No point hiding now: Julia Jacklin on the making of The Gem 

We sat down with her to talk about beginning again in her thirties, finding calm at home in Melbourne, and writing a letter to her younger Julia Jacklin selves.

“What inspired The Gem? I guess that’s always like… how do I spin that one?” Jacklin laughs.

“Because it’s like… I had to make an album because it is my job, I guess. So the inspiration was like, ‘It’s been too long.’ Yeah. I got to make another album. That was kind of the initial thing.”

After eight years, Jacklin parted ways with her manager, and her original label contracts had run out. Navigating this new independence eventually led her to team up with Melbourne independent staple Remote Control Records for her next chapter.

“That’s all I knew, working in the industry, was with these certain people,” Jacklin reflects.

“And then it almost felt like… I don’t know, very odd to begin again. It’s strange to begin again in your 30s in anything.

“It felt like I was about to start at a new high school or something. I had to make new friends again. And it was quite daunting, but very important that I did that.”

Rather than diving straight into another gruelling release schedule, Jacklin set up weekly residencies in Las Vegas and New York and at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, before embedding herself in an artist sharehouse in Iceland to write.

“They weren’t all retreats,” she clarifies. “Once you enter into the industry churn… momentum keeps going, right?

“It’s quite hard to get off that because you have to agree to things really far in advance. So, yeah, I think that year was just me like, ‘What if I just played once a week?’ And then see what happens in between the shows instead of what a regular tour is, which is like, night after night after night.”

Instead of taking a full year off, Jacklin teetered on the all-too-fine line between work and rest. But that period of searching eventually brought her home for her first extended stretch in Melbourne.

“It was like the first time I’ve been at home for that long since I moved to Melbourne,” she says.

“I think a lot of it was influenced by finally stopping and being at home and actually sneaking into my life in Melbourne.

“It just felt like this record got to exist alongside my normal home life… I usually felt like I could only have one or the other.”

The groundedness Julia Jacklin reclaimed after going away and returning to her Melbourne roots undoubtedly shaped The Gem.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Julia Jacklin (@juliajacklin)

Throughout our talk, she shares her thoughts on what she considers integral to the making of the album.

“I’m like… so convinced that melody is king,” she insists. “And lyrics are definitely second fiddle. That’s not to say that lyrics aren’t incredibly important, because they are, but I think that you’re doing such a disservice to great lyrics if you don’t pair them with a good melody.

“This was truly an album where I don’t think I wrote any of the lyrics first. It was all melody.

“The hardest part of this album in many ways was making sure I wrestled every lyric into a melody and also that I let go of some lyrics that I was like, ‘Oh, I really think these are good, but if I can’t attach them to a good melody, they’ve got to go.'”

When asked what rituals she implemented in making The Gem, Jacklin said that before studio days she made a point of dressing up, showing up in good, solid boots “to feel hot, to feel whatever makes you feel confident,” while blu-tacking references across the studio walls.

“I’m a very tactile person,” she adds. “I’ve bought the same plain journal since my first album, my process journal…Decomposition journal. So I always have to have that specific journal. And I need to have visual references pinned on walls… I’m very much like a Beautiful Mind kind of person, blu-tacking a lot of stuff to walls.”

Crucial to The Gem, the album was tracked in collaboration with her closest friends.

“Shout out friends,” Jacklin exclaims triumphantly. “I’ve always been so obsessed with friendship as a concept, but friendship is so complicated…

“…especially when you add my job, where a lot of the time you are your friend’s boss, or you spend half of every year away from your non-band friends and miss the birthday parties, miss the weddings, miss the funerals.

“But I made this record with truly my closest friends. People are a bit like, ‘Ooh, don’t do it,’ but I just didn’t have that experience at all. If anything, it just strengthened my friendships with them. It just requires a lot of transparency and humility.”

That deep sense of community dismantled an old belief that she needed isolation to grow as an artist.

“I used to spend so much time alone because I thought, like, ‘I need to be alone in order to be around people,’ where I’d go away to study and think, and then I’d come back with everything I’d thought about and be like, ‘Okay, no, I think this is how you love, this is how you are loved by people.’ But I feel quite differently now.

“You can have love and freedom at the same time if you are allowed to be yourself around people, and if you feel liked and respected and like, just held.”

Much of that shift comes down to a gentler form of self-acceptance.

“You don’t really get to choose who you are,” she reflects. “You can kind of tweak the edges, but you just kind of get what you get.

“When you accept that about yourself, you stop thinking that every single person, including yourself, is a work in progress that has an endpoint. I can connect with the person I was when I was 10 years old. I thought I was going to change a lot more than I have, and there’s just so much relief in that.”

Nowhere is that emotional arc clearer than on the album’s closing track, I Wish, a compassionate conversation across time that references two pivotal periods in her life: when she was 15, and when she was 27.

“My 15-year-old self would just be absolutely shocked that I do this for a job,” says Jacklin, softly.

“Back then, I think I wanted to be a pop star. I’m not exactly a pop star, but I’m adjacent. I’m in the realm! And my 27-year-old self would be so relieved that I am still doing this.

“After my first album, that whole experience was so intense and overwhelming that I remember very distinctly being like, ‘If this is what this is, I don’t know if this is what I want, actually.'”

Where past iterations of Julia Jacklin felt unmoored, The Gem captures an artist who has made her way back to her truest essence.

“I think both younger versions of me would be really relieved that I seem to be in a good place,” she says. “And I think that they would be able to sense that based off how rounded the music sounds.

“There’s a calmness to it or something, something that definitely at 15 and 27 I didn’t possess and definitely wouldn’t have been confident was going to be part of my future self.”

Listen to Julia Jacklin’s The Gem, here.