Stella Donnelly on friend’s painful breakup that inspired her new album: ‘I’m trying to protect them – but I wrote this record’ | Australian music

STayla Donnelly didn’t want to write songs about the friend who broke her heart. But every time the Australian-Welsh singer-songwriter tried to channel anything else into her lyrics, the hurt was always there at the surface.

We have a language for dealing with romantic grief, learned from movies and songs, but there are fewer mirrors in art for dealing with the end of platonic connections. On her third album, Love and Fortune, Donnelly captured the dull pain of rejection by a friend who knew her better than anyone. This may become the go-to record for hidden friends when they find someone they’ve known intimately for years no longer wants to hear from them.

When this happened to her, Donnelly felt helpless, and realized that “no amount of questioning or communication would do any good. I’ve never experienced that in my life.” Can talk about any tensions in other friendships she had before; This time she was having a conversation with herself.

“It’s a very heavy problem that, for me, has never been resolved,” she says. “never.”

As much as the 33-year-old tried not to write about it, it came up every time she touched an instrument. She writes about letters left unsent on a friend’s trail, hides herself away and doesn’t show up at parties she thinks her friend might also go to in Ghosts. “It’s as much a show as it is a magazine in a way,” Donnelly says of the album.

We were talking about kombucha tea at Ceres Garden, a farm and nursery in Melbourne’s East Brunswick. Magpies and other species that Donnelly, a keen ornithologist, mentions by name, fly around us. Birds are a symbol of recorded sophistication: on the soft, wistful keys of “Pleasing Everyone,” she recalls birdwatching with her ex-girlfriend as a gentle recorded chirp arrives on the track. “Wherever you are, I hope it’s nice to you,” she sings. By the time we approach the album, “Laying Low” becomes quieter, singing of the feathers left behind when someone flies away. By then, I had learned that trying to catch them would be a fool’s errand.

Donnelly is quick, enthusiastic and cheerful in conversation, but she struggles in interviews, she says, “because I’m too busy trying to protect the other person in all this. But then I went and wrote this record.” When the sun’s strange shower sends us running away for cover, it also gives her a respite from having to wrap her mind around her words. As we settle back into the rain, she apologizes for “giving political answers,” explaining that the last thing she wants to do is twist a knife into someone else’s side with an uncensored version of events.

Donnelly has taken an intentional break from the music industry in recent years. From the moment her debut album, Thrush Metal, was released in 2017, she never allowed herself to stop. This record featured her breakthrough single Boys Will Be Boys, which arrived in a moment of vision and became a symbol of the Australian #MeToo movement. “The first song I released was the heaviest song I’ve ever written. That came under pressure.”

Donnelly has toured internationally, scooped the inaugural $25,000 Levi’s Music Prize at the Australian industry conference Bigsound, and received multiple Best Album nominations at the Air Awards for her debut, Beware of the Dogs, and an Aria nomination to boot. “I used to say to myself, ‘I don’t care,’” she says of the workload. I’ll just say yes.'” “It was a little crazy.”

After years of approval, collapse became inevitable. People around her could tell Donnelly was “in [her] “The end of wit for a while but it was moving forward.” She was overwhelmed, “a little scared, and getting sick.” Shows have been cancelled. Her label, Secretly, would later be dropped by him.

Searching for that spark of creativity was harder than ever when she was mired in exhaustion. Perhaps this was the real wake-up call. “I’ve always stood for honesty. So it was hard to have a hard time and not be able to give so much.”

In an attempt to establish a normal life and daily rhythm outside of making, selling and promoting her art, Donnelly took a job at a local bakery. She began riding her bike to work before dawn, where she and her fellow restaurant musicians spent the day listening to community radio stations as they served local musicians who came in for coffee and sourdough. “I couldn’t escape the music if I tried.” And I already tried.

She started playing in friends’ bands, and mixed rhythm sections alongside her husband, Marcel Tosi, of the Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: “That’s where Marcel and I really connect. I play bass and he plays drums, and that’s my favorite context to be with him because we’re there together, supporting someone else’s music, and it’s not about either of us in that moment.”

They traded headlining performances for a fundraiser in their backyard last year, when 75 people showed up to help chef Aheda Amr, a Palestinian refugee, raise money to buy her own food truck. She watched her friends perform intimate shows for dozens of people. In her attempt to escape the music industry, she found out what the music community looked like. “And then I started writing more songs again, because it was like, ‘Oh, I love this.’”

Even learning a secret wouldn’t catch her next record in the end seemed like a blessing in disguise. “I cried for one day, and then the next day I felt really free. I again felt like that little kid in overalls who wanted to write an EP. It was that feeling of ‘nobody really cares what I do – so what am I going to do?’

After writing her previous two records on tour and on Deadline, Donnelly wrote Love and Fortune in her head and on her bike around Melbourne’s northern suburbs.

Six months ago, after being diagnosed with a neurological disorder, she learned what self-care looks like for someone with a sensitive mind. “It’s just realizing that I need a little extra help here and there with things, and riding a really loud motorcycle down the street can be a day-to-day wreck for me. I’ve been kinder to myself now, in terms of everything.”

“Get my little life back… I set myself on fire for someone else’s toy,” she sings on “WALK,” a song about taking care of herself as she would her beloved pet. Taking care of her basic needs became a new daily devotion.

“I think, up until this year, I was very hard on myself because I was like, ‘Why can anyone else do this and I can’t? Why can anyone else cope with life?'” she says.

She now has a “hindsight kindness” towards previous versions of herself. Those who couldn’t cope also, who endured the discomfort of walking around and sat in bed waiting for a text – and then beat themselves up for doing so. “Finally, allowing myself to write an entire album about this big thing that happened to me made me accept that this is who I am now: I’m this annoying person who writes songs about his personal life. I had to come to terms with the fact that this is who I am, and love this person.”

• Love and Fortune will be released on November 7 (Remote Control/Dot Dash Recordings). Stella Donnelly will tour Love and Fortune around Australia from 19 February to 6 March, then the UK and Europe from 19 March to 2 April; See here for all dates