“I’ve envisioned and fantasised about releasing an album since I was an eight-year-old,” says Gretta Ray. “I was in the back of the car listening to Kylie Minogue and Missy Higgins on my walkman dreaming about an album.”
That fantasy is now a reality: her debut album Begin To Look Around arrives in the midst of another lockdown in Victoria. It’s perhaps not as glamorous as what a Kylie album launch would look like, but it’s a triumph nonetheless.
Begin To Look Around is a “coming of age” record. An intimate and personal document of her transition from her late teens to her early-20s — a time of love, heartache, travel, and growth, all of which is magnified on the record. She’s learned it all in real-time and the songs that make up the 16-track effort document everything in the heat of the moment. Ray shies away from no emotion. Instead, she embraces it all, translating it to crisp, pulsing pop songs that recall the earthy songwriting prowess of artists like Higgins, Taylor Swift, and Paul Simon.
Ray is no stranger the growing up publicly. When she was just 18, she won triple j Unearthed with ‘Drive’ — a forthright guitar-pop song that introduced us to an earnest songwriter. Begin To Look Around captures that same warmth and thrill for the unknown and sharpens it, deepening the emotions with experience.
If ‘Drive’ was scratching the surface then Begin To Look Around is plunging into the deep end. It wasn’t meant to be that deep though. When she set out to make her debut album life was yet to throw heartbreak in her way.
“I didn’t have an idea what I wanted the record to become. I just wanted to make pop music and become more of a seasoned songwriter,” she says. “The universe was like, ‘it’s time to write your debut record’ and just shat over everything.”
Photo Credit: Alexander Gow
Heartbreak On The Road
2019 was a shapeshifting year for Ray. Before the world came to a hard halt, she was living a life on the road, with everything moving at a million miles a minute. Ray opened for Gang Of Youths on their world tour and also travelled Europe with her friends. At the same time, a relationship at home had fallen apart.
“2019 in hindsight was so ridiculous how many parts of the world I got to travel to,” she says. “That was really exciting and distracting but the moments I would have where everything still felt pretty painful, they would hit you out of the blue — it doesn’t matter where you are.”
You can hear that movement throughout the record whether it be the literal depictions of travel on songs like ‘Paris’ and ‘It’s Nearly Christmas In Philly’ or the pace at which the record gallops. As the title of the album suggests, her eyes are wide open taking everything in — even as her emotions warped inside.
“The universe was like, ‘it’s time to write your debut record’ and just shat over everything.”
“I was tending to this relationship that wasn’t going to work but I was so in denial,” she admits.
When you’re seeing some of the greatest cities in the world, however, it’s hard not to find wanderlust. “The greatest days can still seem magic in the midst of my sadness,” she sings on ‘Paris’. The beginning of the record, in particular, brings a push and pull between sadness and wonder.
She recalls coming off stage after opening for Gang Of Youths in London and being overwhelmed by sadness. “It was one of the first times when I realised I can’t text my person and say how I felt. I’d become so reliant on that form of communication with that person,” she recounts. “I was lying on the couch in the green room and crying while my manager packed up my guitar. Then I went onto the stage [with Gang Of Youths] and screamed SAY YES TO LIFE and everything was alright.”
During the tour, Gang Of Youths’ frontman Dave Le’aupepe became a confidente for Ray.
Soaking in the band’s ability to simultaneously process trauma and prioritise optimism is an important step on the path to Ray learning to exhale. “All I had to do was have a chat with Dave and everything was okay with life,” she says before saying that she’s inspired by the way Gang Of Youths’ records embrace the uncertainty of life with an energetic grandiosity. It’s apt then that Le’aupepe appears on ‘Worldy Wise’ — the record’s beacon of positivity.
“Can you brave it? Miles from Melbourne, can you take it? Don’t get complacent wherever you are,” she sings. Far from crumbling in her dressing room, the world sounds limitless, as if she’s leaping across continents.
