“You have to keep playing and playing, otherwise you lose them,” she says, flexing her fingers across the fretboard.

Jean’s visceral dedication to her skill maintenance on guitar is plainly apparent — and almost bleeds into — her artistic presentation and persona.

DARWIN songbird Stevie Jean launched her new single ‘Estranged’.

Rugged and untroubled, vulnerable yet self-assured, the muscular tone to Jean’s presence, songwriting and aesthetic has her on an unstoppable path to stardom.

In her Humpty Doo home, where the trees are comically green and the gardens overgrown, Jean is recovering after a run of interstate gigs.

“It’s kind of like being a FIFO worker,” Jean says of life as a touring musician.

Days on the road can last 14 hours, and tours go weeks at a time.

But at home, where Jean is leisurely cutting out miscellaneous magazine clippings to paste into a scrap book, there’s seemingly infinite downtime.

“Time is what you get living rural. You get to be in the empty space where things come out of more organically,” she says.

“Out here it’s a lot better for creative thinking and process.”

It’s then that Jean’s Blue Heeler Trixie, who has learnt to open all the family home’s doors with her own paws, struts into the room.

Trixie’s skills seem to present a case study in what can be learned during downtime in this sprawling tropical oasis of Darwin’s rural area.

Ferns, fish tanks, reticulated gardens, swings, bikes, scooters and a capital C Cubby-house are the landmarks inside this lush maze.

When Trixie, 7-dog-years-old, starts calling out for attention, Jean says “she shouldn’t be acting like such a pup”.

Maybe Jean is projecting — since her rise to prominence through the Triple J Unearthed music charts, it’s become almost cliche for music reviewers to label Jean as mature beyond her years.

“YOU can call me mature all you like, but I watch The Powerpuff Girls regularly,” quips Stevie Jean.

The Nanny (named Fran) is another of her TV favourites.

But programming choices aside, while her peers are stumbling over a mountain of troubles — angst, ennui, uncertain futures and other banal teenage troubles — from her jungle vantage point, Jean is tapping into a precocious intellect and deep well of talent to see the forest for the trees.

In 2018, Jean released two tracks side-by-side which captured Australia’s attention.

Estranged and Hell in Every Religion — the latter of which spent weeks atop the Triple J Unearthed charts — gave music fans a glimpse of an artist with a voice as powerful as her Powerpuff Girl attitude, crooning epic bars of gothic lyrics with cutting cynicism and incisive social observations.

Jean remembers back to high school when, as a 14-year-old, she came up with a line — ‘I’m going to hell in every single religion”- that any pop artist would kill to dine on.

“I came up with (the lyrics) in my room after a rough day,” Jean recalls.

“I went to an Anglican school for a little while. It was driving me a little bit insane. I think we’d had school chapel that day, and just sitting up there and the stuff they say is kind of ridiculous. Lord forgive us all our sins, but you’re saying that to 13-year-olds. It felt wrong. I hadn’t come out yet and it was a weird thing. If I was to come out in this school, what was going to happen?”

Running amok meant adventuring. Whether we were smoking or drinking was kind of outside of the point. We just wanted to be out of the house

THE freedom of Steiner School rang much truer with Stevie Jean than the restrictions and prescriptions of sermon in chapel.

Jean attended Milkwood Steiner School where she picked up the violin at age seven (“music constantly, every day, far more than maths,” Jean remembers).

Her lingering memories of early high school resemble a chapter-by-chapter outline of a coming-of-age novel.

“Mandorah was a regular spot around that time. We were either running from the cops or from teachers,” she says.

“My early teenage years I seemed to go along with the outsider kind of crowd. We were always just running amok.

“One time I was on the back of my high school boyfriend’s quad bike running from the police because we’d had noise complaints, so we were just going through the bush with the cops trying to find us.”

Stevie said her unshackled early teenage years were more beatnik than trendy, with spontaneous escapades taking precedence over more fashionable teenage vices like smoking and drinking.

“Running amok meant adventuring,” she explains.

“Whether we were smoking or drinking was kind of outside of the point. We just wanted to be out of the house. We wanted to be in cars driving a long way away. I spent a lot of time at a swamp out at Howard Springs. I’d sneak out at night, someone would pick me, and we’d go four-wheel-driving in the swamp. We’d just sit there and watch the moon. That was the vibe. I don’t know how I got through year 12. I was out from 2am until 6am, then school from 8am.

“From ages 14 to 17 I was running amok fairly hard. From 17 to 18 kind of pulled my act together, started focusing more on my career.”

That career for Stevie Jean is starting to take shape.

“In the long run I want to make a sustainable career out of music and I want that to be my main income and my full-time job, but it’s a windy road,” says Jean.

Signed to management and publishing deals with Perambulator and SFM Publishing respectively, coming off interstate tour dates, a slot at the Arafura Games closing ceremony and a support appearance at Tash Sultana’s Darwin concert, Jean is traversing that road rather nicely.

And with new music released as of last week, Jean is ready to get return to those 14-hour days on tour again.

PREY, released last week, has Stevie Jean parachuting back up the Triple J charts.

Collaborating with Bowraville rapper Tasman Keith, the pairing has produced something taught, tense and originally wired, yet alarmingly (in a good way) reminiscent of Kendrick Lamar and Rihanna in Loyalty.

The track is rising up the Triple J charts steadily after the video — a reel which brings to life 200 seconds of acutely modern rap/hip hop — was released to sweeping praise.

After unlocking a formidable partnership and chemistry with Tasman Keith (who plays Barunga Festival next month), the duo’s musical co-experiment will extend to a full EP set for release later this year.

IN arguably the most famous coming-of-age text based in the Top End, Peter Goldsworthy’s 1989 novel Maestro charts the course of a young musician.

“Everything grew larger than life in the steamy hothouse of Darwin,” wrote Goldsworthy, “and the people were no exception.”

The same could be written of Stevie Jean some three decades later, who continues to grow before the Territory’s eyes.

Back in the exotic hothouse of her Humpty Doo hide-out, an almighty deluge descends — the rain thundering against the palms and pandanus.

“I might look calm on the surface, but I can make you nervous,” intones Jean, singing lyrics off a yet to be released song.

As she sung the rain stopped and temperature dropped. Despite a little breeze, the Humpty Doo bungalow seemed to quieten to a dead stillness.

“ELLA! Trixie!,” yelled Jean out of the hush, admonishing her Blue Heeler in Greek.

Trixie had this time emerged through a different doorway, expecting an encore.