Foto-© Sean McDonald
Angus & Julia Stone machen seit fast zwei Jahrzehnten zusammen Musik. Auf ihrem siebten Album Karaoke Bar klingt das weniger nach Routine als nach dem Versuch, Routinen loszuwerden. Die Platte entstand zwischen Griechenland, Frankreich und Australien, ihren Ausgangspunkt nahm sie auf Hydra. Im Zentrum steht dabei eine ziemlich einfache Idee: Was passiert, wenn man aufhört, alles kontrollieren zu wollen?
Im August treffen wir Angus und Julia Stone in Berlin. Wir sprechen darüber, warum ihre Arbeit im Studio immer freier wird, weshalb Loslassen für Julia inzwischen fast zu einer kreativen Methode geworden ist und was Karaoke mit echter Verbundenheit zu tun hat. Außerdem geht es um das gemeinsame Schreiben nach all den Jahren und um die Momente, in denen der eigene Kopf der Musik eher im Weg steht.
Now that Karaoke Bar is finished, what feeling sits at the emotional centre of the record for you when you listen to it? Do you even listen to it at this point?
Angus Stone: It all starts to make sense after. When you’re in it, it’s like looking at an image too closely; it’s quite blurry. In a way, it’s almost like therapy: You talk about what happened afterwards, work through it, and start figuring out what the record is about. For us, I think it came after we’d finished this really beautiful tour in Paris called the Living Room Sessions. It was basically about bringing people back into our living room and telling stories about how we started writing and how we moved into this world of being on stage and telling stories. After that, we decided to travel and make music in different beautiful locations with studios. In the past, we’d usually go into a studio knowing we had a certain amount of time to finish a record. This felt much freer. We were in these historic, beautiful places, enjoying wine, having dinners and writing music at the same time. I think that really shaped the record.
Julia Stone: Yeah, the music was part of something that wasn’t just about the music. It was about this whole world we were in at the time. Like Angus said, we were really experiencing the joy of making music on that tour. Now, listening to the album about a year and a half after we made it, it reminds me of those times and of how we felt. That changes as a record lives and breathes, but right now it brings back this sense of a happy, peaceful time.
Place seems to be a recurring theme on the record. Even the song titles refer to places, though not necessarily the ones where you recorded them. Do you feel the different locations shaped the songs? And was it challenging to take in all those different influences while still maintaining an overall vision across the album?
Julia Stone: From the beginning, Angus and I have made records in different places, and I think what makes them cohesive is this continual thread of how we were feeling at the time. We’ve talked a lot about how much place affects music. Angus put it really beautifully: it affects everything and nothing at all. All the elements of what’s happening on a particular day add up to what a song becomes, but it’s not as linear as being in a certain place and therefore making a certain sound. It’s more like capturing a moment in time and all the feelings that brought you there. We made this record in Hydra, Miraval, hotels in Mexico City and back at Sugarcane, Angus’s studio. But the feeling that carried through all of it was the joy of working together.
What I find interesting is the contrast between coming off a tour of these big, historic venues and calling the album Karaoke Bar – a much more democratic, communal place for music. How do those two worlds come together for you, especially knowing you’ll be taking these songs back into big venues?
Angus Stone: I think it’s kind of cathedral-agnostic. A place of unity isn’t based on the number of people or the size of the room you’re all standing in. It comes down to being vulnerable and experiencing the moment together. It’s interesting because sometimes, when you play those big venues, you can actually feel more alone. With the lights and the distance, you sort of internalize things and have to adjust. Smaller rooms feel different. So I think there is something interesting about coming from those big venues to the idea of the karaoke bar – that sense of connection can exist in both.
Julia Stone: This is the first time we’ve really thought about that particular duality: the spaces we work in and then making a record and calling it the name of almost the opposite. But I agree with what Angus said about spaces being agnostic. You can be in the most intimate venue or the biggest venue, and what makes it feel connective is the people in the room. You can be in the most intimate venue or the biggest venue, and what feels connective is the people in the space. We’ve played shows that are so big, but somehow feel really small, because we’re all there together singing the songs. And after 20 years of making records, our music has become the fans’ songs too. Sometimes we play shows and the crowd is singing louder than we are. It is like a karaoke bar. We’re listening to them as much as they’re listening to us. I think when we came to deciding on the title of the record, the feeling of a karaoke bar was kind of where we were at, and where we are now. The joy of making music is about community. It’s about building a community.
