INTRODUCING 19-YEAR-OLD JULIA WALLACE AND HER DEBUT SINGLE ‘WARM LIGHT’
We’d love you to meet Julia Wallace, she’s new around here. Julia is making music with warm dark tones of textural piano and introspective vocals. She recently made an EP in the shack at the back of her parent’s place during lockdown and this is her first single, 'Warm Light' - LISTEN HERE.
Julia is part of a new mentorship program launched by manager Charlotte Abroms (Angie McMahon, Ainslie Wills, Haarlo) and manager/publicist Alyse Newman (AANTHOLOGIES). This program aims to make a contribution to supporting the next wave of teens and young artists who are setting their hearts and minds on a career in music.
We asked Julia to introduce herself. “I am Julia Wallace, lovely to meet you. I didn’t talk for days on end when I was little. Maybe I was saving it up for now. The songs I write are about girls I’ve loved and my aggressive guilty conscience. And also about my dog.”
Julia describes 'Warm Light' as a simple song with two chords, inspired by the droning repeating piano tracks on LCD Soundsystem's ‘All My Friends’. She recorded eight textural piano parts to stack up on top of each other, which builds and expands into a mesh of parts swimming around and overlapping. Julia tells us the song was written while aimlessly pacing between rooms at home and experiencing various shades of light. It was written at a time where she was feeling particularly restless and exhausted.
“Every couple of lines is written about someone I was thinking about at the time, including my dog with a broken foot.”
At just 19 years old, Julia is an established multi-instrumentalist and performer in the jazz scene. She plays in five bands, and her trumpet playing has seen her graduate with a scholarship to a prestigious highschool, an entrance scholarship to WAAPA and recently complete an Intensive Jazz course at Brubeck Institute of Music in California. When Julia's is not performing or practising her craft, she's teaching maths to kids as her day job (loves fractions). We asked Julia what kind of kid she was.
“I was that kid that tried to make trumpet cool and carried my trumpet everywhere. It was my safety net. Listening to and playing music through school became my lifeline when I was an angsty teen who realised I was gay in a conservative girls' high school.”
Recently Julia felt plagued by a sense of imposter syndrome in the jazz world and decided to switch direction to the affectionately self-titled genre of ‘bedroom layered slow pop.’ This is where she found herself singing and writing on the piano again, a place that Julia describes as safe and cathartic.
“Through writing a bunch of songs I found a ‘sound’ and had a pipe dream that I could start this solo artist project. And here we are!”
Warm Light was recorded in Julia’s shack in Perth and co-produced and mixed remotely by Jono Steer (Angie McMahon, Hiatus Kaiyote, Leif Vollebekk) at The Perch Recording Studio in Castlemaine. Julia plays all instruments on the track except for drums which were recorded remotely by Leigh Fisher.
‘WARM LIGHT’ IS OUT NOW. LISTEN HERE.
