These emotional bruises show on songs like It’s All Okay and Let’s Forget, written as Stone tried to make sense of it all. “When that relationship ended, there was a really weird period of time touring without him and getting used to single life, which was a whole new thing,” she tells me. “You make plans and you think that love looks a certain way, or at least I did… My grandparents married really young, and I had this idea in my head that love would look the same way for me. It took time to realise that you can’t control things like love, you can’t just put it in a frame and put it on the wall – it doesn’t feel the way you think it’s going to feel. I guess that was the feeling that inspired a lot of this album; the trials and tribulations of growing up and falling in love with different people and developing different ideas about love, whether it’s a romantic love, a love between families or a love between friends. It’s an idea that really preoccupies me.”
Stone finds many of these songs difficult to perform – though not for the reason you might expect. She’s at peace with the emotional content, but the arrangements on By The Horns, bigger than any she’s worked with before, have pushed her voice in all new ways. “It’s All Okay is one of the first songs I’ve written with such a strong drumbeat,” she tells me. “I’m quite a soft singer and I’ve never had to struggle to hear my voice before, but that song has such a strong drumbeat on the chorus, such a strong piano part, that suddenly I’m faced with that challenge. On this tour, that’s been one of the songs here I’ve really had to tell myself, ‘Focus, Julia!’ As that song goes on, I do start to feel the emotion of it, particularly in the choruses. I do sometimes come offstage feeling a little twisted after singing lyrics like that.”
In the past, Stone has talked about how different instruments inspire her songs – she might pick up an unfamiliar guitar and, when playing around with it, suddenly find the roots of an all-new song taking hold. She continues to find inspiration this way, the title track of the new album being a perfect example: on her last Australian tour with brother Angus, one of the players in their backing band brought a mandolin on the road with her. Stone’s interest was immediately aroused – she’d never written songs with one before, and she wanted to find out more. “The nature of the mandolin, the size of it, makes it very easy to travel with, so we’d always have it in the car with us while we were travelling between shows,” she says. “We were all really excited to have this new instrument to play with while we were driving around the country – it was our first big regional tour of Australia, and we got to play lots of places like Bunbury and Townsville, so we were seeing all these amazing landscapes on the drive.
“I’d just been through this crazy love affair, I had this fresh experience of By The Horns happening, and then I had the mandolin. It’s a combination of things like that that make a song happen,” she continues. “The voicing of the mandolin is different from the guitar. I learned a couple of chords, a couple of ways to make sounds, and then I found my way around the mandolin in the boiling hot back garden of a Bunbury motel. I was sitting out there feeling sorry for myself thinking ‘it’s all so much!’ and plucking away. The chords I was hearing were ones I’d never heard on a normal guitar. I can play them on guitar now, but that mandolin really gave me the feeling of By The Horns. Even now, when I do acoustic sessions for online stuff or whatever, I always bring a mandolin with me to play By The Horns. I feel like it always brings the sound of that song.”
BY ALASDAIR DUNCAN
