Sticks and Stones

“In the album's title track I was just describing something that I thought was incredibly interesting. I'd never been in a situation like this before, to me it was just mind boggling,” Julia Stone says calmly, with a smile. In stark contrast, this writer is fuming, really to absolutely rip into the song's protagonist, a lying, cheating, lowlife who thought romancing Ms Stone was something that he could do while he was also seeing someone else.

“I couldn't get to the base of what the motivation for his actions was, I was just mesmerised by it, and also felt very alive in it. And that whole thing about 'you had me by the horns' was like, I think I'd been asleep for a long time. I hadn't been with someone for a long time, it was really like 'Ooh, God'. You know, life is really fucked up and heavy, and people get hurt. And I guess it's such a sacred and beautiful relationship for so long, but then this whole word of infidelity was also exciting in the most negative way; and in a positive way, it was exciting, and so the song came out of that energy. Having the girl that was involved also being around, she turned up at my house and you know, she was so lovely, and I felt connected to her and my empathy for her was like, women are amazing and so forgiving. I'm not a man hater, I love men, but I think it is this constant battle... it's about being a human... things like this remind you that you can be treated poorly by the opposite sex.”

If you aren't listening too closely, the relative calm of Stone's voice and the song's wispy arrangement would let you miss that it's actually about being cheated on quite ruthlessly. There are bits that are brutally descriptive (“you had her in the same bed while it was still warm.... my hair was still on the pillow, my music was still in the air”), but she's right, it is also kinda lovely. Her chorus “I believe in love” is relatively standard pop-song fare, and as she still addresses the offender as 'darling'. It's not until the very end that we get a sense of what's coming – “I learned my lesson; nobody is to blame, except for you”. It's part of that great canon of anti-love songs that sneak their way into music – how to share, learn and explore the darker side of life without needing to scream, shout or threaten to cut off someone's appendage. As Neil Gaiman once said, “When something bad happens to you, make good art”. And indeed, it seems a great song makes for great revenge as well.

With the album proper you certainly can, and should, still position Stone as girly – her stage presence and music still captures the best of a wistful, whimsical, and relatively floaty musical vibe. But also in that girliness is quite a wicked, pragmatic and very, very sharp attention to detail. Observing the puzzle rather than trying to solve it is her point here, drawing on the contradictions in life and using them to push her forward, rather than getting frustrated by them. Still talking about the title track, she continues, “Then the chorus, 'I believe in love', is just, it is empowering. It's like things are fucking crazy and people are hurt, and people are feeling really victimised and shaken, but who cares because love is there [at] the bottom of all of these actions?”, she says. “This is the thing, I really don't think life is that black and white, the song is 'no one is to blame, but then you are to blame', and this is how we are as humans: 'I think I love you'… 'no I don't'… 'wait, I love you'… 'hang on, give me five minutes'… 'no, not sure'… we're emotionally schizophrenic. When you have songs, so many are so one or the other, it's so nice to have both sides in one song.”

This new offering has been a chance for Stone to show off some of her own shades of grey (much more successfully than some crappy, mainstream pulp fiction mind). The other big indecision song, I'm Here, I'm Not Here, also covers a state of being present and absent at once, the time where you sometimes just have to make it happen even if you don't want to. However, Stone's found that expressing herself musically has helped focus an otherwise relatively frantic disposition. Answering a question about her speaking voice (not as light as her singing voice, but still quite soft, and peppered with playful expletives), she says, “I know that speaking's very different to singing, and having a conversation [about something] is very different to singing it. I notice the change in that, when I'm hanging out chatting as opposed to writing, there's a calmness to it that I don't have when I'm conversing. When I converse I'm very excited, usually, you know. But as soon as I start to sing, the way that it sounds and feels in my body, it calms me down. But I don't know, I don't hear such a distinct change in my voice, but I believe you, I have been told that before, it's kind of like a shock when you hear me talk, if you haven't heard me talk. I guess everytime I sing a song it is like going into another world. You can go from singing a song which is about, you know, 'I can feel your heartbeat when I'm all alone', to then, you know, 'you fucked this girl and I'm really pissed off'. They're very different emotions and really different feelings and so I do know that I'm going from [one] to the next but it's not a conscious thing, it's like the song just takes me there, the sound and the lyrics. And if I don't really go there then I'm not really singing the song.”

She does concede, though, that doing something that calms you down as an occupation can sometimes have its drawbacks, particularly day in, day out. “Sometimes I'm really not singing the song, sometimes. You know, when I've been with [brother] Angus and when we've done so many shows in a row, sometimes I have been 'I can't phone it in, I can't go there',” she laughs. So sometimes she's not keen to jump on that Big Jet Plane? “Yeah, I'm not on the plane, I'm getting out here, I'm getting a coffee,” she smiles. “But music is pretty special, and it is pretty rare that I phone it in. Even if you've exhausted and you've done it every night, music does have a way of just bringing you into the moment and being there. Because of the nature of sound, it's so tangible, it's in your ears and as soon as you hear it you have to come to plate and really experience it, and so I feel really fortunate to have this as a job because I am so floaty and so flaky, music, because of the vibrations and stuff, [brings me back]. And yeah, and I guess that's one of my big dreams, just to be here all the time, not disappear.”