Jack River
Header photograph by Alex Wall. Embed photograph by Michelle Pitiris. Interview by Heather Hawke.
“It was spacious, filled with nature and animals, camping, horses, farms and the ocean,”Holly Rankin says about her childhood growing up in Forster, New South Wales. “I couldn’t dream up a better childhood.” Her mom was a painter and took up painting once again when she was pregnant with her. When Holly was old enough, her mom started craft lessons for her and her friends. “We were always allowed to create mess and draw on things and use anything in the house to make things.” Her parents encouraged all of them to play music from a really young age, and always to spend time finishing things if they had cool little ideas.
The first song Holly wrote was a protest song when she was nine about a farm that was being sold off to developers in their local area. “I remember being so outraged that a song came into my head and I sang it to my parents and tried to record it to send to the developers.” Although she says that mission failed, it kicked off the power of writing songs within her. At the age of fourteen she dove deeper into song writing to comes to terms with the death of her sister. That time period completely changed the direction of her workand shifted her life. She felt detached after her sister’s passing which actually made her feel almost infinite like. As if there were no boundaries and all of his fears dissipated, because she didn’t care about anything.
It wasn’t until her late teens that her song writing ambition kicked in massively, the ambition she thought she’d use for politics or economics. She released her debut EP ‘Highway Songs #2’ under the moniker Jack River in October 2015 and her long-awaited debut LP Sugar Mountainwas released this June 22 via Hopeless Utopian (the production house & creative agency she founded).The album she says is named after Neil Young’s bittersweet ode to youth and the loss of innocence. To Holly, the album is “The souvenir of my youth, the wish of what it could have been.”
The writing of the album stretches across so much time, she says. “I think I wrote A LOT of music between the ages of 20 and 23 or so, they seemed to be crazy emotional, and I was processing a lot about my teen years and trying to really shape my brain to be present and ok with the ‘here and now’.” She didn’t feel any limitations when recording the album, but as soon as she got the taste for the essence of Sugar Mountain– “sugary, gritty, guitar infused synth pop inspired by the early 2000’s”- she really homed in on that production idea.“Things that I used to think were stupid, or songs that I thought were stupid (Teenage Dirtbag, Stacy’s Mom) became core influences on the record – and I realized their sentimental power and how much I value that feeling in a song…when the sounds date back to other sounds from times that you treasured, golden hour times of my youth in particular.” Everything in this album she says is about her trying to re-think her darkness. However, like with anything she does, she never wants to put something into the world that doesn’t have some sort of hope behind it.
The artwork that goes alongside her music was done by one of her best friends Lee McConnell – “who I have shared every dream with since I was 17”– while they were holed themselves up in her room for two days playing the album and “dreaming up the core visual visions for each song.” “We worked pretty closely and put a huge amount of thinking and feeling into each page, and the cover in particular – we fretted over that for days if not months.”Since our brains and our lives are 4dimensional, she says that all of theart she makes to describe life must be as life like as possible. Which means giving it a personality across all platforms and in all ways. “It is also the way I naturally create, when I hear a song I see the whole world that could accompany it.”
Aside from being a musician, she also put on Grow Your Own festival in her hometown of Forster, New South Wales in June 2017. She made it when she had a lot of time and a longstanding vision to bring music back from the city to her hometown, and let the nation know how great her hometowns music, food and culture actually is. She says that it’s now morphed into focusing on where things come from – “with bands t’s, their story, how they grew, where they came from, and with food and culture producers it’s the same – where did they come from, how did the area shape them and their product.”
Grow Your Own festival led her to found and run Electric Lady World, a concert-hosting platform that aims to amplify the strength of women in various job fields, it’s also a blog which includes profiles and interviews of these incredible ladies. She was originally propelled by the Women’s March’s in 2016, “I wanted to create something within my own industry to influence change on line ups and show people how fucking great female artists are in our country.” Now that the #metoo and equal opportunity movement is sweeping the world they’ve been very inspired by that, and in general, “electric women every single day doing what they love.”
Since she’s basically started and is now running her own small business she says to “be strong in your own way, admit to your mistakes daily and don’t get stuck on them (don’t get stuck on failure), power on through the dark and stay true to your vision and you will eventually find something magic.” Adding, “Also – be disciplined AF, financially, mentally and physically! I am learning these things EVERY day still and will forever.”
