Ruby Fields has released an album that ought to go straight to the pool room of Australian music.
Over the past decade, Ruby Fields has been a mainstay across stages and airwaves in Australia, which is all the more impressive given how rarely she actually releases music. Today’s Small Achievements is only her second album in 10 years, a pace most record execs would scoff at given the anxiety around an artist being forgotten and replaced by the next “big” thing.
So why are we still talking about Ruby? The answers are all there in Small Achievements (duh).
Firstly, it’s a melodic thing. Ruby’s always had a knack for walking the line between melancholic and hooky in her verses, saving her biggest moments for anthemic choruses. You can throw on her music without really focusing and still find yourself subconsciously getting swept up and away.
But the main reason she’s adored, IMO, is that she’s a master at pairing huge, raw emotional moments with the down-to-earth and mundane. Right next to a lyric that makes you cry with longing, she’ll bring it back down to earth with one about condoms in the bin or having a wank and a shower. It’s this roughneck poetry that makes her music approachable and magical.
That’s all there for you to hear on Small Achievements, which was worth the goddamn wait, right? Ruby’s national tour kicks off tonight too (dates below, tickets here). Check out our interview with her below:
It’s been a while between releases. How much of this time was spent refining these tunes, and how much spent livin’?
Ruby: I thought you were about to ask how much time in my life I’d spent drinking. I was like, whoa.
I wrote a lot of these songs years and years ago, but a lot of them have been restructured and musically rewritten in a style that’s closer to where we are now. I’d say it’s probably half and half. Some were written a long time ago, and then there are newer ones like ‘Muscle’ specifically, and ‘Mikey Echo’, that are very much in the new pocket of the way we’re writing.
A lot of younger artists now tease the same chorus online over and over on socials. Your approach feels almost the opposite. How do you see that?
Ruby: Maybe I’m not as chronically online as I thought I was. I use my phone a lot, but my discovery page is more like Kyrgyzstan reels and cooking and shit. I don’t know if it’s as music-driven as it should be.
For us, I pretty much write a poem. Writing is the thing that comes easier to me. Then musically I try to come up with something that’s slightly interesting and doesn’t sound absolutely horrible, and I take it to the boys and go, “What can we do with that?”
Then we sit there for a couple of hours, go around the world with ideas, and usually it’s right next door to the first thing we did. Then we go and record it. That’s kind of been our process for this record.
We’re actually thinking of going and writing and recording in Prague in September or something, granted the world doesn’t completely shut down. I’m interested to know how that’ll work and whether it changes the way we do it. But generally it goes poem, melody, then arrangement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26DODCMe5AU
You’ve spent time living in the Northern Rivers. What’s the best and worst part of living there?
Ruby: After being in the Northern Rivers for five years, my favourite part was that there were pretty much no traffic lights unless you went into Byron, and even then I’m pretty sure it’s just roundabouts.
My least favourite part was no indicators. No one ever uses their indicator. Northern Rivers time is beautiful until you get stuck behind someone on the way to work because some people drive 150 and some people drive 50.
At the end of the day though, it’s just the most beautiful spot up there. You couldn’t ask for a more gorgeous place to live.
You framed some of ‘Small Achievements’ around the Billinudgel pub. What makes a pub such a special place?
Ruby: I feel like there’s just so much character and charm. The more personality a pub has, the more they care about their staff and locals, the more pictures are up on the wall, the more stories it has to tell.
A pub feels like the living embodiment of memories — places where people have celebrated love, death, everything.
For instance, on the record there’s a song called ‘The Floods’, and it was about the Lismore floods in 2022. Everyone went and volunteered. It was weird if you didn’t and you weren’t covered in mud at the end of the day. Every single person I know was.
Every single pub was packed by 5pm because everyone had done as much as they could, and then everyone came together. No one was alone. Everyone came together to drink beers and talk about it.
With Small Achievements, it was about a guy I know that lives there, Sharky, getting a hole-in-one at golf and everyone celebrating that so much. It mattered to him. I like the idea that our achievements are something we get to define, and that we should be finding value in the things we do a lot more often than we do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWAGDi-nP0A
The outro of ‘Stay’ is huge. How did it feel cooking that one up in the studio?
Ruby: I’m stoked you like that song. I truly love this record as a whole. I like to think it ebbs and flows, but I love ‘Stay’.
That was one we actually wrote together. It was one of the only examples of us writing music before me writing the words. The verse melody, everything, the instrumental, it all came together naturally. Then I started writing about touring and feelings around touring.
A lot of my song structures are like, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, big breakdown bridge, then come back for the last chorus and you’re out. It’s almost embarrassing that most of my songs are like that.
I remember that part coming in and getting to belt those lines in the outro. I know I put too many words into songs, so I challenged myself: can I just do a chorus that’s one word? Just one crazy thing I’d never usually do. Can I just pick one word? It ended up being ‘Stay’.
I think I probably watched Interstellar right before that, so I was softly influenced by that. But the idea of staying or going, being on the road, being home — there wasn’t some huge deeper meaning.
It was one of the songs we felt the most free to experiment with and have fun with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbRikOJYURk
Did you handpick your support acts for the upcoming tour?
Ruby: Yeah, of course. I’ve wanted to do something with Mac The Knife for a while, but I think schedules kept conflicting.
Platonic Sex are unreal, such a sick band out of Brisbane. Their riffs and everything are insane.
Smol Fish in Perth are really, really good as well, and they’re going to replace Platonic Sex for the day they can’t make it.
All the bands are insane. They’re all really cool. As always, we love watching the supports, so I’m heaps keen to watch the whole lineup at every show.
Any recent small achievements for you personally?
Ruby: Something that felt like an accomplishment was I cut out the booze for four weeks before this tour and tried to do no gluten, no dairy, to sort out this health thing I was going through. I did heaps of exercise and was really focused.
Again, to some people that would be such a lame one — like, good for you, month off the booze. But I really wanted to lock in and give this album campaign as much focus as I could, and withheld going to the pub or doing whatever.
I think a balance of that, releasing this independently, and starting work on guitars again feels really cool. Basically, maybe as a boring answer, just making moves to get things in a good spot.
