How Julia Jacklin found inspiration in pop music for her new album Pre Pleasure

In her third studio album, we meet Australian singer-songwriter Julia Jacklin at her most evolved. There’s a newfound assuredness within Pre Pleasure, as we bear witness to an artist who’s not afraid of expanding her lyricism and songwriting process. She also integrates the sounds of strings, piano, and saxophone—all firsts for Jacklin. The resulting record is dynamic, lush, and vibrating with love and tenderness. Pulling from the pages of pop works, Pre Pleasure features hooks that linger, emboldened by Jacklin’s trademark emotive and raw lyricism.

In the Pre Pleasure single “Love, Try Not To Let Go,” Jacklin croons, “Give me time, time to figure some things out.” As The A.V. Club learned when we talked with Jacklin recently, she still has plenty of things to figure out, including art’s role in times of crisis, how to give and receive love, and the best place for writing songs.

A.V. Club: Let’s start with like the album’s inception. When did the first ideas for Pre Pleasure start to come into place for you?

Julia Jacklin: The first song I wrote was “Too In Love To Die.” I think that was the first time I’d written a full song start to finish since the Crushing tour. It took me quite a long time to get back into that headspace. Touring a record and writing record really feels like two completely different jobs, so it takes me a while to shift into each space. It just requires such a completely different part of your brain. It took me a while to recover from the Crushing tour, I was pretty wrecked.

I don’t think I’ve ever just started writing and then I’m like, “Oh, I think I have a record.” I booked the studio time in Montreal before I’d finished writing it. I’ve done that basically every time with my records because I need a deadline. If I was relying on my own timeline I would never have made a single record. Especially with this one. I really needed that motivator to not show up empty handed. It was a bit more challenging than the last two to get it going.

AVC: Where do you do most of your writing? Are you someone that can write from anywhere, or do you need a specific space to get your ideas going?

JJ: I wish I knew myself where I can write best, but I’m still figuring that out. A common thread is I don’t really write at home. I find that home is a bit of like a music-free zone for me—a resting place for other parts of my personality. I usually have to be busy doing something else. I think that’s why this one was a bit harder to get together. With Crushing I wrote mostly on tour—it’s just helpful to be busy and distracted. This record came together just from everywhere. I write a lot in the car, or in the shower. I think that’s a very common thing these days, because they’re sometimes the only two places where you can’t be distracted by a whole host of garbage on your phone.

AVC: How did this record offer new challenges for you?

JJ: I just think making a record is challenging itself, no matter how you do it. It’s a pretty bizarre process. But, the third record feels a bit more like you’re an established songwriter. Everyone says that the second record was gonna be the most pressure, but I don’t know what happened. I didn’t feel that for the second one. Every time I’ve made an album, it’s just been in one block of time in a pretty enclosed space, so there’s not much outside stuff coming into the actual creative process which is really nice. But I met Marcus the day we started. So that was a bit challenging—a bit of a strange way to do it I’ve been told, but I have done that every single time I’ve made a record. Me and Mark have quite different musical references, so that was kind of nice. It challenging because it forced me to have to fight for what I wanted a bit more than in the past. It’s good, because then you know if you’re really standing by something, then you must really care about it.

AVC: When you were talking about the musical influences that y’all were each bringing, what were some of your influences for this record?

JJ: I was wanting to make something that was a bit nicer to listen to than my last record, just a little less intense. For myself, for starters. I was wanting to make a record that was a bit more generous to myself and to an audience, just a bit more joyful sounding. That came from falling back in love with pop music and over the last couple of years connecting with that less complicated feeling around music. Music that’s engineered to make people feel good.

AVC: “Ignore Tenderness” is a pretty interesting track. What’s the message you were thinking about when you were writing the song?

JJ: It started as a generous hand back to my confused teenage self. You know, diving into the world of sex as a young person with no sex education and incredibly terrible messaging in popular culture. Then, seeing the ramifications of that over my entire life. You think we’ll go off and be able to shake it off but a lot of those formative experiences and lessons and information are embedded into my brain and it’s a lot harder to shake than I was expecting. Just really realizing how important it is for younger people to get positive messaging and helpful messaging at that age instead of shame and criticism. I just wanted to write a song that was reaching back to that person whilst acknowledging that it’s no small thing and those early experiences really shape your entire life and you need to do a lot of work to unlearn that. A lot of us don’t have the time or the money or the encouragement to work through that stuff.

