Common wisdom was never going to suit Gretta Ray. Her first release of 2021 introduces an innovative concept in new music sharing: Duologies — two songs joined in theme but creatively distinct, issued as a pair, with echoes of the classic Double A-sided single. Listen HERE.
“The idea of paired songs is something I’ve already played with,” the Melbourne singer-songwriter says, pointing to her Here and Now EP of 2018. “I used to refer to Radio Silence and Time on stage as ‘sister songs’: they’re about the same scenario from different angles.”
“When I write a song, I often find it’s in response to something that I’ve already written about, whether that be a week or a year ago. Bigger Than Me and Readymade are both songs about my relationship with creativity, which is something that I can become very obsessive about, especially since I’ve found myself on that path, completely immersed in it, collaborating with a lot of like-minded people.”
Rising from the simmering thrill of a strange inner-city hotel to the vertigo of 30,000 feet, Bigger Than Me is a big, exhilarating pop song that embraces the leap of faith in Gretta’s meteoric journey, from winning Triple J Unearthed and the Vanda & Young Songwriting Award at 18 to her recent inroads in London and the USA.
“I was aware I’d entered this new chapter of my life: travelling to create, and meeting and working with creative people,” she says. “When we wrote Bigger Than Me, I was reading Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert at the time, which is a very beautiful take on creativity being this kind of spiritual outer force that we engage with.”
Bigger Than Me, co-produced by Robby De Sa and Dylan Nash, was an act of almost ecstatic collaboration, written in one 12-hour session with Dylan Nash (Dean Lewis) and Ned Philpot in Sydney, and destined to become a peak gig experience.