Stella Donnelly on recalibration, having a break from music, and new album 'Love and Fortune' • Interview • DIY Magazine

Cast your mind back to 2022: a strange no-man’s-land of a year when we were collectively trying desperately to pretend that everything, actually, was back to normal - no harm done! - while internally reckoning with the pandemic’s fallout. Such was the landscape into which Stella Donnelly released her last album, ‘Flood’ - a still shell-shocked world that perhaps pressed the reset button a little too hastily, determined to counter two years of stasis with more, more, more. On a personal level, though, Stella found herself contemplating the opposite, exhausted by living out of a suitcase, chugging along the write-record-tour industry conveyor belt.

“I remember it being a really difficult time for a lot of artists around then,” she reflects this morning (or evening, as is the case for her), video calling from her home in Naarm / Melbourne. “It was very confusing - there were less venues to play in, but everyone was touring at the same time… it just felt like we’d come out of the gates really fast.”

Following her ‘Flood’ tour dates, she realised something had to give. “I think I hit a creative wall, mostly,” she admits. “I remember things that were meant to be really fun and exciting not being that good. I just felt like I was suspended in the air; I was a bit numb, and I wasn’t being very present… that was a bit of a red flag. It was [a case of saying]: ‘I could write another record and it would probably be shit, and then that’ll kind of be the end. Or, I could just take a break and hope that people like me enough to want to hear my music again’. I took that risk, I guess.”

Working in a bakery; living in a shared house; joining a netball team; reading self-help books: it may not sound like a particularly bold existence on the face of it, but, in an era where artists are increasingly expected to be all-singing, all-dancing, all-vlogging polymaths, choosing to slow down and really sit with herself was, Stella explains, daunting in its own way.

There were moments where she considered, quite genuinely, whether she would be happier without music. “I think most musicians question it a lot,” she nods, fondly recalling how much she enjoyed “that normality of coming home at the end of the day when other people are coming home, having dinner, sitting around with housemates - especially when none of them are in music…

“I guess because my music is under my name, I really feel like my identity can be really tightly tied around it,” she offers. “I made the mistake of not giving myself a nickname in the early days, because I didn’t ever expect this to go anywhere.” Even so, a decent number of her friends have never heard a note of her work. “It’s so funny - and fuck, thank God, because they love me just for who I am day to day.” On reflection, would she have created a pseudonym or stage persona when she first started out, to help delineate between Stella the person, and Stella the artist? “God yes,” she says emphatically. “Something ridiculous that just wouldn’t have worked, probably… Sports Bra or something.

“I’ve accidentally ended up being a tennis player, but I want to be in the Matildas, or the Lionesses, you know? I’d much prefer to be in that environment than be like fucking Andy Murray.” She laughs, caveating: “he’s great though!”

“If I wanted to sing about this, I had to face my own responsibilities and my own shame.”

The product of this pensive time - her third full-length, ‘Love and Fortune’ - is a record of both endings and beginnings - of standing at a crossroads knowing the way back is impassable, and having to tentatively feel your way forward, one small step at a time. Much of it, she smiles weakly, is centred around the breakdown of a significant friendship - an event which “really shakes your world up in a big way”, yet is rarely given the same social weight or pop culture air time as romantic breakups.

“And there’s so much shame [around them],” says Stella, noting how “a romantic relationship can end for so many reasons, and quite often it’s because of [non]monogamy, or other people”. Friendships, in contrast, aren’t exclusive in the same way, meaning when they end, “it has to be a pretty serious, substantial thing” - and one which other people can’t take the fall for.

“I think that’s why it took me a while to put this album out,” she affirms. “Because if I wanted to sing about this, I had to face my own responsibilities and my own shame around the fact that it happened. It’s way more complex - it speaks to our humanity when a friendship doesn’t work out, I feel.”

Between music, cinema, and internet pop psychology (who hasn’t done a five-minute online quiz to find out what their love language is?), romantic breakups have a whole cultural lexicon, an armoury of framing devices and phrases - incompatibility, ghosting, gaslighting - which allow us to label phenomena, make sense of hurtful behaviours, and ultimately move on with our lives. But for other forms of relationship breakdown, there’s no such roadmap.

“That was challenging,” Stella acknowledges. “I found myself trying to tackle the whole story in every song, and that wasn’t working for me, so I started to set some limitations for myself: I approached it as though each song was a chapter, and that helped me begin to create the skeleton of the album.” From the self-righteous pettiness of ‘Feel It Change’, to the deflated resignation of ‘Friend’ or ‘Ghosts’, to the haunting regret - still tinged with residual care - of ‘Please Everyone’, the tracks meander between moods, an unflinchingly frank journey through the murky emotional mire of blame, forgiveness, and acceptance.

