Julia Jacklin's New Album Was Born From A 'Very Unnatural Environment'

Over the last couple of years, things have gone gangbusters really quickly for Sydney-based singer-songwriter Julia Jacklin. After years plugging away in virtual obscurity – essentially treating music as a hobby – her debut solo album Don’t Let The Kids Win (2016) began touching nerves aplenty with its honest perspectives atop country-tinged indie-pop.

Before long she was belting out the album’s assuredly introspective lyrics on far-flung shores on a seemingly endless cycle of international jaunts and forays – on top of her burgeoning Australian obligations – but this increased workload came with a hidden cost.

Her relatively rapid ascent and the accompanying need to be away from home put a strain on many relationships in Jacklin’s life – both romantic and otherwise – a bittersweet scenario which, while difficult to navigate at the time, has in turn conceptually shaped her accomplished follow-up collection, Crushing.

More than just a break-up album – although from the opening track, Body, a relationship and its subsequent dissolution looms large over proceedings – in a broader sense it’s a personal reflection on dealing with change and taking charge of your life on your own terms and at your own pace, and is more empowering than melancholic.

Jacklin explains that Crushing was born from her writing for her own sake and striving to process all the strange things she’d just been through, rather than any expectations from outside her own inner sanctum.

“I didn’t really approach it at all, I don’t think,” she reflects. “I didn’t really write many songs in the year-and-a-half after I released Don’t Let The Kids Win because I was just touring and not really knowing what I was doing on the road, it was a pretty exhausting and strange time.

“I was just kind of getting by I guess, so I started writing again just for the need of doing it, not for the idea of, ‘I’ve got to make a record.’ I didn’t really have those pressures on me, there wasn’t like some time limit where I had to have the second record made.

“So I finished touring and booked in the recording time and it was nice – I didn’t feel that scramble to just grab anything that worked vaguely and make a record, it was nice.”

"I think a lot of songwriters are overthinkers at the best of times let alone sitting in a car every day for six months."

It seems by treating her own wellbeing as a priority that she neatly avoided the notorious ‘second album syndrome’ that plagues some artists when they hit the big time quickly.

“I’ve been hearing a lot about that during press,” Jacklin laughs. “Obviously it must be a thing and it’s not like I didn’t think about that – I did stress about it a little bit – but a lot of that noise happens on the internet and from other people talking, but in my actual normal life I wasn’t thinking about, ‘Oh no, the second album!’ in every day of my existence.

“Sometimes I’d feel that existential dread, but most of the time I was just writing songs like I have all the time.”

The tone of Crushing is far different from her first album – its minimalist nature and spacious mix placing Jacklin’s voice and lyrics firmly front and centre – and while the singer admits that this is mainly due to a desire to subvert expectations, it’s also indebted to some magical synchronicity in her fledgeling musical relationship with producer Burke Reid (Courtney Barnett, The Drones).

“It’s a few different things,” she offers of Crushing’s sonic sensibilities. “I guess coming into the second record I always thought part of the ‘difficult second album syndrome’ was that the second album needs to be bigger and bolder and I need to change my sound and I need to add all these bells and whistles – it needs to be a bigger, slicker record.

“But then when I was coming up to it I was, like, ‘But I don’t like those records, why would I make one myself?’ I also didn’t know anything about string sections and advanced production in that way, so I don’t want to bring in a producer who does all these things to my songs that I don’t understand.

“So that was one part of it, and then Burke and I had this real weird magical moment together where I’d been listening to the Neil Young song Out On The Weekend and that had to me informed that I wanted my second album to sound like – just a song where you can put on headphones and kinda hear the whole room, just really warm and dry and you can hear the people sitting in the room.

“But I was kinda embarrassed by that and thought, ‘Yeah, cool Julia, as if Burke has not had every folk-rock musician coming into his studio saying, “I want to sound like Neil Young!”’ ‘Yeah cool, no shit, so does everyone.’

“So I didn’t mention that and I guess I was trying to convey that vibe without actually saying that song – I’d only met Burke really in the studio on our first day, so I was a bit self-conscious about him I guess – but then we were talking and he went, ‘Ok, from what you’re saying I’ve wanted to make a record like this for a while, and I think we should shoot for this kind of sound,’ and then he put on Out On The Weekend by Neil Young!

“It was this moment where I was just like, ‘What?! Are you reading my mind?’ and from that moment I knew that this guy totally gets me and has my back fully, and I just trusted him completely. We listened to a lot of Bill Callahan and just records that really have the vocals so high and dry in the mix that they just kind of punch you in the middle of the chest when they come in.”

This approach works wonderfully in placing focus on Crushing’s lyrics, a personal and vulnerable brew stemming from a lengthy stint of soul-searching.

"We live in packed houses and we’re always accessible online, and it’s pretty hard to find space for yourself, even when you’re not a touring musician."

“I wrote most of them on tour in this very unnatural environment where a lot of emotions are pretty heightened – big highs and big lows – and being away from any sense of stability and normality,” Jacklin recalls. “I love touring but it gives you so much time to think, and I think a lot of songwriters are overthinkers at the best of times let alone sitting in a car every day for six months.

