Julia Deans: Going deep and raw

Friday, 20 April 2018

What, I have to ask, has she been doing with herself?

Former Fur Patrol singer Julia Deans has a new record due out any day now. Good news, of course. But the last one came out seven years ago. Seven! That's a hell of a long time between records, isn't it?

Consider this: a baby born the day Deans put out her last solo album, Modern Fables, would be halfway through primary school by the time the follow-up, We Light Fire, finally saw the light of day.

The little tyke would be running, jumping, climbing trees. They would have a fair grasp of the alphabet and simple maths. They could probably draw a passable dinosaur.

Indeed, they would be halfway to becoming a teenager.

**READ MORE:

* Fur Patrol: the family reunion

* Q&A: Singer, songwriter and musician Julia Deans

* Julia Deans channels Joni Mitchell in Both Sides Now

* My favourite road trip: Julia Deans and Fur Patrol**

So, my question is this: what has Deans been doing for those seven long years? Sitting on her arse?

I picture her in the little home studio under her house in the Auckland suburb of Northcote, barely moving, the place suffused with a wan Autumn light, the mixing desk covered in cobwebs and dust, her guitar strings rusty from lack of use.

'Oh, God no!' she wails. 'It hasn't been like that at all!'

There was no laziness involved, Deans assures me. If anything, the new album took so long because she had too much work on.

'I got involved with all these other projects and kinda thought I could do them on the side, but I was wrong.'

It started with The Adults, a collaboration with Shihad frontman Jon Toogood, Shayne Carter, Anika Moa, Ladi 6 and a host of other musical mates.

After that, Deans had an arts festival hit on her hands, travelling the land singing the songs of Belgian balladeer, Jacques Brel.

'That Brel show was incredibly all encompassing. I couldn't just learn the words; you have to really climb inside songs like that. Brel's songs are so big and emotional and dramatic - you can't just sing that s… lightly.'

There were also arts festival performances singing the songs of Joni Mitchell and Billie Holiday, tours with Anna Coddington and SJD, roles in Jesus Christ Superstar and a Bowie tribute show.

'Yeah, and every one of those performances taught me things that have found their way onto the new record. Doing Brel in particular, I learnt so much about my abilities as a performer, and it also encouraged me to become more deep and raw as a songwriter.'

As someone who had written original songs since she was a teenager, Deans didn't expect to learn so much from singing covers.

'I was never that person that turns up at your party and grabs the guitar for a singalong, you know? I never learned a heap of classic covers. I'd just pass that guitar to the next person.'

Or you could sing a Fur Patrol song. At most parties, Deans could probably count on a few drunks in the corner, shouting 'Lydia! Lydia!'.

'That's true. And I wouldn't mind doing that, because most New Zealanders know the words. They're happy to sing along, so I'm not just out there on my own.'

On her own. Now there's the thing. From multiple different angles, Deans' new record consider notions of loneliness and isolation, and the ways we can all fight against them.

It's a record about togetherness, mutual support, whanau, community.

'I guess the overarching theme of We Light Fire is connectivity. We live our lives as individuals, but behind that, we often take for granted just how connected we are. That whole 'no man or woman is an island' thing, it's so true.'

Deans proposes that reinvigorating our relationships with friends, family, partners and our wider communities is the key to decreasing our anxiety and increasing our resilience.

This feeling of mutual support can help us feel OK about the world during these troubled times we're living through.

'We've forgotten how to be villagers and look after each other,' she tells me.

'The rise of laissez faire capitalism has really undermined our sense of community. It sets the scene for focussing on selfishness and personal gain. So many people are really holding onto their little corner of the world and their little bag of money and their little domain of power without thinking - 'Hang on- am I actually being a selfish a….hole?''

She laughs at this, but for Deans, this is a deadly serious matter. The wealth of a tiny sliver of our society is obscene, she reckons, given the daily struggle of many at the other end of the spectrum.

'Anxiety is pretty much the defining factor of our age, right? People are worried about money, their health, the precariousness of the world politically, and they try to deal with it using medication, religion, drugs, alcohol, new age beliefs and so on. But often it boils down to economics. Money and power are continually being sucked upwards to lubricate the lives of the wealthy, and everyone at the bottom of the heap is forced to compete for whatever crumbs are left. We need to fight that system in every way we can.'

This feeling of taking back power is central to We Light Fire. Written between other projects over those seven long years and recorded in her basement studio with the help of her partner, former Salmonella Dub/ Shihad sound engineer David Wernham, it's far more than just a collection of pretty ballads.

This time, it's personal. Deans sings about the curative power of friends and family from the perspective of the gratefully healed.

We Light Fire is about feeling stronger and sharing the love, whereas many of the songs on previous solo album Modern Fables were written immediately after a period of depression.

'I have been through that wringer, yes. After the collapse of Fur Patrol, I was physically, emotionally and financially spent. I moved back here from Melbourne in bits. I spent some time where I seriously considered giving up music, but that thought spun me even further down into the depths.'

Fur Patrol called it quits in 2008 after three albums, two EPs and a bunch of memorable singles, including the chart-topping Lydia in 2000. The band was frequently all-consuming, and afterwards, Deans found herself questioning her core identity as a musician.

