Track By Track: Ruby Gill on Her Debut Album 'I’m Gonna Die With This Frown on My Face'

Ruby Gill rose to prominence in 2018 with the independently released single ‘Your Mum’. The single came out a couple of years after Gill had moved to Melbourne from Johannesburg, South Africa, where she was born and raised. Gill has remained in Naarm, where she’s part of a wider music community that includes songwriters Angie McMahon, Maple Glider and Mimi Gilbert, as well as producer and multi-instrumentalist Tim Harvey (jade imagine).

Harvey produced Gill’s debut album, I’m gonna die with this frown on my face, on which Gill interrogates social norms and grapples with the pressures of living out one’s young adulthood on a burning planet amid a postcolonial, neoliberal shitheap. Ahead of a national album tour, Gill breaks down the album track by track.

Ruby Gill: I’m gonna die with this frown on my face

1. I forgot to be profound today: I have always – and I think a lot of us have always – harboured a lot of internal pressure to be externally “interesting” and to perform to a level that pleases the corporation/community’s ideals of what a functional, successful, worthy adult might look and act like. This song was my questioning of that narrative, my small act of defiance against a job that makes me tired and a world that I never feel truly good enough for.

2. Anchor: My one small request for some stability among the turbulence, asking for a rock to hold onto in the big river.

3. Stockings for skating: Whenever I faced difficult adult times and wasn’t coping anymore, I would get in my car and drive the six hours it takes to get from Joburg to KwaZulu-Natal to rock up at my mum’s house, take my shoes off and skate down the parquet passageway in my stockings. I miss that reclamation of childhood being only 600km away.

4. I’m gonna die with this frown on my face: A song I wrote about being angry all of the time. Every minute of every day.

Ruby Gill – ‘I’m gonna die with this frown on my face’

5. Public panic attacks: A song about having a panic attack in public.

6. Dirty work: About moving to Australia and realising how much unresolved stuff I was carrying with me and putting on the people around me instead of dealing with it. All the dirty laundry piles up and then it is very hard to forgive yourself and learn to be without it.

7. In time with the engine turning over: I always fight with people in cars. When you go on a long drive with someone you can say things you wouldn’t say to their face because you’re looking out the windscreen and there’s no eye contact. It all comes out of me.

8. Cinnamon: A short story about a white family in their Joburg mansion full of Great Danes and table tennis tables and wilful ignorance about the complexity of the land and society around them. I thought it was specific but after moving to Australia turns out it maybe applies to a larger group of people.

9. Calling out: I once went birdwatching alone in a remote forest in South Africa, species wishlist in hand, full of hope for new friends and sightings, but the 6am mist and rain were not playing ball. Not even a pigeon. I felt righteous anger at nature for failing me until I came to a clearing, and through the mist sounded the call of a Verreaux’s eagle-owl.

I knew it was a Verreaux’s eagle-owl because I had also been listening to a CD-ROM of the bird calls of Southern Africa on repeat for three weeks in preparation. I never saw the owl, but it reminded me that all around us, nature is alive even when we have no proof of it. Places and people continue to exist even when we cannot see them.

10. Borderlines: My letter to the Australian immigration department about being stuck on a bridging visa, so far from the land and people that raised me. Obviously, I did not send it as I would have been deported.

Ruby Gill – ‘Borderlines’

11. Champion ruby: I was thinking a lot about my unhealthy attraction to people who smoke cigarettes. I was raised on secondhand smoke and although I can’t roll a ciggie to save my life, my tendency is to surround myself with people and experiences that remind me of that childhood. They’re not always so healthy.

12. All the birds under the westgate: I was going over to my ex-partner’s apartment to fetch the last of my belongings after we split up. He was cooking curry when I got there – the curry recipe that I had taught him – and he was doing a relatively good job of it. I commented that it smelled good and he took that as an opportunity to ask me to “finish it up” for him.

So I ended up making rotis while he took a phone call on the balcony just thinking, “This has to be the weirdest night of my life.” When I got home I wrote this song in one sitting and then went to sleep and never saw him again.