Gin Wigmore on grief, reinvention - and the moment she knew her marriage was over
Sunday, 12 July 2026
Gin Wigmore's new album Beautiful Mess is split into two halves: the breakdown of a marriage and the making of a new life. She talks to George Fenwick about grief, reinvention and why the idea of permanence still scares her.
Gin Wigmore remembers the moment she knew her marriage was over. “We had no more compassion left for each other,” she says. “You’re done after that. When someone tells you something that you should have compassion for and you feel nothing, it’s a pretty dark place.”
Wigmore is in an armchair in her studio, which hides behind a curtain from her new sandwich shop, Wigmore Deli in Kingsland, Auckland. She opened it with a mate; he lives downstairs, she lives above. There’s a drum kit in the corner, a school of guitars and afternoon sun streaming through the north-facing windows. Before we start chatting, Wigmore lifts a The Supremes record from a crate of vinyl – a mystery box of records she found in the desert hotel she once owned – and puts it on to score our interview. “Without music,” she says, “I get a little bit lost.”
We’re meeting a few days ahead of the release of Wigmore’s fifth studio album, Beautiful Mess, her first in eight years after 2018’s Ivory. It’s an album of two halves – side A Beautiful, side B Mess – which tracks the fallout of her relationship breakdown with Jason Butler, lead singer of American band Letlive, and the rebirth she found as someone able to “call the shots on my happiness again”, she says. Wigmore sings with startling honesty about being both a mother and a daughter, and learning to close the chapter on her marriage.
“When I married Jason, and I’m sure he will say the same, we just thought there’s no world where we’re not together,” she says. “Like this is our chance, this is our moment, this is our lifetime, and the fact that it can get to a point where someone’s going through mental turmoil and our response on either side is just kind of, ‘I don’t care’. Yeah, it’s f…ed. It’s f…ed. There’s no coming back from that.”
Wigmore and Butler married in 2014, and the pair have two sons together. As much as divorce tilted her entire world on its axis, she regrets nothing; his name remains tattooed next to a Cupid-arrowed heart on her right hand. “He was my greatest love. I will always love Jason,” she says. “It’s not to go, ‘F…, that didn’t work out’. It did work out, it was great, we had a good f…ing go of it.”
At the end of 2024, after 15 years in the US, Wigmore had packed up her life and moved back to Auckland with her two sons. Days after our interview, Wigmore is taking them back to LA to spend summer with their dad, and she’s heading on to Japan for a week with her “gorgeous new boyfriend”, to whom she was introduced by a mutual friend. Upon her return to Aotearoa, Wigmore had initially ruled out dating. “I was like, there’s no way I could go on an app or do anything like that. I created this kind of celibate future for me, with dogs and a ranch and music and riding horses.” But equally, “I don’t like being alone”, she says. “I like to have a little wingman, you know. I like doing life with a little ride-or-die.”
Beautiful Mess was written in two distinct bursts. The first came after a career tangent, when Wigmore bought a desert hotel north of Palm Springs on an impulse – a chapter in her life she loved, but eventually had to end. “I was pregnant with my second son,” she says. “My housekeeper had called in sick and there was no-one else around. I was only three days away from giving birth, and these people had come and stayed at the hotel, used a fake credit card and just gone on a massive drug binge. There were just needles and drugs and shit everywhere. I was in the room, cleaning up, and I was on the floor and I remember having these contractions, just trying to breathe through it. I thought, ‘I just don’t know if I can do this. I think I’ve got to call it’.”
She sold the hotel, “made a nice little profit”, and started working on what she’d intended to be an album with a good friend who was trying his hand at producing. The album was “99% done”, says Wigmore, when her friend confessed his love for her – as in, ‘I want to run away with you and be with you, let’s do this, let’s f…ing go’, she says.
“I just didn’t want to touch music again, because all through that record I thought that we were having these really cool, vulnerable writing moments, but I think they were seen as these moments that we could be close together. It f…ed with my head.”
The second half came when she rented a recording studio in California’s Yucca Valley with her longtime bandmates, bashing out six songs over seven days with plenty of wine and tequila. After locking them away for a while, her guitarist Dave Goodison gave her the jolt she needed. “He was just like, ‘Is this music ever coming out now?’” she says.
