The latest album from Australian singer/songwriter Grace Cummings, Ramona is a work of raw truth rendered in its most beautiful form. In a departure from the self-produced approach of her 2019 debut Refuge Cove and its 2022 follow-up Storm Queen—the Melbourne-based artist worked with producer Jonathan Wilson (Angel Olsen, Father John Misty, Margo Price) and dreamed up a lavishly orchestrated sound that fully accommodates the depth and scope of her vocal prowess. With its visceral reflection on grief and self-destruction and emotional violence, Ramona brings a stunning new grandeur to Cummings’ music while refusing to soften or temper its humanity.
“In the past I’ve been caught up in worrying about whether I’m being too emotional or over-the-top, but this time around I decided not to filter any of that out,” says Cummings. “My only intention was to be myself, which meant being extremely vulnerable in my writing and my vocal performance, without going back and editing myself later on. It reaffirmed for me that being completely yourself is really the only way to offer the world something that it doesn’t already have.”
Recorded at Wilson’s Fivestar Studios in Topanga Canyon, Ramona came to life in collaboration with a stacked lineup of musicians that includes harpist Mary Lattimore and string arranger/multi-instrumentalist Drew Erickson (Weyes Blood, Mitski, Lana Del Rey). “I wanted everything and the kitchen sink on this record, to make it as big and dramatic as possible and show a whole range of colors,” says Cummings. “Jonathan and all the other musicians are so incredibly good at what they do, and so considered in their approach, but there was also a sense of fun and lightness in the studio that allowed me to be myself.” Featuring Cummings on guitar and piano and Wilson on guitar, drums, banjo, and organ, Ramona ultimately serves as a dazzling showcase for the voice once hailed by The Guardian as “powerful enough to pound granite into dust.”
“She is one of the most powerful singers I have ever recorded, Wilson shared. “Her emotional delivery of music is just stunning, a once in a lifetime thing. I remember first hearing her music and being completely blown away, which hasn’t happened in a long lonely time.”
Angel Olsen recently visited Wilson’s studio and was floored by Cummings’ new album. “It felt like the wind of a hurricane entered the room,” Olsen recounted. “I remember feeling so activated and surprised by Grace’s vocal capacity that I actually felt my body brace itself against the wall.”
“I was able to explore a lot of things I’ve always known I could do with my voice but held back in the past, because I was trying to fit into a particular genre or sound,” Cummings says. “There are moments of prettiness on this album, but also some soul and some parts that are almost operatic—I just tried to match the feeling of the song, and didn’t think about anything else.”
Also an accomplished stage actor, Cummings imbues all of Ramona with an unbridled theatricality—an element on glorious display in the album’s title track. “I wrote that at a time when I wasn’t doing well and had the sense that other people saw me as a weak little bird,” says Cummings, who mined inspiration from Bob Dylan’s 1964 song “To Ramona.” “I didn’t want to be myself so I decided to be Ramona instead, full of intensity and melodrama. For me there’s a lot of safety in putting on a costume or a mask; sometimes it feels like the only way to express any true honesty and vulnerability.”
All throughout Ramona, Cummings inhabits every emotional state with a potency and passion that invites total surrender from the listener. After opening on “Something Going ‘Round”—a gorgeous introduction to the album’s sonic opulence, unfolding in a lush arrangement of strings, horns, guitars, organ, tubular bells, and more—Ramona drifts into the piano-led reverie of “On And On,” a moment of transcendent lightness and luminosity. “I wrote that about watching a friend of mine play with their little boy and thinking how beautiful it was, and questioning any other part of life that isn’t as good as that,” says Cummings. Later, on “Common Man,” the album takes on a whiplash urgency intensified by the track’s galloping rhythms and soaring vocal work.
“A person I once knew wrote a song about wanting to be a common man: work 9 to 5, come home and have a cup of tea, and be so tired he wouldn’t worry about anything and go right to sleep. That sounds like my worst nightmare,” Grace laughs, “So I wrote about wanting to be a cowboy instead, which to me represents complete freedom and detachment from this mundane world.” And on “A Precious Thing,” Cummings’ voice shapeshifts from delicate to furious to utterly shattered, channeling the sublime devastation at the heart of her lyrics (“Love is just a thing/That I’m trying to live without/And oh, what a precious thing/But it’s nothing I care about”). “I wrote that song on Christmas Eve, feeling exactly the way you’d assume from listening to it,” she says. “It’s just an everyday tragedy that I tried to sculpt into something beautiful.”
For the final track to Ramona, Cummings chose a sorrowful yet tender piece called “Help Is On Its Way.” “I think that’s the most meaningful song for me on this album,” she notes. “I wasn’t in a good way when I wrote it, but there’s a tiny glimmer of hope at the end that let me know what the whole record was supposed to be: a way of finding some beauty and profundity in painful times.” Referring to the writing of “Help Is On Its Way” as exceptionally cathartic, Cummings hopes that Ramona might provide her audience with a similar sense of relief and release. “A lot of the time the only way for me to process what’s happening in my life is to write about it,” she says. “So it’s a deeply personal record. But I hope that people come away from this album feeling like the songs were written just for them. Because they were, in a way. Watching the deeply personal evolve into something that’s shared by so many different people makes me feel less lonely in this world.”
