There’s no artist quite like Ziggy Ramo. After his critically acclaimed 2020 debut album, Black Thoughts, a 16-track journey that cemented his place as one of Australia’s most exciting talents, Ramo is back with an ambitious new record.
Sugar Coated Lies marks a significant sonic departure from his debut, and mirrors interesting thematic parallels to Stan’s new series, Black Snow, in which Ziggy stars. Boasting new collaborations (hello, Alice Skye!), stories and hooks, the recently released work is testament to Ziggy’s continuing evolution as an artistic force.
Junkee sat down with Ziggy to talk about his new record, musical influences, and art as a method of healing.
Junkee: Ziggy, you described your first record, Black Thoughts, as an obituary. I’m curious to know how you would describe your most recent release?
Ziggy Ramo: I think it would be journal entries. You know, Black Thoughts was kind of the obituary, I was in a very dark space and I didn’t think I would be around for much longer. So I wanted to get all of my understanding out. Whereas Sugar Coated Lies is so much more of the internal reflections of picking up those pieces.
Black Thoughts is so much external and it’s systemic and it’s out and it’s explicit, whereas Sugar Coated Lies, is a reflection and it’s coming inward and it’s like, ‘What is it like to live in the context that Black Thoughts describes?’
Confessional songwriting and vulnerability are arguably core pillars of your work. How do you approach vulnerability in your songwriting and your broader artistic process?
It’s kind of out of necessity. It’s like survival, right? There’s a line in ‘Better’, the final song on Sugar Coated Lies, and it’s, “accepting that I’m weak is really what made me brave”.
I think when I was younger I had this understanding, well, this false understanding that you had to keep it all in to be strong. Whereas I really started to realise that being honest, that’s true strength. It just wasn’t practical to try and keep it in because keeping it in just felt like I was poisoning myself.
I’m a complex, whole human being who grows, who changes, who evolved, and I wanted to demonstrate that my existence is resistance.
So for me, approaching vulnerability is really self-indulgent almost, because it makes me feel so much better. To be able to process [my feelings] both through therapy but then also through art. It’s kind of being able to take these things and these thoughts from your body and then actualise them outside of yourself, so you can look at them and understand them in a different way.
Processing emotion and art over time is something I also wanted to ask you about. For both of your records there was time between recording and releasing. For Black Thoughts, you recorded that in 2015, and then released it in 2020.
And then for Sugar Coated Lies you began recording in 2018, but are releasing the album this year. What do you think that time and space between recording and releasing has meant for you? How has this influenced how you interact with your work?
Thank you for such a thoughtful and perceptive question. I was chatting to someone the other day and they said it way more profound than I could ever, but they asked me, ‘Are these wounds or are they scars?’ And that is, I think, the biggest thing. You know I’m talking about these really dense, heavy dark things, but because I’ve literally had, you know, four to five years to process these wounds they become scars.
So it allows me to be a lot more objective about it and also I guess it prepares me to be able to sit and talk to people about it because instead of it being a very re-triggering thing, there’s a distance.
Hopefully it allows me to have been reflective on the work so that I can actually somewhat articulate the intention. I’ve lived with it for so long that it’s always a pretty big barometer for me if I still feel moved or connected to it in some way.
Hopefully it will still translate to people, but I think the biggest thing is: I really like to make art. The intention is art, right? For me, so much of my art is solely just about expression. So I have these big artistic and creative moments where the majority of the writing happens and then I just get to sit there and ruminate with it and get it to a place where I feel really ready to let it go, and I’m so ready to let it go after all of this year.
(Ziggy Ramo. Image: Supplied)
I wonder if that’s also part of the vulnerability process as well, that time in between recording and releasing. I’m sure there’s a journey in the writing process, and then another journey in the recording and then releasing process again.
Totally, and that’s the other thing: if you think about who you were four or five years ago, that person hopefully has changed quite a bit and grown and gone through different experiences. So when you go back and look at that person, parts of it are recognisable but then also other parts of it are completely different. So it’s kind of, I don’t know, maybe a romanticised thing of getting to go back to your past self and spend time with them and check in with them, and also check in with where you’re at [now]. I didn’t intentionally have that as a process, but it’s just formed that way through circumstances and it’s something that I love and weirdly feel like that I just do that.
I know what my next record is after this and I wrote it in 2020, so by the time it comes out it will have all happened again. And I’m sure I will start writing the next thing after that as well. So it just seems like I’m kind of stuck on this hamster wheel of writing and sitting. But I think that really comes from just wanting to be more creative, right? I’m writing something because it means something to me and then I’m taken somewhere else and then when I revisit it, I can really make sense of the creative outpour.
It feels like by honouring your past self, you’re able to make more sense of it in your present self.
Massively. And I feel like if I had to put out Sugar Coated Lies in 2018/2019, the conversations I would’ve been having around it would’ve been so different. I was in such a different place.
I want talk to you about you putting Sugar Coated Lies out, and I want to talk about your brother because your brother has been really pivotal in your work: introducing you to hip-hop with Kanye’s The College Dropout and even training you to freestyle as a kid after he discovered you could on ‘All Falls Down’. Of course, there was also the phone call from your brother that actually promted the release of Sugar Coated Lies, let’s talk a bit about that.
He’s been a constant in a pretty unstable journey, right? Like I’m sure you would’ve felt this trying to find a path in the arts and creative space. Like it’s not linear, right? You’re going up and down, side to side and you just hope for an upward trajectory.
[My brother’s] always been an island of safety … he has heard all of the things that I’ve ever done and the intention [for us both] was always for this record to get out there. It was just finding the right time.
