Interview: Julia Stone On Making Sixty Summers with St Vincent & Doveman

With her new solo album finally about to be released, Julia Stone talks to The 13th Floor about making Sixty Summers with Doveman and St Vincent.

The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda spoke to Julia Stone about a month ago as the release date for Sixty Summers was approaching, but with things being what they are, the album is now due to see the like of day on April 30th. This is Julia’s third solo album and the first working with St Vincent. 

Julia was clearly excited to talk about her new album, so settle in and have a listen and read along!

Click here to listen to the Julia Stone Interview:

Or, read a transcription of the interview here:

JS: So, things have been good in Australia. We’ve been getting on and it was really great to play proper concerts with a proper PA and a proper room and lights.

MD: And a proper audience?

JS: And a proper audience. I mean they still weren’t allowed to dance or stand up so that was pretty strange.

MD: How did they regulate that?

JS: I guess people just follow the rules now. I also think that I don’t have the kind of crowds that will be throwing chairs and stuff and the songs don’t really lend itself to, I mean, the newer songs, it felt pretty weird playing to a sit down.

MD: There is a song called Dance.

JS: That’s right and I had to actually alter the song a little bit cause I felt, everyone laughed when I said I’m gonna play a song called Dance and obviously we’re not gonna be able to do that and then I said so I’m gonna alter it slightly so it’s less weird to not be able to dance.

MD: Since we are talking about that song, that’s the one, you have a video with Susan Sarandon in and Danny Glover in it.  How did that happen?

JS: That was so wild. That was one of those real pinch-yourself moments. My friend Jessie Hill, who directed it, we’ve been collaborating for years and her and I just before the lockdown, or the pandemic swept the world, we were in Paris and we were talking about that video, what we would do for Dance and we felt like we really wanted to tell a love story of people in their seventies.

We felt like wouldn’t it be interesting to explore that idea of being on a dating app in your seventies and what that would feel like when you see someone you fancy and showing people that, you know, I think for popular mainstream media, we don’t see a lot of examples of people in their seventies being romantic and being sexy and falling in love and we really liked the idea of showing how incredibly sexy and fun life can be in your seventies because both Jessie and I have grandparents who were very eccentric and very sexy all the way through and so we really were like super inspired by that idea.

As we started talking about it, we thought well who’s the person or the people that are gonna tell this story the best? We always shoot for the stars, we go ok, who’s the most ideal person for the role and you know, you ask and most people say no. Firstly, we thought Danny Glover. We both love Danny and from everything we grew up watching him into also then as an older actor, more like Royal Tenenbaums.

Very classic and beautiful face and just so iconic and so we thought, “Ok let’s ask Danny.” And so we, well Jessie put together an incredible treatment about these people who find each other on the dating app and they’re getting ready and it’s all about the feelings of first love or when you’re excited and nervous and what you do and turning that into you start to dance as you’re getting excited.

Anyway, she sent the treatment to Danny’s team and Danny wanted to get on a call with her and so a week later, Jessie and Danny Glover were chatting on the phone and she called me after the phone call and she’s just like. “Oh my God, he loves it and he’s great and he’s lovely and he’s gonna do it!” And then I said, “Well, you know who are we gonna ask to be his date?” And she said, “Well actually I had a great chat with him about that and I asked him, cause he asked who was gonna be, and I said to him, in your dream life, who  would you love to go on a date with who’s an actress? And he said, an actress in their seventies and he said hands down Susan Sarandon.”

MD: Good choice.

JS: Yeah, he’s not wrong.

MD: Exactly.

JS: Yeah, and she loved the treatment. It got sent off to her. It was maybe two months after those initial conversations we were shooting mid-covid in New York city.

MD: Now the album is called Sixty Summers and you co-produced it with your regular guy Thomas Bartlett (aka Doveman) but also with St. Vincent. That’s very exciting. I just got an announcement that her new album is on the way and there’s a new song out today.

JS: Oh, I know, it’s so exciting.

MD: So I need to know all about how the two of you, or the three of you got together and worked together on this record.

JS: Well, Thomas and I, we’ve been working together for a long time and we’re really close. So Sixty Summers started really not as a vision for a record at all. We were hanging out because we like hanging out and I would finish a tour with my brother and I would fly into New York city and go straight to Thomas’ studio where he always is and we’d write songs. And it was really just fun.

