The tender meaning behind Julia Jacklin’s crushing ‘I Wish’
Though it could be argued that Australian songwriter Julia Jacklin is still only getting started as far as her career is concerned, the work she’s put out to date has demonstrated a sublime amount of maturity and emotional gut-punch over the last decade.
Introducing a wondrous ability for narrative songwriting from the word go on her debut album, Don’t Let the Kids Win, her 2019 follow-up, Crushing, is as hefty as its title would suggest, beautifully summing up the existential dread often associated with entering your late 20s through a collection of succinct indie folk anthems.
While many artists often find themselves keen to go through a significant stylistic shift after establishing themselves to a higher degree, she hasn’t let her deeply personal lyricism slide and only appears to be continuing to hone her craft by taking immense care on every subsequent project. On the latest offering from her upcoming fourth album, The Gem, she serves up a slice of personal history which aims to sum up the heartwarming origin story of the record, and it ends up being one of the most touching moments in her catalogue to date.
‘I Wish’, the second single to be released from The Gem, is a song that Jacklin stated upon release to have been written as a message to her younger self, something that she has previously chosen to do on her earlier records. Now a decade on from her debut, she’s addressing a version of herself from around the time her career began to take off rather than referencing her earlier life, and the constant reassurance she provides for her past worries is meant to serve as a future reminder that she was able to navigate her way through the toughest transitional period of her life.
While as yet unheard in the context of the full album, ‘I Wish’ is set to be the closing track on The Gem, evidently serving as a means of tying up all of the themes that she addresses across the 11 songs.
However, what’s interesting about the concept behind the entire album is that ‘I Wish’ also appears to exist early on in the chronological timeline of events that inspired the album, with it directly referring to her brave decision to up sticks and move to Melbourne from Sydney after the release of her debut.
The album’s title refers to the bar she began frequenting after moving to a new place where she had no friends or prior connections, and ‘I Wish’ is a reflection on how she was nervous to put herself through such an upheaval at the time, but is proud to say that things worked out fine in the long run.
“I want to love and be loved, but I also want to be free,” Jacklin said of the album’s overarching theme, “The tension between those two things has been the central question of my life”.
While The Gem isn’t out in full at this moment in time, it would appear that none of her touch has disappeared on what’s set to be an astounding next chapter in her career. ‘I Wish’ appears to act as a curtain on the early portion of her career that provided her with a number of obstacles to overcome, and a permanent reminder that it’s possible to conquer them.
