The Fiona Apple album that blew Julia Jacklin’s mind: “I love this record”
Australian musician Julia Jacklin is perhaps one of modern music’s most underrated lyricists, bold and honest in her personal and relatable dissections of life and love. She manages to capture the minute details of the seemingly mundane and communicate feelings that many of us struggle to put into words.
She released her first album, Don’t Let The Kids Win, in 2016, before earning further acclaim with 2019’s Crushing and her most recent effort, Pre Pleasure, which she shared in 2022. Jacklin has mastered a perfect balance between humour, thought-provoking observation and heartbreakingly beautiful sentiments, demonstrating a real knack for penning gut-punching lines as much as optimistic and tender ones.
On ‘Don’t Know How To Keep Loving You’, Jacklin laments a fading relationship over melancholic guitars, singing, “I want your mother to stay friends with mine” and “What if I cleaned up? What if I worked on my skin?/ I could scrub until I am red, hot, weak, and thin/ Too tired to run away, what do I do now?” Visceral and vulnerable, the song is a perfect encapsulation of the singer’s skill, although it is just one of many tracks that highlight Jacklin as an incredible master of her pen.
While Jacklin has a varied breadth of influences, it seems as though one particular singer has influenced her songwriting the most – Fiona Apple. The American musician rose to prominence in the late-90s with her album Tidal, which featured the hit single ‘Criminal’. Wise beyond her years, Apple’s lyrics quickly impressed listeners, even more so when people discovered that the singer was just 18, having written most of her songs as a teenager.
After winning a Grammy for ‘Criminal’, Apple released When The Pawn… in 1999, which was also critically acclaimed. It took her six years to deliver her next project, Extraordinary Machine, which Jacklin cites as a major influence. The album, produced by Jon Brion, contains tracks like ‘O Sailor’ and ‘Get Him Back’, and earned Apple another Grammy nomination, this time for ‘Best Pop Vocal Album’. According to Jacklin (via Amoeba), “My first love showed me this record when I was 13 and it blew my mind, and I think it formed particularly what I love about song lyrics more than anything.”
Lyrically, Apple is similarly honest and personal like Jacklin, using enchanting melodies and a strong vocal performance to communicate themes of love coming to an end, standing your ground against someone, feeling stuck, and reassurance. She also isn’t afraid to drop some comical lines, such as “I opened my eyes while you were kissing me once/ More than once/ And you looked as sincere as a dog,” in ‘Parting Gift’.
“For my high school graduating performance, I sang ‘Parting Gift’, it was very dramatic,” she added, proving how much the record has seeped into her musical DNA. “I love this record. I’m very grateful to it and to Fiona for making it,” she continued. Jacklin even learned how to play guitar by following along to ‘Not About Love’. Clearly, the album had a profound impact on every aspect of Jacklin’s musicianship.
