Nobody cares about you as much as you do Julia Stone finds her feet

Julia Stone isn’t worried about being solo again. Or worried about what any of us have to say. “Nobody cares about you as much as you do. After years of being in the music industry, it’s like everything has to come from you. You have to create it, you have to love it, you have to care about it. Because if you don’t, nobody else will.”

Stone will be back with her younger brother, Angus, in their on again/off again duo of 15 years, at some point (pretty soon, if rumours are true). She knows the albums she makes on her own, such as this year’s eclectic and slinky Sixty Summers, are more niche than the mainstream love affairs of Angus & Julia Stone. She’s fine with that, too.

Julia Stone says people misunderstand her laid back appearance. “It’s not as simple as that.”Credit:Brooke Ashley Barone

She’s even fine hearing editors have been known to knock back stories about her because she is nice, makes good music, but is a little bit straight and dull. You know, the arty bohemian type who is off with the pixies, probably vegetarian and has nothing really to say. That’s the real Julie Stone, isn’t it?

“People misunderstand me and they think I’m just laid back,” she bats back politely. “And there are parts of me that are laid back, but I’m also someone who has a very complex inner world that isn’t something you can explain in a conversation. I try to gently just say it’s not as simple as that.”

When we talk, pre-lockdown, Stone is looking pretty relaxed in a loose white T-shirt, chunky pale blue sneakers matching vividly thick eyeshadow. She is up from Melbourne, where she lives, and is sitting in the Surry Hills office of her BMG record label.

Now 37, it’s true Stone is not the waif of her folk-pop double act. Her solo music is filled with anger and desire, strong emotions and nuanced considerations. Forget big jet planes, those are the parts of Stone that are the most interesting.

Julia Stone goes it alone at The Factory Theatre in February this year. Credit:James Adams

“To be honest, those are the parts of my stuff that I find really interesting,” says Stone. “Life is a little bit, or at least it has been for me, [that] you get pulled along and sometimes you just let whatever is pulling along, pull you along because you don’t know how to make choices or take turns.”

To a certain extent, that’s how she disappeared into the multiple ARIA Award-winning thing that is Angus & Julia Stone. As she tells it, she and Angus were never particularly close growing up on Sydney’s northern beaches and the sibling pairing was more a matter of coincidence than planning when people started noticing not only did they each write songs but they sang well together. Two different people, two years apart, became one entity, and the only safe place was in the middle.

“For us, we were following that path, but it felt like we had different things to say and how do we say something together when we are such different people?” says Stone. “Imagine, sitting with your family member in an interview, being asked questions and trying to find a way to express yourself that also works for that person and not throw them under the bus.”

Did that mean closing off artistically and personally?

Despite their professional success, Angus and Julia Stone were never particularly close when they grew up on Sydney’s northern beaches.

“For both of those we were constantly navigating a way to be that made sense in a brother/sister dynamic, which didn’t really make sense to us,” she says. “I think what’s nice that happened to Angus over the years was that finally, we were like, how about we make the Angus & Julia project something that really is us together? So we’ll write songs together, but they are always the world of what is the best of Angus and Julia Stone meeting.

“What ended up being our most honest record was [2017’s] Snow, because we wrote it all together, but I think we both felt we had other things we wanted to say.”

On her own, Stone is more comfortable talking about anxiety and insecurity, of her volunteering at the phone counselling service Anxiety Recovery Centre of Victoria (“for people like me”), of sex and letting loose, of dodgy ashrams and even dodgier gurus (where she learnt she had a “spidey sense” for the slimier men who abound).

In fact, she is happy to talk about anything that has mostly seemed hidden in her public life. “That’s what anxiety really is, a disconnect between what you feel and what you think and trying to manage that,” she says.

Her new album Sixty Summers reflects that new-found balance. It’s her third solo effort and was recorded in New York with co-producers Annie Clark, aka St Vincent, and Thomas Bartlett, a pianist best known as Doveman. Over its 14 tracks, it’s an album of sensuality and rhythm.

“I’m a very emotional person, in the sense that I am really comfortable talking about those elements of my life and my way in the world,” says Stone. “I just feel like with [Sixty Summers], particularly working with Annie and Thomas, they’re both those people too, they don’t want to hide away from that stuff.

“Life is brutal and savage, and it’s like you are going for something and to get to that place you have to bend yourself into all these weird positions and contort yourself to get there. That’s the choice. That’s what it feels like.”

The contortions on the album are quite physical, too, with Stone singing to a potential lover to “light the fire in me” and pressing for the feel of skin against skin on a dance floor. Did she feel vulnerable letting those feelings out?

“Making this, in the room co-writing with Thomas, Dan Hume, with Annie, it was a celebration of sensuality and sexuality. There was a fun-ness to it,” Stone says. “I’m someone who wants to go to a club and rub my body up against other humans and dance, I have been like that since I was a teenager. I wanted to be in the world, feeling humans and being connected.

“That’s why I think relationships are where I grow because intimate relationships are the place where I have learnt the most about myself.”

Were those lessons learnt when things went well or when things went wrong?

“I think that stuff, that really meaty stuff that happens in life â€" and no one in their 30s has not had trauma of some kind and hasn’t got some element of their brain working in a way that’s challenging â€" when you turn up to a studio with someone like Thomas or Annie, they are like, tell me more about that.”

And while that tell-me-more enthusiasm may have been intimidating for some, for Stone it was the safest place to be, as she dipped in and out of writing the album over four years. So much so that when her last tour with Angus ended in 2020, there was no thought of going anywhere else but back to Bartlett’s New York bolthole.

“My life had been touring, living in a bus with 15 blokes, and I felt like when that finished everyone went back to their families and I didn’t know where to belong. I felt like Thomas was the person on the planet that really celebrated the parts of me that nobody else knew about,” she says.

“So I booked a ticket to New York and I took my suitcases straight to the studio, where he always is â€" he never leaves â€" and I showed up and he poured me a glass of wine, wrapped his arms around me. I spent the days there and if he was working on another project I’d just hang out with whoever it was.”

There is one limit to all this Stone openness, this place where she declares that “my favourite saying at the moment is ‘truth be told’” because “it’s truth, and truth is always going to come out”. And that place is the music industry where her “spidey sense” has kept her out of trouble, though sometimes only just.

Raise #MeToo, or any of the recent ructions in the Australian industry that has seen several high profile men publicly embroiled in controversy, and Stone pulls back.

“Unfortunately, publicly, I don’t say a lot about stuff because I worked so hard to make music and to have a career and to be able to sustain myself making music, I don’t want the only thing I talk about to be men’s bad behaviour,” she says.

“And that’s what happens as a woman: eventually you start saying these things, maybe pointing out names, and every interview you’re asked about this person, and that’s another win for a man.”

Refusing to be pushed on it, or to reveal the advice and support she’s given to female artists and colleagues who have suffered at the hands of sometimes rampant misogyny, Stone will only say she’s a believer that “life sucks and life is beautiful, both things are true”.

Which is the kinda thing the holistic, off with the pixies, vegetarian hippie business Julia Stone of our assumptions would say. But hey, she says, if that’s what you want to believe, she can live with that.

Sixty Summers is out now.

Bernard Zuel is a freelance writer who specialises in music.

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