INTO STELLA
Diminutive in stature, the fine-featured Stella Donnelly has a style presence like her music: a disarming exterior that belies a powerful, crucial poignancy. By Alice Birrell.
The diminutive, fine-featured Stella Donnelly has a style presence like her music: a disarming exterior that belies a powerful, crucial poignancy.
Stella Donnelly might never know if an accident led to her success. “I put out this little cassette of demos which was the EP. I was playing in a bunch of other bands, working in a cafe, working in a bar, keeping myself busy in Fremantle,” she says over the phone. “Somehow Mechanical Bull ended up on a Fresh Finds playlist, which has something like 50,000 listeners,” she says with a laugh, recounting how one of those first songs wound up on a well-followed Spotify edit. “I don’t know how it got there, because it was all this hip-hop music and then my song. I’ve still wondered to this day.”
She may well stop pondering, since it’s hard to imagine that her singular brand of music wouldn’t have reached the right ears anyway. Triple J Unearthed named her one of its artists of the year in 2017, the same year she took home the Levi’s Music Prize. Last year she played South by South West and this year she’s on a dream run of festival bills, including Roskilde and Fuji Rock (“Oh my God. I can’t believe it.”). She fixates on finer points like this, though, because to her, words, and the careful placement of them, have been a constant axis around which her life has thus far orbited.
Born in Western Australia, Donnelly found herself speaking another language at five years old, when her sister, mother and father picked up and moved back to her mother’s native Wales before her younger brother was born. She and her sister went to a Welsh-speaking school and were fluent within months. “We adapted, as you do when you’re a child. It was amazing getting to spend that time of my childhood with my mum’s side of the family; they’re all incredible people and singing and music is very much part of the Welsh culture and identity.”
Upon returning to Australia, Donnelly continued to tell stories through song. “Here people say: ‘Oh, I can’t sing, I can’t sing.’ In Wales you talk to a builder, you talk to a financial advisor and they’ll all sing for you without hesitation. I loved not having that embarrassment.” Now she sings with an Australian accent, eschewing affectations many exports assume to fit in with the global tone of music.
What she has instead is authentic and dichotomous. Donnelly’s new album, Beware of the Dogs, is filled with a sometimes ebullient but at other times sauntering guitar that is a decoy for her biting wit and often serious messages. The song, Old Man, which Rolling Stone called a “#MeToo
masterpiece”, plainly connects the dots between language and actions after Donnelly had her fill of sexist remarks thrown around a pub she worked in. “I’ve worked too hard for this chance, to not be biting the hand that feeds the hate. So have a chat to your friends, ’cause it’s our words that’ll keep our daughters safe,” she sings. Her other songs deal with the problematic side of overt Australian nationalism, hypermasculinity and bad bosses, always with a healthy inflection of humour. In Tricks, she sings: “You wear me out, like you wear that Southern Cross tattoo.” Citing Billy Bragg and Courtney Barnett as influences, the quotidian plays conduit for her message, and is her way of engaging with partisan politics.
Her music-teacher father and her mother, a nurse, fostered that engagement. “They’ve never just put walls up around our house and left it at that and let us live in our white privilege,” she explains. She remembers her dad, not spiritually spoken for, taking her through various religions exploring the good and bad. “He always presented the other side of the picture and enforced objective thought.” She thinks her articulateness also came from them, her mum taking her to protest marches as a young girl. “They’re in two of the most underpaid industries in Australia, I think, and I guess I’ve always had parents who have stood up for what they believe in and have also stood up for others.”
Not that her upbringing was overly serious. Between watching her dad perform at stand-up musical comedy gigs, joining a punk band and a cover band in high school, she dabbled in music until the EP gained traction when she was 25. “It was almost when I stopped trying to make it happen that it happened.” On weekends she would catch the train into Perth to go window-shopping with friends and a style developed that has now taken full shape: vintage-inflected, graphic silhouettes, but nothing
She thinks her articulateness came from her parents. “I’ve always had parents that have stood up for what they believe in and have also stood up for others”