We love writing and we loved hanging out so we’d watch Veep or Thick Of It or Party People and order food and then write songs between doing that. And that was just happening for a couple of years, a couple of weeks here and a week there,  a few days here and there and we realized after a couple years we had about fifteen, twenty songs in different stages of development.

And I think that was initially the conversation of maybe there’s an album in this. We sort of had the conversation but we didn’t, we weren’t entirely sure about it so we just kept writing. And another year went by and we ended up with about 25, 30 songs. And then I had this phase, Angus and I had finished touring and I started to think maybe I’m ready to put out a solo record now.

MD: The last one had been like 2014, right?

JS: Yeah. I love working and I love touring but I also really like the time off between. So I didn’t wanna just back-to-back finish a cycle with Angus and then go into a solo cycle which I had done all through my twenties. I’d put out a record with my brother then I put out a record of my own, then I put a record with my brother. I just, I hadn’t stopped and I was enjoying a more relaxed approach to the in between sections but a long time had passed and I felt like yeah, there was just this space to have the conversation and Thomas and I started trying to figure out what the record was and we couldn’t get our heads around it.

We both had different ideas about what songs would go with what and Thomas actually came up with the brilliant idea of asking Annie Clark (St. Vincent) to jump onboard and help us finish the record. And of course I completely supported that idea because not only do I absolutely respect and admire Annie as an artist, but I have in my brief crossing of paths with her over the years, always really enjoyed being around her as a person so I thought the idea was great on a number of levels.

I thought, “Ok, she’s gonna really be incredible to really finish this and make some great music but I get to hang out with her”. So, Thomas asked Annie and she was at the final stages of, I think, she was at the final stages of mixing this Sleater- Kinney record that she had produced, so I knew she was into getting into production and, anyway Thomas asked her and she said she was interested.

She came to the studio one night when Thomas and I were there and we played her the 25, 30 songs, I can’t remember the number that’s why I keep saying 25, 30. I don’t know how many it was but she listened through and wrote notes. I remember she had a notepad and a pen and really seriously started through listen to each song and  sometimes she’d ask to hear the song again. And after a couple of hours she had a pretty clear idea of which songs she thought would make the final kind of…what’s the word? Like, what’s a list when it’s not the final list but you know the penultimate.

MD: Penultimate is good, yeah.

JS: She culled it down to fifteen or so or sixteen and had a lot of ideas about which ones were really close to almost being done and which ones we needed to just completely reshape and restructure. And that was great. I instantly and immediately felt, “Oh we’re gonna finish this record.” And Thomas as well. We felt incredible with her on board because she’s very driven, she’s very hard-working and incredibly great at producing.

Such a great mind, like in terms of the catalogue of music that she’s listened to and understands and knows about so she can really draw on a lot of really pretty obscure references which I was blown away by the only other producer I’d worked with that could do that and did that regularly was Rick Rubin.

MD: I’m sure he could, yeah.

JS: Yeah, and I was actually reminded of that moment of being in the studio with Rick similarly to Annie where he would pull up a track from a record from 1982 track five on the record and he’d say, “I think the drum fills on this, this is something good to listen to as an inspiration for a feeling”.

She would do that and she’d be talking about, I can’t remember the references, but they were so obscure sometimes and I’d be like, “Who is this band?” Some band from Manchester in 1995 that put out one record that became this cult followed record that I didn’t know about.

She’d bring it up and I would understand what she was talking about because of the reference, what she was trying to get me to sing like or what she was trying to get the song to feel like and it’s a really clever ways of producing with musicians I think because once her hear something you know what the person’s talking about. It’s harder to articulate with words. She did a lot of that.

But I knew Annie prior to that through a mutual friend and drummer that we worked with. His name is Matt Johnson and I bumped into Annie and Matt in the Helsinki airport probably, I don’t know seven years ago. We were walking through the airport and I saw Matt walking with this beautiful woman and we called out to each other and he said to me, “You know Annie this is Julia, Julia this is Annie.” And he said, “You guys should be friends.” And so she said ok, give me your number and she took my number and sent me a text message straight away saying “friends”. We stayed in touch over the years and bumped into each other at festivals and so the story goes.

MD: So the story goes. The album opens with a tune called Break, which to my ear, had a kind of Talking Heads vibe to it which I guess isn’t surprising since with Annie’s involvement, she’s worked with David Byrne in the past and blah blah blah so I guess it all kind of simmers and comes together and something like that. Would you say that’s a fair assessment of the deal or no?

