INTERVIEW: Julia Stone releases third solo album 'Sixty Summers': "The record is definitely a step towards more traditional pop music, but it still has this heart of strangeness"
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Brooke Ashley Barone
Julia Stone first rose to prominence as part of folk duo Angus & Julia Stone in 2007. Over the next decade, they scored two number albums on the Australian charts and achieved success across Europe. While part of the duo, Stone also released two solo albums and today she returns with her first solo album in eight years, Sixty Summers.
Created over five years, Stone worked primarily with Thomas Bartlett, aka Doveman, and Annie Clark, the Grammy-winning singer, songwriter and producer known as St. Vincent, and sees her move away from her folk and indie-rock background into full-blooded, electronica, experimental pop. It is a stunning and fascinating album and highlights Stone as one of the most truly exciting and innovative artists making music in Australia, if not the world, today. From the brooding first single ‘Unreal’, to the eclectic world music inspired ‘Break’, through to the tender ballad ‘We Have All’ it explores every corner of the broad soundscape that makes up pop and is sure to become one of 2021’s greatest albums.
To celebrate the release of Sixty Summers we recently caught up with Julia to find out more.
Hi Julia! Congratulations on Sixty Summers, what an album. It is human in its most wonderfully coloured, celebrated mess. I want to go straight into your opening track 'Break' with its Cuban Mardi Gras heart. It is such a delicious declaration of love and such a joyous surprise from you as an artist. Where did this one originate?
Thank you so much. Thomas Bartlett, who wrote a lot with me on this record, is one of these incredibly prolific songwriters who will just make 20 tracks for fun. He'll be in the hotel room between shows making these songs on whatever he brought with him whilst he's travelling. And I turn up at the studio and he'll say, ‘here's 20 new songs if you want to write to any of them.’ He also doesn't name the songs, they're named after the particular wine he's drinking at the time that he writes it! I heard 'Break' and immediately I said ‘ that one, I want to sing to that.’ I immediately heard lyrics in my head, I was just remembering moments in time, I guess, but they were coming out in these free flowing words. It was 20 minutes of doing this then we both looked at each other and went ‘I think there's something cool in there’. It was almost in its complete stage when Annie Clark came on board, she took out a few of the synth parts, she added in some live drums, she added in some of her guitar playing. So it had this kind of evolving world.
And what an opener and also a fanfare announcement to your listeners - hey, guess what I'm doing.
Yeah and I think that's why I chose that as the first song. It felt so colourful, and it felt was right in that sweet spot of what the record represented and I felt that it was. The record is definitely a step towards more traditional pop music, but it still has this heart of strangeness. And I liked that about 'Break', it was somewhere between the two worlds and some of the songs like 'Who' and 'Substance' are more traditional pop, I would say, and then 'Unreal' 'Dance', 'Easy', they're a little bit more unusual pop. Somewhere between the world of songwriting that I've come from, and the world of songwriting that I'm moving towards.
I'm so glad you said that, because I wanted to talk to you about 'Dance'. For all its loveliness, it's got this beautiful gritty, almost dive bar feel to it. You've got these genres, you came from that folk sound and we're hearing pop songs. Do you think in 2021 genre is still a thing? Or is everyone just now going we're going to just make music that we want to make?
That's a really good question. And certainly it's something that we always get asked about every record. For Angus and I, people have said that we're folk music, and that's fine by us, I don't mind what anybody says what genre I fit into, or what I am. But for us, it was always strange when we were getting nominated for blues and roots categories, with songs like ‘Chateau’ we were just like, it doesn't feel blues and roots, and it doesn't feel folk. When we made Snow (2017) both of us were pushing towards a world that was not folk. And that was because Angus's inspirations and interests were going more towards where he is doing now with his Dope Lemon band and I was going more towards what I'm doing now. I think we need a framework. Humans like to know what door they're walking through. And so we framed things in a certain way to make it easier to access. When I finished this record, I was talking with Annie's engineer and I was like, ‘what is this record? Is it pop? Like what is it? I don't really know’. And he said I think it's good not to know what your music is because then it's something new and it's something different and that's exciting. And and I agree. Hopefully we are moving into a genre less world with music where it's just the song and it's just what it is. And it doesn't need to be labelled, and maybe that means we move into a world with a whole bunch less labels across the board.