I was working on a show called Black Snow and it was just hauntingly connected to this album. I had mentioned this to him in passing and a big part of why I jumped onto being in Black Snow was because I had this album sitting there.
I had said, ‘I really should probably go back and listen to that,’ and he asked me if he could get the link to listen to it again, and I sent it to him. He just called me one day and he was like, ‘It just has to be out,’ and then I started having conversations with the producers and I said, ‘Look I have this song that I feel like probably should be in this show’.
[My brother] has all of the energy in the whole world for it, and the day that I wrote ‘Never’ he was in the studio as well and in some of the piano recordings, you could hear him like screaming out of excitement because he was just having so much fun. He’s my biggest cheerleader in support and he was right, it was definitely the right time for it to come out. So you’ve got to listen to your big brother.
Great advice, for sure. The day the record came out was on January 26th, which is a day of resistance and protest and also a day of mourning. How do you see Sugar Coated Lies adding to truth telling by releasing on this day?
Yeah massively, it was a very thoughtful decision to go on that day. I can remember that day, there’s so much agony and I mean there’s always going [to] be so much agony associated with that day.
I think the thing for me was that the agony isn’t confined to that singular day for us, right? Like we experienced those same thoughts and feelings 365 days a year but the nation has that conversation on that day and then goes back to regular programming. So, for me, it was more about making that statement that this is every day for us. It doesn’t matter when I put out a record, whether it’s on January 26th or not, this is how I feel every day, all the time.
Sugar Coated Lies is a departure of Black Thoughts and initially I feel like if you hear that I’m putting a record out on January 26th, you probably have a perception of what that record would sound like. And Sugar Coated Lies is not at all that and that was also really important to me that it was. I’m a complex, whole human being who grows, who changes, who evolved, and I wanted to demonstrate that my existence is resistance and me having self-determination; continuing to be an independent artist; continuing to be able to be art-led; that was adding to true telling because this whole record is about my lived experience.
It’s a little bit more nuanced in that there’s so many songs about trauma and intergenerational trauma and the trauma that we carry. The dots aren’t as spoonfed to you as they are on Black Thoughts, but for me it was about remaining [true to myself] on every day of the year and being self-determined enough to just give people what I’m ready to give them, versus play into the trope of like having the be politicised all the time, right? Because that’s what’s so funny, I’m politicised all the time, regardless of what I’m doing or what I’m saying.
It was really big because it was almost trying to not even acknowledge that it’s Australia Day in a sense. It was just like, no, this isn’t a day that I celebrate. This isn’t a day that is significant to me. So much has led to [where I am now and] so much has gone into my opportunities from my ancestors and forefathers and community.
Let’s talk about your collaborations for Sugar Coated Lies. What was it like collaborating on this record with music that is so deeply personal?
Honestly, anyone that touched this record, I have really beautiful relationships with. Everyone knows me as a real person outside of just being an artist. So I weirdly never even thought about like, ‘Oh these are vulnerable songs and it’s weird to show them to people,’ because all of those people were present in my life.
It was just the ultimate privilege, because on my first record I didn’t have any collaborations, so this time around I wanted to approach it differently and grow and develop and shift as an artist.
A big part of that was wanting to connect with other artists. Alice Skye, I think I’m probably her number one fan in the whole world, so I was just overjoyed to be able to collaborate with Alice.
Vonn is an amazing newer artist. For whatever reason, I was lucky enough to come into Vonn’s sphere and I’m such a big fan and believer in what Vonn’s doing as well. And all the other writers and producers and Lewis Mitchell who executive produced and wrote with me. So like a big part of this was doing cool stuff with your cool friends, really. That was kind of the whole approach.
It must have been special to work with people who’s music you love and would also probably have some form of musical influence on you. Speaking of musical influences, I read that at six years old you started learning guitar and that just happened to coincide with the release of Corinne Bailey Rae’s iconic ‘Just Like A Star’, which was a favourite of yours. I heard you described the vocals on the track as intimate, as if she’s talking directly to you. Of course, there are differences in genre between your and Corinne’s music, but what do you think about that track and can you share other early musical influences on how they’ve shaped your work?
I was always just drawn to storytellers. I was always drawn to people who were using art as a mechanism and vehicle to express something. I think that song specifically — there’s such heartache, there’s such emotion, and it just moves you to hear that performance. It was like a magnet for me.
Coming from Indigenous culture, storytelling is innate and it’s what we’ve been doing for 50,000 years. But I didn’t have access to my ancestral song lines, so something my dad and I have talked about is reawakening and rediscovering song lines and positioning oneself as a song man. Reemerging something that’s deeply embedded in the fabric of my DNA. So I think the musical influences that really spoke to me were things that kind of hit on that, you know, ancestral tradition and ancestral pool, and then that has been forwarded into what I’m trying to do.
(Ziggy Ramo. Image: Supplied)
When you were younger you were working in health with remote communities and you’ve said you didn’t know if you could advocate for community through music at that time. I feel like that has very much changed now – your music absolutely does that. What do you think of the power of music as advocacy?
Thank you so much, very humbling. But yeah, with health there are so many social factors that go into determining positive health outcomes and it’s so far reaching in every aspect of life.
I think the power of art and the power of music, specifically, is that it moves people. I think within trying to create [a] shift we need people to be aware, and moved, and engaged. That’s what really drew me [to] feeling [that] my purpose of caring for Country and caring for my community could align [with] my passion for art. Trying to share understanding and lived experience with wider communities, who will in turn have an impact on impacting change.
Ziggy Ramo’s new record Sugar Coated Lies is out now.
Editor’s note: This interview has been condensed for length and clarity.
Interview and words by Issy Phillips, a multi-media producer and journalist. Follow her on Twitter.