Loud and Clear: Stella Donnelly
Fremantle singer-songwriter Stella Donnelly brings a unique voice and fearlessness to her music.
On a windy Friday afternoon in the Queensland capital, a young woman in a maroon jumpsuit steps out from the shadows to stand centrestage in the sunshine, electric guitar in hand. “G’day Brisbane — how ya goin’?” she begins. “My name’s Stella Donnelly. I’m from Fremantle, and it’s so great to be here.”
As the first of three acts this evening at the Riverstage, hers is the toughest assignment, playing as she is to a crowd of a few hundred people laid out on picnic blankets on the big green hill as well as a few dozen leaning against the front barrier. Most of them are here to see the headline act, roots rockers John Butler Trio. But with a vocal talent that’s evident within seconds of her first song and a fine line in charming self-deprecation that helps to ease the scepticism of unfamiliar listeners, she soon has the early birds on her side.
“This next song is about my old boss at a pub that I used to work at, back in Freo — it’s called U Owe Me,” she says after her opener. Donnelly cuts a small figure, but her set of sharp, smart songs — coloured by memorable rhyming couplets such as “You’re jerking off to the CCTV / While I’m pouring plastic pints of flat VB” — makes a big impression. She dons a harmonica for a stripped-back cover of Kylie Minogue’s I Believe in You, which shows off a sweet warble at the top of her register and earns hearty applause from the onlookers. “This next song is called Boys Will Be Boys, and it’s a little more serious than my others,” she says halfway through her set. “I wrote this song about three or four years ago now, and just to give a quick content warning, it does involve sexual assault and victim blaming.
“It’s about something that happened to a very close friend of mine.”
She begins finger-picking a slow, waltz-like chord progression. “My friend told me of a secret / Told me that she blames herself,” she sings slowly, enunciating every syllable. “You invaded her magnificence / Put your hand over her mouth.”
There is a sense of dark clouds approaching on this otherwise sunny afternoon, as the young songwriter tells a troubling story that demands to be heard. In its chorus, she sings, “But why was she all alone / Wearing her shirt that low? / They said, ‘Boys will be boys’ / Deaf to the word ‘no’.”
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In the hours leading up to her performance, Donnelly is unfailingly polite and friendly with everyone she comes across — a living embodiment of treating people as you’d wish to be treated. She shakes hands with security staff and takes the time to get their names right; with one of the stage crew, she quickly bonds over their shared Welsh heritage.
Her mother is Welsh and her father is Australian. This cultural cross-pollination meant that she grew up listening to Stereophonics and Catatonia alongside the likes of Paul Kelly and Hunters & Collectors. She is left-handed, but it was her father who encouraged her to learn her instrument right-handed, so that she could easily pick up and play any guitar at a party — good advice, as it turned out.
In her dressing room, her rider features potato chips and chocolate as well as an ample supply of fruit. “Bananas are my fuel,” she says, smiling. “I’m obsessed with them. Better than cocaine; I could be into that, but I’m into bananas instead.”
She describes this tour as a dream come true, and considering that she began writing and recording songs under her own name only a few years ago — after plenty of time spent gigging in West Australian cover acts and indie bands — that phrase seems an apt way to capture the notion of being the opening artist on a national tour that has taken in big venues like the Sydney Opera House forecourt and Melbourne’s Myer Music Bowl, as well as smaller venues in Bundaberg and Coffs Harbour.
But for a show in Perth’s Kings Park with her band on February 1, she has performed the remaining 10 of these concerts solo. “I’m about to take the band on a 10-week tour,” she says, “So I’m making up the pennies while I can on the John Butler tour.” From mid-March through to early May, they’ll play more than 30 dates in the US, Europe and Britain, then take off again for another nine-week run, including festivals in July such as Japan’s Fuji Rock and Roskilde in Denmark.
Before all of that, though, her debut album Beware of the Dogs will be released worldwide via independent record label Secretly Canadian, which means that Donnelly’s label-mates include Philadelphia band the War on Drugs, Yoko Ono and fellow Australian songwriter Alex Cameron.
Recorded in WA last winter with bassist Jennifer Aslett, drummer Talya Valenti and guitarist George Foster, its 13 tracks are roughly half full-band treatments and half solo recordings in the style of her six-song debut EP, Thrush Metal, which was captured in her lounge room on a $100 guitar and released in 2017. Its cover photograph features the songwriter with noodles hanging out of her mouth, and its first run consisted of just 30 cassette tapes.
The EP included Boys Will Be Boys, and it’s that four-minute track that put her on the map internationally. Written before the #MeToo movement that swept across the culture but released in its midst, the song’s moving music video centres on several silent young women filmed in mundane home environments — sitting alone on a bed among disturbed bed sheets; in the backyard bringing in the washing — while each appears to harbour something they’d rather not speak about.
“It’s not really my song any more, in a way,” says Donnelly. “Hearing so many people’s personal experiences after they’ve heard that song, I feel as though that song can belong to anyone, for many different reasons. I’m more than happy for it to be used as a resource for learning or understanding, because it came from a really real place.”
The decision to include that track on Beware of the Dogs came late in the process, but she’s happy she made that call. “Unfortunately, I feel that that song still needs to be heard,” she says. “Out of all the songs I had on the EP, that song still hurts the most. I still feel it.”