JS: I mean, the only reason I would say…I totally believe and agree with what you say about the simmering of the circles we move in and things that were inspired by. I think for sure that’s a really reasonable way to think about Break. But the only thing that, well I guess it still does make sense, your idea, but it’s more the inspiration of Break was largely Thomas.

Break was one of the songs actually that was very close to being finished when Annie came on board. Annie added in a lot of really cool stuff. She brought in Stella (Mozgawa) from Warpaint to play an amazing drum section through the bridge. She also took out a bunch of stuff, it was a pretty loaded track and she stripped out a bunch of sounds that were probably arbitrary in hindsight.

She did some really great production on that song. But the energy and the feeling of it that I know you’re talking about, it also reminds me a bit of Talking Heads. When I started singing on the song, Thomas has already developed this sound and maybe because Thomas knows David quite well.

David comes and works in Reservoir Studios where he works, he was around and maybe even played on, I can’t remember what Thomas’ part in David’s most recent solo work was but I know David’s…cause I met David in at the studios when he was working on, not the last record, the record before? American Utopia?

MD: Yeah, that’s the one with the amazing live show that was …….. that was incredible.

JS: I think that was the one. I’m gonna look it up because Pat my friend who did a lot of the engineering on Sixty Summers, he worked on that with David. And so Reservoir Studios works like four different studio hubs within the one studio complex in Midtown in Manhattan. So, there’s always different people coming and going throughout that space.

I think you know on some of the times they had Questlove in there doing a show from the big studio. I mean I’ve seen so many people come and go out of that space and I was really lucky when we were doing a recording session that David was working in there and I’m such a huge fan and he came in and sat in on the session and listened to us recording and I was like, “Ooh!” It was very cool.

MD: Well it goes to show how the effect of something like isolation and all this stuff that covid can have on music because you don’t get that natural coming and going of people and running into each other.

JS: Totally. Yeah, it’s really a different way to write music and I have been collaborating with people during lockdown but it is so different. It’s like you know, Thomas and I had been trying to write songs from a distance and it’s really slow going because a lot of the stuff that happens is because of what’s happening in the room and we really miss that and miss each other and we all feel I think everyone in their own fields who are used to working together, it would be a whole different vibe.

MD: Now you mentioned Matt the drummer but there’s also another Matt on the record, Matt Berninger from The National. He’s on a tune called We All Have and that’s quite a big deal. How did that happen?

JS: Very similarly to how all of the collaborations happened on the record. I’ve had an intertwined history with The National through Thomas. So Thomas is a long-time collaborator with The National.

I believe he’s played on almost every record that they’ve put out and so initially I became quite close with Bryce (Dessner) and then I’m trying to think who played on By The Horns but somebody came and played on, I think it was Scott (Devendorf) who played on By the Horns.

So long ago and my memory’s pretty bad but then I’m only confused because then we played all together at the Burgundy Stain Session in New York and the Burgundy Stain Session is a night that Thomas puts on where he has a house band which were The National minus Matt and then he gets different artists like Trixie Whitley was on the night I was playing and he gets different artists to jump up and do one of their songs and then do a cover so I got to play with them all that night as well,

So I was starting to get to know these guys through sessions and different events and then Bryce and I did a Burgundy Stains Session in Adelaide as part of the Fringe festival. We did this really cool version of Blood Buzz Ohio where I sang it in the key that I had recorded it in and Bryce did the solo in the key that The National did the song in so it was very dissonant and a strange, wonderful performance.

Bryce had been in at the studio at Reservoir during the making of Sixty Summers and he had played on Break and then I, yeah…we had finished the record and we had got to this point where we were actually in the stages and mixing, I think We All Have was already mixed actually. And Thomas got in touch with me randomly out of the blue. I was in Australia I believe.

I can’t remember, but I was not with Thomas when he sent me a message saying. “Hey I really think that We All Have needs something, like it needs something else in the song”. And I’m always like, “Ok great, what is it? Let’s do it.” And he said, “I think it needs a vocal in there, a male vocal and I really think Matt’s voice with the deepness.”

MD: He does have the voice, doesn’t he? It’s like the voice of God.

JS: Yeah, he has like really Leonard Cohen style that he sings, you listen. So yeah, I again with Thomas’ ideas they’re always good and I said, “Well if Matt wants to do it, of course that would be amazing.” And Matt wanted to do it. He liked the song and Matt’s a real collaborative person.