“So yeah, I think a lot of it came from me staring our car windows and just running through things over and over in my head. I wrote most of the lyrics in the car really, or on a plane.”

Fortunately, during the creative process, Jacklin didn’t concern herself with the implications of putting such innermost thoughts into the public domain.

“I don’t know, I didn’t really think about it until now when I have to talk about it all the time,” the singer says. “I’m figuring it out, I think I’m ok with it. It’s not like I’ve accidentally dropped my personal diary on the ground and someone’s picked it up and published it online, it’s definitely a curated, crafted version of my life, taking artistic liberties and artistic licence.

“I also don’t think I’m talking or singing about anything that crazy or that personal – I think a lot of it is talking about the sadness in how kind of normal and boring heartbreak can be, in a way, because you’re not actually that special when you go through it. And that’s what’s so hard about it, because sympathy runs dry pretty quickly because everybody else has gone through it as well, so it’s, like, ‘Yep, well, anyway that sucks but move on.’

“But it’s hard because most people have had the same experience so people can empathise, but sometimes you actually just want a bit of sympathy.”

Time and distance have allowed Jacklin to make some of her own discoveries about Crushing, little traits she wasn’t even aware of during its making.

“When I’d finished the record and listened back to it a few weeks later I was surprised that I referenced my body in the first five songs,” she continues. “Things kind of reveal themselves even to me after the fact, but I guess a lot of it is just the feeling of claustrophobia about being a touring musician or even just a young person today – we live in packed houses and we’re always accessible online, and it’s pretty hard to find space for yourself, even when you’re not a touring musician.

“But when you’re a touring musician you add that stress and it doesn’t help, and just being in a relationship... A lot of it’s about my struggle with wanting space and needing space, but then also sometimes needing comforting – just the constant struggle between those two things is explored.”

Crushing also finds Jacklin in fine vocal form throughout, a powerful performance she attributes to her recent strict touring regime rather than the extensive singing training of her youth.

“I think honestly it’s just from touring for three years and singing every night – that’s the biggest school I’ve ever had,” she admits. “When you have to sing the same songs over and over again your voice just starts to open up a bit, and I’ve noticed over the years that I’m getting a stronger voice just from exercising it – I guess like how if you lift weights every day your arms change.

“But also I was pretty self-conscious on that first album and kind of felt a bit embarrassed about singing loudly or having the vocals too present in the mix, so it’s a lot more reverb-y and the vocals aren’t as vulnerably placed in the mix, they’re quite nestled in there. I just really wanted the vocals to not be hidden at all and not be too perfect.”

The new songs haven’t been widely road-tested yet, nor has Jacklin figured out how they'll mesh with her older tunes.

“We did a short tour of the UK a few weeks ago where we played them for the first time, which was really interesting,” she tells. “This is my first time having two albums and working out how to put two albums together in a set is odd.

“Then I played the full album the other day for a media thing, and I was, like, ‘Oh man, this is a heavy show!’ There’s not many songs where it’s, like, ‘Ok, now we’ll have some emotional reprieve,’ where I sing a song about the joy of dancing or something, it’s all pretty intense. I’m going to have to figure that out. But then if you listen to my music then you’re not coming to my show to have a super light, joyous time.”

Jacklin admits that right now she’s favouring the sharing aspect of the song-making cycle rather than the creative, a case of absence making the heart grow fonder.

“I think definitely now I’m leaning towards loving sharing and performing, but that’s only because I haven’t done that in a while,” she chuckles. “I’m sure once I’ve been on tour for three months I’ll be, like, ‘Man, I just want a room to myself and an acoustic guitar!’

“But I’m not really a studio-head: I enjoy it but I find it pretty gruelling. It’s not that I’m lazy but I just don’t care about some things, like I don’t want to try seven different amps – the first one or the second one sounds fine – although sometimes in the studio you gotta be a bit more vigilant with that stuff.

“It’s good for me to be forced to be more careful with that, but my set-up on stage is super simple: I don’t like fuss, I just like to play. I just want to plug in and play. I don’t like fuss, I guess, is what it boils down to in the end, and playing shows is not fussy for me, it’s all fun and all heart.”

The fun and heart are what endeared Jacklin so readily to her growing global fanbase, and she admits being rapt by the traction she’s earned so far.

“Yeah, the last three years has been a very intense time of growth and it’s been pretty special,” she marvels. “I’ve toured a lot so I’ve been able to see – going back to a city in America somewhere multiple times and just to see the audience growing a bit and changing is really nice.”

This massive success comes with a price, however, which in this case is another gruelling itinerary that will find Jacklin living out of a suitcase for months. With the touring trials and tribulations documented on Crushing in mind, is she daunted by the prospect?

“I don’t know yet,” she ponders. “I feel ok about it because I feel that I get touring now – I kind of understand the lifestyle – whereas the first time around I was just, like, ‘What is this crazy place which is now my workplace?’

“You’ve got to really remember that it is a workplace and it’s not like an insanely long weekend or something, you’ve got to keep looking after yourself. And settling into the van a bit more and not thinking that it’s going to be over soon, because it’s not. It’s going to be a while.”