Music Feeds’ Love Letter To A Record series asks artists to reflect on their relationship with music and share stories about how the music they love has influenced their lives.
Christchurch dream pop outfit There’s A Tuesday released the new EP, Boy Scout, on Friday, 3rd June. The record comes with BENEE’s seal of approval, with the Aotearoa pop singer signing There’s A Tuesday to her Olive Records imprint.
Here, There’s A Tuesday’s Minnie Robberds pens a love letter to Julia Jacklin’s second album, Crushing, released in 2019.
There’s A Tuesday on Julia Jacklin’s Crushing
Nat [Hutton] and I were 17 when we heard Julia Jacklin’s’ Crushing. The ten-song album was pretty pivotal for us as young females beginning to navigate the music industry. The song that stuck out to us was ‘Head Alone’, a song we still cover in our live set to this day.
The song is incredible in all senses, musical and lyrical. Julia’s lyrics speak of owning your own body and “raising it up” to be yours. We think that her lyrics and their message are so immensely beautiful and poignant, especially in our current times where women and people who menstruate still have to fight for their rights to make choices for their own bodies.
This song will forever be so special and incredibly inspirational to us. We hadn’t really heard anyone talk about these very important topics much before, especially in music. It made us feel powerful and heard as young wāhine and makes us feel the same way still. We realised we wanted to make music that spoke of such important topics and have strived to do that since.
Some other tracks that have been really important to us include ‘Body’, ‘Don’t Know How To Keep Loving You’, and ‘Good Guy’. These songs all travel somewhere so intimate, close and special. It’s so beautiful that Julia invites her listeners into this place. We think it’s so important to be personal and honest in your lyrics and definitely felt really inspired by the way Julia did this in Crushing and still does in more recent releases.
We were heading out of high school into the big wide world and it’d be fair to say that Crushing was with us for that journey, playing in the background of Nat’s new room at the university halls of residence and my car on my way to a new job being a teacher aide.
The songs traveled through our families and me and my dad Mark – who is a big Julia fan – went along to her show in Ōtautahi and were both totally amazed by her live show and how amazing she was at performing. We danced at the back of the venue and had the most beautiful time.
Nat was lucky enough to meet Julia at the end of last year when she played three shows in Auckland (of which Nat attended all three). Although she was already attending two out of three of the shows, when she was in Christchurch and saw on her phone at 11pm that Julia was playing a pop-up show at her favourite record store, she climbed into her savings and bought a ticket to fly and see her the next morning. It was well worth it as she sat on the wooden floor, legs crossed listening to an acoustic show of Crushing.
On the day of the third and last show, Nat bought me a flight and ticket to go see her for my birthday. We danced and cried all at the same time. It was beautiful. This is a total love letter to Julia Jacklin’s record Crushing. It’s been a beautiful thing in our world.
