JULIA STONE
The singer-songwriter acknowledges the forces who have shaped her art and her inspiration
“WE SHOULD BE SO ASHAMED OF THE WAY WE HAVE BEHAVED IN NOT ACKNOWLEDGING INDIGENOUS VOICES”
TEELA REID
Lawyer, activist and Wiradjuri and Wailwan woman Teela Reid is so fierce and passionate about justice. Everything she does is about building strength for her community and resistance to the injustice in this country. It’s very easy to look elsewhere, to places like the United States, and think that racism is extremely bad there – which it is. But it’s reprehensible here in Australia. We should be so ashamed of the way we have behaved and still behave as a country in not acknowledging Indigenous voices. Witnessing Reid in the world and how she’s living her life is inspiring me to confront the discomfort of the suffering that has happened – and continues to happen – in Australia. And I am completely taken aback by her capacity to go forward with strength in spite of extreme trauma and intergenerational pain due to systematic racism. There’s a tendency for people, myself included, to avoid painful things. But Reid motivates me to want to have the difficult conversations. Just because something makes you uncomfortable isn’t a good enough reason to not be showing up for this conversation and this movement.
JESSIE HILL
Director and filmmaker Jessie Hill and I both grew up on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. However, despite going to the same high school and living only a couple of streets away, we didn’t meet until I was 23. Back then, she was a fashion designer and was the first person to gift me a dress and some amazing white leather boots. All through my twenties, every time I returned home for summer, I found myself hanging with Jessie, just being together and in nature. One night, we were at this really beautiful party. There was an amazing harpist playing music and it just felt magic. We were dancing and she turned to me and said, “Can you believe we’ve only got 60 summers left?” I remember having this really strong sense of only having one chance to be in this body on this planet, so how am I going to show up? I admire Jessie so much because she’s always thinking like that: How are you living your 60 summers? How are you showing up for other people? How are you showing up as an artist? She helped instill in me that real sense of being honest with yourself about what you want to say and how you want to say it.
ANNIE CLARK (ST. VINCENT)
I’d met Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent, a few times before asking her to produce my new album, Sixty Summers. I always found her very warm and lovely, but what I love about working with Annie is all of her qualities as a person come out in her art and process. She’s not only extremely intelligent and really musical, but also incredibly hardworking. In a studio setting, particularly with songwriting and singing, there’s a sort of vulnerability that happens. It’s so subtle. Some people might not be doing anything that’s negative but you just feel like, “I don’t want to keep going.” It’s not like that with Annie. She creates an atmosphere of support, while also really challenging me. I’ve been writing songs for a long time and sometimes I’ll settle and say, “That’s good enough.” Annie will say, “No, it’s not good enough. Find a better way to say that.” She’s one of the few people where individualism is celebrated. That’s such an incredible quality to have as a human, where you find the things in other people that are unique, and you really champion them. She did that all the time with me.
Sixty Summers is out April 16.