Living across the ditch for a decade, Julia Belle and her sister busked on the streets of Lismore, NSW, and when back home in Wellington for holidays, from her earliest teenage years. Way before then she recalls composing her own songs before even starting primary school, using a family dictaphone to record and play them to friends. A career in music seemed likely, but life challenges have meant it has taken her until 27 to release her first long player, the painfully frank yet hope-laced ‘Dreamland’. She discussed the EP/album with Richard Thorne.

“I started playing guitar when I was 10, which is when I started actually writing music. But when I was like, literally three years old I remember being like, ‘This is a song I wrote’.

“I was so serious about it that once I got older I’d listen to back to those old songs, and then at school I would make people sit down and listen to me sing these songs I wrote when I was three! Obviously they were ridiculous songs, but I think I’ve always been inclined towards that for some reason.”

Bic Runga was a Kiwi favourite in her busking years, with solo Irish artist Hozier and English singer-songwriter Gabrielle Aplin rating high among early influences.
“I was really, really obsessed with both of them for a long time! They were early song structure influences, like Hozier made me all about putting poetry in your lyrics.”

A similarly introspective acoustic artist, Julia’s first studio experience in her mid-teens was deflating, a setback rather than progress towards any recording musician dreams she may have harboured.

“It was like, ‘Alright, 130 beats per minute, three-minute-30 song, upbeat, happy. Write it right now, and we’ll record it.’ And here I was, used to singing like Hozier Irish folk, like really depressing music! And I was like, ‘Oh, I can’t do that.’ And of course, it came out and I wasn’t proud of at all, because it had nothing to do with me, and my life and my experience.”

The opposite must be said of ‘Dreamland’, an intimate and often raw expose of mental turmoil and escapism, seven tracks that document her years-long struggle with OCD. Named for the solace of day dreaming, it is very much about Julia’s personal journey, with pain and confusion evident. Yet through the excellence of her songwriting and engaging voice, there is considerable beauty in her folk-pop EP that will hold real-life meaning for many.

To some degree the lyrics stem from a treatment diary of her daily struggles with OCD that reached a two-year peak in her mid-twenties, partly including the period of recording.
“I wrote these songs while trying to make sense of my mind,” says Julia. “There’s always a pull between what’s real and what’s safe in my head.”

She describes a therapy for people experiencing multiple OCD issues in which you list them in terms of impact, and work on number one, the easiest thing, until you can get to address number two. Then once number two feels like a one, you move to number three, and so on…

“So I had these lists, and I was writing notes on like, how difficult those things were, and how I felt internally about that. And that really led into lyrics that I would just write in my on my notes app, that weren’t really necessarily related to each other as a song concept. At times I would put them all together, which ones were in the same realm and felt like they were in the same story. And sometimes the melody came and sometimes it didn’t, but the ones that did come are the ones on the EP.”

‘Dreamland’ was recorded with Wellington producer Toby Lloyd of Tiny Triumph Recordings, who Julia has gotten to know since 2019.
“I didn’t have any kind of resources to do any recording at all, I was just 21 and really poor! I was posting clips of my songs, and just like tagging Wellington and stuff, and somehow from that Toby and I had started to follow each other. Then in 2020 I got messaged saying he was doing this competition for musicians, because of the financial hardship of Covid, and I should apply.

“So I sent in a demo, I think on like the last day, and then I won the competition, and I got to record with him, making a music video and everything! It was just an amazing experience, especially after that time in Australia!

“With Toby it is about, ‘How can we serve your artistry? How can we serve the music? How can we be as authentic to you as possible?’ And I think coming off that other experience, I was like, ‘Wow, this is amazing!’ Even though I was still finding my sound for a couple years after that, just everything about the experience made me feel like, ‘Yeah, this is who I want to work with.’

Lloyd, who has a long list of credits among artists of various genres, is equally complimentary of Julia as an artist.

“Julia truly is one of the most gifted songwriters and artists I’ve had the privilege of working with in my very long career in this industry. She is absolutely incredible. The single Let Go is a stunning and poetic song, with melodies and harmonies that will get stuck in your head for days!”

Hoping for NZ On Air Development funding they held off until a second application was turned down, then determined to just record the whole EP a couple of songs at a time, whenever she had enough money for the recording and mastering. An 18 month-plus process since they started recording, the seven-song EP alternates escapist ‘dream’ tracks, with others that face the realities of her mental health battles, coming to a close with Let Go.

“I think there’s probably several key songs on the EP, depending on what mindset the listener is in when they’re listening to it,” smiles Julia. “But Let Go is, I guess, the crescendo, where in all of the other songs I’m either in complete crisis or I’m in some kind of escapism dreamscape. Let Go is like, ‘Okay, well you have to do something about this, you can’t just stay like this forever.

“For me Let Go has an open-ended meaning, and in the music video we kind of did that with a hopeful and a hopeless. So the hopeless is; ‘You can go this direction, where you jump off the ledge’, which is what the lyric says (and that can mean something really terrible and dire). Or you can go this direction, and jump off the ledge metaphorically; aka, I’m letting go of all of this terrible stuff that’s happening to me. And you have to choose. Like, you’ve just spent six songs talking about how cripplingly mentally ill you are – do something about it. Make a choice!”

With an engaging natural vibrato in her singing voice she gets a lot of Gracie Abrams comparisons, and being a fan herself is happy about that. Noah Kahan, Phoebe Bridgers and Adrianne Lenker are artists she says “gave her permission” to be openly vulnerable and sad in her music.

“In a way where I was trying to not be that for a while, because I was like, ‘Oh, this is embarrassing.’ Or other people can be like, ‘Oh, your music’s really sad.’ But actually, that’s who I am, and the experience that I was having at that time – and that will evolve and change over time.

“For the first time I feel really solidly about all of the songs, even though I feel some of them like scary or embarrassing to release, because they are so honest. All of them I’m like, ‘Yeah, this is true, this is me,’ for the first time.

“You know what, if I didn’t get to record any more music for some reason, I would be completely content with this EP. But I hope that I get the privilege to continue recording. I’ve got at least two albums worth of songs that I’ve written since this project ended. It is seriously difficult at times to record as an independent, honestly. But seriously, a privilege, and I really want to keep making music.”