Ella Ion On Reconciling With The New Person She's Becoming

Ella Ion is slap-bang in the middle of packing.

But this isn’t immediately obvious. The fragmented-folk artist possesses a naturally serene exterior. She’s cool, she’s calm, her features are always locked into a gentle smile. It is only when she tilts her camera to reveal a bursting suitcase and clothes strewn across the floor that one would suspect that she is a breath away from jetting off to Europe.

Ion, currently based in Tarntanya/Adelaide, is set to showcase at The Great Escape, the celebrated pop-up festival in Brighton. She will also be supporting rising indie darlings Folk Bitch Trio in Paris and in London.

Suffice it to say, May is going to be a hectic, exciting month for Ella Ion.

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“It’s definitely a bit of a shock to the system,” she says. “I think I’m just starting to settle into the reality of being away from home for the longest time, and releasing music, and all the emotions that come with that. I’m just in the last few days really starting to relax into it, and the nervousness is making way for excitement.”

The last time Ion traveled to the UK to perform, she was accompanied by her, cellist Lucinda Grace. “I was really lucky to have a buddy with me...It was really special.”

But Ion is on her own this time - which is definitely a marker of growth.

“I think I have that confidence now. For full independence. I love a little bit of healthy chaos. I’m actually really excited to navigate things by myself.”

On top of everything else, Ion will also be releasing new music for the first time in two years on Wednesday, May 7th. The two tracks, Map and Creature Skin, out via Our Golden Friend, possess a gossamer-like sonic fragility. Both songs are gentle and arresting - two adjectives typically associated with the Ella Ion sound.

The songs were produced by Stefan Blair of Good Morning, with Dylan Young and Snowy Halliwell on mixing and mastering duties, all of whom she is incredibly grateful to. “It was just such a lovely experience. It just came together so well. Everything has just been such a dream.” She very much felt that she was in safe, virtuosic hands.

Creature Skin, she says, was written at the tail-end of a long-term relationship.

“I had felt like I was just not able to express myself, and I was having all these thoughts that [the relationship] really needed to end for such a long time, and I was so afraid, and I was so, like, held back, and I was so just scared to go out into the world on my own without this person, because they had played such a fundamental caring role in my life. But, you know, without sharing too much or putting this person down, they were also…I think they had me on a short leash and were kind of more interested in shaping me into who they wanted me to be.”

Writing songs was almost her way of “willing” herself to make a decision and leave the relationship and “shed that version of myself that had been built around this other person.”

She adds, “I was also going to church at that time. I'd been baptised at 19, and went to church for a few years after that. And so I knew that leaving that relationship would also be leaving the church community, in a sense. It was like shedding all of those beliefs that I had been building because I knew that…” She sighs, and continues, “Unfortunately for me, church wasn't a healthy thing. My faith still remains in drips and drabs, and it definitely had really good impacts on me in some ways . But I just knew I needed to get out of that community to fully grow and be more realistic about the world.”

Maps came a little bit later.

“I was on my own. I was trying to navigate the dating world, and I was making a connection with someone new and really struggling to trust myself in that relationship,” she says. “That song was really me getting those feelings out and navigating them. It’s me tracing those old wounds and trying to figure out where they came from and trying to reconcile with this new person I was becoming, and finding her a little bit unrecognisable.”

The release of these new songs before heading to Europe is a wonderfull full-circle moment for Ella Ion. She once wrote about being terrified to venture out on her own - now she is boarding a plane alone and travelling to another continent to play her songs in rooms full of countless strangers. Not to mention the fact that on top of it all she will be opening for Folk Bitch Trio.

“Oh, I’m so excited,” Ion gushes. “I saw them for the first time at WOMAD, and I was like, ‘God, I’d love to play a show with them someday.’ They’re so great.”

She says, “I’m excited to meet them and to create a more authentic connection with them through playing music together.”

The thought of having such vulnerable, honest songs out there in the world could be a scary thought, to some. But emotional honesty is natural to Ion. “Sometimes you just got to say it how you mean it. But I’m also a bit of an over-sharer in real life. I find it really difficult to connect with people unless we’re getting straight to sharing our deepest darker secrets.”

Why does she think she’s prone to being so open?

“I mean, I’m Italian,” she laughs. “But also, just sharing what you really think and saying how you actually feel makes you so much more relatable to other people so much more quickly, and as a lyric-writer and a musician that’s the main thing you want to do so that people can feel connected to you.”

She shrugs. “I don’t really know any other way to engage with music.”

Map // Creature Skin will be available on all streaming services on May 7th.