Local singer-songwriter Maggie Rigby launched her solo EP Best Love in the Universe to an attentive audience at the Bridge Hotel in Castlemaine on Saturday, November 18.
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Rigby, the child of Castlemaine folk musicians, has spent a decade playing and touring with The Maes, a band formed in Melbourne with her sister, Elsie.
The Maes have produced three multi-award-winning albums and played many of the world's most prestigious roots music festivals, including the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in the US and Edmonton Folk Festival in Canada.
But the EP is Rigby's first solo musical undertaking and she was "stoked" a hometown crowd had turned out to usher it into the world.
"It's been a real adventure for me putting out a solo record," she said.
"I quite like performing by myself, and having to hold the space alone feels like quite a fun challenge.
"But this is very new for me."
Playing largely unaccompanied, she swapped between guitar and banjo, the warm instrumentation underpinning soaring vocals that delivered a birds-eye view on topics like love, loss belonging and change.
Started in Scotland in 2022, the EP was "born from the pandemic", a breakup and the "sudden, seismic shift" of becoming a full-time carer for a grandparent with dementia," Rigby says.
Among its tracks is a song dedicated to "the undertaker who took my grandfather away the day he died".
Rigby acknowledges "there is a lot of sadness in the songs" because she was heartbroken when she wrote them.
The self-produced EP is described on the musician's website as "gentle, wintry, complex, catchy, joyful and bold", with "spine-tingling vocals, intricate songwriting" and interesting instrumental exploration. Its songs offer commentary from our times, and place.
Rigby was "on the edge of laryngitis" on Saturday night but had staved it off, she said, with a glass of good whisky provided by the pub.
The appreciative audience hung on every rise and fall of her pure voice and poignant lyrics, as she played, solo, under a blue light on a small outdoor stage veiled by grapevines.
Rigby will take her new EP to Melbourne, Sydney and Beechworth over coming days.
