Julia Jacklin isn’t a fan of songs that take the obvious path. “I like listening to something where it feels like somebody’s in a gray area and we’re all in it together—we’re all kind of like, ‘Hmmm,’” she tells me over Zoom from her home in Melbourne, where it’s morning and she’s shaking off a long night. Her own work also defies easy categorization. If one of her songs starts out by conjuring up comparisons to the lilting country-folk sound of ’70s Emmylou Harris, it might end up somewhere closer to the raw-nerve confessional punk of Elvis Costello from that same era.
So it makes its own kind of sense that when Jacklin found herself with everything in her career lined up by the book to launch her into breakthrough success, she’d leave her management and label to hole up for a year in a dodgily soundproofed studio above a Melbourne pub called The Gem, where she first found her footing in the local scene, and make an album as knotty and uncompromising as she wanted. What could’ve been a recipe for career suicide wound up producing some of the strongest, most accessible work of her decade-long career. Named after the pub it was recorded above, The Gem transforms conflict, contradiction, and confusion into festival-scale sing-along anthems.
With the record out this week via her new label home of 4AD, we asked Jacklin how she pulled it off.
I’m always interested in music that comes out of unconventional circumstances in terms of the creative environment, so I’d love to hear about The Gem, the pub.
I moved to Melbourne nearly 10 years ago, and it was one of the first places I went to when I was doing that early stage of moving to a new city and going out by yourself to try to meet people. The stage is right in the front room, so you walk straight in the door and you’re watching the band. It’s on a residential street, so it’s also kind of the only thing that’s lit up at night when you’re in that area, which always feels a bit like a moth-to-the-flame kind of energy. Coming from the Blue Mountains, from Sydney, Melbourne always felt like this magical, musical place. It’s kind of the place to be as a musician in Australia—or that’s what I grew up thinking—and I feel like The Gem was just one of the first places I went to when I moved down here that made me go, “Ah, Melbourne.”
I didn’t intend to record there. I did a song with Faye Webster upstairs at The Gem because it’s got an area that we could film in. Then I found out that an old friend of mine actually had a studio upstairs. I got talking to [co-producer Robert Muinos] and we decided to do it there. It ended up being an amazing experience, because I’d never recorded an album in the town where I was living, [and] I’ve never recorded an album over that long. It felt like I was going to work, like a normal job in a strange way. It felt like I was in the world as I was making this record, instead of isolated from it, which is what a lot of record-making processes can feel like. I enjoyed having to work around the sounds of a neighborhood and the sounds of the pub.
“It felt like I was in the world as I was making this record, instead of isolated from it. I enjoyed having to work around the sounds of a neighborhood and the sounds of the pub.”
I think a lot about how separated music-making is from everyday life these days. Even in New York City, you can walk around all day and not encounter anyone playing live.
Yeah, it’s this weird situation where that’s kind of supposed to be done in private, and only delivered when it’s this perfectly captured thing. I feel like that environment can feel so pressurized. As soon as I go into a vocal booth in a soundproofed black-box studio, I’m suddenly like, “OK, if I’m not the best singer in the world, I’m gonna hate myself,” because that’s all I can hear.
You expected it to be a two-week process to knock out this album, and at one point early on you thought you had finished. Then you spent another year working on it. I’m curious what you needed that year for—what you needed to learn or how you needed to grow.
You know when you have a gut feeling, and you know that if you stare at the feeling, you’re gonna have to do something really annoying? No matter how many times I’ve been through this, I still sometimes convince myself that somebody else is going to tell me the truth, and actually my gut is wrong. [But] in this job, your gut is the only thing you have. I feel like my whole career with music has been an exercise in the consequences of ignoring my gut and the rewards of listening to it. It’s kind of crazy how that’s a non-linear process, because you can always fall off the wagon in terms of starting to question your own instincts. You have to be so vigilant. You get into this industry and the pace of it is insane, and if you don’t actually force yourself to stop, you could find yourself 20 years down the line being like, “What the fuck happened?”
“My whole career has been an exercise in the consequences of ignoring my gut and the rewards of listening to it... You can always fall off the wagon in terms of starting to question your own instincts.”
I’d gotten myself into this thing of [having] to put out an album every three years, where even a week after I’ve put out a record I’ve had people asking, “So what’s next?” It can make you go insane. I think I hadn’t realized that I’d been rushing at this timeline that I’d self-imposed, but had felt like was what was expected of me. I’d also overhauled my whole team. My label contracts had finished. I’d stopped working with my long-term manager, and I was completely untethered to anything in the music industry at that point. So the whole first chunk of the process, I had this feeling deep inside me that I wasn’t ready to do this yet, but I was hoping I would just get it done and people would go, “This is amazing,” even though my gut was saying something different.
I even had a listening party at my house, and we all listened and we all high-fived. It was mixed, it was mastered, I had sent it around to labels. I was prepared to put out a record I wasn’t happy with, just because I wanted to avoid being embarrassed. But I’m really proud of myself that I was like, “No, it’s not done, and it’s OK.” It was an exercise in showing up for myself and allowing myself to be a messy artist. I just was like, “This is your fourth album, you can be a bit crazy.” And then the second part of this record was one of the most joyful and creatively fulfilling and wonderful experiences of my life.
“Songwriting is an exercise in asking questions, and there are no answers. I think I’m more settled in that now.”
It seems to me like you’ve become a much more confident writer, even since the last album. How do you feel like you’ve grown as a songwriter since then?
For me, a huge part of becoming a better songwriter is to become a better person. It’s my responsibility to really get to know myself and make sure that I’m moving in a way that’s good for me, even if that means making hard decisions. I just think I went through a lot of change and growth in the last few years, and now I feel like a more confident person. I love my last record in many ways, but it was such a different process, and there were a lot of fear-based decisions made there, just because of where I was at in my life. This time I hope people like the music, of course, because for me music is about communicating with other people. But I’m not as concerned. I just wrote the songs that I wanted to hear.
Throughout the album, you build up a certain kind of tension and sustain it, and you’re very selective about when you let it go. “Get Away From Me, I Think I’ll Love You Soon” jumped out at me because it’s such a catchy tune, but it also feels conflicted.
I love holding tension in music. Sometimes I don’t like when I listen to other music and people release the tension too quickly, or too much. Songwriting is an exercise in asking questions, and there are no answers. I think I’m more settled in that now. When I was younger, I felt like everything was going to have an answer, and I felt like life was just about finding everything and pinning it to the ground. As you get older, you’re like, “Oh no, nothing’s sticking.”
It can be really stressful when you go through that transitional period, which I feel like for me happened in my late twenties, where I was like, “So you’re telling me that I’m always going to be operating on this level of confusion?” Sometimes it feels like this pressure to present a question, and then by the final chorus you’ve presented the answer. That’s not what life feels like for me. You can never figure anything out in three and a half minutes. FL
