California Gurls

Julia Holter, new Californian avant-pop royalty, has conceived an ultra-contemporary version of the '50s Hollywood musical Gigi. Her album, Loud City Song, offers a wry commentary on Los Angeles, celebrity and materialism. Not that she describes it that way.

The singer-songwriter played here last summer with Laneway. A few months later Holter unveiled Loud…, her third album – and first on the prestigious Domino label. This time Holter, previously a bedroom act, used a professional studio. She reunited with engineer/producer Cole M Greif-Neill (the husband of Nite Jewel's Ramona Gonzalez), but also involved other musicians – “a blessing,” she admits. “There were so many things that other people do that really make everything so much more efficient and bring the quality up so much more. Basically, I had made all these demos on my own and then I brought them to Cole, who produced the record with me, and we would realise these visions that I had. He would have all these ways of knowing how to make them a lot fuller in the sound.” Loud… has a jazz swing – and cinematic opulence.

Holter, her main instrument the piano, studied music at the University of Michigan, then the California Institute of the Arts. She admits that, in her college years, this formal training inhibited her creatively – until, at least, she discovered the experimental side. “In the end, I'm a very intuitive songwriter, so I don't think too much about what I'm doing when I write.” In 2011, Holter debuted with Tragedy, based on an extract from Euripides' lesser-known play Hippolytus, which she followed with the fragmentary Ekstasis. Loud… again has a literary source, albeit an indirect one. Holter was inspired by the Academy Award-winning musical Gigi, MGM's palatable adaptation of French writer Colette's 1944 novella about a novice courtesan, portrayed in the film by Leslie Caron. She's referred to it elsewhere as a “grandma” film. “Oh, yeah!” Holter laughs. “I mean, I was kinda joking, but it was something that my grandma had at her house that I grew up watching.” She read Colette's Gigi at uni, eventually recognising its potential as a sonic narrative. “I wrote a poem about the story once and it was just really easy for me to write about this coming-of-age girl and how she deals with society. It's the kinda thing that you can translate to any situation… It [is about] an individual's disenchantment with society.” Holter appreciates that her revisioning could be interpreted as a critique of aspirational urban-pop, with Gigi's protagonist a reluctant ratchet or Bling Ringer. “I would say that it was not commenting on anything. I was just creating a story and I was trying to make it relevant in a way. The reason I like to use stories is because somehow working with someone else's experience makes it more universal.” Such an approach to songwriting seems impersonal, yet Holter says it isn't. “I don't really worry about it because I just know that there's going to be me in it, for sure. If I steal something, then I know that there's something of me in it. I think there's enough of me in it that it's interesting – 'cause, honestly, I think that my life is not particularly interesting. I'm 29 – I think I have somewhat of a perspective on the world, but it's limited. It's more fun to work with other people's perspectives, too.”

Loud… is Holter's most LA-sounding record – even if counterculturally, the artist comes across as an electro Joni 'Lady Of The Canyon' Mitchell. She concedes to being attached to her hometown, oft-immortalised in pop. “It's a place that I never seem to wanna leave. There's just so much going on and there's so many different atmospheres – there's beach and there's mountains and there's downtown…” Holter has a similarly diverse fanbase. She has no idea where she belongs in the wider music scene, despite her past collaborations with both Nite Jewel and weird-folkie Linda Perhacs. “I kinda see things more poetically. I see myself like I'm writing poetry and then putting it to music.” She draws on various genres depending on the mood of a project.

For her upcoming tour Holter will have a five-piece band with violin, cello, drums and sax (Holter is on keys). Holter wanted the music to feel live – and fresh. “It's all live and it's all arranged differently from the record – partially out of necessity and partially just because I always think stage is different than recording.”