Absolutely, and then by taking away that label, you also take away the comparison. The album was recorded sporadically over five years. How did that come to be? Was it in part perfectionism, or was it in part that this album was going to be this complex, entirety of your emotions and experiences?
I think probably a mix of both. Again, on that final day, Annie had gone great, we're done, everything sounds great. I was sitting in the studio with the engineer, and I was like, ‘actually, open up, open up 'Substance', I think I think I need to re-sing one of those harmonies’. And he just looked at me and he said, ‘it's done Julia, it's done’. And I had this sadness, I don't want it to be done. I want to just keep working on it, because I loved working on it so much. Part of it was perfectionism, another part of it was I enjoyed all of the people so much and I didn't want that part of it to be over. And I really had to accept that it was over. Another part of it was I started writing this record when I was touring with my brother. So I would fly to New York and write with Thomas or I'd write with Dan Hume and those blocks of time were really brief. So even though it's written over a long period of time, it would be two weeks in New York, or a week in Sydney, or a week in London. And it was just whenever I got the time off. And then it wasn't until I finished touring Snow that I really started to have the space to think about maybe making a record of my own. And I still wasn't really sure I wanted to jump straight back into promoting and touring again. That was also part of it, just the reluctance to want to do it. And I knew that if I was going to do a solo record, I wanted it to be something that I was going to really commit to and really did embody everything that I wanted to say in music at this particular moment.
Do you find in creating this album, was your approach that much more enjoyable because you really were making the album as a whole just for you?
I think that's a really good way of putting it. There were parts of me that I really love about myself, that were being celebrated by people I deeply love and respect. And I think that was something that was so exciting and satisfying and fulfilling. I was trying things and I was doing things that were very natural to me, like writing pop choruses and singing in a particular way and freestyle writing these things that Thomas and Annie were just cheering for me. They just kept on reminding me of how strong I am as a writer and as a performer, and that was really giving me this confidence and strength that I really was valuing and needed. That's why I look at this record as so pivotal for me, because the hope of growing and changing through life is that you do start to love yourself more in a really authentic way. And this record is that part of celebrating myself and not doing it for anybody else and not doing it to sound a certain way just doing it because it's fun, and it makes me feel good.
You spoke about having that team behind you that just encouraged and supported you. You're quite an activist yourself for females in the music industry. How important is it within your own career trajectory as an artist to support women? And shall we say, in a tuneful way, educate the ignorant within the industry, with the tools and the means that you have?
Yeah, I was asked a very interesting question the other day about my experience in music and I have often reflected on how lucky I've been because I've had my brother around in so many environments and situations. And I've thought about women who are solo artists starting out in the industry, and how scary and dangerous it can be. And as we have moved through this #MeToo movement, recognising that the world of music is probably up there as one of the worst places for young women to be walking into rooms on their own. And I didn't have to face that because I had either the band or my brother. And the only times that I've been exposed to uncomfortable situations was when I was walking into rooms on my own. I've really reflected on how lucky I am, but also how sad it is that I have to say how lucky I am, that shouldn't be the situation. We're all just here to make art. And the fact that I was lucky because I had a man around me to make sure nothing bad happened is so crazy. The reality that you have to have a chaperone in 2021 to go into a co writing session is hugely unfortunate. It should be the most natural human instinct to be kind and to treat others with respect. But unfortunately, that's not the world that we live in. For me, it's about acknowledging that I have been lucky and then also recognising that it hasn't been that way for other people. My interest in supporting people goes across all sorts of things. I'm really interested in mental health now and how that impacts people's ability to thrive in the world and and how we can acknowledge that part of our experience as humans.
Before I leave you Julia, what's on the horizon this year, apart from the album, we've got tours coming up?
Yeah, I'm planning a tour, hopefully now that the travel bubble’s open between Australia and New Zealand. And then my big dream is early 2022 I can get over to Europe and the US and play this record, because it's a really fun record to play live. And hopefully people can dance and be able to be close to each other. I've been fortunate to do a couple of concerts this year already. And the ones that people were allowed to dance at were just absolutely wild and fun. And I think more than ever, we need human contact. So I'm hoping that I get to be a part of bringing that to to people.
Sixty Summers is out now. You can buy and stream here.
To keep up with all things Julia Stone you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
