Ruby Gill shares the song Jamie from her collection Fishing is not about fishing

Ruby Gill has released Jamie, the second song to emerge ahead of her next collection. The Melbourne singer-songwriter is building toward a record called Fishing is not about fishing, though neither a release date nor a tracklist has been attached to it.

The first preview arrived in August. Carol / not carol is a character sketch Gill wrote with her wife, and Stereogum quotes its opening lines, which place Carol watching light heat up a dashboard and playing poker in the evenings for the extra cash. Naming songs after people and writing them as portraits is a particular discipline, and two singles in a row suggests it is the frame for the whole record.

The release before that was not a music record at all. In June she put out an album of live poetry, which is an unusual thing for a songwriter to slot into a release schedule and helps explain the phrase she has chosen for what comes next: a collection rather than an album.

Gill has spent several years on the Melbourne circuit writing songs that sit closer to spoken narrative than to conventional verse and chorus, and a title as flatly contrary as Fishing is not about fishing fits that. What the report does not give is when it arrives, who is putting it out or how many of these character songs are on it.

The remainder of the Stereogum piece is behind a registration wall, so nothing beyond the opening is drawn on here. Other indie songwriters have been trailing records the same way this month, including This Is Lorelei, who shared Oh No Now My ahead of a September album, and Asher White, who put out Stage Diva from a coming record. Anything Gill dates will turn up on the release calendar.