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On Julia Jacklin’s excellently unusual new album Pre Pleasure there’s a track referred to as “Too In Like to Die.” It’s very a lot literal. The besotted narrator ticks off a few deadly calamities—a aircraft crash, a stroll onto the freeway—then swears they might by no means kill her, as a result of, you understand, she’s in love.
In interviews, Jacklin has stated she didn’t intend the observe to be so morbid, that this tragedy tune was, in truth, the results of an try to put in writing a contented, cheerful love track. “I felt that was the one manner I might write about love in a optimistic manner,” Jacklin told Stereogum, laughing. Which is a fairly good sampling of what makes Jacklin—singer-songwriter, 31, Australian—so particular and particular. In understated methods, she whirls collectively intoxicating, overwhelming moods.
Earlier than Pre Pleasure, her third album, Jacklin had at all times written her songs on guitar. However Pre Pleasure could not have existed if she hadn’t put down the axe and picked up a keyboard. After touring behind 2019’s Crushing for 2 pandemic-interrupted years, Jacklin says, “I used to be so sick of guitar. I’m not an excellent technical guitarist. You get caught in the identical chord patterns and strumming rhythms. It felt like the one manner that I might write new songs was by altering it up.”
She acquired her first keyboard from the musician Steve Moore, who’s performed with drone-metal legends Sunn O))) and composed horror film scores. “I by no means owned one thing like that,” Jacklin says. “Perhaps as a result of once I was younger and a bit insecure I believed, ‘Oh, a guitar is a severe instrument, and a Casio keyboard with a extremely shitty drum machine sound will not be what an expert musician needs to be writing on.’ However that present from somebody who’s been a musician eternally—who’s actually performed it on stage with Sufjan Stevens—it was like, ‘OK, properly, if it’s ok for you, clearly it’s ok for me.”
The opening observe and lead single from Pre Pleasure, “Lydia Wears a Cross,” kicks off with a kind of “shitty” drum machine sounds. As Jacklin chants the catchy title phrase—“Lydia wears a cross / says she’s by no means gonna take it off”—robotic thuds march on. Tinny and beguiling, it wrong-foots any longtime Jacklin listeners anticipating pleasing, unhappy, acquainted guitars.
Jacklin, who finally moved from a Casio to a Roland, says that the great thing about keyboards is that it’s straightforward to get sounds out of them. “The guitar, it’s tremendous painful at first, it doesn’t really feel intuitive. The keyboard—a cat can play a keyboard!” she provides. “I undoubtedly didn’t dive into that instrument in a technical manner. It was extra simply, you place down two keys and also you’re like ‘That’s cool. That sounds good.’”
Altering her songwriting course of is a part of Jacklin’s total love of private experimentation, which has seen her take tap dancing and screenwriting lessons. It’s additionally part of a transfer towards extra private inventive freedom. “Whenever you’re a lady singer-songwriter who sings about emotions, folks make a number of assumptions,” she says. “I used to be simply saying to somebody, typically I wonder if the one purpose I’m a people singer-songwriter is as a result of I’m 31 and I got here up within the time of Laura Marling and Fleet Foxes and Mumford and Sons. These are the issues that find yourself fully describing who you might be. How did I find yourself right here?”
In the course of the making of Pre Pleasure, Jacklin listened to a number of Leonard Cohen’s stuff from the Nineteen Eighties, “when he was a bit foolish.” “I used to be pondering, how cool is it that somebody might write ‘Suzanne’ after which additionally write ‘Jazz Police’?” she says. “To me that report completely feels like an artist that’s simply making an attempt one thing on.” Trying forward, Jacklin wish to do a bit extra of that herself. The keyboard was a step in that course. She’s not fully positive, or no less than not at present saying, what the subsequent steps shall be. “Three albums in, I really feel like I’ve proved myself to myself,” she says, “I genuinely really feel like I’m gonna method issues a bit in another way shifting ahead. As a result of it’s like, on the finish of the day”—she smiles—“who cares.”