This origin story starts on a dirt road in the middle of the Arizona desert. That’s not a metaphor for a long, winding journey through harsh terrain; it’s an actual road, where Georgia Mae rolled her car six times and broke her spine. The crash, which occurred at the end of 2018 on a road trip back to California from New Mexico, became the catalyst for Mae’s EP Gigi and the Dragonfly.
“That moment was rock bottom. I had already been going through a rough time with a traumatic relationship, and then I had the car accident. It sounds like a cliché, but the accident really put things in perspective.
There’s something about a near death experience that gives you a new lease on life. I knew I was lucky to be alive and I wanted to fulfil my purpose: which has always been music,” explains Mae, who had been living in L.A. and working as a writer and recording artist on shows including Keeping Up with the Kardashians, having studied at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music and grown up in Lismore on the NSW north coast.
It took six months for Mae to physically recover from the accident, but the mental healing is ongoing. Music has been at the core of that process.
When the now 28-year-old came back to Brisbane in 2020, she turned her life-altering experience into an equally transformative EP, which tells the very personal story of working through trauma and coming out stronger.
For Mae, that story is best symbolised by blue flowers: the melancholy of the colour blue and the beauty of nature’s blooms.
“There are always going to be good and bad things in life, and we shouldn’t shy away from either of them. We can’t stop the rain, so let’s dance in it,” says Mae of the meaning behind the last track on her EP, appropriately named Blue Flowers.
Gigi and the Dragonfly is out now.
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