Neither the previous record nor the songs from the desert felt like the full picture, and she wanted to tell “the whole story”, she says. “Dave was the one who said, ‘Why don’t you treat it like vinyl, a side A and a side B?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I wrote the song called Beautiful Mess not long ago. I feel like it’s a beautiful mess’. He was like, ‘That’s the f…ing record’.”
On the lead single Country Diamond, Wigmore yearns for a past love; “Where are you now?” she sings. “Do you think like me and wonder what it could’ve been?” It’s a fascinating line from someone who embraces life full-throttle, with constant forward motion. Though Wigmore has a tendency to think about the roads not taken, true to her duality, she rejects the notion of regret entirely.
“I was jamming Non, je ne regrette rien by Édith Piaf since I was 11-years-old,” she says. “It’s drilled in through my own personal experience with losing Dad and stuff; just rinse life.” She likens herself to Juliette Binoche in Chocolat, uprooting her life when the wind changes. “When it’s time to go, I go, you know. And even just that word, when people have asked me, like, ‘Oh, you’re here [in New Zealand] permanently?’ ‘Permanent’ does something so deeply to my soul, I don’t know what it is; still in therapy twice a month to try to figure that shit out. There’s something that really freaks me out about that idea of permanence.”
Wigmore grew up in Devonport as the youngest of three siblings and lost her father at 16, which left her reeling. “You don’t really know how to grieve,” she says. “You’ve been, in my case, a bratty little teenager. Bitch, really, I was a f…ing bitch. I put Dad and Mum through hell. Obviously now looking at lots of things, I had a lot going on in my head that maybe I didn’t quite get the right help for, but you’re grappling with that, and then you lose them.”
Her dad had felt pain over Christmas, and by the time he got an X-ray in the new year, it was discovered he had stage 4 cancer. He died that July. “It was f…ing horrible,” she says. “I didn’t want to go to the funeral because I just didn’t want to deal with it.” Wigmore wrote down everything she felt about her father and put it in his coffin. “It relieved me of all these things I would have otherwise had sitting on my heart forever, but from that moment it just locked in that nothing is guaranteed, there’s no point in waiting on life to begin.”
That’s been her compass ever since – to take every opportunity and to wholly love what she chooses to do. “Obviously, it doesn’t always go to plan, but if you’re going with that intention, you do things like open a deli with one of your really good mates and you have them live below you and I live upstairs, and you create compounds.
“You go into life being in the driving seat and it puts you in charge of writing a pretty f…ing fun story.”
Growing up next to a church, it’s not hymns Wigmore remembers hearing on a Sunday morning; it’s her late father’s response. “It was his only day to sleep in, and he would be so pissed that he’d have to get up early listening to this, so he’d blast Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera on the speakers out on our front balcony to drown it out,” she laughs. “He said, ‘At least if I’m getting up I’m playing my own f…ing music’. I liked that sort of punk approach. I saw [music] as a tool to say ‘f… you’.”
Wigmore started writing songs after being given a journal by her mum and picking up her dad’s electric guitar. “I remember always bitching about some shit and my mum finally said, “Here’s a journal, write down all the things that are wrong with your life’, so I did. I wrote: ‘My mum’s a bitch and I f…ing hate this and I don’t want to do this anymore, and I hate wearing school shoes’, just dumb stuff.”
Her unconventional voice “just came out like that”. She didn’t get into school shows, which required more classical styles of singing; she thinks the teacher who ran the school shows thought she was just an opportunist trying to skip class. (“And I would have been,” she says.) It was her dad who would accompany her on the ferry from the age of 14 to sing in open mic nights, and Wigmore never looked back. “I loved everything about it.”
Having her sons has helped her recalibrate her relationship with the music industry – part of a raft of epiphanies that included reflecting on her own mother. “When you make your own family, I had a whole new found respect for my mum,” she says. “Just knowing what motherhood is, and what a f…ing struggle and blessing, and all the things that is.”
Parenthood also “put music in its place”,she says. She remembers performing a gig while pregnant and feeling more relaxed on stage than ever. “It’s not to say that music doesn’t matter, but none of this matters. All I care about right now is the fact that I’m doing something bigger than everything right now. I’m making a f…ing human, this is so dope.”
Divorce was like “walking off a cliff into oblivion”; the resulting album, she says, is like an autopsy. “I’m not hiding anything, you know. There’s nothing to gain, there’s nothing to try and be. I’ve died on the table, and it’s an autopsy.”
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