He loves working with friends and he jumped on board and he was on tour at the time. He recorded it in a hotel room and sent it back. It sounded great and yeah and that was really exciting cause I hadn’t had that much to do with Matt prior to this and after he did that, we’ve since chatted on the phone and it’s been really nice to get to know him because of that collaboration and he’s a remarkable person.

I always say, he was one of, I think he was the first person to get back to me when I reached out to all of my musician friends around the world to do Songs For Australia for the bush fire relief record.

MD: I’m glad you brought that up, I wanted to ask you about that.

JS: Ok, sure sorry. You can ask me and I’ll tie it together with Matt.

MD: I know that that was something that you’d worked on in the interim and you did Beds Are Burning and I was just wondering why you got involved and what it was like for you to work on something like that.

JS: Well, I was in Madrid and I knew the fires were bad and I was in Madrid shooting the album cover with Phillippe Coustik, a beautiful surrealist artist who is based out of Madrid. Jessie and I had flown in to work with him and then I went to London afterwards and Thomas was there working on something and I remember writing to Thomas just chatting on Messenger or whatever, Messenger on text message and anyway, he’s like, “What are you up to?” And I said, “I’m just sitting in my hotel room in London feeling bad about the fires.” And he said, “I’m in London, do you want to have dinner tonight?”

So we ended up out at dinner and we had this really lovely dinner and I started crying at the dinner table because I had got a message from my mum who was evacuated from Lake Conjola and she was sending me photos of them in traffic on the freeway trying to get out and it was just bumper to bumper traffic and the smoke.

It was a frightening picture. And it was not just mum, it was so many people and it was the footage of I think a lot of people really were affected as most humans are when you see footage of animals being hurt. I think our Australian animals are so iconic it was this, seeing kangaroos on fire trying to escape and it was just like terrifying and horrifying.

We went back to the hotel and we were listening to music and he was being really sweet just saying, “Play me some of your favourite Australian music”. And I started playing different music I’d grown up listening to from Australia and then I said my favourite song. I was pretty drunk at this point, and I put on Beds Are Burning and I was dancing around the room singing every word.

And he said how about tomorrow we go into the studio and we do a recording of this? It would be pretty nice to do that. And I said of course yes it would be great to do that and so the next day we went to the studio and we recorded Beds Are Burning and it was really cathartic and sad and felt just how…

I don’t know how music can make you feel so much and that song in particular. It has such a rich history in terms of what it’s talking about with how incredibly poorly Australia has behaved in relation to the First Nations people. And I was feeling really emotional about it all because I was also aware of a lot of conversations that were happening around indigenous Australia having desperately tried to tell the government that this was gonna happen and that the land should be managed by First Nations people.

All of this stuff that had been ignored and forgotten and pushed aside. So I finished the song and Thomas said, “you should put it up online and ask people to donate to download it so you can give money back to some of the organisations.”

It was a logistical thing at the time, I just couldn’t figure out how to get people to pay to download a song like they, download it onto their phone?

MD: People don’t pay for any music these days.

JS: I was like, That’s not gonna work at all and it’s not gonna make any money’. So and then I started thinking, “I wanna make money for some of the organisations that I think are doing really incredible stuff”.  The Seed Mob First Nations organisation that are doing so much incredible work and Firesticks Alliance, which is cultural backburning practises being spread throughout Australia and then also Climate Change Council.

I had this ‘Ok how do I make money for these people?’ Let’s make a record. At least a record you’re gonna get people who will buy the vinyl, you’re gonna get people who will stream the whole record, there should be little bit of money from streaming and if everybody donates a hundred per cent of the proceeds, we could have something. So I just started writing to everyone who I knew.

MD: So it sounds like a pretty organic way that it started. It wasn’t like somebody, some big wig at a record company had the idea.

JS: Oh no, I definitely it was a Thomas and me moment. We reached out to everybody, Thomas as well he asked all of his mates and I knew a friend who was working with Laura Mvula he was making her record and I wrote to him I said, “I know you’re in the studio with Laura right now, get her to record a song”. And he was really sweet he was like, “Alright I’ll ask her”. And she’s amazing she did an incredible version of Reckless and yeah it was just incredible people just coming out of the woodwork to say yes to do it and I think it’s raised over a hundred grand now.

