“Figuring it out takes time”: Inside Vera Blue’s most honest album yet
image via @verabluemusic/instagram
Words by Frankie Anderson-Byrne
The singer-songwriter talks identity, honesty and the making of ‘Modern Rituals’, out August 21.
For years, Celia Pavey built a second self out of glitter and distance, someone called Vera Blue who got to feel everything so Celia didn’t really have to. Then she wrote an album that tore the two of them back together.
Talking to her about Modern Rituals, her upcoming third record as Vera Blue, feels less like an interview and more like catching someone mid-exhale, who’s accepted she’s comfortable in her own skin.
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The realisation that Celia and Vera Blue “are not separate entities” didn’t hit all at once. It settled properly once she’d nearly finished the record and named it: ‘modern’ meaning the present, ‘rituals’ meaning the emotional patterns we keep returning to as human beings.
She wanted one song to hold the whole thing together. ‘Rituals’, the album’s opening track, built with Grammy-nominated producer Lachlan Bostock, is that song.”It sums up the whole album, about all the different versions of myself that make me who I am.”
She describes looking back over her own life from a bird’s-eye view, and from up there, the two lives she’d always quietly kept in separate boxes resolved into a single horizon. “It was a slow dawning,” she tells me.
She’d always felt like herself onstage, never a character, never a performance. The shift wasn’t in how she showed up. It was in finally seeing that there’d only ever been one of her all along. “Now I look at Vera Blue and she’s also just Celia. The name is just another identity of Celia.”
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On paper, it sounds like a small thing to work out. In practice, it’s blown the doors off how she writes.”It’s allowed me to be more honest,” she says. She points to ‘In The Corner’, where she nearly talked herself out of the line: “Sitting waiting for ya / For you to fuck me up again.”
A lyric almost got softened, and didn’t, and the album is sharper and truer for it. “And it’s like, yes, I would say that. I swear all the fucking time. Just say what you feel and don’t overthink it.” There’s something electric about talking to a woman who’s decided the honest version of a feeling always wins.
That honesty cuts past relationships and straight into mental health, something she used to bury under production and distance. “This whole project isn’t about being perfect or reaching a point where I’m fixed,” she says. “It’s a journey. I might die one day and not have figured it out, which is kind of beautiful.”
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Sonically, Modern Rituals swings for something bigger, and Celia lights up describing it. Where previous records leaned on longtime collaborators, this one threw her into rooms with a rotating cast of writers and producers across LA and Australia, including John O’Mahony, whose hands-on ’90s analogue synths dragged her toward something rawer and more alive.
“It was challenging as much as it was exciting,” she admits. “Once I find my bubble I feel safe, but I think I needed to be pushed.” The names she keeps circling back to – Enya, Madonna, Björk – all chased the same reckless vocal freedom she was after.
Everything is visual for her first; she thinks in scenes, in the language of film and theatre, hunting sounds built to hit you like a jump scare and give you goosebumps, in the best way. Listen to the record and you can feel that instinct everywhere, like every track was written to be watched as much as heard.
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Asking what actually carried her through the writing process, her answer isn’t grand in the way you’d expect from a record about ancient human patterns. It’s her sausage dog, Texas.
“He’s my child, he gives me so much joy,” she laughs, and you can hear the love in it. “We’re both good for each other.” Between him, travel with her now-husband, and simply forcing herself back outside after a stretch of staying in, she frames all of it as ritual: the plain, daily act of opening your eyes to the world again and choosing to be a little braver in it.
She kept the record lean on purpose, eight tracks, nothing spare. “I didn’t want to overwhelm people with lots of everything.”
What she wants listeners to take from it isn’t a lesson so much as a jolt of recognition. “I hope they find a little piece of themselves on the journey,” she says. “Resilience, desire, longing. I just want people to feel things, enjoy the music, and have fun and dance.”
There’s no performance in the way she says it. Some people spend a lifetime chasing who they’re meant to be. Celia just turned around and found her waiting there all along, ready to take the stage.
Vera Blue’s Modern Rituals tour kicks off on August 21 in Brisbane, running through Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. For tickets, head here.
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