The album’s gorgeous lead single, Old Man, treads similar emotional ground but from a different perspective — that of an abuse victim weighing when they’ll divulge their secret. “Are you scared of me, old man? Or are you scared of what I’ll do?” she sings in its chorus. “You grabbed me with an open hand / The world is grabbing back at you.”
Donnelly wrote the chorus following Thrush Metal’s release — “After the #MeToo moment had happened, it was this strange feeling of watching the world change in front of me, for women,” she says — and the rest came together while recording the album. She likes that its playful, melodic arrangement is offset by the dark tones of its lyrical content. “It was a way for me to also put the middle finger up to anyone who trolled me when I put out Boys Will Be Boys. I didn’t want to change the way I wrote my music just because now I have an audience.”
The minimal music industry infrastructure she found at home in Fremantle means Donnelly never expected she’d be playing her songs to big crowds. Yet here she is, a known name internationally thanks to adulatory coverage on indie rock website Pitchfork and The New York Times, as well as becoming a fixture at festivals nationally after Triple J named her as its Unearthed artist of the year in 2017.
“Essentially she’s in the lineage of the folk tradition, and our job is all about story and what’s actually happening around us in society,” says John Butler, who shares a manager with Donnelly. “It may have our personal slant on it but it’s an important role for culture. Stella is brave, too; not afraid to lose a few people. I like that. We’re not here to keep the masses sedate and comfy. We’re here to speak our minds.”
Looking ahead to the near future that will see her away from home with her friends, playing in venues small and large, she defers to fellow songwriter Julia Jacklin, who recently posted on Instagram on the release day of her second album, Crushing, that she was about to begin “a year of staring at my own face/soul”. That rings true for Donnelly, who anticipates that she’ll spend much of this year “holding a mirror up to myself, and looking in at the good and the f..kin’ shitty stuff”.
Such is the life of a professional touring musician, which is rooted in the art of repetition. She has learned, however, the value of packing a particular possession among the necessities of life on the road: a portable fishing rod.
“In Fremantle, I used to live on an isthmus, with the ocean on one side, and a river on the other,” she says. “I went fishing with my dad a lot when I was young. It’s a good way to meditate. Usually, I caught nothing: a couple of puffer fish, and that’s about it. But I’m serious about fishing: if this music thing dries up, I’ll have my version of a Rex Hunt fishing show in no time.”
Donnelly carries her instrument out to the big stage, where she greets the technician at the sound desk before briefly running through a couple of songs: one finger-picked, one strummed. With a guitar slung over her shoulder and a microphone before her mouth, she faces the empty green lawn and sings. Her voice rings out loud and clear.
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Halfway through her performance of Boys Will Be Boys, Donnelly’s hands work through the chord changes while she sings what is one of the most wrenching and unflinching examinations of human relations in popular Australian music. It is a masterpiece of lyrical economy, evoking deep feeling and meaning with just a few words.
At Donnelly’s feet, up near the barrier, a young woman holds a small boy against her hip. As mother and son gently sway together, here is a scene of the potential power of art. Maybe that early exposure to a song like this will influence his later behaviour towards his fellow men and women. Maybe Donnelly is helping to build a kinder world for all, one listener at a time.
Before she began playing that powerful song, Donnelly spoke a little more about its origins. “When this thing happened to my friend and she opened up to the people around her about what happened, they questioned her,” she said. “I even remember hearing some of my girlfriends at the time asking her, ‘What were you wearing that night? Why did you get so drunk? Why did you talk to that guy in the first place?’
“That’s just not good enough,” she continued. “We need to stop questioning women and everyone on how they dress and how they act, because no one’s ever asking for it. But I also wrote this song because I’ve got a 16-year-old brother, and I know so many beautiful, amazing, gentle men in my life that don’t deserve to be bundled into that whole ‘Boys will be boys, they’re all the same’ kind of attitude. Because it’s not true; they’re not all the same. The more that we do that, the more blame we’re putting back on the victims. It’s just not cool.”
In its closing lines, she sings, “Like a mower in the morning / I will never let you rest / You broke all the bonds she gave you / Time to pay the f..king rent”. Once the song ends, it’s as though that dark cloud has dissipated — but for first-time listeners here at the Riverstage, its message will likely linger long in the memory.
Keenly aware of the song’s power, Donnelly knows the show must move on from the troubling emotional terrain it explores on this Friday afternoon. Up next is Tricks, a song from her forthcoming album — whose music video was directed by Jacklin — wherein she mimics the sound of its lead guitar break by singing the notes aloud. When the crowd cheers for her mouth-guitar solo, she laughs and says, “Don’t pity me!”
Before she leaves the stage, she describes recording her EP as “a bit of a joke. I thought, ‘30 cassette tapes — Mum and Dad and 28 mates. They’ll find it funny.’
“Alas, everything went a little differently, and now I’m here, and Thrush Metal is written on a record and I’m not sure if it’s funny any more, but I’m just going with it. Anyway, this song is off that EP — it’s called Mean to Me.” As the sun sets after her performance, the young woman in the maroon jumpsuit treks up the hill to the merchandise desk, where she is available for autographs, handshakes, hugs and photos with her fans — male and female, young and old. Well before she arrives, a queue has formed.
Beware of the Dogs is self-released on Friday via MGM. Stella Donnelly performs at The Farmer & the Owl festival in Wollongong today, followed by Sydney (Wednesday and Thursday) and Melbourne (Saturday).