. She says her heart was racing when she played the band the demos of the new songs.
“I felt so exposed,” she says. “But my band is super-cool, collected characters. None of them said anything. It’s just on with the music.”
Looking back, she thinks she was subconsciously testing out how she would feel with the songs, her thoughts, and her grief, being out there in the world.
“As a songwriter, it’s hard to have written stuff and then not see it through to being a song,” she explains. “The recording process helped. Once you’ve broken the barrier of playing songs to your band, the hardest part is over.”
Her initial demos were very solemn, but once the band started working on the songs they morphed as they got pushed into new, unexpected directions. Maybe it was the exuberance they felt at finally being in a room playing together again after a couple of years apart but the result was a collection of songs ranging in mood from joyous to shimmeringly beautiful to tear-jerking.
“I quite like dancing to some of the songs,” Fullbrook laughs. “It’s got a good range of feelings on it. Which is good, because grief is a whole spectrum of experiences it’s not just sadness. There are beautiful moments as well as sadness. The band went down that road and I happily, gladly, followed because it gave me a little bit of separation from the sad emotion of the lyrics. It was good for me.”
She also grappled with how personal to get when discussing this most personal record.
“I’ve definitely struggled with how to reconcile talking about it and how much backstory to give it because I don’t want the audience to have heavy baggage when they listen. I want them to come to the album and be able to embrace it for their own life with their own experiences. With their own joy or their own grief. For it to be up to them completely. But I have to be honest about it. It feels weird not to be.”
She also hopes that talking about it will help normalise conversations around miscarriage. It’s a heartbreaking occurrence for many women and couples but one that’s mostly kept hushed away. Perhaps because of the anguish involved. And while Aotearoa New Zealand doesn’t keep any official stats on pregnancy loss before 20 weeks, the Ministry of Health estimates that 1-2 out of every 10 pregnancies is lost, which works out to between 7500 to 14,750 miscarriages every year.
Our hearts blink on sympathy cards
The message reads over and over
Why does it have to be so hard?
Sounds Like - Tiny Ruins
“I want this to start a conversation about it and open a discourse and everything. It’s weird that people don’t talk about it. I’m still kind of like, ‘What do I say about this album?’ It’s hard because I’m going back in time and thinking about this really difficult time,” she says. “But at the same time, it’s been you know, heal … Oh, I don’t like the word ‘healing’. It’s been healing but it’s what I do to process experience.”
Writing about what she experiences, she says, is hardwired into her. Be that journalling, poetry or songs. It’s how she’s navigated or made sense of life for as long as she can remember.
“It feels like it’s almost out of my control whether they become songs or not,” she explains, likening it to a being on a moving train. The band’s asking for songs, rehearsals are planned, and recording studios are booked.
“It just happens,” she says. “Like, okay, this is the album now. I’m really proud of that because it’s an honest work of my real life and experience. I’m not trying to shy away from it. It’s a big human thing to go through. We all have these experiences, and sometimes it’s a relief to have them happen, because you’re like, ‘Okay, this is life, this is what happens and we’re all gonna go through it.’ But at the same time, I’m being a bit protective of myself. It’s a weird in-between feeling. I’ve been nervous about letting the songs go. I’ve wanted to hold on to them. Even though it was ready to release I just wanted to keep the songs to myself a bit longer.”
I need a ceremony
I need a ritual
I need a ceremony
I need a ritual
The Crab/Waterbaby - Tiny Ruins
There’s a peculiar comfort in not letting go. You cling to that sadness in order to still feel close to what you’ve lost. To still feel something. You come to believe that letting go means forgetting. The pain is comforting because it is there with you when what you’ve lost can’t be.
“As soon as it’s gone, it’s gone,” she agrees. “In some ways, that’s what you wanted. You wanted it to be released, in this case literally released, and then you can move on to the next thing. And that is what I want to do. I’m looking forward to writing the next record about this next period of time. But there is a sweetness to letting go of that whole chapter of my life.”
Now let’s go give this day a chance
The Crab/Waterbaby - Tiny Ruins
Fullbrook estimates that she and her Tiny Ruins bandmates have been sitting on Ceremony for around 18 months. That’s not so unusual these days. The pandemic pushed back nearly every new album, show or movie. However, Covid was not the reason for the delay.
“I had a baby,” she smiles. “So that delayed the plan.”
Fullbrook’s daughter is a happy and healthy 14-month-old now. Like all new parents, she’s feeling sleep deprived and has been riding “a roller coaster of emotions”.
“I’d always wanted to have a child, it was something I’d always dreamed of,” she says. “It’s hard but it’s wonderful at the same time. It’s the hardest and the most beautiful year that I’ve experienced on this planet so far. She’s so funny and super-sparky.”
“She slept through the night for the first time, just a couple of nights ago,” she says with a sense of relief that all parents that have got through that hump will relate to.
Then, taking a sip of the coffee she’s been cradling throughout the interview Fullbrook laughs and corrects herself.
“And when I say that, I mean, she still woke up for like, two feeds. She’s got a lot of energy.”
* Tiny Ruins new album Ceremony is out Friday, 28 April. The band tour Aotearoa throughout May. For dates and tickets visit Banishedmusic.com.
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