“Where is your Ramona now?” Grace Cummings sings on the dramatic title track from her upcoming album. “She’s little, she’s sweet, she’s nothing at all to me.” The LP will come out April 5.
The music that surrounds her powerful, orotund voice builds and falls, with piano clanging behind her and the bass guitar taking long foot-slogging steps forward, pushing her. It’s emotional and grand, like a metamorphosis in real time, and by the end of it, she’s singing, “It’s just the time to be Ramona,” over and over. A music video, directed by Yianni Rowlands and animated by Dougal Morrison, shows Cummings singing the tune in wavy black-and-white, like a tube TV between channels, as well as a Venus burning, flowers, and dark, gothic landscapes.
“This song makes reference to two of the most momentous songs in my life, Bob Dylan’s ‘To Ramona’ and The Wizard of Oz’s ‘If I were King of the Forest,’” Cummings said in a statement. “It’s about putting on a mask to become brave and true. I have spent a lot of time living in my own little world, because I have been quite scared of the real one. I have spent much of my life believing that I deserved to be unhappy. I became a weak little bird who didn’t know who she was and at times I was so unwell that I didn’t even think I wanted to be in the world anymore. I hated what I saw in the mirror, and I wanted to be somebody else. That’s what ‘Ramona’ is about.”
She explained further that she wrote the song in a dark moment. “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,” she said. “I didn’t want to be myself, so I decided to be [Dylan’s] 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 or vulnerability.”
Cummings, who is based out of Melbourne, will embark on a short U.S. tour this spring. She has previously released videos for the Ramona tracks “On and On” and “Common Man.”
Grace Cummings Tour Dates
May 1 – Los Angeles, CA @ Gold Diggers
May 4 – Atlanta, GA @ Shaky Knees Music Festival
May 5 – Carrboro, NC @ Cat’s Cradle Back Room
May 7 – Washington, DC @ DC9
May 8 – Wilmington, DE @ Arden Gild Hall
May 9 – Brooklyn, NY @ Public Records
