Australian singer Kita Alexander on her latest ARIA Award nomination: ‘I need to work on my poker face’
Ahead of the 2024 ARIAs, Australian singer Kita Alexander contemplates being nominated for one of the night’s biggest awards – and how she might react if she wins.
Stellar
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There were more than a few times when alt-pop singer/songwriter Kita Alexander contemplated throwing in the towel on her music career.
When her boyfriend, champion surfer and Olympic medallist Owen Wright, suffered a traumatic brain injury while surfing in December 2015, she took time out from touring and recording to help care for him during his recovery; the pair had only been in a relationship for a matter of months.
A year later, in December 2016, their son Vali was born, meaning the Brisbane-born artist again stepped away from the stage and studio.
Alexander and Wright, who married near their home on the New South Wales far north coast in 2020, soon welcomed daughter Rumi in January 2021, and the Triple J darling once more retreated from the spotlight.
So when an excited Vali and Rumi ran on stage to dance with their mum at the Ability Fest in Brisbane a few weeks ago, it was validation that she hadn’t thrown away her dreams of pop stardom.
“I thought many times about quitting my music career to be there 100 per cent of the time for my kids, but having them see me shine on stage and come up there to see what I do has made me incredibly grateful that I never gave it up,” she wrote in an Instagram post celebrating the moment, which melted the hearts of festival goers.
The nominations for the 2024 ARIA Awards offered peer recognition of her talent and reward for her dogged determination to forge ahead with her ambitions.
In addition to the two nominations for ‘Atmosphere’, Alexander’s hit collaboration with Australian superstar DJ and producer Fisher, she also made the cut for the hotly contested Michael Gudinski Breakthrough Award.
The nomination, for her debut album Young In Love, which was released in March, comes after almost a decade of recording for Warner Music, her songs generating more than 310 million streams on Spotify since 2015.
So her “breakthrough” has been a long time coming. “I was so shocked,” Alexander, 28, tells Stellar of her nomination.
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“Somebody said to me that it seemed it was kind of late for me to be nominated for Breakthrough Artist and I said, ‘Not to me!’ Because there has been so much stopping and starting with my career, having taken time away and not been actively touring or doing promo, it feels like this has happened because I worked really hard over the last couple of years.”
Ahead of this week’s ceremony, Alexander joined Stellar for a fashion shoot to showcase modern, whimsical looks that are both youthful and regal.
“Most of [the outfits] were familiar to something I would wear on stage – I felt gorgeous,” she says, revealing that she’s hoping to include similarly eye-catching motifs in her ARIAs outfit, with “a little pop of colour”.
Whatever happens on the night, she says she wants to win one of those dangerously pointed silver ARIA trophies, and jokes that she might practise her “it was an honour to be nominated” reactions in case this isn’t her year.
“I need to work on my poker face,” she admits, “because I’m worried when they do my category, the camera will swing to me … and I’ll do some awful micro-expression.”
For more from Stellar, listen to the podcast Something To Talk About:
The 2024 ARIA Awards red carpet will air live from 1.30pm AEDT this Wednesday on the @ARIA.Official YouTube channel. The awards will stream live on Stan from 5pm, with a special presentation on the Nine Network at 8.30pm.
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