23 Feb 2024

NZ Live: Georgia Gets By

From NZ Live, 2:20 pm on 23 February 2024

Georgia Nott is best known as one-half of the electronic pop-duo BROODS (with her brother Caleb).

After a few years living in Los Angeles, she is now based in Wellington and producing music solo as Georgia Gets By.

Georgia Nott

Georgia Nott Photo: supplied

Georgia Gets By plays Auckland's Whammy Bar on Friday 1 March and Wellington's San Fran on Saturday 2 March.

It's a "spiritual experience" to both play and see a live music show, Georgia tells Jesse Mulligan, but post-pandemic many musicians can't afford to tour.

"It's just like really expensive to put on a good show. You're hiring a lot of equipment, you're paying a lot of people. People don't want to spend more than $25 on a ticket so you don't want to exclude people from shows by making your tickets ridiculously expensive ... I just have to think of it as an investment and I never regret a tour."

For Georgia, songwriting is a way of processing things that also helps balance out "how chaotic life is".

"Even on the chill days, it's a lot and it's very over-stimulating. I think [music] puts you back in your body.

"It kind of taps into something that my brain can't always fathom in the moment of my emotions. It's been my therapy since I was like 10."

In rehearsal for her upcoming Georgia Gets By shows, Georgia felt like her heart was swelling.

"Even though these songs are kind of from a place of like 'What the hell is going on?', playing them live is like a way of just transmuting it into this euphoria that's really cathartic."

As a woman in the music industry, she's often felt a "quite stressful" expectation to prove yourself, but these days has a bit more confidence.

"I just feel but the stats are in and clearly I'm supposed to do this so I'll just relax a bit.

"I'm not competing with anybody but myself anymore."

Georgia Gets By was the product of unstructured days at home during the pandemic, Georgia says.

"I was living with my partner at the time and we just like spent all day experimenting because we couldn't do anything [else] … By the end of it, we were like 'Oh, we've got a new project'.

"I like the idea of having variety and being able to experience new things and try new things and feel like a beginner all the time because it becomes pretty boring if you don't put yourself out of your comfort zone."

After "solidly just like cranking it out for a decade" with BROODS, Georgia says it's nice for she and Caleb to have a break.

"Both of us are having time to work on our own projects and develop a sense of self outside of one another, seeing as we were basically babies when we started.

"It's been really, really fun to like watch one another go down our own roads and clearly see what's at the core of one another.

"When we come back and write another record, I think we'll better for it, you know."

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