TIME FLIES: Ladyhawke
Words by Hannah Powell. Images provided.
Yo Vocal talked to kick-ass Kiwi artist Ladyhawke. Off the announcement of her upcoming album’ TIME FLIES’ and nationwide tour, there’s much for fans to get excited about. Philippa “Pip” Brown and I talked about the record, her upcoming tour, and her years throughout the music industry. You’re in for a treat.
Introducing the TIME FLIES New Zealand tour. Stopping off in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch, Ladyhawke’s October is looking rather busy. It’s been a hot minute since she’s done a tour. I ask her what we’re in for.
“I always play a big mix of songs,” she says. “A lot of old stuff, [but] I’ll play a few new ones off the record. I always mix a lot of the back catalogue in, so it’ll be really fun.”
With an upcoming album and two new singles under her belt, Pip sounds excited to be getting back on stage. For her, each city on the tour has a different memory associated with it. Playing post-quake Christchurch in 2012 was a night she’ll never forget. Auckland’s Halloween show in 2009 has a special place in her heart. Spending her student years in Wellington, San Fran was an old haunt. She knows the rock ‘n’ roll venues like the back of her hand.
A month ago marks the release of her latest single, ‘Mixed Emotions’. A song about relationships and the rollercoaster that comes with it, ‘Mixed Emotions’ explores turmoil through an upbeat and overall fun track. Describing how she loves to match an upbeat song with dark or odd lyrics, Pip laughs, saying, “I’ve always thought it’s quite fun to mess with the head that way”.
Earlier in the year, March 5 brought the release of the collab track ‘Guilty Love’. Pip wrote the song with Georgia Knott from BROODS.
“We just wrote the song from scratch, [how] being brought up in a certain way made us feel embarrassed to be who we were,” she says. “We had to fit into this box of what a woman should be. [We] both didn’t feel like we fitted into those stereotypes.”
Fitting into the ‘box’ of a popstar was never Ladyhawke’s destiny, either. Reflecting on previous records, Pip tells me about her time thus far in the industry.
“I came into the whole thing from a rock band background…punk, sleeping on couches on tour, being stuck in a really crappy van that smelt like diesel.” Starting out in Wellington-based band Two Lane Blacktop in 2001, she moved to Melbourne shortly after to pursue music. There she met Nick Littlemore, then had a stint at playing in the band Teenager before starting her solo career.
Pip says the real lesson learned was through her first album, ‘Ladyhawke’ – a process she tells me she wasn’t prepared for. As a queer woman, she said she didn’t quite fit into that popstar box back then. Even though she had come out, she was told to not tell anyone about it.
“Women in the music industry – it’s always been tough. If you don’t fit into that popstar cliché that’s been around for so long, people don’t know where to put you.”
Her second album, ‘Anxiety’, came from a darker place; Pip described how she felt hurt by the industry and thought like she couldn’t be herself. Her brighter record ‘Wild Things’ reflected her time in LA – she felt happy, healthy, and sober.
Fast-forward five years, and much has happened since – her daughter’s birth, her treatment for skin cancer, and her struggles with post-natal depression. The last five years were made up of life-changing moments, she says, which is why she made ‘TIME FLIES’.
Pip has seen a massive change in the music industry, too.
“A massive thing that’s changed is the shift in the whole world with perception and acceptance of LGBQTFA+ communities. The whole Black Lives Matter movement – these are all things [that] affect artists because we are the people making music and creating… we’re not just this one group of people [who are] straight and white.”
The dream, for Pip, is for the industry to be run by the people. “The higher-up people need to be women and queer and people of colour,” she says.
“These are the people who need to be running it, running the show. Until then, it’s not going to be fair, and it never will be.”
‘TIME FLIES’ is a collection of songs from 2019-present, written in a time where Pip felt the freest. Some songs were written in LA with producer Jonny English, while others were finished over Zoom. Meeting Kiwi producer Josh Fountain was Pip’s “final piece in the puzzle” once she couldn’t travel post-pandemic. The last four tracks on the record she wrote with him. The record will be released on October 8. Until then, I’ll be playing her new singles on repeat.