How Gabriella Cilmi learned to trust her own songwriting

A quick search of the Australian-Italian pop singer yields this Google consensus. When Cilmi first broke into the music industry almost 20 years ago, she was on the cusp of adolescence. Cilmi was discovered at ten, signed at thirteen, and three years later released her hit song “Sweet About Me” from her 2008 debut album, Lessons to Be Learned. The track propelled her to international stardom, and she went on to release her albums Ten in 2010 and The Sting in 2013. After her third record, she went quiet, choosing to step out of the global spotlight that had rapidly changed her life in just a few years.

“It definitely felt like a whirlwind,” Cilmi recalls. “I was given this amazing opportunity. I’d come from the ‘burbs in Australia, and all of a sudden I was travelling to the UK, travelling around the world, writing and making a record. I didn’t really tell anyone at the time because I was always conscious of the fact that this just might not happen. But it was a very adult world, and I think that if my kid were that young and wanted to get involved in the music industry, I would probably say no and wait. It was a bittersweet experience, being thrown into this adult world with expectations to deliver something that will be a success.”

“I was so young, and people thought it was kind of weird that a big voice was coming out of a little-ish body,” she continues. “I got signed to Mushroom Records in Australia, and they took me around to play these acoustic sets for record label executives, and I ended up getting signed to Island Records in the UK.”

Now thirty-four, Cilmi is settled in a cottage in the countryside, far away from the buzz of London where she first moved to record her debut. It’s a slower pace of life, she tells me. You can see all of the seasons, she says, and it takes an hour to walk to the nearest shop. The quiet serves as a stark contrast to her early experiences in the UK, which saw her surrounded by the noise of opinions on where she should take her career next. 

Still, people are raising similar questions. What is Gabriella Cilmi up to? Where did she go? There are countless stories of pop artists making their mark just to eventually retreat from the industry, but Cilmi never intended to establish a clean break — she just needed to recalibrate. Corporate pressure strained her relationship with the music, diminishing the passion that pushed her to pursue it in the first place. And while there have been whispers of a return — as indicated by Cilmi’s 2019 EP, The Water — she’s now preparing for a major comeback with her first full-length album in thirteen years, Pure Love. 

Pure Love is described as a “soulful, organic” album on which Cilmi sings from the heart. The songs are built around the genres that she loves: deep soul, jazz, and classic rock. But most importantly, the album is a product of Cilmi recognising a spark in a younger version of herself. 

Specifically, the moment that Cilmi decided to make a new full-length work came from revisiting a video of her performing The Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” at the Catholic festival Festa Della Madonna when she was ten years old. Stomping, wailing, and moving with all of the precociousness to indicate a star in the making. While watching the video, Cilmi’s partner told her simply: “You just need to do that”. 

It was the resolve that Cilmi needed to allow her appreciation for music to trickle back in without pushing to meet expectations, but in its purest form of her love for the craft. “I just felt really seen in that moment,” she reveals. “We all have these inner children in us. The inner child, the inner teenager, and maybe even our future selves. Once I started trying to please her, and make music that she would love and that she would be proud of. That was kind of the key to unlocking this record.” 

Cilmi speaks fondly of her early memories of engaging with music, recounting instances of singing in the school bathrooms — because “obviously, everybody likes the sound of their voice when it’s in the bathroom” — performing at Italian festas, and listening to records from her family members. “It used to take me quite a bit of convincing to get up and sing because I was always a bit shy,” she admits. “But I just always loved music. Once I was out of my body, I could remove myself from myself when I sang. I guess it’s a way for me to escape, but at the same time be myself, which is a bit of a paradox.”

For Cilmi, music induces a meditative state. “There’s something about the physical act of singing that keeps you grounded,” she explains. “It gets you out of your head. And that release is so good for you. It doesn’t matter whether you’re professional or not, there’s something about making sounds and moving your body that makes you feel good.” 

But while rapid success brought opportunities that a young singer can only dream of, there were moments when it clashed with the transcendent nature of Cilmi’s experience, forcing her to become hyperaware of herself as a teen navigating the landscape of the music industry. “I could feel that energy behind it, but I didn’t know what it was,” she says. “That industry machine, I didn’t understand it.” 