MD: Not bad, not bad. Getting back to your record and your career, I’m kind of curious because like we’ve said this is your first solo album since like 2014. We’ve seen you with your brother here several times in the interim over here in Auckland, but this record feels, because of all these people that you’ve got working with you and you’ve got Susan Sarandon on board and Danny Glover, it feels like a big deal. Are you feeling like this is something kind of a step up from what you’ve been doing or is this just another record to put out? How are you looking at it in terms of career moves?

JS: I think for me, it is really…I keep saying to Jessie, I said this to Annie and Thomas, it feels for me like a first record. It feels like this is…my previous solo records By the Horns and The Memory Machine, most of the songs on those records could have easily sat on a record with my brother.

They weren’t particularly hugely different in genre or they felt like Angus and I write a lot of music and we only could put six songs each on a record together. And for a two-year touring cycle that’s not a lot of music. We both felt pretty frustrated at times that we had all these other songs that we really loved and we loved writing that we couldn’t share with people.

So we started doing solo projects and the solo projects always felt like a side project to Angus and Julia Stone. I’ve always toured them and I’ve worked hard to get the music out there from those solo records because I love playing the song but it was in the back of my mind, “Ook I’ll do this and then I’ll make another record with Angus,” because we had been building this thing for so many years.

This time around I think for Angus with his project as well, we both were really ready for a big change and I felt that it was slow moving and gradual like a lot of things in my life it takes a bit of time for me recognize what’s good for me and it was the years of working on Sixty Summers with Thomas slowly that I really started to  get a sense of where I was really happy. And I felt really happy making this record and I started to feel like ‘Oh this is where I want to spend my time. I want to spend my time in this world in this style of music, in this style of writing.’

So I really felt the songs were bigger. I felt that there was, because if what Annie and Thomas had brought to the production it felt like a record that needed visually a lot of…it felt like it was very dynamic and I also felt an opportunity to show all these other sides of myself that I hadn’t been able to in the music that I had previously put out into the world. I felt, “Oh I can dance now”, and there’s space for it. I can act in my music videos and be quite strange and unusual in terms of the stories that I’m telling.

MD: You can even dance in French.

JS: Yeah, that’s right. I can dance in French, I can sing in French, I can sing in Spanish, I can ask directors to go to places with me in emotional stories that I really feel exciting to tell. So each step of the way I felt really inspired to find what’s the best way to tell this story and as it’s turned out, it’s felt a lot bigger and more weighty in my life.

MD: Speaking of your life, I wanted to touch on one more song before we call it a day here. The song is called Substance. It sounds like it may be very autobiographical and kind of weighty and whatever so what can you tell me about that?

JS: Substance is, it’s so funny, you’re the first person to ask about Substance and it’s one of my favourite tracks on the record. It just is so fun and I love songs that are kind of angry as well. I think like I said before, that side of myself when I’m on stage singing, I love channelling anger. I think it’s an incredible force when you’re performing.

MD: Well, you’ve probably got all sorts of stuff pumping in you anyway so you might as well draw on that.

JS: Yeah, I think it’s great advice actually for singers onstage is to, someone once said to me ‘if you’re ever nervous or you ever feel when you get onstage you’re not in your body, find anger cause anger pulls you right in straight away and you’re in there and you’re really singing the songs.’ It’s an easy emotion to access, at least with me. So Substance is a bit of an angry song because it’s being taken advantage of.

I wrote that song with an Australian artist who goes by the name of Vera Blue. We wrote it actually three years ago with Dann Hume, the three of us in a room together and we all had stories of these people that had been with us for the wrong reasons. Yeah so, there’s autobiographical stuff in there, definitely. But it’s a combination of a few people’s stories as happens in a co-write so yeah.

MD: Have you got any ideas about how you want to present this music in front of an audience at some point?

JS: Oh yeah, I’ve got a lot of ideas. We actually, pre-covid, were rehearsing our light show and our stage show. I really wanted the stage show to be quite theatrical and to be very dynamic, so I was working with a great lighting technician and designer from Sydney who I have admired for years. Unfortunately, we haven’t had an opportunity to put the show on yet but we will. And when we do, it’s gonna be exciting. I think this part of me, the drama and the theatre of how I like to express is gonna have its day in the sun, so I look forward to presenting the songs in that way.

MD: Hopefully you can bring it over here.

JS: Oh my gosh I would love that. We absolutely have loved playing in New Zealand. I’ve only ever played with my brother in New Zealand but the shows have hands down been just, I mean the crowds, everybody feels like they’re really there when they are at a gig so I look forward to doing that again.

Julia Stone’s Sixty Summers is released April 30th on BMG Records