Standout ‘Year Of Trouble’ is particularly stark; over little more than a sparse piano arrangement, Stella puts her guilty conscience under the microscope for what’s a guttingly sad ode to lost love. “If I forgive myself / Will history tell it twice?” she asks, “Your beautiful face to read / I never read it right”. “I was feeling quite self-conscious about that,” she says now, shyly. “I was kind of embarrassed that I went so hard, but that’s probably just me being in my head about it.” She pauses, then continues. “I’m equally embarrassed and proud that I let myself be that vulnerable.”

“I’m equally embarrassed and proud that I let myself be that vulnerable.”

Where her previous records (‘Flood’ and 2019 debut ‘Beware Of The Dogs’) were also characterised by unvarnished emotion and gut-punch lyrical candour, ‘Love and Fortune’ does indeed play Stella’s calling cards with even greater finesse. (“Could you do me a favour and pick out the truth from a life / I could never replace someone as big as you were in mine”, goes opener ‘Standing Ovation’). Not beholden to the preferences or pointers of a label, she wrote the record “in secret”, resolving to simply be “as honest as I could” and “write as much for me as I could”.

Retreating to her souped-up garden shed - where her builder housemate Zac had created a makeshift, soundproof writing “box”, complete with “an op shop piano, a drum kit, and a desk” - she quickly found that normalcy, once again, was a winning catalyst for creativity. “I started to approach writing songs as though I was turning up to work, which was a really nice feeling. If I’m just sitting watching RuPaul’s Drag Race or something, I’m feeling guilty about it; my guitar’s sitting in the corner of the room, and I know that I should be doing other things. So having that space - which I don’t take anything else into, other than songwriting - has been such a game changer for me.”

Interiority, however, doesn’t necessarily equate to isolation. While soul-searching and self-reflection became the bones of these 11 tracks, it was by “approaching music with way more curiosity and community” that Stella shook off her disillusionment and began to enjoy being an artist once more. Simple pleasures like attending gigs, listening to local radio, and connecting with fellow musicians proved pivotal, helping her make peace with - and even find admiration for - “how hard it can be for artists sometimes”. She pauses, grimacing slightly: “It really sounds like I’m trying to be a guru…”

Admittedly, there are moments on the album where echoes of life coach-type musings can be heard (take ‘W.A.L.K’, which sees her seek solace in the outdoors, or the title track, which wryly parrots promises to “teach you / How to design your own breakthroughs”). “I was reading so many self-help books at the time that I think that accidentally infiltrated the record too,” she smiles sheepishly. Be that as it may, the Stella Donnelly school of thinking has no shortage of sage advice. “I heard someone say something really beautiful the other day: local music is not something you need to overcome; local music should be the framework and foundation of what you do,” she recalls. “I really loved hearing that; I really want to try and hold on to that feeling. There’s this attitude that you need to just get out of your local scene and ‘make it’ overseas or whatever, but I feel like that just leaves you feeling really isolated.”

“There’s this attitude that you need to get out of your local scene and ‘make it’ overseas or whatever, but that just leaves you feeling really isolated.”

As much as ‘Love and Fortune’ is an album about disconnect, it’s also about recalibration - about honouring the symbiotic relationship between the self and our surroundings, and recognising that - much like this decade’s dystopian start taught us - we are inherently products of our environment.

From field recordings of birds (‘Please Everyone’) and geographic references (‘Feel It Change’) to gleaning inspiration from nearby haunts (the lullaby-like ‘Baths’), there’s an immutable sense of place to the record, a groundedness that invites intimacy without expectation. (At one point, she tells us, its cover was going to be a map of her daily cycle route; “unfortunately, the lines the map made looked like a gun, so we got rid of that idea”). The final artwork, though, is just as powerful: a painting of Stella sitting, shivering and exposed, on the side of a pool, it perfectly captures her musical precipice - and how, sometimes, you’ve just got to take the plunge, kick out, and keep yourself afloat.

Despite her dip, there’s still the prevailing sense that Stella Donnelly, despite it all, is a glass-half-full kinda girl. As she puts it on the album’s buoyant, groove-flecked closer ‘Laying Low’: “I only hope that one day we can say hello / Smile, look in the eye / But until then I’m giving up on laying low / I’m done, say goodbye”. For now, there’s no sense of trepidation about re-entering the fray; in fact, she’s in the middle of writing another album. She grins: “I mean, it’s either be optimistic, or I just fucking quit music and hate myself, you know? I only picked one of them.”

‘Love and Fortune’ is out now via Brace Yourself.

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