Me? Well, my full name is Virginia Claire Wigmore, shortened years back to Ginny, then with a little more innocence lost, it got dwindled down to an even tidier nickname, “Gin.” I guess my ma & pa were always big fans of a few cheeky G&Ts on a regular occasion, so it seemed a winning fit for all.
The music? It all started rattling out of me around 12; can’t say it was all that great, but it seemed to pull a slightly misfit and unclean crowd of around ten folks on a Wednesday night from 8-9pm, so I guess it had some sort of legs. And those legs luckily grew a little bigger, landing me on the mean streets of Sydney after a few rocky and somewhat sinister detours through the west coast of New Zealand baking one too many lemon meringue pies and to the badlands of the party party Gold Coast. Ending up with my feet firmly and sensibly held in Sydney, I managed to write a short & sweet E.P., titled quite simply, Extended Play, purely because I wasn’t the savviest kid in the music club and never actually knew what “E.P.” stood for, so I thought I better clear that up for the other rookie vocab musicians alike.
After the E.P. had lived out its life on the shelves of about four music stores and one AM radio station, it was time for me to sign up to play with the big boys and make an album. I was skeptical of this happening due to my highly un-prolific nature. But with the help of a few good men such as Mike Elizondo and Dan Wilson, I was able to make my very first album, Holy Smoke, a reality and take my first step towards global domination. Global being largely New Zealand, where Holy Smoke took a grip on my homeland for a hearty year of praise, adulation and radio saturation. Being proud as punch with all that success, a U.S deal with Motown, winning gold-coloured awards and free stuff arriving by post regularly, I decided I better not throw in the towel on being an “artiste” just yet. So I threw my university application to the real world in the drawer one more time and ventured to the US of A to begin work on Album #2.
The southern states of America held my hand for the first few months of self-discovery. Taking me to church for the first time, with the sermon being casually led by The Reverend Al Green, I asked myself why I hadn’t tried this whole religious thing years ago. But after coming to my senses whilst eating pulled pork BBQ shortly after service, I quickly realized church would probably never live up to that kind of high ever again, so I put the lyrics about the devil back in my jeans pocket and naturally turned to the all forgiving hard liquor-pouring juke joints of Clarksdale, MS. After learning a thing or two about the “real” blues, and finding out from a chap named Eddie who had a penchant for moonshine, that I clearly ain’t got them blues if I could afford a plane ticket from New Zealand to Clarksdale, I decided I better keep on chewing through this whistle stop tour of mine to find the true blood and bones of this record. So, I got down to business and started writing furiously. I wore my fingers down to a callous state writing with every Tom, Dick & Harry around the world, including a chap named Charlie who plays for a man named Bob, to wrestle my emotions and bring out the raw grit hiding in my tightly guarded sub-conscious. Lucky for me, it all paid off in the way of 11 tip-top songs that have the love of a cowboy, bathe in a little lonesome blues, dance to a touch of rock ‘n’ roll and have the swagger of a woman past midnight.
After much persistence in the form of incessant nagging to my label to get Mr. Butch Walker to produce and Mr. Jake Sinclair to engineer, I found myself in the beachside haven of Santa Monica in the U.S. summer of 2011 with those two fine gentlemen by my side ready to record my second album. After a month of live and loose recording with the Black Widows and Stu Thompson, we managed to uncover my newest album Gravel & Wine…
