Stuff Digital Edition

Score and three before ‘old’ muso gets break

Kate Green kate.green@stuff.co.nz

There aren’t many careers where 23 feels too old. But breaking into the music industry in her early 20s, every year it took her felt like too many for Julia Belle.

Although her first single was released in August, Belle has been writing music since she was three. Her first song was a scathing retort to the cold-blooded theft of a toy car in the preschool playground.

After 20 years refining her craft by busking with her twin sister on the streets of Byron Bay in Australia, her first professionally produced single, called No Way I Can Sleep, was released in August, with a gig at Wellington’s Cable Top Eatery in central Wellington.

It all kicked off in December last year, when Belle, now based in the capital, won a competition run by producer Toby Lloyd, whose name appears on hits by the likes of Stan Walker, Hollie Smith and Shapeshifter, and movies like Mortal Engines and The Hobbit trilogy.

The competition arose out of the first lockdown, Lloyd said, after seeing the damage Covid-19 had done to the music industry.

A former sound engineer at Massey University, he left the position with some overtime owing. Instead of cashing it in, he decided to take his payout in studio time and provide an opportunity for an upand-coming artist to cut their teeth.

In the digital age, sound quality was important. A song could be the best thing ever written, but with low production quality it would never get a look in alongside the highlyproduced singles played on the radio today.

In the end, there were two winners; Belle, and a band called Shivers.

‘‘I was looking for amazing songs,’’ Lloyd said. ‘‘Julia’s demo blew my mind.’’

Lloyd, too, was familiar with the concept of ‘‘burner artists’’. Young women like Belle would be taken on

by a record producer, and have every kind of opportunity and support thrown at them, and once they hit their late-twenties they’d be dropped. He was determined to give the artists he took on something better.

Belle summed up her fears: ‘‘Women only have a certain amount of time to succeed.

‘‘I see people younger than me who are doing better. I feel like important people will think I’m too old.

‘‘When you are somebody who doesn’t come from money or nepotism,

and you’re just trying to grow, 23 feels too old.’’

Belle described her sound as ‘‘sonically, quite dreamy’’, intended to take listeners to a different realm.

Lyrically, it was centred around her own experiences with mental health, introspective and selfdeprecating, and painfully relatable. ‘‘Often I’m not trying to find a resolution, I’m just putting it down on paper.’’

Lloyd would often get voice memos with little snippets of hastily sung tunes, scraps of a song in the making, recorded by Belle on her

phone midway through her workday.

New Zealand on Air is supporting her with its September round of New Tracks – a monthly compilation of new music from New Zealand artists distributed to broadcast and online platforms.

Her next song, taking shape quietly in Lloyd’s little studio in suburban Johnsonville, has the working title Time Flies And I’m Miserable.

‘‘It’s about being 23 and realising you’re not 16 any more, but it feels like no time has passed.’’

Arts And Culture

en-nz

2021-09-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-09-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/281792812174935

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