FEATURE:
My Favourite Singles of 2022 (So Far)
Three: Julia Jacklin - I Was Neon
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A couple of…
PHOTO CREDIT: Nick Mckk
Julia Jacklin-related things occurred last week. For one, she released her third studio album, PRE PLEASURE, on 26th August. It was also her birthday on 30th August. The Sydney-born artist is one of my favourite songwriters, I love her music and adore her voice. Her albums are superb, and I have been following her since she released her 2016 debut, Don't Let the Kids Win. PRE PLEASURE is among her very best work. One of my favourite singles of the year is I Was Neon. She has also put out the wonderful Be Careful With Yourself, but I think I Was Neon is my favourite song from Pre Pleasure. It is classic Jacklin! Go and get Pre Pleasure as it is among the best albums of this year. It is hard narrowing down the best singles of this year. With stiff competition from Jessie Ware, Kendrick Lamar, Wet Leg, Caroline Polachek, Nova Twins, Charli XCX, Beyoncé, and others, I feel that Jacklin has released a real pearl of a song. I am going to drop in an interview that she did with The Guardian (not all of it), but NME were among those who wrote about the release of I Was Neon back in June:
“Julia Jacklin has shared a new single titled ‘I Was Neon’, the second to be lifted from the singer-songwriter’s forthcoming album ‘Pre Pleasure’.
In a statement, Jacklin explained that the new song was originally written for a short-lived side project, Rattlesnake, that she played drums for in 2019.
“I rewrote it for my album in Montreal, during a time when I was desperately longing for a version of myself that I feared was gone forever,” she continued. “I was thinking of this song when I made the album cover, this song is the album cover really.”
‘I Was Neon’ arrives alongside a video directed by Jacklin herself and shot in Melbourne”.
One of Julia Jacklin’s best songs to date, I Was Neon shows what a sensational talent she is. I don’t think we embrace Australian music enough or spotlight artists from that country. Jacklin is one of the very best artists from a nation that has provided us with so many legendary artists and brilliant music. I want to move on to that interview from The Guardian and some extracts:
“Her 2016 debut Don’t Let The Kids Win had been warmly received, but Crushing seemed to hit a nerve and a cultural moment. Songs such as Body, Head Alone and Pressure to Party charted a messy, cathartic arc that was part breakup album, part reclamation of personal and bodily autonomy – and they arrived amid a wave of singer-songwriters, including Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus, who were recasting folk and Americana to tap a millennial-friendly vein of love, anxiety and defiance.
Soon Jacklin was playing to bigger, younger and more enthusiastic crowds around the world and fielding Instagram messages from the likes of Lana Del Rey, who invited her on stage to duet on Crushing highlight Don’t Know How to Keep Loving You.
“I saw my crowd change before me, which was really exciting,” Jacklin says over coffee in Melbourne, where the Blue Mountains-raised singer-songwriter has lived since Crushing came out. “They got quite a lot younger and just a bit more engaged – actually engaging with it on an organic level.”
But as she began to contemplate its follow-up, she found herself drawn to the music that elicited the same organic, unguarded reaction she saw in her young fans – even if it meant sacrificing a bit of cool to do it.
PHOTO CREDIT: Nick Mckk
“I feel like I’ve wasted a lot of energy in my life trying to be cool,” she says.
“Over the last couple of years [I’ve been] reconnecting with music that I enjoyed before I was heavily influenced by what I felt I was supposed to like. I think that’s a journey everyone goes through; you like all these things when you’re younger, and it’s so uncomplicated, and then it becomes really complicated for like 15 years,” Jacklin says. She is now 31. “You define yourself, at least I did, by your music taste: ‘I am my music taste, I don’t exist except for the things that are on my iPod.’”
Recorded in Montreal in September 2021, Pre Pleasure teases out the edges of the warm, guitar-driven template of her first two albums with hints of drum machine, piano and glossy orchestral flourishes arranged by the Canadian composer Owen Pallett. Across its 10 tracks Jacklin sings about the past and the future, family and friendships, love and loss, but even its most subdued moments have a lightness to them.
“The strings feel a lot more connected to those early days of singing as a kid, when I was obsessed with listening to a lot of Doris Day and those types of singers,” she says. “Those melodies, and the way I sing them, just feels very connected to old, old, old me in a way that I can’t really articulate yet.”
The album closes with End of a Friendship, full of cinematic strings and a big, classic rock guitar solo. “Usually with folk records, and the records I’ve made in the past, the last track is some acoustic, sad number; you kind of go out with a whimper,” she says. “But I wanted this record to go out with a kind of ‘movie magic’ moment.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Nick Mckk
Pre Pleasure sees Jacklin look back to her youth in other ways, too. On Ignore Tenderness she sings about “stripping down / looking at my own reflection / ever since I was 13 I’ve been pulled in every direction”. Meanwhile, lead single Lydia Wears a Cross revisits her years at a Blue Mountains Catholic primary school, when singing in choirs, listening to Jesus Christ Superstar and acting in no less than two amateur productions of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat made her fall in love with performing.
“I love singing, it’s the most spiritual thing for me, because I’m not a spiritual person,” she says. “The closest I’ve felt to God was watching Jesus Christ Superstar, performing in Joseph and the Technicolour Dreamcoat. That’s where religion started to make sense to me; where it was infused with joy and love and all of the things that people say it’s about”.
It has been challenging ordering the best singles from this year so far. I am going to run down positions four and five, then do another feature for six to ten inclusive. Julia Jacklin is an artist I have a lot of respect for. She is such a magnetic talent whose songwriting is so smart and deep. The refrain and line of “Am I gonna lose myself again?” is one of the most striking and stirring. I love the verse of “I was neon, I was a floodlight/Arms out reaching for everything in sight/I swear I could be it, swear I could be it”. Pre Pleasure is a fantastic album. You just know she is going to be making amazing music for years more. I cannot wait to see…
WHERE she heads next.