Julia Stone's Folk Pop Roots Are Actually Cemented In Orchestral Music

One of the highlights of experiencing Julia Stone – or Angus & Julia Stone – live is when she plays trumpet, usually just spinning her guitar around on its strap to rest behind her back while she plays. Given that it's probably not the most popular instrument to wish to play, from a kid's perspective, we wonder what it was that first attracted her to the trumpet. 

"When we were kids, our primary school didn't have a music program and our dad is a music teacher, and he decided that he would start a music program at Newport Primary School," Stone begins. "And so he of course made sure that all three of us kids were the first members of the school band. So I think the school band started with about ten kids on instruments and it was my sister [Catherine] on saxophone and me on trumpet, Angus on trombone and then about seven other kids that Dad had sort of wrangled in to start this band, and he was the conductor. 

"And the way that we got to choose our instruments was: Angus and Catherine and I were taken to an orchestra performance, and our mum and dad said, 'Pick the instrument that you wanna play.' And so we sat and watched the performance, and I remember looking up and seeing a guy with a spray can who was using it to kind of fix his tuning slides on the trumpet, and I thought, 'I really would love a spray can, I should probably play that instrument,' and so I picked the trumpet based off that. And I never got a spray can; I don't know what he was using a spray can for," she laughs, "it never turned out to be something that I needed but, yeah! We then continued to play all through school. 

"Angus and Catherine stopped once they got to high school, but I really loved the trumpet and I kept playing and I joined the jazz band and some of the sort of, like, state symphonic wind ensembles and orchestras. And I spent a lot of my teenage years travelling 'round playing in orchestras and big bands and stuff like that. And my first kind of live singing performances were singing jazz songs with the big band at school."

Here we were thinking that the orchestral performance must have featured a trumpet solo that blew Stone away! She chuckles. "I mean, as a kid I loved music because it was fun to dance to, but it wasn't something that made sense to me straight away. You know, I was a kid that liked collecting rocks and I was a little kind of collector, and I didn't find myself drawn to music; I did it because I was told I had to do it and I had to practise and I hated it! 

"I mean, I just hated band [practice] and then slowly, slowly I started to understand and feel the specialness of when groups of people make sounds together, and as soon as I felt that, and I looked at that, I've loved that feeling of creating with other people." 

"There's nothing like the feeling of being in harmony, you know, like, singing in harmony with Angus is one of the greatest privileges of my life; just to have two voices from the same family... and then you get to make sounds kind of a third apart and it just feels so cool!"

After admitting she's witnessed overnight success stories in her "world of music" struggling to come to terms with how much their lives have changed, Stone describes the path to success she and her brother Angus paved as "paced out". 

"We have both had that gradual journey and also we've had each other through it all so that's also something that we're really fortunate for, 'cause you have someone who's known you since you were a kid and there's no — you can't trick them, you can't all of a sudden be a different person. It's, like, you know who they are and they know know who you are. Angus and I know each other so well that there's no hiding and there's no pretending to be, you know, a famous person, whatever that may be; you're just two kids from the Northern Beaches who love making music."