The “industry machine” became more of a complex beast once Cilmi found herself exposed to the public eye. “It was really overwhelming and confusing, because you’re being sent so many signals,” she admits. “Someone would tell me you need to smile more, and someone else would say don’t smile too much. You’re just like, what do you want me to do? And I was becoming a teenager, fifteen when we filmed the video for ‘Sweet About Me’ and sixteen when it was released. Things became really confusing at that time.” 

“You’re trying to figure out who you are, and that innocence was starting to fade,” she continues. “My love for music and singing was becoming tainted.” Although Cilmi’s debut album did accurately reflect parts of who she was as a teenager, she regards it as a more stream-of-consciousness work in progress. “I never really got enough time to finish the lyrics properly,” she recalls. “So half the time, the songs didn’t make that much sense. But they kind of did in a stream-of-consciousness way. So that record was me learning and discovering who I was, but it wasn’t until the next chapter that I think that really got distorted.”

The next chapter that Cilmi is referring to is Ten, an electric, disco-leaning collection of songs that differed from the glam rock and Motown influences that coloured Lessons to Be Learned. In hindsight, she describes it as “a brilliant pop record”. But when the album’s lead single “On a Mission” was selected for her without her input, she became aware of the reins tightening on her creative agency. 

“I was like, ‘What? So you’re telling me what my next single is?’ Like, I don’t have any creative input in this?” she recounts. “And I really didn't feel like a woman on a mission at the time. I was still a girl in a sense. I was only seventeen or eighteen, and I was exploring and writing in the meantime, but it never seemed good enough for the label at the time. It just felt like an arrow to the heart, because it felt like somebody was telling me what to do.”  

The image built around Ten persisted, with the expectation for Cilmi to be poised as a woman who had it all together despite being in her late teens. Mature, polished, and sexy. Meanwhile, she was trying to make things work alongside her image-moulding. She drew inspiration from Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer, drawn to the propulsion of Italo disco. Although she was experimenting with these rich sources of inspiration, the label's preoccupation with how she presented herself was hard to ignore.

"It became increasingly more about how I looked," she says. "People were creating a new persona around me, more so than the music. It was about them wanting me to be this mature, sexy woman on a mission. At the time, that was very much what was doing well, and it just was not me. Everyone who knew me looked at those images like, what? I was always the dishevelled girl, not that polished, very sexualised image. It's the same old story. How many young women have been treated that way since the beginning of time? You turn eighteen and all of a sudden, you just know.”

By the time The Sting arrived, something in Cilmi had already started to give. "You can feel it ending before it does, like the end of a relationship," she says of that period. "I was coming off stage crying because I was so confused, doing these weird robot dances with two left feet, not really enjoying myself." She cut off her hair, ended a relationship, and left her management and her label within the same stretch of months, writing much of the album with the band she'd been touring with rather than waiting to be dropped. "It was scary," she admits, "but it was kind of what I needed to do."

However, taking this step didn’t provide immediate clarity or resolution towards a new path. "I did feel a sense of relief, and then panic," Cilmi says. For a moment, she went back to basics and turned inward. She went home, got help for her mental health, and dealt with a bad flare-up of OCD she'd had since she was a kid. Then, she went straight back into making an album because, as she puts it, "that's kind of all I knew how to do. I just felt like I had to keep on going." People around her suggested other paths. Go back to school. Try something else. "But I've spent so many years just working on this," she says. "Like, what else would I do? I can never quite imagine doing something else." 

What the years away eventually gave Cilmi went beyond a change of direction. She learned how to redefine what success meant to her, and to give herself the space to create without label supervision. No longer chasing an image that never fit, the way that she wanted to make music was reshaped. "All the artists I love have something about them that isn't perfect," she says, calling back to the work of Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, and The Rolling Stones as artists whose dynamism struck her in her youth. "That's kind of what makes them good. I was never giving myself that permission."

As she began to piece together Pure Love, Cilmi looked for records that favoured spirit over perfection, citing Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs and Englishmen, and the Muscle Shoals sessions where the Swampers backed everyone from Aretha Franklin to the Rolling Stones. "The Swampers would just pick up the tune and go," she says. "You get an energy when you're standing in a room with a bunch of musicians that you don't get when everyone comes in on different days. I like things that are ramshackle, imperfect, improvised. It's the human touch, which is missing in so much modern music."

