Ōtautahi singer-songwriter Miriam ‘Mim’ Jensen’s confessional indie rock songs manage to be both incisive and reflective, and since she first emerged in 2022 they’ve already taken her places. She has performed at SXSW Sydney, opened for Shihad and enjoyed international radio and streaming success. Released in March, Jensen’s sophomore EP ‘Shadow Of The Gift’ represents an important step on her personal and artistic evolution. Nur Peach talked through the EP’s six tracks with her.

“A lot of this EP felt like growing pains for me,” Mim Jensen says candidly, not shying away from sharing deeply personal truths. “You know how we have all these parts of ourselves that we really struggle to accept that they’re part of us? They feel dark and they feel gross.

“After writing this EP, and having more time to reflect on it now, it’s given me another chance to look at it and what it means for me. I realised that a lot of these parts of us, they feel dark and they feel bad, but they’re actually not. They’re just parts of us that we’re yet to welcome in a compassionate and loving way. It’s kind of just about doing the shadow work, which feels tough, but as you’re halfway through you’re like, ‘This isn’t actually so bad, you know? This is okay, I’m gonna be all good.’”

This concept of shadow work, one of the cornerstones of the self-improvement community, inspired the EP’s poetic title.

“The way I like to view it is – if you flip ‘Shadow Of The Gift’ it’s ‘Gift of the Shadow’ – and what I’ve realised is that when you enter the nitty-gritty and you do the hard work, the gift is you. Because you receive far more of yourself that you’re able to bring to the world for other people to see and just love more of you, and for you to love more of you.”

Themes of healing, self-introspection and acceptance play out across the EP, especially notable on tracks such as cruisey, yet driven opener Past Life. 

“When I wrote Past Life it started with a reflection I’d had around how much I’d been romanticising intimate relationships and my friendships, and expecting more than what people really had to offer. Just a searching for myself externally, through others, instead of internally -and how that can be quite damaging, and how we often let ourselves down because of that. There’s knowing people in past lives, but then there’s also the need to leave past versions of ourselves behind to move forward and grow. So there’s kind of this beautiful double meaning!”

A starkly evocative music video directed by Adam Hogan and Soane Pamatangi accompanies Past Life. The video ends with Jensen shooting a double of herself, but she says it’s not about suicide.

“That’s meant to represent killing off a past version of yourself and moving forward with your life, and the amount of courage that takes, and the forgiveness that you have to have for yourself during that process.”

The shooting symbolism draws parallels to another track, Warm Gun, a slow building track culminating in a devastatingly visceral climax, the most high energy point on her EP. In the climax Jensen wails words that could also be interpreted as relating to that moment of killing off a past self. ‘When you’re staring down the barrel of that warm gun, is it me looking back at my chosen one?’ 

“That one was really tough for me to decide whether or not I should release it because it is quite angry. It’s an angry kind of soft song!” Jensen laughs. “Which is interesting. Whenever I play it now it feels like all the anger and frustration I was experiencing transforms into some sort of sense of empowerment.”

Once she’d decided to include it Jensen seriously considered making Warm Gun the closing track of the EP. That place however went to Safe in Body.

“It was so hard for me to decide. In my logical brain, I was like, ‘The transition between Dream Spinning into Warm Gun is too perfect. It has to be that way.’ I didn’t really want to close the EP off with that combination. I tried two different sequences with Warm Gun being the last song and then Safe in Body being the last song, and then I was like, ‘Nah. This makes sense.’ Because this EP is such a journey and it’s such a story of this time of my life, I want it to go out with a bang! I want it to go out with Safe in Body being this happy, full circle moment of, ‘I’ve been through all of this, and this is where I am now, and it’s only gonna get better!’”

It’s clear on listening this choice was the right one. Safe in Body, a buoyant tune with definite notes of country feels more resolved than the rest of the tracklist. ‘I wanna feel safe in my own body,’ Jensen declares over and over in the chorus.

