Don’t ask Julia Stone what the songs on her and brother Angus Stone’s superb new album, Karaoke Bar, mean. She is only now deciphering songs the pair wrote a decade, or more, ago.
“I think, for me, the songs are still so new sometimes it feels like you’re still sort of learning your own songs at this stage. It feels like they all happened and now we’re about to play them. Angus and I work like that; we don’t write a song and then workshop it for a couple of years on tour and then record it. We write it and record it at the same time and what you hear is us writing the song. Our recording process has always been like that, it’s pretty raw to what the writing process is. So, other songs now, not necessarily from Karaoke Bar, but songs from previous records I feel like now are making more sense to me having now played them for 10, 15, 20 years. Now I’m like, “Oh, that’s what that means,’” she says.
One that particularly to her is the gorgeous “Santa Monica Dream,” a song she says has changed so much it is occasionally too difficult for her to even finish the song live.
“I think it used to just be a time and place when I was living in Santa Monica and in a particular relationship. And now all of the lyrics and what they all mean to me now are so different. Each moment of the journey that we’ve been on is held inside of that song and sometimes it’s really hard to sing that song because it feels like it embodies all of the time and all of the loss of the last 20 years in that song,” she says. “There’s been many nights where I can’t finish the song, it’s just too hard to sing it. And then Angus was talking the other day about how much songs have changed for him because people come and tell you stories about what the song has been in their life. So, we have people come up to us and tell us, ‘This song, for me, was my mum was dying and this was the song that we would listen to together in the last week of her life. It was the song that was always ours; now for me it represents my mom and me.’ Then you have somebody else tell you a story about how…I will never forget this one guy who told us about his son had an allergic reaction and he had our record playing in the car, a CD on the way to the hospital with his son having an extreme reaction. He was obviously so stressed out, and he said our music made him feel like everything was going to be okay, which luckily it was. But you hear things like this, and these stories become part of the song. They become this like thing that gets thicker and richer and the song becomes something entirely different from what it was when you wrote it.”
The subject of songs evolving comes up naturally in our utterly fascinating hour-long conversation, one of the deepest interviews I have ever done, as we talk about the way music and her life has changed since becoming a mother a year ago. And, no surprise, it has caused a seismic shift for her.
“She’s a year. I think that since she was born, yeah, exactly what you said. The priority is just her being happy. And now my job is really to facilitate a happy life for her. And that includes her seeing her mum doing what makes me feel great. I think it’s super important for her to know that I’m a creative person that goes into these places and for her to witness that it is important to me. But it’s less for me now. I just want to show her what it is to be content. And just be yourself and that’s all you can do, is show up and be yourself and where the chips fall is has got nothing to do with you,” she says. “None of us fucking know why one song works and another song doesn’t. None of us know, we don’t know what’s going on. So, just show up and do your best and follow your nose down the roads that that are there for you. I find it incredible, being a parent is so hard. I’m older so I’ve lived my own sort of selfish life for so long and all of a sudden it’s just never going to be about me ever again, which is so good. But it’s also like, ‘Whoa, sleep is not mine anymore, the days are not mine, everything becomes so different.’ I know it’s very cliche to say, but it’s a real blessing. I don’t know how much more, for me as a sort of selfish single person, I could have evolved beyond what music was giving me.”
Stone recognizes she is fortunate she had a career before her daughter was born, so she didn’t have to give up certain things the way she watched her own mother do so.
“I think having had my own life and had a career that has been deeply satisfying from a creative point of view means that now I am really ready to be her mom and have that be my priority. I look at my own mom and how young she was, she was just in her early 20s when she had us. I think that would have been really hard, she had lots of dreams she didn’t get to do. I think it was hard for her to be a mom um and give up all of those things for us. She did and she made us her priority, but I think that probably came with a much bigger level of sacrifice,” she says.
It’s not to say she didn’t miss out on some big moments for her pregnancy and motherhood, like singing “Big Jet Plane” in her native Australia with pop goddess Dua Lipa.
“She’s so awesome. I was so sad that I couldn’t be there that night. I was nine months pregnant and about to have a baby,” she recalls. “So, I literally couldn’t go to the show, but I was at the hospital just being like, ‘Oh my God, the sacrifice that I have made to not be able to sing this song with her and be on stage with her.’ I was devastated. But I obviously was equally excited to meet my daughter. But yeah, I think it was just incredible. She’s a real force. And from what Angus has said as well, just a very genuine person. And I think really in love with making people feel good.”
However, any trade-off Stone has to make is a small price to pay for the bliss she finds making her daughter her priority. For instance, as a new mom, Stone has likely seen the end of her clubbing days, which, for her, is a bigger deal than you might think. While she loves lyrics and singer/songwriter music, that is, as she explains, just one side of her.
“I have two very different sides to me. I love dancing. I used to go clubbing a lot and I loved that feeling of euphoria of being just so free in my body to just move to music. I love all that when Ariana Grande and Lady Gaga did ‘Rain On Me,’ that direct kind of dance music and dance pop,” she says.
Then there is the other side. “I feel like I get very drunk on lyrics. Of course, Leonard Cohen was a huge influence for us growing up and was played a lot in our house. I’d just disappear inside listening to his records and feel like there’s a sort of aliveness to that space of listening and feeling understood through someone else’s lyrics,” she says.
Those lyrics will always be there for her, as will dancing, which she now gets the euphoria of sharing with her daughter.
“I still definitely feel like dancing is really important. But now I do it with her. Now we put on music, and we all dance in the kitchen. I still feel like dancing is a really important part of what makes me feel happy,” she explains.
Indeed, satisfying those two disparate sides is what makes Stone and her brother such a powerful and compelling duo. They can write songs of utter beauty, but also understand the importance of going out, as evidenced by the video for the title track of Karaoke Bar. Directed by Stone herself, the haunting clip was inspired, she says, by nights out.
“I was looking at photos of it the other day actually because I was remembering one of the nights just before we wrote ‘Karaoke Bar.’ Angus and I had randomly had two nights out at karaoke bars separately; him in New Zealand and me in Sydney,” she recalls. “For me, it was this place in Sydney that never closes, it’s always open. It’s called The Pickled Possum, and it’s really dive bar-y, the perfect karaoke bar. All the things; the floors are sticky, the toilets are just covered in people’s numbers, and everyone goes there after a night. But there’s the old man who stands in the middle of the room every night or every week and comes in and sings the song that nobody knows but it means so much to him and everyone’s trying to sing along to the odd song. Then you’ve got the people that are there all the time to show off how good they are and then you’ve got just the drunk people. I was looking at photos because I was there with a group of my girlfriends and it was a night that is like any other night at a karaoke bar, but it feels like the best night of your life. You never forget the feeling of being arm in arm with strangers. I think that night, the big one was ‘Wrecking Ball,’ Miley Cyrus. Everybody was going off on that.”
In karaoke bars, concerts with Dua Lipa, coffee houses, stadiums, festivals, Stone has a deep love and appreciation for watching the power of live music.
“That’s what the beauty of music is, when we’re performing a song to a room full of people and everyone knows the words to the song every single person who’s singing that song is singing it about their love, about their life. It’s not our song, it’s their song and you’re getting a thousand people singing back their song to you,” she says.
