New Music: Ruby Gill – Jacaranda

There’s no doubt that the Jacaranda is a visually appealing, colourful tree, one that dominates wherever it is found.

It’s also invasive and relentless, a bitter gift of destruction to the people and world around it. Ruby Gill sings of changing relationships and the migrant experience in her song of the same name, with houses and buildings empty, and not knowing what she’s coming home to when encountering family, friends, and landscapes she once knew intimately.

There are mentions of meals shared, and Zam-Buk, a balm that is popular in her native South Africa, and Gill mentions the Jacaranda too. It turns the streets of Pretoria and Johannesburg into seas of purple when in full bloom, but it’s banned in Australia, where she lives now, due to its invasive nature.

Maybe the song, a flinty take on folk with a poetic air from her Fishing is not about fishing album, is a tale of negotiating change when you return home. I think there may be another message too, about how migrants are viewed wherever we pitch up to live our lives.  

Fishing is not about fishing was released on the 16th of October, and is streaming on Spotify and Bandcamp. Gill plays the last of her UK gigs, supporting GORDI, tonight in London – for album and gig info, follow Ruby Gill on Instagram. She also appears at Left of the Dial Rotterdam this weekend.

Header photo by BridgetteWinten