Photo Credit: Alexander Gow
Dancing Through It
Ray finds that sort of bounding energy in the blueprint of pop music. She was determined to embrace the genre on this album, studying the form and techniques of a traditional pop song. Even when she’s not radiating positivity like she is on ‘Worldly Wise’, she’s expressing herself overbold, dazzling instrumentals. Her willingness to go big is perhaps the record’s biggest strength.
There’s a striking confidence in her commitment to expressing every emotion with vigour that feels tied to pop’s roots. Like the genre’s greats, from Robyn to Lorde, she’s tapped into this unique ability to exhale and dance even as her heart shatters. That’s powerful, and it results in the album’s most glorious moments from the wickedly sharp ‘Cherish’ to the sprawling, anthemic ‘Love Me Right’. “Now I’m wide awake and I have less weight to take, it would be hard to break this concrete frame of mind,” she sings on the latter defiantly claiming her independence with a chorus that soars higher than anything she’s ever made.
“I can definitely write the songs that have a little bit of a sting now. I’ve arrived at that point,” she laughs. ‘Cherish’ is where you hear that the most as she sings, “I’m no match for your demons, I know that I won’t beat ‘em.” The instrumental that unfolds behind is a stark comparison to the lyrics, building her self-confidence before she even arrives there lyrically. She calls ‘Cherish’ the most “honest” song on the album, but it also may be the one that achieves her goal of making pop music that’s both repeatable and organic.
“I really wanted the pop elements of those songs to shine through,” she says.
She honed in on that from the beginning, making sure these songs would sit in your brain for weeks before injecting her own personal touches to it. “Once I had these songs that were a balance of neat and authentic, it was like what’s going to make this more me,” she explains.
She found that in sweeping orchestrals, grand pianos and live drums spotted throughout the songs. As a result, the album is lush and expansive — you can almost see it spilling over festival crowds. The feeling echoes that of Taylor Swift’s Fearless, a record she notes had a significant impact on her as a 10-year-old. It tears from the pages of her diary but it also rings out across a stadium to great effect without sacrificing any of the intimacy. That’s a difficult balance to achieve. To be both grandiose and gentle.
Photo Credit: Alexander Gow
Exhale
“These things will change, can you feel it now,” Swift sings on ‘Change’, the final song on Fearless. It’s a moment of relief — a final exhale — on an emotionally dense record. Rey created a similar feeling with Begin To Look Around’s closer ‘Care Less’. “I’ve come to my senses,” she sings with resolve.
“I wanted it to feel light,” she says of closing the album on that note. “You dip into this intensity and then you just move onto the next thing.”
That move was actually inspired by Ariana Grande’s thank u, next. That album dealt with trauma in a magnified way but then it closed out on ‘break up with your girlfriend, i’m bored’. It’s a “shrug,” as Ray puts it. A reminder that these immense feelings are temporary.
It’s a “shrug,” as Ray puts it…a reminder that these immense feelings are temporary.
In exploring this, Ray recognises something she’s been doing since the beginning of her career. On ‘Drive’ she sings, “it’s the best thing in the worst way.” ‘Drive’ is a bright spark but there’s also a lingering uncertainty that this loved-up feeling could be temporary.
Begin To Look Around unpacks that feeling of uncertainty even further — learns to celebrate it even. “This is a fucking disaster but I’m having a dance,” she laughs while attempting to pin-point the defining feature of the album. She’s found it.
Ray would rather be playing these songs out to huge crowds, and she’s more than excited to do that once it’s safe to do so, but you can see how this record could be a comfort right now. It’s an album that accepts uncertainty rather than fearing it. Even when things are at their bleakest, she attempts to appreciate what’s immediately available to her, whether that be a breath of fresh air or a cry-dance.
“There’s hope in this broken heart, dancing amidst the disaster of it all,” she sings on ‘The Cure’. It’s the album’s mantra, and a heartening one at that.
Gretta Ray’s Begin To Look Around is out now via EMI.
Sam Murphy is a music writer and Co-Editor of The Interns. He also co-hosts the podcast Flopstars. Follow him on Twitter.
Photo Credit: Alexander Gow (@alexandergow)