AVC: With “Moviegoer,” what made you focus on the theater experience?

JJ: I wrote it on a day when I was feeling incredibly hopeless about the world and especially the role of art. It’s such a common narrative that art is cathartic and it’s a way for us to all feel better about ourselves. I think people think that writing songs is this incredibly therapeutic thing. I used to think it was, too, or at least I used to say it was. On that particular day, I was really feeling the limitations of that. I was just feeling lots of feelings around the role of art and how cathartic it is for creatives and for people who listen to it. And then, who even gets to make art? I really felt like having one of those heavy days of really questioning the whole purpose of your entire life and how and if what I’m doing is worth doing, you know? Is it actually helping me? Does it make me feel any better? Does it make anybody else feel any better? Is that even the point? I think every artist has to have those moments every six months where you’re just like, like, “Oh, cool. So my whole life is just singing some words to a guitar. Wow. That’s crazy.” I’m glad I wrote that song, but it definitely came from a dark day.

AVC: Do you feel different about it today?

JJ: Yeah, I think so. It’s just like—step one: Don’t take yourself that seriously. That was definitely a feeling that comes from being really deep in your head, mining your own head to try and come up to some answers. But what you actually need to do is step out of your own head for a second and take a breath. I still do feel complicated about being an artist—what that means, what my role in society is, and what kind of responsibilities I have, or don’t have. I think at the moment, I’m just a little bit like, “You’re okay, just get over yourself, it’s gonna be fine.” I think it’s in part to being so far removed from the performance aspect of this job for so long. That’s the part where I actually see tangibly in real time straight in front of my face that what I’m doing is a good thing to do with your life. When I start tour next week, I’m gonna feel like it actually doesn’t have to be that complicated. I like singing, people like hearing me singing, it doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that.

AVC: A lot of your music is a very deep expression of your inner mind and heart pursuits and all of those things. What’s at the heart of Pre Pleasure for you?

JJ: Crushing to me was a celebration of the understanding that I could have boundaries with people. That was really liberating and exciting. It was honestly the first time in my life where I realized that was something that I could have. I could express feelings to people, and they could listen to them and change their behavior, whereas before I felt like a bit of a doormat in a lot of my relationships and friendships. I could have my own wants and needs, and they deserve to be met a lot of the time. I think Crushing kind of came from that space.

This one feels like maybe a little more complicated, like understanding the limitations of that. Relationships with people and boundaries, whether it’s romantic or with your family, with your friends, it’s always gonna be a continuous conversation. Especially for someone like me, who is such an overthinker. I’m never going to be able to have one conversation with someone and then we can ride off into the sunset of bliss. I think this record is feeling the weight of that. Everybody’s bringing in their own baggage into every single relationship and just being close to people is difficult, but it’s so rewarding. You need to constantly show up for people in your life, and they need to constantly show up for you. It’s never just like a done deal. Just, life is hard. That life is hard. Life is beautiful. That’s all the record is about.

AVC: Using love language as a frame of reference, how do you like to show up for the people around you and foster those relationships?

JJ: Understanding how other people receive love is such a huge revelation for many people—realizing that you can’t just cut and paste your own version on to every single relationship in your life, and making other people understand that about you. That is the whole Love Languages thing. Which, coming from my upbringing feels very cringy to talk about, but it is like a helpful tool. I think I’m an acts of service person, but I think that being the most helpful person in the world actually doesn’t foster the kind of relationships I want. I totally understand acts of service is a way to show people you care if you don’t feel like you can with words. It is a beautiful thing. But there needs to be quite a few ways in which you show people you care about them. Also being an introverted person, I feel like it’s always gonna be a struggle, as someone who really needs my own time and my own company and has a job that is very forward facing and takes up so much of my social energy. So yeah, still figuring it out. Still figuring it out.