She found the perfect space to emulate this feeling at Middle Farm, a studio just off Dartmoor in Devon, after her partner found producer Pete Miles online. Cilmi sets the rural, isolated scene. Apple trees stood outside the window, the wi-fi barely worked, and everyone stayed present. Miles made fresh pasta the day they arrived, and Cilmi — who counts food as a direct route to her heart — was sold before a song was even recorded. "He's kind of like this sage, this forest wizard," she says. "He loves the things about a voice that a lot of people would dismiss. He likes to hear the crack in it." She refers to "Love Me Like It's The End Of The World," the album's closer, as an example. Cilmi recorded the song at the end of a long day. While her voice was audibly tired, Miles kept the take rather than asking her to redo it clean. "My voice was breaking, and I was tired, and I think that really added to the feel of the record," she says. "He gives you permission to explore those parts of yourself that you'd usually ignore."

Everything was tracked live to tape, with songs workshopped on acoustic guitar or piano with barely a demo to work from, just to be built upon by musicians in the room. "A lot of the other records I'd made, and writing sessions I'd been to, you'd open Pro Tools or Logic and figure it out like that," she says. "This record was intentionally done the other way." The sound is remarkably robust, moving away from Cilmi’s previous pop-oriented inclinations for a collection of songs that stand like a fine wine; sultry and smooth, with just enough bite to remind you that with this album, she is asserting herself with confidence. 

This feels like the backbone for all of the songs on Pure Love. Cilmi emulates the likes of Carole King and Roberta Flack, exploring what it means to stand up for yourself — as best demonstrated by lead single "YRU Hanging Around”, a kiss-off she says came from "that aha moment when you realise you don't need anyone's permission to live the life you want except your own — acceptance, and loving radically and authentically. She moves through a multitude of textures, ranging from gripping, melancholic piano ballads and punchy rhythmic grooves backed by rich choral harmonies. The arrangements feel deliberate, carefully homespun, a testament to the care that Cilmi has poured into presenting herself sincerely through this work.  

She was also intentional about who was present for the writing process. Wanting the album filtered through the female gaze, Cilmi brought in songwriters Julia Church and Anna Kranz, the latter of whom had also lived through a version of the same industry Cilmi had. Many of their experiences overlapped, including facing a "that's not what girls do” mentality, which kept Cilmi from playing an instrument as a teenager — constricting her role to the face, the pop songstress. Together, the pair wrote "No To A King," one of the album's most pointed songs. "A lot of these songs I was just dismissing, throwing away, putting in the bin," Cilmi says of the writing process. "Then, looking at it from a different lens, I was like, oh no, these are actually pretty good. I might actually have what I need. Stop searching for something you already have."

The album takes its title from what Cilmi describes as the spark that never dies, however buried it gets. "It's a reminder that it's about that spark that's within you that never goes out," she says. "That innate passion for music and creativity, and that feeling that no matter what happens, you can't go wrong, you can't make a wrong move. You're supported." Many of the songs, she says, work as letters to her teenage self, an attempt to hand back some of the voice that was talked over for so long. "I wanted to give her a voice," she says. "To hopefully empower people that may feel like they've lost part of themselves, to go back and rediscover, and connect with those older versions of themselves. It's about reclaiming your power, reclaiming your voice."

With such a sudden explosion into the music world at an impressionable age, Cilmi is pulling from a particularly unique knowledge base. When you ask her what she's learned over the course of her career and extensive hiatus, it can be summed up in a word: resilience. "I've always been quite emotional, and I take things to heart, and I love a good cry,” she says. “But when I look back on some of the situations I've been in and what I've experienced, I haven't given up. That's something I've learned to admire about myself. Despite my softness, there is this strength that I have." 

That strength has held Cilmi throughout her life, from the girl stomping her feet at the Festa Della Madonna to the woman recording in a Devon farmhouse, ready to reclaim her space after thirteen years. And as she reflects on the road that got her here, Cilmi doesn't hesitate to clarify that despite running into hurdles and limitations, she wouldn’t have it any other way. "I wouldn't change it," she says. "Those experiences made me who I am. Now I can share my experiences with others — and help them realise that they can say no too.”

“Speak your mind,” she asserts. “Always lead with your art, and don’t compromise that.”