That brings me to another duality. A karaoke bar also stands for imperfection, vulnerability and being in the moment. At the same time, the record sounds quite orchestral and cinematic and more expansive than some of your more intimate records. How did that sound evolve? Did you start with a vision of making something bigger but still intimate, or did it develop as you went along?
Angus Stone: The music, the instruments, always lead you. So, whatever it is – the bassline or whatever you start with – will be really stripped back. Then you go to the next layer and the next, and you’re building this little temple of sound. At some point, it all starts to make sense. You kind of go, “Oh, I can hear something.” Sometimes you can actually hear the words, or the music can almost paint itself in the way of the story it wants to tell. That’s what I love about it. Sometimes it will just drive itself in the way it wants to be told.
Julia Stone: Yeah, it’s like modern-day treasure hunting. If you let it happen and kind of get out of the way, you’re just as surprised as everybody else by what ends up coming up. I think that’s important to mention because people sometimes ask what songs are about. Some songs are very specific, and then with others, even to this day, we’re still figuring out what they’re about. Sometimes I’ll sing a song now and think, “Oh, that’s what I wrote it about.” It’s a really nice discovery process. In a world where so much is easy to figure out, songwriting is still such a great mystery.
As the songs change once you start playing them live, is that something you’re already thinking about while recording: the live shows and the people who will hear them? Or is making the record more of a moment between you and the musicians, with all of that coming later?
Angus Stone: I think it comes into your peripheral vision. At this point in our career, you sort of have an intuition about how you can put it together live, but it’s never at the forefront of why you make decisions in the studio. I’d say it has moved forward over time, though. When we first started making records, we used to sing so quietly, and as we moved into bigger rooms and played to larger audiences, it was sometimes quite difficult for us to play live because we were such a gentle little unit. But with experience, you start to realize that it is part of the whole picture. You just never want that to have you on a leash or make those decisions for you when you’re being creative. But yeah, it’s there.
Julia Stone: I would say it becomes part of it as you’re getting towards the end of finishing the record. In the back of your head, you’re thinking, “What kind of rooms would these songs work in?” We’ve been touring for 20 years, so we’ve played a lot of different spaces. When we made Cape Forestier, our previous record, I think Angus and I knew as we were making it that those were going to be sit-down theatre shows. We just knew from the sound of the record that it wouldn’t work in standing clubs. As we were making Karaoke Bar, I think we felt, “Oh, this could be a really fun festival record. We could play outdoor venues, people can dance.” So once the record is done, you start to see where the songs can work. And like Angus said, it’s part of the whole picture. It has to be, because that’s how people hear your music. So much of it is about people hearing it and having an experience with it.
Angus Stone: The rooms really do matter. Although, in a way, they do and they don’t. If you’ve got a crowd, or fans, who understand what the next record is and are intuitive in that way, I think they’ll be respectful of whatever venue you book. But you’re also a bit at the mercy of the space. If you booked a punk venue – not that we would – you might get walk-ins, and potentially it could be a bad situation. Every record is unique, and we’ve been so lucky with the venues we’ve played, these magical churches and cathedrals, these historic little corners of the earth.
When you finish a record, what do you take away from the process beyond the record itself? Do you feel like you’ve learned something or gained a new perspective from making it?
Julia Stone: With each record we make, we learn something. For me, it’s a wide variety of things, but probably the thing that stands out is that the way Angus and I work in the studio is always evolving. Each step we take moves us further towards a more pure form of creativity. It’s taken us time to figure this out, but with each record I get more excited for the next one because I think, “Oh, we’re really free in this space.” There’s this constant dichotomy within yourself between wanting to control what you’re making and wanting to be free. I like the process of realizing that I’m trying to restrict an idea inside myself and then letting it go. The time in the studio with Angus is very precious to me because it’s so illuminating in terms of the way the mind can limit freedom. And I think that speaks to life more generally: this idea that if you hold on tight, you’re somehow going to be better off or safer, when actually letting go is where all the magic happens.
