Julia Cumming was gigging around New York City at age 13 and would soon be hailed—alongside her partners in the grungy power trio Sunflower Bean—as the savior of rock ’n’ roll before she was old enough to get into clubs on her own. Now, at age 30, after spending over half her life as one voice in a collective, she’s stepped out on her own with Julia, a powerful solo statement that channels an end-of-your-twenties search for self through the creative confidence of a seasoned veteran. Backed by a squad of heavy hitters (including Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and session musicians who’ve played alongside Vampire Weekend, TV on the Radio, Beck, and Olivia Rodrigo), Julia distills an expansive set of influences ranging from Burt Bacharach to Stereolab into music that’s as emotionally complex as it is sonically, standing in a lineage of pop auteurs like Joni Mitchell and Fiona Apple.
With the album out now via Partisan, we spoke with Cumming about coming up in the scene as a teenager, her experience releasing music outside of the context of Sunflower Bean for the first time, and finding the perfect team of collaborators to bring these ideas to fruition.
As a veteran musician, what’s it been like for you to release this album after going through this routine so many times already?
It’s been very, very freeing. I think a lot of my relationship with being a musician previously—even just jumping on gigs when I was a teenager—so much of how I thought about music and the way it was written, was directly related to performing it. This was the first time that I was working on something that really nobody knew about, so I had a lot of time to just tinker with it and set it up and really try to get control over the work in a way that I just was never able to [before]. It’s definitely deepened my relationship with myself as a person and as a songwriter. It’s just been a really exciting time.
I saw Sunflower Bean recently at The Roxy. I hadn’t checked in with you guys in a minute, and it was nice to see your work and be like, “Oh good, they haven’t been crushed by the experience of going through the record industry as teenagers.”
Yeah, it’s funny, my experience is obviously very specific in music and in fashion. I think even though it’s specific, the things that I think have been challenging from it, or that I’ve learned from it, I feel like in a strange way do also feel like the most relatable things. It’s stuff that everyone struggles with, and that big theme for me is like, it’s not just about people perceiving you wrongly and you being mad. It’s about how you absorb other people’s ideas of you and become them and slowly become OK with them, because it’s easier than trying to figure out who you really are. And I think I just had a hyperspecific experience being seen in other people’s eyes, a lot more than someone else, maybe.
But in a way, I think it just gave me a perspective about how you exist in other people’s minds, rather than how you know who you really are. I’ve had the privilege of working with people who I do really feel are excited about what they do and some real masters of their field when I was really young, and that’s also a priceless experience. I just think it’s more interesting to take responsibility for how you move through these fields, but even if you take responsibility for it, it’s OK to change, too. It’s OK to just try to discover who you are.
“This was the first time that I was working on something that nobody really knew about, so I had a lot of time to tinker with it and get control over it in a way that I just was never able to before.”
One thing I really love about this record is the complexity of the writing, this almost classical chamber-pop with lots of complex chords and melodies. How have you been pushing yourself to explore new things in terms of structure and theory?
I’m glad that that has been coming across. I feel that people generally do want more from the music that they’re being given. They want to be challenged a little bit. But I didn’t want to challenge in the way of dissonance, or in the way of straight-up math rock. I really wanted the record to be a fun listening experience. Another word that I used was “effervescent.” I wouldn’t say it’s a sad record, but it’s showing a lot, and I think that can be sad and that can be hard, but I don’t think that those things need to be mutually exclusive. I wanted to bring them together and create something that wasn’t so morose.
And I love morose music! I’m a sad girl, I love writing sad music. Sadness is very inspiring to me. But I also have a very deep love for the Brill Building and classic American songwriting. I wanted to do something that was in service to that format, and really celebrating that format, but also not, you know… There’s kind of the LA ’70s-revivalist scene that involves a lot of people dressing up—and that’s fine, too, because if I could live in the ’70s, I would. But I wanted the record to be recorded in a way that was a lot more hi-fi, so that it could meet people where they are and within how their ears function with modern music. If you recorded this record like a ’70s record, I think that that would minimize what I hope it can do, or who I hope it can reach.
I spent a lot of time thinking about what I could do with structure and letting my mind kind of run free. I would spend a lot of time listening to Brian Wilson demos and Joni Mitchell and dance around. I’d kind of do self-reiki and dance around to try to pull out the energy. I was like, “What if I just followed every instinct that felt really primal?” And then, after doing a lot of work like that, I would then go to the piano, and if I landed it right—if I had an idea and I had done the work—then I could get something pretty interesting.
“I feel that people generally do want more from the music that they’re being given. They want to be challenged a little bit.”
In your bio it says your dad is a Burt Bacharach historian. Is that as an armchair historian, or in a formal way?
He wrote the liner notes for the Burt Bacharach box set that came out in the ’90s. He has a historian brain, so he does kind of historian-related projects from time to time. He’s just a huge, super-duper music nerd, which has been passed on to me as well, and he was definitely how Burt came into my life. When you’re listening to Burt Bacharach, it’s this combination of beauty and melancholy and wit and melody and pop. It gives you something to think about. It gives you depth, and I think that was what I was really interested in, using the beauty of melody and complexity to play with depth.
“I was like, ‘What if I just followed every instinct that felt really primal?’ And then I would go to the piano, and if I landed it right then I could get something pretty interesting.”
You put together a really amazing group of collaborators for this album. What was it like to open up the creation of such a personal record?
I got incredibly lucky many times in this journey, the biggest one being in working with Brian [Robert Jones]. As soon as we started working together, I was like, “Oh yeah, this is my person for this sound.” With Brian, I think he could tell there was so much that I wanted to do and needed to do on this record. And I think through this sound and the writing that I was bringing to the table, there was a lot that he wanted to do, as well. Right now he’s in Hayley Williams’ live band, and he was in Paramore’s live band and Vampire Weekend’s. We’re both touring people, so we know that space, but getting to move into a recording space together was just a very beautiful thing.
We worked with Chris Coady as the producer, and he’s just the master of the mics. As I mentioned, I really wanted a more hi-fi approach, and I thought that he understood that. And then with the musicians, I really wanted to make sure that every musician that played on the record liked the music, and that, if possible, they could have a little bit of a relationship to it, so that when we did the sessions, you could kind of energetically sense their own relationship to it. I know that’s a little woo-woo, but it was just my approach. It was a distinct Wrecking Crew–style fantasy that I wanted to go for and try to get this group do the best that I could, to have them have some relationship to each other, hopefully, and just a relationship to the music so that we could make it feel lived-in. We could make it feel natural, as if those recordings have always been there. FL
