Nine years is a long time.
Long enough to go from a 16-year-old uploading an EP for fun to a full-time musician with her debut album Feel Alive and a world tour locked in.
I meet Steph Strings at Hope St Radio, her favourite bar in Melbourne, the one she says she’ll probably be buried in one day. It feels like the right place to talk about a record that’s fundamentally about belonging, to yourself, to a city, to the life you’ve chosen over the one that was handed to you.
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I ask her how it feels, the gap between then and now.
“I think 2017, I was just doing it for fun. I was almost just like, here world, here’s an EP,” she says. “But now I’m a full-time musician, this is my job, this means so much more than it did 10 years ago. Even just so much more money and time and more riding on this one.” She pauses. “You only do your debut album once. So there’s a lot of emotions tied to it.”
The most obvious difference between then and now? She didn’t sing at all back then. Steph built her reputation as a fingerpicker of uncommon dexterity, the kind of guitarist people talked about in reverent, slightly disbelieving tones. Touring with Kim Churchill, Ziggy Alberts, and Pierce Brothers only added to that.
“I was watching them perform thinking, they all sing,” she explains. “Instrumental stuff is wonderful, but for where I wanted to go, I don’t think I could’ve done it just remaining a guitarist.”
I tell her it’s nice to have those timestamps, past versions of yourself preserved in amber. She nods. “It’s a time capsule for sure.”
The album was described as a celebration of growth, movement, trusting instinct. I push her on that. Where does fearlessness actually come from when you’re packaging your life into 12 songs?
“Rockstar Gypsy is all about confidence,” she says. “Me being in America and performing and going, ‘Should I be this clean, perfect popstar?’ But no, I’m a bit of a gypsy and a rockstar, so it took confidence to stay true to yourself.”
There’s no performance in the way she says it. “Big themes of growth and dreams and following those. That’s all just come from where I’m at in life now. I still feel like a kid at heart, but in the last few years I’ve just matured a bit. Grief, loving. I think about it in a different way and express it in a different way.”
The writing process, she tells me, is non-negotiable in its simplicity. There’s no sitting down to manufacture a record.
“The only way the song works is if I’m like, ‘I’m going to play my guitar right now because I really want to and I feel really free and I want to get into flow state.'”
It’s only later, in the studio, that she starts thinking about sequencing, cohesion, the bigger shape of the thing.
“The start is not thinking about an album,” she says. “I just want to play because I bloody love it.”
One track stands apart. A Storm in April is built on piano, an instrument Steph admits she barely plays. “I know how to play two songs on piano, and they’re both on the album,” she deadpans. She wrote it in April 2017, a month she describes as horrible, as a kind of purging. Years later, on tour with Kim Churchill, she played it to him one night.
“He looked at me and said, when you do an album one day, put that on the album.” So she did.
Melbourne bleeds through the whole record. She wrote Melbourne Blue about the strange vertigo of coming home from tour to find everything exactly as you left it. “I come back to my old childhood bedroom and the same tramline, and it’s exactly how it was 20 years ago, which has made me feel strange at times.”
Hope St Radio gets a namecheck in the song, and Three Wishes was recorded in Northcote with Alice Ivy, the city’s industrial hum folded into the production itself. The Workers’ Club, where she played her first headline shows, has its own chapter in this story too.
“This place will always be my home,” she told me, though she’s about to leave it behind for a while.
North America first, then Europe and the UK, then home for Australian shows, then back to the States for festival season. Bonnaroo is on the list. She says the name with appropriate reverence. Noah Kahan, Kesha and Role Model are playing the same day.
I finish by asking what makes her feel alive. She doesn’t hesitate.
“Laughing my head off. When I’m laughing so hard I’m bawling and telling the other person to stop.” Then her expression shifts slightly. “But also when something horrible happens, or a song plays that reminds me of someone, stepping back and going, I need to feel grateful for feeling this.”
A few years back she told a friend she wished she didn’t have to feel so much. The friend’s response stopped her cold. “She said, how dare you say that. That’s your body telling you you’re alive.”
Steph Strings plays 170 Russell, Melbourne on May 15. Tickets here.
