JULIA JACKLIN

DON’T LET THE KIDS WIN

Julia Jacklin shares two points of interest about her debut album, Don’t Let the Kids Win. “I use my favourite word, ‘grocery,’ and there’s a reference to Zach Braff,” says the Sydney, Australia, native, with a liberal dose of the aversion to self-aggrandizement that feels typically Aussie.

“For sure, I mention some pretty Australian things, like the Hay Plain, Adelaide and Sydney’s Central Railway Station,” she says, when asked if her music owes anything to her homeland. “I wrote a lot of it while working in a factory in St. Peters, Sydney, and a few songs were written while driving my car up and down the east coast. I’m hoping that it seeped its way into the sound.”

Jacklin calls this collection of 11 songs “a document of my early 20s”; we call it a revelation of Carole King proportions—in both vibe and its potential to be one of those albums you bond with and end up playing 30 times for your (hypothetical) teenage daughter.

The 26-year-old also buries another pretty fascinating tidbit: All of the songs on this album were recorded in a small town in New Zealand while Jacklin lived with the producer, Ben Edwards. “It was a pretty amazing time recording this album,” she says. “I moved into his house in New Zealand for three weeks the day we met. Could have been a disaster, but it turned out quite well.” h