What a year Kate Miller-Heidke has had.
We’ve seen her sparkling with soaring vocal performances and outfits, stealing singers as a judge on Channel Seven singing competition The Voice, and audiences across regional Australia have witnessed her shine during her mammoth Catching Diamonds Tour.
Rounding out its final dates in Victoria this month including a stop in Warrnambool, Geelong and Healesville, the vocal and songwriting superstar has showcased her catalogue in some of the country’s more beautiful theatres. Whilst having experienced some epic production settings throughout her career, including representing Australia in Eurovision in 2020 and being a contestant on The Masked Singer, The Catching Diamonds tour saw Miller-Heidke put the songs at the forefront alongside her biggest collaborator and champion.
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“I’m performing with my partner in life and music Keir Nuttal, he plays guitar. It’s my favourite way of performing at the moment. It gives us the scope to be really dramatic with dynamic actually. We can pull things back to a whisper and we have the freedom to improvise within the songs and change things. Both of us get bored quite easily so it’s fun for us to paint the songs with slightly different colours each night.”
Whilst still on the road, finishing off what has no doubt been an exhausting yet exhilarating tour, Miller-Heidke has just announced a secondary tour, the Telling Tales tour for February 2025. Taking to capital cities, the run will put a spotlight on the songwriting ability of Heidke and her diverse collection of songs.
“This tour [Catching Diamonds] was regional Australia only so we still haven’t done the capital cities. The atmosphere of this tour is a basis, but there are a bunch of new songs that I will be road testing. It will be quite different from this tour.”
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It’s almost unheard of for an artist to announce a whole new tour whilst still in the midst of an epic live show run, but for Miller-Heike, it’s where she thrives. She will be trying to translate that vigour on her next record.
“This year has been pretty epic and I’ve loved every second of it but I’m looking forward to being in a songwriting cave for the last couple of months of the year,” says Kate Miller-Heidke.
“Live shows have always really been at the heart of what I do. The goal for my next record is to somehow capture the magic of what we do live. I actually think what we do live is better than anything I have captured on recording before so I think I am really digging deep into that because I want to bring that energy to the next record.”
Whilst encapsulating the energy of her live show, the record will hone in on Miller-Heidke’s extraordinary storytelling ability. Reflective of the title of her next tour, the emphasis on this album will be about continuing her tradition of telling tales.
“For me as a songwriter it has always been about telling stories. I came up through the folk tradition. I have a lifelong love of pop music as well obviously but in my heart of hearts, folk is where I came up. The Woodford Folk Festival is the single biggest influence of my life in music and it’s about connecting with people through story and letting them in,” she explains.
“Music is communication and storytelling and mythology and my new songs are very much in that tradition in that folk tradition. There’s a thread of gothic folk, dramatic folk and storytelling through the new songs that I’m really looking forward to playing for people live.”
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Theatrical, operatic, folk, pop; there is not a genre that Miller-Heidke cannot master. The return to her roots for her current writing state, as with all previous records, is reactionary to her last record, Child In Reverse, which saw her push deeper into her pop pulses.
“For me every record is a reaction against the previous one. My previous record was about pop music and trying to crack that illusive formula to the perfect pop song and pop music is about minimalism and about being super efficient with a few core ingredients. I do feel like I’m done with that now, for now anyway and I want to go back to a place that is more expansive, maybe more experimental and possibly a little more florid, and I want to get away from electronic instruments and back to real wooden instruments and the voice. I don’t want to put it into too tangible terms because it is still in an amorphous phase but that is the thread that I am following.”
Before she takes rest in her creative cocoon, Kate Miller-Heidke will be jumping up for A Day On The Green dates supporting Missy Higgins on her The Sound of White Anniversary Tour, and finishing off her Catching Diamonds tour. Be sure to see the songstress shine on the stage across all of her tours.
Check out Kate Miller-Heidke’s touring schedule here.