“I think it is something that so many of us experience. We all deserve to feel safe in our bodies first and foremost, and it just sucks that we’ve never really been taught how to do that. How do you even learn how to do that? I wrote the song when I was going through a very tough moment. I’d never written a song to comfort myself, but all of a sudden, I just picked up my guitar and started singing about how I was feeling, and then, ‘I wanna feel safe in my own body’ came out and I was like, ‘Oh god, this is how I wanna feel! Why don’t I feel safe in my body right now?’

“It’s amazing, because every time I play that song it feels so good, and it brings the same comfort that it did when I first wrote it. I guess that’s how I want it feel for others is comfort. I want people to listen to it and be like, ‘Ahh, you know, I feel good!’ Cos that’s how it feels to me!”

Dream Spinning is a soaring, ethereal interlude inspired by an especially vivid dream.

“It was this very visceral experience,” she passionately describes. “In the dream I was an astronaut and I somehow got lost from my spaceship. And I was drifting in space, and I had this feeling of, ‘Oh my god, I’m gonna die!’ I was just gonna starve to death whilst floating in space. And then all of a sudden, I got sucked into the orbit of this planet, and all I could see was blue and this gold sort of light around me, and then I ended up on this alien planet. And I was doing all these little missions on this planet and meeting all the people. It was quite interstellar, I guess, but I’d never had a dream like that!”

Jensen discussed this dream with her Christchurch-based producer, Will McGillivray, aka Goodwill, notable for being the former frontman of indie-pop group Nomad and production credits with for the likes of There’s a Tuesday and Mousey.

“I was just sitting there talking to Will about it, and he was like, ‘Oh, we should write a song about that!’ And that’s how Dream Spinning was born. We wanted a mini track on the EP that would blend a couple of songs together. Not a full song, but just a little moment in time, so that’s how we came up with that one.”

This was their first time working together, and while Dream Spinning was the only co-write McGillivray produced the entire EP.

“Will is just the best,” she grins. “It was such a cool experience. The thing about Christchurch is that everybody knows everyone, so I’ve known Will for quite a few years. Prior to working together, I knew his music and stuff, even when he was back in Nomad!”

McGillivray is largely responsible for the soft, intimate sound and feel of ‘Shadow of the Gift’. This is especially notable in comparison to Jensen’s first EP, ‘Emotional Affair,’ which was more upbeat, energetic and dynamic.

“I think a lot of that was mainly the space I was in emotionally, but also Will really wanted to focus on the intimacy of the songs. Really just building off me and an acoustic guitar, and fleshing it out from there. I hadn’t jammed any of these songs with my band. It was kind of like taking them straight to Will and building off of them in that way – whereas with the last EP we were live tracking everything and me and the band had been playing those songs for years. It was such a different process, and I think there’s merits to both, but I really liked just being able to build it from the ground up in this fresh way.”

She says fans can expect more energy from the live versions of her new songs.

“It’s nice to leave some of that for the live performances, so that people who come to the live performance, they’re gonna be like, ‘Oh! Wasn’t expecting that!’ Because in the EP it’s a little more intimate, which is so cool, but when I do play live, I love to just be like, ‘Oh my god, I’m gonna do an Avril Lavigne and rock out – just have fun with it, and just let my voice go!”

Speaking of live performances, Jensen has had some memorable ones in recent years. One highlight was showcasing at the first ever SXSW Sydney, which she chronicled in an On Foreign Soil feature for the Dec/Jan 2024 print issue of NZMusician. However, her biggest gig to date was in March, when she opened for NZ legends Shihad on two different dates at Auckland’s Spark Arena and Nelson’s Trafalgar Centre.

“They were amazing!” Jensen says of that experience. “Honestly, these were the biggest shows I’ve ever played, so it felt like a very special moment. It was just a really great time, and it felt like a really cool step in my journey as well. I just feel super grateful to have had the opportunity.

“I kind of thought I would be really nervous. Part of me always gets a little bit nervous before I play. But there’s this thing that happens, probably by the time I get through the first verse of the first song – I’m just locked in, and I’m just having a great time and I’m not nervous anymore. It’s just like, ‘This is what I do and I love this. So this is awesome!’”