Grace Cummings – Cowboy, Freak, and the Dream of Authenticity

The Australian artist reinterprets seventy years of folk music without fearing comparison to the past.

by Daniel Moor

Hearing Grace Cummings' scorching voice for the first time is like a jolt of lightning. With a background in theatre, the Melbourne-based Australian singer-songwriter has, ever since her spare 2019 debut Refuge Cove, known how to infuse her songs with a powerful dramatic tension that lands with immediate emotional impact. Alongside the taut theatricality and consistently formidable vocal performance, Cummings pairs a lean, often ironic style of songwriting that digs into the symbols of popular culture. Famous figures, animals, cowboys and freaks are chimeric characters that amplify the possible meanings of her lyrics through suggestion and allegory. What's more, the essential – and largely acoustic – instrumentation used to arrange the songs on her first two records has helped emphasize their vivid, imaginative quality. But just when her songwriting seemed firmly anchored to the driving force of her voice, the artist decided to veer towards a lush, strongly psychedelic folk-rock. Timeless yet always perfectly current, Cummings' music rereads seventy years of folk music without fearing comparison with the past. If anything, every dialogue with the canon so far has left her enriched, and has always allowed her to assert her own strikingly original vision in the most authentic way possible.

Looking to the sky

The closing track of Refuge Cove, the piano ballad "In The Wind", ends with a pained yet hopeful gaze towards the sky, towards a human, profane paradise. The Australian singer-songwriter's second album picks up this celestial dimension: "There's no world we live in/ I've just discovered Heaven", run the opening lines of Storm Queen. But where the firmament of her debut is wrapped in an impenetrable cloak of darkness, here it seems lit by a blinding, almost artificial white light. The air now feels impalpable, and the surroundings seem perceptible only as they dissolve. And as our reality thus empties of corporeality and physicality, a song can be heard far off, the angelic melody of an Ave Maria intoned in the stratosphere – distant, then, and unreachable, yet one towards which we feel inexplicably drawn, as in a kind of sacred devotion.
On Storm Queen the settings are abstract, as though viewed through semi-transparency. But there's also a kind of thread of dissolution running through the songs' lyrics, one that erupts in the anguished vocal of "Up In Flames", the album's best track. When a steadfast symbol of centuries-old Western culture like Notre Dame unexpectedly catches fire and, in an instant, risks crumbling into flame, smoke and ash, a reflection on human finitude takes shape, transposed and transfigured into a relationship shattered by the estrangement of the two people who had lived it. A sense of loneliness then takes hold, lit by the glow of dawn and fought off with a prayer entrusted to the rustle of the ocean breeze.

The guiding spirits invoked within the album's lyrics are likewise ghostly figures. Townes Van Zandt appears in a hallucinated vision, amid the saxophone's blaring on the title track, guiding the lyrical self through its pains, while on "Raglan" "Highway 61" spins unceasingly on the turntable, letting Dylan's voice ring out alongside Cummings'. It's in "Raglan" too that percussion enters during the instrumental build, proof that, while staying true to the spare arrangements of her debut, this album tries to add new colours to the Australian artist's musical palette. Even so, Storm Queen, like Refuge Cove before it, remains a record mainly played (and conceived) on acoustic guitar and piano, recorded in a way that keeps it suspended in a timeless limbo.

"I'm invincible now!"

Aspiring to an ideal of complete artistic freedom, Cummings temporarily left her native Melbourne to record her third album at producer and musician Jonathan Wilson's studio in Topanga Canyon. If on Storm Queen, aided by the pandemic restrictions then in force, the Australian artist made a magnetic minimalism her strength, on Ramona (2026) she instead lets the eleven new songs bloom in a lush sonic garden. From the gorgeous opening ballad "Something Going 'Round" onward, the work Cummings, Wilson and their collaborators have put into the care of the arrangements is truly remarkable. The dynamism of piano, drums and strings slowly opens up into a lavish stage for the singer-songwriter's powerful vocal performance, which sets no limits on her highly dramatic delivery. And while the theatricality of Cummings' songbook is by now a well-established stylistic trait, immersion in this new setting opens up fresh expressive possibilities. Between a Bond movie-style ballad – "Work Today (And Tomorrow)" – and tracks that sound like a live set in a jazz club ("Everybody's Somebody"), the orchestral apparatus is in fact seamlessly woven into the harmonic backbone of each song.

On "On And On", meanwhile, it's the percussion that drives the song through a slow, epic ride that seems to foreshadow the one taken by the cowboy at the centre of "Common Man". Immersed in a pristine landscape free of any human trace, this blurred figure takes on not only the symbolism of a phantom, boundless freedom, but also becomes the mark of a new awareness. With a guitar slung over her shoulder or a piano to sit beside, Grace knows she's invincible, even more so than the gun of the nameless blond gunslinger from Sergio Leone's films.

I am a Cowboy
I ride and I ride
My idea of heaven and a pistol by my side
I can’t stand
To be the common man
Green and blue
Have turned into gold
The sunlight and the moon
My mother and my home
I’m invincible now!

It's precisely this awareness that lies behind her fourth album. Indeed, on Bloodhorse! (2026) the Australian singer-songwriter set herself no limits and, once again alongside Jonathan Wilson, decided to do, without hesitation, exactly as she pleased. Brazenly not caring about how critics and audiences would eventually receive it is clearly a bold choice for a musician who, despite having a solid and loyal fanbase, still doesn't live exclusively off her art, but also works as a disability care worker. So here she is, back at Topanga Canyon, where the creative alchemy with Wilson keeps bearing fruit: amid lysergic streams, folk-rock and the cinematic use of strings, Cummings crafts increasingly sophisticated arrangements for her songs. It's not just a matter of greater layering, but of a sound that expands and grows sturdier. It's surely no accident, then, that the record opens with a psych-rock composition where epic grandeur is set ablaze by a kaleidoscope of hallucinated visions tied to morphine use.
Bloodhorse! is an album unafraid to venture into dark, mysterious corners, or even into downright grotesque territory. "FAKE" scrapes endlessly at filth, discomfort and trauma until strings and percussion melt into a nearly two-minute drone, which in turn dissolves into the piano-rock march of the title track. And although the theatrical dimension and the astonishing vocal performance ("My God" was recorded even though Cummings had pneumonia at the time) remain ever-present, it's the weird moments that heighten the hallucinated, surreal aura hovering over the record.
The title track is in fact followed by a second take as a coda, a satirical, AI-generated interlude that mocks the male gaze at the heart of macho country pop. A genuine WTF moment that, yes, was certainly entirely unnecessary, but which clashes with the surrounding material in a paradoxically natural way, and which, through a kind of palinode, corrodes the mythologised cowboy figure that Cummings had claimed for herself as the symbolic centre of her previous album. This amused perspective also surfaces on "John Lennon", where the sad acknowledgment of the failure of "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)"'s pacifist hope is followed by a jab – sung, what's more, with enviable aplomb – at the Beatles' eternal, tireless rivals, the Rolling Stones: “John, the war still isn’t over/ Even though we want it gone/ But we’ve still got The Rolling Stones/ They’re just in need of a rolling rhythm”.

Humour aside, that in-form vein of wit notwithstanding, the Australian singer-songwriter clearly enjoys making music, and you can hear it. Indeed, between ballads, nods to 1960s psychedelic rock and what may be the best song of her career ("My God"), on Bloodhorse! she's also slipped in another perfect Bond-movie song ("My Island and Me"). Never mind that its protagonist drinks Jack Daniel's instead of a Vodka Martini: with voice and music alike, Grace Cummings seems truly unstoppable.