Feature: Ruby Gill - Fishing is not about fishing
The latest release from Ruby Gill Fishing is not about fishing makes profound the realm of the normal: it asks where love lives beneath the surface of our everyday activities, and offers that to survive in the true crime that is the current world, you must build a life around the most banal, natural things. Like crushes, prawns, family, driving, self-knowledge, or saying ‘I love you’ in different ways.
Written last year while Ruby was touring and living on the road, and with it only being recorded this year, means that “none of it has grown old. I’m still the same person in the songs, which feels like an honour. To be here for it,” she shares.
No one writes like Ruby does, with such reverence for what it is to be a person, shying away from nothing, and throwing beauty on everything.
On opening track ‘Lord, let me be a pastry chef’, she re-weaves her own creation story after exiting the non-consensual church, “throwing out the book” to become herself.
On ‘Jacaranda’, she honours the migrant experience of living across two realities: ‘I don't know what I'm coming home to, and I don't know how to cry about it’.
And the title track itself, ‘Fishing is not about fishing’ is an ode to all the ways that her father showed her love, even when he didn’t say it.
‘A crush on a firefighter at an inappropriate time’ is the perfect example of Ruby’s ability to point out the apocalypse, while making you feel glad to be alive in it; in this poem-turned-song, Ruby falls in love with a stranger during the bushfires:
‘committing arson in my own body to get your attention, put your visor back on, spare me the tension, it’s a crisis and I am distracted, how can you operate that vehicle with that mouth? operate me.’
Towards the end of the record, Ruby descends into a sort of confidence rare in today’s scene, as though nothing could touch her, and everything is worth it: ‘Shrimp with my girl’ is a scathing, witty review of the news: ‘I paid ten dollars for the latest New Yorker, just ‘cause I’m desperate to think like a man’.
‘Errands in heaven’ is a country-ish ode to the time that she ordered sardines, and the restaurant didn’t have any, triggering an existential crisis, crooning ‘nobody likes to think about nothingness.
’ And the album closes with ‘Librarian love’, a song written for Ruby’s aunt and uncle, who got her through so much as a child and as an adult, singing ‘you always read to me like I understood.’
Fishing is not about fishing was co-produced with Tom Iansek (#1 Dads, Maple Glider, Kate Miller-Heidke) in London and recorded live the Crowe’s Nest Studio (Lianne Le Havas, Little Simz) with her beloved bandmates Lewis Coleman (The Cactus Channel, Pet Sounds) and Jess Ellwood (Angie McMahon, Julia Jacklin), resulting in a fuller, more ‘band’ sound than what we heard on Some Kind of Control.
The album brims with Ruby’s trademark dry wit, literary prowess and distinct voice over a minimal sound. Drama after drama is told with complete and confident resolve, as she writes down the origin of who she is, and why we are with complete wonder and both eyes open, fending off doom and angst.
Fishing is not about fishing the third release from Ruby Gill is avaliable now.
