Julia Jacklin returns after finding her quiet strength

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This was published 5 years ago

Julia Jacklin returns after finding her quiet strength

By Craig Mathieson

Recently Julia Jacklin went to 'the Bad Place', which for any successful musician is the comments section below one of their videos on YouTube. “Don’t read the comments,” is not so much a piece of advice as a mantra in the music industry, but the now Melbourne-based singer-songwriter took pleasure in finding a viewer who thought that Jacklin was “totally pretentious” in the “stupid” music video for her recent single, Head Alone.

“I know reading the comments is bad, but I truly feel that it makes me stronger. It’s nice for me to see how a shitty opinion doesn’t destroy me like it would a couple of years ago,” Jacklin says. “I found that comment so funny. On my first EP it would have destroyed me – I might have internalised it and even agreed with it.”

Julia Jacklin's album Crushing is out now.

Julia Jacklin's album Crushing is out now.Credit:

On Friday, the 28-year-old releases her second studio album, Crushing, two-and-a-half years after her breakthrough debut, Don’t Let the Kids Win, introduced her insinuative mix of jangling guitar pop and alt-country melancholy to a receptive audience in Australia and internationally. The new album is starker than its predecessor, capturing a sense of physical and mental spaces that have either been strived for or surrendered to someone else.

“A lot of this record is about me struggling to, on one hand, have more control while, on the other hand, be kind to myself and accept that I don’t have much control and that that’s OK,” she says.

Sitting in a cafe at Melbourne’s Southbank that overlooks the Yarra River, a chunky keychain sitting in front of her that she takes on tour because it reminds her of the life she’s leaving behind, Jacklin is a drily witty presence with an outlook on the world that is optimistic but tends to drift to the pessimistic when considering her own career. Just when she sounds like an artist who has found a defining identity, Jacklin is thinking about an end point.

“I don’t particularly like getting my photo taken. I don’t like thinking about the way I look. It’s a lot singing about yourself, talking about yourself, getting on stage,” Jacklin says. “As much as this industry is changing it’s still quite ageist for a woman. I don’t know if I have the strength to push through that. Will people care when I’m not young about my view of the world?”

I realised that getting louder doesn’t get people’s attention in the way you need to

The songs on Crushing – not to mention the size of the venues she’s headlining over the next six months in Australia, Europe and North America – make clear that Jacklin is just getting started. The opening track, Body, is a bittersweet five-minute evocation, a short story about the end of a relationship that’s established with scathing detail but reaches a state of haunting realisation about who we discover ourselves to be.

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“As you get older you realise that there are so many unresolved things that you either have to let fester in the core of your being or totally let go of. There’s never a clean ending,” Jacklin says. “You’re giving people things all the time and sometimes you going to have to leave things with people that you’re never going to get back, whether it’s emotional or shared stories or literally photographs. You can’t reclaim everything.”

Interviewers keep asking Jacklin if Body is autobiographical, which she refuses to answer. “I’m keeping something for myself,” she says. But the song’s origins are incidental compared to what making it revealed to Jacklin. She had to accept that the song didn’t have a chorus, and then realise that rigging the arrangement’s dynamics was no substitute for believing in her own ability to hold the listener spellbound.

“Because it didn’t have a verse/chorus structure I thought the only way to keep people interested was to start really quiet, but by the end be huge and anthemic,” Jacklin says. “But I realised that getting louder doesn’t get people’s attention in the way you need to. Keeping it quiet felt 10,000 more times powerful.”

In the period leading up to her new album, Julia Jacklin relocated from Sydney to Melbourne.

In the period leading up to her new album, Julia Jacklin relocated from Sydney to Melbourne. Credit:

Jacklin, who grew up in the Blue Mountains with parents who were teachers, has spent the past eight months living in Melbourne, having followed a handful of her closest friends from Sydney. It’s been a regenerative period, complete with musical side-projects such as the band Phantastic Ferniture, which released an album in 2018 after years of casual gigs. It’s as if Jacklin is fortifying herself for the 18 months of touring to come.

“If you’re a person with a public life there are so many things that you can’t control. Your face is online, your body is online, your opinions are online – which people casually read and judge,” she says. “On top of that you play shows every night and meet fans and industry people. I love what I do, but you’re spread thin all the time.”

Jacklin is constantly debating issues like these in her head, trying to weigh the cost and benefits of the life she’s forged. The one thing she’s certain of is that you never get a definitive answer.

“The turmoil helps if you’re a songwriter,” she says with a smile, “but as a person it’s really irritating.”

Julia Jacklin plays The Forum in Melbourne on March 14; the Metro Theatre in Sydney on March 15; and the Cambridge Hotel in Newcastle on March 16.

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