'But then the support and encouragement of my friends and family really changed things for me. I couldn't have come out of that nose-dive by myself. It brought home to me just how much we all need each other.'

Listening to We Light Fire, it strikes me that Deans has become not just a happier person, but also a more skilful and nuanced singer.

Just listen to opening track, Clandestine, a country-inflected standout in which her voice sounds both deeper and more agile than ever before as it dips and glides and soars up into the rafters.

'I think that's vocal maturity, yes. Singing other people's songs and working out how my voice can mesh with different melodies - I learned a lot from that. Also, your voice drops over time, and the tone becomes richer. I listen to old recordings of me singing songs like Lydia and I sound so squeaky and young! But I was only 23 when I sang that, and I'm in my early 40s now.'

Elsewhere, there's an impressive variety of sounds, styles, textures and arrangements.

Pick Up ducks and dives around some slippery double bass from Richard Pickard. Walking In The Sun ponders what we might achieve as humans if we didn't waste so much time and energy holding one other back.

Deans is particularly fond of Centre, a song whose central idea came to her when she was travelling back to Auckland on the Waiheke Ferry on New Year's Day with good mate, Anna Coddington.

As befits its watery beginnings, it's a shimmering, sun-dappled sort of ballad, with Deans' lead vocal floating atop a multi-tracked 'Wall of Julia' soundscape of her own backing harmonies.

Written following the suicide of a friend's daughter, Chelsea is sad and tender, a plea for perseverance in the face of shaky mental health.

'It's about holding on a little longer when things are tough,' says Deans. 'That idea that with a bit more support, that person might have gotten over the hump. It's also about the sorrow of those left behind - that feeling of guilt for not having let them know quite how much they meant to you. If you've ever really felt very low and alone and trapped in your own head, you can relate to that part of it, I'm sure.'

Based around a guitar riff that came to her in a dream, fully-formed, The Panic is a more head-down, arse-up rock track. It could almost be a classic old-school Fur Patrol song, the kind of thing they might have once unleashed on drunken punters speeding off their nuts in assorted Melbourne rock bars.

Near the end, the song gets gate-crashed by the sort of monster distorted electronic bassline that was once a staple of brawny British drum'n'bass tracks.

'I really love that sound. It's awesome!. It really evokes this idea of a dark feeling that could just crawl up out of your chest and eat you! That song is about learning how to live with anxiety and how to manage those feelings before they get out of control. They're times when you feel so isolated, but I can guarantee that within shouting distance is someone else feeling exactly the same way.'

The album follows a sort of journey, then, over those seven years. Taken together, these songs chart the terrain travelled between a tentative, post-depression period of self-reflection to a more recent flourishing of righteous indignation.

'Clandestine is the oldest song on the record, and it's about the secrets you keep from yourself and others. It was written seven years ago, soon after we moved into this house. And the most recent song is Burning Cars, which was inspired by all the political turmoil we see these days on TV. It's about the control a very small bunch of people have over our lives, and the flip-side of that, where the majority feel a real lack of control over their own destiny'.

As you'd perhaps expect, the key song here is the title track, We Light Fire. It starts out with some acoustic folkie finger-picking, then ends up somewhere else entirely.

Somewhere along the way, you find yourself staring into a roaring bonfire, your body hot at the front and cold at the back, your hand holding a stick with a sausage on it, or perhaps a melting marshmallow.

'Actually, I'm more a 'banana in tinfoil' sort of person,' says Deans. 'But you're right. We Light Fire really sums up the theme behind the whole album.'

The song was partly inspired by a list of 'human universals' used by sociologists.

'It's a list of things we all basically share, regardless or where or when we're born. Things like crying, laughing, feasting, telling jokes, avoidance of incest and murder, rituals around birth and death. And one of the things on that list as the use of fire. We use it to cook and stay warm, in ceremonies, as a message beacon, and of course it brings communities together around a bonfire. Sitting around gazing into a fire always feels ancient, right? It feels like something we've always done as humans; it's hypnotic and tribal and deeply symbolic.'

All these songs arose from demos strapped together in the home studio over the past seven years, many starting out with Deans 'mucking about' with synths to broaden her skills beyond her usual electric guitar.

Assorted mates including Anika Moa, Tama Waipara, Annie Crummer, Anna Coddington and SJD showed up to sing and play, but Deans puts much of the credit for the album's impressive variation in sounds and styles down to the engineering skills of long-term partner, David Wernham.

'At one point I worried this record might be too diverse, but the songs really work together, I think. Where my previous record was a bunch of songs where I tried to convince myself I was going to be OK, this record is me singing about what I've learned, and the gratitude I feel. It's less introspective, more outward-looking. Really, I have great faith in humanity. Most people will behave in a supportive, generous way to each other, if they can. Most people agree that we all need to work towards a more fair and equitable society, where the resources are provided for people to be happy, safe and well-fed, and I hope this album helps people think about the world in that kind of way. I think music, and art in general, really does have the power to help change how people think about things. The fact that you can dance to it, or sing along…well, that's just a bonus, right?'

Julia Deans' second solo album We Light Fire is released on May 11.