Sixty Summers

“It feels like a first record for me,” Julia Stone tells Apple Music of her third solo album, made over the course of six years. “It represents finding more freedom in my life and myself. It\'s been such a gradual process, but I kept feeling like this is really fun. I was celebrating parts of me that I have kept secret.” *Sixty Summers* is vast, deeply compelling, and entirely unlike her first two records, or those made with her brother as Angus & Julia Stone. “When Angus and I started, it was very immediate, going from writing ‘Wasted’ on the guitar having just learned to play to putting it out and then all of a sudden playing shows. With this record, I took my time to figure out where I wanted to go.” Stone wrote and produced much of the album with Thomas Bartlett and Annie Clark (St. Vincent), with additional writing and vocals from The National’s Matt Berninger and Bryce Dessner, Meg Mac, and Vera Blue, among others. Her time with Clark in particular pushed her to new levels of creativity—and also deep, tough-love scrutiny. “Annie’s very detail-oriented, and she\'s got this thing about connecting to the intention of the song, and what the story is about,” she says. “A song can sound good, but if you\'re not saying the right thing, then it doesn\'t matter. I think it\'s rare for people to care as much as you care about music. At times I was a probably a bit like, ‘I think that\'s good enough, I\'m getting across what I want to say.’ And she\'d just go, ‘No, work on it. Make everything count.’ And I loved that. It wasn\'t her record, but she cared so much.” Below, the Australian singer talks through each song on the album. **“Break”** “‘Break’ is a song about being at the mercy of something, like a feeling. Like falling in love, whether it\'s good or bad for you, sometimes it\'s just out of your control. So just let go and enjoy the ride. We tried to make it feel that way sonically, so you get pulled along by the rhythm and the groove of the song and you can\'t stop being pulled along. It doesn\'t give you a gap to breathe from that feeling.” **“Sixty Summers”** “I always think about those Australian summers as a teenager, going to Big Day Out, watching a band play, being high and being like ‘Oh my god, life is so incredible!’ A friend of mine grabbed me by the shoulders during one of those magical nights in my twenties and said, ‘Can you believe we only have 60 summers left?’ I have always been interested in what death means, but until that moment I’d never really felt the brevity of life.” **“We All Have” (feat. Matt Berninger)** “Collaborating with Bryce and Matt was a dream. It’s really direct, lyrically, about human beings having the capacity to be okay when you\'re not okay. I don’t believe that you always have to find the silver lining in a terrible experience. Matt recorded his vocals on tour. I love our voices together. They couldn\'t be more polar opposite in terms of texture and sound.” **“Substance”** “It’s about falling for someone who doesn\'t really take you seriously and realizing maybe too late. I wrote that song with Vera Blue and Dann Hume. We all connected on that experience of people wanting to be with you for the wrong reasons. Initially, when we wrote it, Celia \[Pavey, Vera Blue\] was singing it and it sounded incredible, but she’d already finished her album at the time, so I asked if I could sing it. Then Annie came on board and created this incredible beat and we messed around with the structure.” **“Dance”** “It\'s that feeling of really deep connection and knowing that it\'s not going to work out but having nothing left to say, nothing left to do about it, so let\'s just dance and enjoy the dance whilst it\'s here. The music video ended up being a different message entirely, but the song itself has that behind it. It\'s darker, it’s like, ‘We’re not right for each other, but let’s just dance.’” **“Free”** “I feel like it\'s a really summer song; it\'s got all the lyrics about the heat. It\'s a very sexy song, about getting high and getting intoxicated on each other\'s bodies. I cowrote it with Meg Mac and Dann Hume during a summer in Melbourne.” **“Who”** “That was the song that was the most transformed on the record—it started as an acoustic guitar and piano. It’s the song that I was most surprised by, because it changed so much when Annie came on board. She really liked the song, but she said, ‘I really want to hear a ’90s dance vibe.’ So we found that beat, and next thing I was singing this dance track. I must have sung that bridge a bunch of times, and she kept saying ‘No, really say that bridge: “I wake up, you\'re on the phone,”’ and it felt really Madonna. I loved channeling that feeling, really going into that pop sensibility for that song.” **“Fire in Me”** “I wanted a song on the record that felt like you can do anything. It has that feeling, the strength and the fire and the energy to do and to change. Annie\'s nickname for me is Red because there is a fire in my belly—I think I\'m a very amicable person, but underneath is this fire to do and to exist and change and grow, and there’s a certain amount of anger in me as well. It really was a celebration of that part of my personality, that stomping feeling of ‘Come on. You\'ve got this, you can do this.’ Anger gets a bad rap and it causes a lot of problems, but it can be an incredible force for change and has an amazing amount of drive behind it.” **“Easy”** “It’s a song that feels good and sounds good and quite relaxed, but it\'s a very sad song about being with someone that you deeply care about, but you\'re not the right person for them. And having that love for somebody and just wishing that you were easier for them, wishing that you were the person that could love them in the right way.” **“Queen”** “‘Queen’ is lyrically one of my favorite songs. It was written at a time that I woke up from a pretty bad-dream relationship, and for years I was just selling myself short. It was all on me, just accepting scraps of love and thinking that was enough. I love the chorus: ‘I\'m dressed like a queen but I\'m begging in the streets/I\'m hoping you\'ll see me lying at your feet/Give me a dollar, buy me a feed/I\'m starving to death when I\'ve got what I need.’ I\'m so sick of having a kingdom of wealth in my experience of myself and completely forgetting about it and just scrabbling around in the dirt. It’s just about remembering that you have access to that within yourself.” **“Heron”** “I\'m a huge fan of Jaco Pastorius, so having the fretless bass on there was so great. Thomas would make a lot of tracks for when I’d turn up to New York, and he’d have all these names—usually whatever alcohol he was drinking at the time would be the name of it. So that’s where the title came from.” **“Unreal”** “I wrote this for Thomas. I was just having one of these weeks in his studio that was so fun; we’d we write a lot of music but we’d also spend a lot of time just lying on the couch together watching *Veep* or *The Thick of It*. He’d just be like, ‘I\'ve got to go, I\'ll be back in a couple of hours,’ and he’d go play a show with somebody like Rufus Wainwright. He went out one night while I had the start of ‘Unreal.’ I said, ‘I\'m going to have a song for you when you get back.’ I felt so in love with him at that moment, I just was so happy to be there and felt so seen and so at home, and in those two hours I wrote the song about feeling like I could totally be myself, be real.” **“I Am No One”** “I’ve had this song in my mind for at least 10 years. I think it\'s the one that is probably the most connected to my records with my brother and my previous solo work. It’s about feeling that you\'re not really special, you’re completely invisible, particularly when you behave in a way that doesn’t correlate with what your heart wants. There’s that feeling of disappearing because of not being honest with yourself. I liked wrapping up the record with this idea of what *not* to do in your 60 summers. And it came from a time in my life where I was probably doing a lot of that.” **“Dance (French Version)”** “When I’d play in Europe, I would always make sure that whatever country we were in, I would learn a song in the language of the country, and because we played so much in France, I was also learning how to talk between songs in French. ‘Dance’ felt like the easiest for me to sing in French because it\'s spoken word. I had shown my French friend, who\'s a beautiful artist, Claire Pommet, and she translated it for me.”

This St Vincent production is a world away from the work Stone has been doing with her brother Angus

Royal Blood have finally found their own, unique voice, while Julia Stone sounds equally liberated on her new solo album

Sixty Summers sees Australian artist Julia Stone gleefully encapsulate the joyous elements of freedom and fun that had at times eluded her previous, slightly darker releases.

Sydney’s Julia Stone, who is perhaps best known for her lovely collaborations with her brother, Angus, has one of indie’s most delicate voices, a trait she’s used to help craft relaxed, congenial indie folk since the pair’s debut in 2007.