Hollie Fullbrook is on the move again. The Auckland-based singer-songwriter, who performs under the moniker Tiny Ruins, is not only preparing for a quick-fire national tour then a longer trek around Australia's cities, last weekend she also had the not-so-small task of moving out of her parents' Glen Eden house and into a flat just off Ponsonby Rd.
The reason for the forthcoming tour, which includes a gig at Chick's Hotel, Port Chalmers, next Saturday, is the release this month of Tiny Ruins' debut album, Some Were Meant For Sea, an 11-song exercise in delicate, sometimes melancholy tunes that often benefit from Fullbrook's accomplished lyricism.
Fullbrook is happy with the debut, relieved to have something tangible to hold and content the recording accurately represents her aims to capture songs in an honest, intimate style.
"I'd always envisaged it to be a quiet album, in a similar spirit to my demos, which were just vocals and guitar," Fullbrook says via telephone from Auckland as she takes a break from packing boxes.
"I hope that when people listen to a song it might strike them as a bit of a story. When you listen to the lyrics, a song becomes more than just a melody and a series of instruments."
Some Were Meant For Sea was recorded in a little over a week in a disused school hall in a small town in South Gippsland, east of Melbourne. Fullbrook, fresh from seven months spent travelling in Europe, worked with producer J. Walker, whose credits include up-and-coming Australian songwriter Holly Throsby.
Between the pair, cello (bowed and also detuned and plucked as a double bass), violin, percussion, piano and accordion were added to songs whose bones largely comprised guitar and vocals. Apart from occasional overdubs, much of the material was recorded live in one or two takes.
"I'd never heard of Gippsland," Fullbrook admits. "It's a bit like the Coromandel; it's very wet and green; it's the southernmost tip of [mainland] Australia so it has a real New Zealand feel. I felt at home there.
"The hall was preserved really nicely. It was old-fashioned with net curtains and a portrait of a queen and Ned Kelly on the walls. It had a lot of character.
"I think the biggest influence of the space was that it provided a nice natural reverb to the recordings. Greg [producer J. Walker] was really careful about setting up microphones to capture the reverb at different places in the room. When it came to mixing, we would tweak those different microphone channels. It meant at least half the songs had just natural reverb on them.
"There is also birdsong on some tracks. We had to stop recording some songs because of a nest of starlings in the roof. We also recorded at night, which gives it a different feel. I think all of those things had an influence on the finished product."
That back-to-basics approach is evident throughout Some Were Meant For Sea, its honest production ethos allowing the 25-year-old's words to shine.
"At the end of the day, of course, people might like the melody, but it is the lyrics that will make you go that extra step. It is something I hold as important when I listen to music."
Much of the material on Some Were Meant For Sea is relatively fresh. Bird In the Thyme, at four years, is the oldest song, written for a play Fullbrook was involved in while at Victoria University, Wellington.
"That spurred me into a different mode of songwriting. I started thinking of more theatrical approaches, of narrative and literary influences rather than just love songs," Fullbrook said.
"I'm pretty terrible at finishing stories and in terms of my writing I'm pretty hard on myself. I think songs, because they are shorter, are more likely to get finished. Often I'll draw lyrics out of the lines of a piece of writing that has been more fleshed out.
"I try to play around with different forms and structures of songs. I like irregular structures as opposed to verse-verse-chorus-verse."
Fullbrook was born one of three siblings in Bristol, England, where she lived until she was 10. Moving to New Zealand, her family settled in West Auckland and at 11, she was encouraged to pick up her mum's acoustic guitar by her visiting granddad. A few years later, she was writing her own songs.
Having studied English literature and theatre as well as law at university, Fullbrook graduated in early 2010. Although she admits there was a period she thought she might "grow out" of songwriting, believing it might have been a hangover from her teenage years, she eventually began to listen to her musical stirrings more closely.
"I was locked into five years of study and knew that to do music you needed to put all your energy into it. It was about my fifth year when I thought I'd do music as soon as I graduated, that I wouldn't look for a serious job."
Significantly, Fullbrook's debut album is being released by influential Australian label Spunk Records, which signed the artist last year.
"Just over a year ago, I'd been working on a recording with an Auckland producer ... I'd also been playing a few live shows and a guy named Matthew Crawley, who is involved in various things musical in Auckland and around the country, tipped off Spunk and told them to check me out.
"They emailed me and I sent them my demos and they flew me over to play a show at a small bar in Sydney in May, 2010. I was days away from going on my OE and suddenly all this stuff started happening," Fullbrook recalls.
"I said I had to go on my OE because it was all booked, but they still wanted to work with me.
"Then, days after I got back to New Zealand, I was flying to Melbourne to do this album."
See her, hear her
• Tiny Ruins, aka Hollie Fullbrook, performs at Chick's Hotel, Port Chalmers, on Saturday, June 25, with support from Bob Scott and Matt Langley.
