Heavenly Sounding Stone

With a mum who is a marine biologist one could believe that Julia Stone was part mermaid, discovered in an ocean during one of her Mum’s scientific endeavours, such is Julia’s ethereal, siren like voice, that, or she truly has the voice of an angel and the personality of one too, the latter being the impression I received while chatting to the songstress about her appropriately named Heavenly Voices’ tour.

Julia is looking forward to bringing her ethereal voice across the water to Tasmania, a place she is well familiar with having visited many times and most recently for a friends wedding that took place in Salamanca Place.

The kind of ambience that surrounded a wedding in Salamanca is important to Julia who believes ambience lifts every performance to a fulfilling experience for both the performer and the audience. Instruments and lighting help to create a mood whether the setting be a pub or a church.

And it is in churches that Julia has been frequenting as part of her European tour, including performances in Germany’s Cologne Cathedral and churches in Scotland.

In her new album ‘By The Horns’ Julia has been exploring the theme of kindness. Julia believes the idea of kindness is deeply ingrained in us and we are urged to be kind to others no matter what, and feel selfish if we aren’t. Julia believes we need to be kinder to ourselves and to learn to accept that we can’t please everyone. This realisation has helped make this a good year for Julia with both the tour of Europe and the recording of her new album. As the album suggests Julia, after much success in claiming 5 Arias with her brother Angus including best album and best single with ‘Big Jet Plane’ is well and truly taking life by the horns.

Julia’s beautiful voice is a genetic inheritance although her parents voices are different from hers, her dad is a musician and music teacher, her mum has a bolder voice suited to musical theatre and Julia’s grandmother, is an opera singer.

Julia has been based in the ambient Mulholland drive where she recorded her album and in keeping with her other wordly voice found herself recording the album in a house belonging to a man who was notably a set designer for Disney and built a house for his wife in the form of snow whites cottage. A pathway amidst trees leads to the little cottage outfitted for the Snow White’s petite companions.

You can see the gamine Julia in Tasmania as part of the heavenly voices tour on Tuesday 19 February at St David’s Cathedral, 125 Macquarie Street, Hobart.

Julia’s new album ‘by the Horns’ is out now.