Milan Ring is remembering the time she let a potential introduction to a pop megastar slip through her fingers. The Sydney singer was at the airport some years ago when she bumped into rocker Nuno Bettencourt, the Extreme band member and Rihanna’s go-to touring guitarist. “He came up to me and just started chatting – he saw I had a guitar in my hand,” she recalls. “He gave me his email, but I never contacted him.”
The faux pas is “classic me”, Milan Ring admits. “I’ve met so many different people that have given me their contacts. I’m not the best at actually following through.”
Not that Milan needs to hustle other musicians. She’s a singer, rapper, multi-instrumentalist, producer and audio engineer who crafted every aspect of her debut album ‘I’m Feeling Hopeful’, which dropped last Friday. In this gently declaratory collection of mood pieces, Milan Ring takes soul, R&B, hip-hop, electronica, dub and psych into her scope. She reflects on emotional turmoil, transformation and healing – songs like the jazzy opener ‘Hide With You’ resonant in this pandemic era.
Of Chinese, Indian and Australian heritage, Milan grew up in Sydney’s Inner-West. She played guitar in bands, studied audio engineering and production, and aired her first EP, ‘Glassy Eyes’, as early as 2014. She recently revisited it, Milan says, and was “surprised” by what she heard. “I think I’ve kept my sound, even though that feels like such a distant person – I hardly know who that person is. But it’s cool to hear that there’s me there still.”
Milan established a profile with successive singles – 2018’s ‘Drifting’, about depressive stasis, was a turning point – and touring. In Los Angeles, she jammed with collective The Social Experiment, which counts Nico Segal as a member and is associated with Chance The Rapper. At home, she’s composed and produced for Arno Faraji, Thandi Phoenix and B Wise. (Milan has also collaborated with The Avalanches, whom she opened for earlier this year. “We’ve made some songs, but we’ll see if any of them make the light of day or not,” she laughs, clearly aware of the duo’s mythically slow turnover.)
Milan was jamming with The Social Experiment when, in “a happy accident”, she met SZA. “I just rocked up to a session one night that she was at – I’d never heard of her before and I didn’t know her music, it was pre-‘Ctrl’,” Milan says, referring to SZA’s acclaimed 2017 debut album. “But, yeah, I was hanging out with her and another great songwriter/singer called Wynter Gordon [who now goes by Diana Gordon]. We were all kinda jumping in the booth, all having a sing on the song at different times…
“She’s such a beautiful person – she’s very, very, very sweet. So she deserves all the incredible success that she’s gotten and more.” Milan channeled that admiration into a lush mashup of ‘Ctrl’ tracks ‘Love Galore’ and ‘Broken Clocks’ for triple j’s Like A Version earlier this year.
“Maybe the more melancholy, darker tracks from the album were brought out of a place of pain and hurt that wanted to be healed”
Determined to remain autonomous, Milan took her time to record ‘I’m Feeling Hopeful’. Her past songwriting was “explorative” but fragmentary, she thinks. “With an album, I always wanted it to be this very cohesive body of work,” she explains. “I wanted there to be intention from the jump; from the outset. I wanted there to be a very clear direction I was going in.”
For the album, Milan collaborated extensively with her friend BLESSED – the pair duetting (and each playing guitars) on ‘Sydney Hue’. The idea for the song came to her during a flight to Adelaide as she listened to demos and visualised herself and BLESSED on a Sydney rooftop. Otherwise, she only contemplated vocal features after ‘I’m Feeling Hopeful’ was largely complete – reaching out to UK MC Che Lingo for the assertive lead single ‘BS’, Chicago rapper Jean Deaux for ‘Pick Me Up’ and buzzy Bad Apples rapper BARKAA for the album highlight ‘Let It Glide’.
On ‘I’m Feeling Hopeful’ Milan boldly addresses heavy subject matter – “things like mental health and depression and addiction and vices and disease, in the sense of addiction being a disease”. Writing in lockdown prompted “introspection”, she concedes. “I suppose maybe the more melancholy, darker tracks from the album were brought out of a place of pain and hurt that wanted to be healed,” she posits. “Music is so healing and the music I create is an extension. It’s like a journal for me, in a lot of ways. It is a healing process. So there were some materials that really dug deep.”
Milan is disinclined to explain her lyrics, but suggests that the material is “both” autobiographical and observational. (Tellingly, she cites James Blake’s oblique ‘The Colour In Anything’ as a “direct influence” on ‘I’m Feeling Hopeful’.) “I definitely take a lot of artistic liberty in the way I explore things that have happened in my life; things I’ve observed; things I’ve heard,” Milan states. “But I like to keep it quite open to interpretation for people, ’cause I enjoy that in songs.”
That said, Milan confirms that one of the album’s rawest numbers, ‘Dreaming’, is “pretty literal”. She sings: “I got kicked out of school / And the judge blamed me / I was 16, they just didn’t hear me / Then I was 19, and I crashed through the screen / All through my 20s / Blacking out what I’ve seen”.
“I was really reflecting on a lot of experiences and my time in my late teens and early 20s. That adolescent time was a bit of a difficult time for me – like it is for so many people,” Milan says. “It really felt like I was going in the wrong direction for a long time. I had to consciously pull myself away and out and towards the light for a spiritual look at it.”
“[Being mixed race] is a whole different story, because you’re never anything enough. You’re kind of floating around in between all these different cultures”
Milan found that spiritual balance by embracing her cultural roots – specifically Hindu philosophies of evolution, empathy and liberation. The album cover depicts her posing, guitar on her lap, in reference to the iconography of Saraswati, goddess of knowledge, music and the arts. Indeed, even growing up in Sydney’s multicultural Inner-West, she grappled with her identity.
“Why do you carve me up into little pieces, fragments with edges and borders, like the borders that run in between countries and cities and streets and homes?” she asked rhetorically in an account of her experiences of racism for the digital photojournalistic project Where Are You Frm.
As a teenager assailed with intrusive questions about her background, Milan actively tried not to identify with her cultural heritage.
“I think, for me, being so mixed race, it’s different as well. That’s a whole different story, because you’re never anything enough. You’re kind of floating around in between all these different cultures.
“But it’s really beautiful and unique. We are who we are. For me, it’s really important to be proud of all sides of me.”
Milan Ring’s ‘I’m Feeling Hopeful’ is out now via Astral People Recordings / [PIAS]. She’ll tour Australia April-May 2022 – find more info here