Julia Stone likes to rewatch old TV shows, switching on something she has seen countless times before to relax into the familiar. Making music with her brother Angus is – and she means this in the nicest possible way – a bit like that.
“There’s something comforting about working together and something really calming about it,” Julia says. “For me, I do solo work, and I love the excitement of working with new people. But sometimes I longed for that feeling of working with Angus.”
I am walking through Sydney’s Domain with the two Stone siblings, who have been making music together – on and off – for nearly 20 years now. More recently, it’s been off. After putting out four hit albums of dreamy folk-pop music, in 2017 the pair announced their time as a duo had “come to an end”, as each set off to focus on solo work. When I last interviewed Julia, in 2021, she told me that while she and Angus still loved getting in the studio together, she couldn’t foresee the return of Angus & Julia Stone anytime soon.
Now, though, they are preparing to share their very beautiful new album, Cape Forestier. So what – besides that comfort-watching-TV feeling – changed their mind?
Julia shrugs. “I think the reason working together has lasted this long is because there’s no pressure for it to be anything or go anywhere. If we feel like making a record together again, that’s great. And if we don’t, we don’t.”
It’s a drizzly day when I meet Angus and Julia Stone and the pair arrive dressed in all black, carrying matching oversized umbrellas. “It looks like we’re at a New Orleans funeral,” Julia laughs. “But happy!” The Domain is a venue they’ve played many times over the years, one that tracks their journey from small-time brother and sister duo to global stars. The first gig “they got paid properly for” was here at the now defunct festival Homebake in 2006, not long after the release of their debut EP Chocolates and Cigarettes, which they’d recorded in the living room of their dad’s house. More recently, since songs like Big Jet Plane found them international fame, they’ve jumped on stage here alongside homegrown heroes like Paul Kelly and international stars like Post Malone.
We were set to stroll around the Domain today, but it’s currently in the process of being transformed from a regular grassy space to an outdoor music venue. Amid the industrial soundtrack of trucks and tradies who’d rather we weren’t in the way, we decide to go elsewhere.
As we walk, the personalities of the two siblings start to show. Julia, the elder of the two Stones, is warm and engaged, a natural conversationalist. Angus, on the other hand, is more reserved; softly spoken and a man of few words. There is a trace of Big Sister Energy as we head towards the Botanic Gardens. “It might be a bit far,” Angus suggests. Julia disagrees – and wins. “It’s only just over that side of the bridge.”
Angus, Julia says, has always been the more introverted sibling.
“As a kid, as he still is – he hasn’t changed in a lot of ways … [he was] very aware of the world around him, and quiet, and observational,” Julia says.
And to Angus, Julia was always the big sister he wanted to emulate. “She had a little girl group that she used to sing in,” he remembers of their childhood. “I used to sneak down and watch through the stairs them practising.”
Today, the pair think they have more similarities than differences. In our conversation, they are kind and supportive with each other, nodding in agreement at statements the other makes and, in Julia’s case, often prompting Angus to chime in with his thoughts with a gentle “what do you think?”.
But working together hasn’t always been smooth sailing – in fact, a lot of it was hard. In the earlier years of their career, spending months at a time abroad on tour started to suck the joy out of making music and took a toll on their relationship. Julia describes figuring out how to travel and work so closely together as a process of “rupture and repair”. Rick Rubin, the superproducer who collaborated with the pair on their 2014 self-titled album, put it more succinctly. “I think they were at a point where they weren’t always getting along,” he said in a previous interview.
It’s possible that’s part of the reason why the pair decided to put Angus & Julia Stone on pause, but getting either Stone sibling to speak candidly can be a challenge – both have the media-trained habit of subtly steering answers away from the question that was asked. But Julia does admit that working with a sibling brings a unique set of challenges.
“I think it’s something that we almost had to learn – that just because we’re family doesn’t mean you always get to just say, Hey, you need to do this thing right now,” she says. “We grew up with parents that couldn’t communicate properly. And so we inherited a lot of that initially, when we started working together.”
The Stones spent their childhood in Sydney’s northern beaches with their parents and another sister, an environment in which Julia says the kids “just didn’t want to get in the way” of their mum and dad.
“Mum had three of us by the time she was 25. She was still trying to do her marine biology degree while raising us. Dad was working as a teacher, a builder, a truck driver. They were doing everything to make ends meet and there were a lot of pressures,” Julia says.
“I wish [our parents] had an easier time, both of them, but it certainly gave us some resilience. Angus and I can be anywhere in the world and we’re like, cool. Well, here we are, this is what we’re doing. And there’s a real acceptance of whatever shows up.”
Today, the pair value communication and have learned to run the business of being Angus & Julia Stone in a way that offers them both more space – they have, for instance, deliberately cut way back on the number of shows they’ll play touring the new album. But perhaps ironically, given how challenging touring has been in the past, the path to making Cape Forestier began after getting on stage together again.
The Stones had reunited to tour with Ben Harper, an act they’d grown up listening to and couldn’t turn down the chance to support. “It just really felt fun to play [together] again.” Those shows led to a conversation about what music they’d each been working on, plans to get together in the studio Angus built in his home at Murwillumbah in northern NSW, and, very quickly, a whole new album of songs about, well, “love”.
That’s something Julia has some recent experience in. She had been helping their mum move into a place in the Apple Isle when she “met a Tasmanian man” and decided she’d relocate there too – carving out a very different existence for someone who’d previously been spending much of her time amid the bright lights of New York. The title track of their new album is named after a boat Julia took out on the water near her new home.
“It can be quite crazy off the coast of Tasmania – huge ocean swells coming up from the Antarctic – and this trawler just keeps going, it just gets through it, it doesn’t shy away from the big waves and the wild fronts coming in,” Julia says as we sit on a park bench underneath a large tree, trying to take some cover from the rain that is now coming down more dramatically.
“It felt like this song was representative of our journey. This record feels like coming full circle – we made a lot of it in the living room, the same way we made Chocolates and Cigarettes, but [after] all this adventure that we’ve been on.”
So how does it feel to be back making music together after so much time apart?
Here, Angus needs no prompting.
“It feels wonderful,” he says.
Cape Forestier by Angus & Julia Stone is out now. They are touring Australia in August
