Jack River is not in Kansas anymore. If the singer-songwriter found her footing with 2018’s Sugar Mountain, she’s now standing tall. Stranger Heart is proof.
Released on Valentine’s Day, the EP is the work of an artist who has well and truly hit her stride. There’s probably a few reasons for that.
“I guess I know how to pick songs that I really love, I have a bit of a formula now,” Jack River, Holly Rankin’s musical alter-ego, tells me. By now, she’s been around the block enough times to know if a song is going to stick.
Her formula?: “Literally letting songs sit for quite a while and making sure they’re chasing me around, like they’re chasing my brain around.”
So perhaps for Rankin, musical maturity was inevitable; she just needed time. For one thing, she now has years of experience working with her “co-conspirator”, producer and musician Xavier Dunn. Their collaboration dates back almost a decade.
“We had the same manager,” Rankin/River says, recalling the pair’s first meeting, “and we got put together for a writing session… we just clicked. We’re kind of opposites in the way we approach music and also our backgrounds. I’m a lyrics/melody/imagination girl, and he’s a Con(servatorium) boy with an incredible technical knowledge of music.”
A new approach to songwriting
Rankin’s lyrics have also come of age on Stranger Heart.
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“Previous to Stranger Heart, I felt like I hadn’t released very up close, personal lyrics and thoughts,” she says.
“I didn’t really have the capacity to feel those things and be honest about them, because I feel like I was going through quite a grief zone for a lot of my early 20s.”
For Jack River, this new ability to impart an “up close and personal” musical experience is a thing of power.
“I think it’s cool with songwriting, sometimes the songs can come before your life experience and you don’t really connect with them. But then you start to understand them, and that’s a really cool process.”
Getting away from the city has probably helped too. After years of hopping from Sydney, Newcastle, New York and her childhood home in Forster, Jack River finally feels settled on New South Wales’ South Coast.
“My partner’s from the South Coast and I’m a country girl at heart,” she says.
“You come home to the city, and for me it doesn’t feel like home and it didn’t have a sense of rest. So yeah, I moved down south to have more of a ‘lifestyle’ and the space and time to do this job properly.”
It’s the word “job” that’s most striking there. With a loyal fan base and busy touring schedule, making a viable, all-encompassing career out of music was probably another inevitability for Jack River. But it’s a privilege she doesn’t take lightly.
“I was lucky, because of my listeners and the support of the industry, to reach that point finally,” Rankin says.
Jack River is going from strength to strength
It’s a career that looks set to continue flourishing. Most pressingly, River will perform at the famed South By Southwest festival in Texas next month. From there, she’ll play a handful of other US dates before heading home. She’s told me that there will be “a few special shows across 2020” for Aussie fans too. And in her precious downtime, she’ll be working on yet another album.
“I can say that I’ve been working on this next work for like a year as well,” she says. “Sugar Mountain, Stranger Heart and the next work all inter-related. It’s not too far away.”
Before I hang up the phone and let Jack River continue her drive to Port Macquarie – she’s heading up there with her partner and dog for a friend’s wedding – I have one more question. It’s a question that has stuck with me since I first came across her music five years ago.
Where does the name Jack River come from?
She laughs.
“My friends and I made up pirate names when we were about sixteen or seventeen. It was just three girls… there was Simon Woodpecker, John Scarlett and Jack River. We used to go out on the town and use those names and we just felt invincible.”
With her career going from strength to strength, you get the feeling that Jack River might still be invincible.
Listen to Stranger Heart by Jack River here
