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Appalachian Popular Programming Society

 

APPS presents: 

Julia Jacklin (solo) with Blondshell 

 

The Schaefer Center

April 5, 2024

 

$5 for students and $10 for the public. 

Doors will open at 7:00pm, and the show will begin at 8:00pm. 

 

BUY YOUR TICKETS HERE

Questions? Reach out to The Schaefer Center box office at (828) 262-4046

 

“A lot of the time I feel like I need to do all the work before I can enjoy my life,” says Julia Jacklin of her third album, PRE PLEASURE. “Whether that’s work on songs or sex, friendships, or my relationship with my family – I think if I work on them long and hard enough, eventually I’ll get to sit around and really enjoy them. But that’s not how anything works is it. It’s all an ongoing process.”

The binary of casual crisis is a powerful force in Julia Jacklin’s music. Since releasing her debut album Don’t Let the Kids Win in 2016, the Melbourne-via-Blue Mountains singer/songwriter has carved out a fearsome reputation as a direct lyricist, willing to excavate the parameters of intimacy and agency in songs both stark and raw, loose, and playful. If her folky 2016 debut Don’t Let the Kids Win announced those intentions, and the startling 2019 follow-up Crushing drew in listeners uncomfortably close, PRE PLEASURE is the sound of Jacklin gently loosening her grip.

Conceived upon returning home at the end of a mammoth Crushing world tour, and finished in a frantic few months of recording in Montreal (“The songs on this record took either three years to write or three minutes”), PRE PLEASURE sees Jacklin expanding beyond her signature sound, while conjuring the ripples and faultlines caused by unreliable communication.

Stirring piano-led opener ‘Lydia Wears A Cross’ channels the underage confusion of being told religion is profound, despite only feeling it during the spectacle of its pageantry. The gentle pulse of ‘Love, Try Not To Let Go’ and dreamy strings of ‘Ignore Tenderness’ betray an interrogation of consent and emotional injury (beneath the sheets you’re just a cave / a plastic bucket, or a grave / who said you’re not what you get / you are what you gave away). The stark ‘Less Of A Stranger’ picks at the generational thread of a mother/daughter relationship, while the hymnal ‘Too In Love To Die’ and loose jam of ‘Be Careful With Yourself’ equate true love with the fear of losing it. Gorgeous string-drenched closer ‘End Of A Friendship’ offers a grand gesture of post-communication – an effort to bestow fireworks on a friendship that’s fizzled out.

“I care so much about the people around me, so much it makes me want to sleep forever, it feels so overwhelming” says Jacklin. “I wasn’t raised in an environment where language was used to express love and care, part of my songwriting process is me trying to rectify that, force myself to put words to those feelings”

Recorded in Montreal with co-producer Marcus Paquin (The Weather Station, The National), PRE PLEASURE finds Jacklin teamed with her Canada-based touring band, bassist Ben Whiteley and guitarist Will Kidman, both of Canadian folk outfit The Weather Station. It also introduces drummer Laurie Torres, saxophonist Adam Kinner and string arrangements by Owen Pallett (Arcade Fire) recorded by a full orchestra in Prague.

“Making a record to me has always just been about the experience, a new experience in a new place with a new person at the desk, taking the plunge and just seeing what happens” says Jacklin, on the decision to travel to Canada and work with a new producer for the third time in as many albums. “For the first time I stepped away from the guitar, and wrote a lot of the album on the Roland keyboard in my apartment in Montreal with its inbuilt band tracks. I blu-tacked reams of butcher paper to the walls, covered in lyrics and ideas, praying to the music gods that my brain would arrange everything in time.” 

You can hear it in the spare drum machine and piano of ‘Lydia Wears A Cross’, which rustles to life on clattering percussion, synths and a solitary dirty lead guitar line. ‘Love, Try Not To Let Go’ (“I need you to believe me when I said I found it hard / to keep myself from floating away”) skates along on airy keys and crisp drums, before blossoming into thundering guitar chords under Jacklin’s full-voiced declaration: “try not to let go”. The sprinkling of strings, chimes and saxophone lend ‘ignore tenderness’, ‘Moviegoer’ and ‘End Of A Friendship’ a woozy dreaminess at odds with Jacklin’s detailed portrayals of shifting personal politics.

Those musical flourishes can be traced to an inspiration Jacklin rediscovered while questioning her own motivation at the end of the Crushing tour. “Once music becomes your job, you can lose the purity of music fandom,” says Jacklin. “I spent the last two years trying to reconnect with that. I didn’t play much, I just listened. Especially to a lot of big pop music like Celine Dion, Robyn and Luther Vandross – music that wasn’t so heavy, big feelings, big production. You lose sight of what putting on a big, beautiful song can do.”

Jacklin remembers being eight years old, sitting at the kitchen bench playing the Canadian superstar’s 1996 hit ‘Because You Loved Me’ on repeat from her dad’s CD player. Listening to it again in 2020, “brought back a lot of nice, uncomplicated feelings about music,” says Jacklin. “Pure joy and feeling. And as someone relatively introverted and trying to be cool, Céline was a good person for me to lock onto during this period, because she’s definitely not that. She’s dramatic as hell and incredibly cheesy. I think listening to her helped me get over myself.”

There are moments throughout the ten songs that reflect this source inspiration, and Jacklin’s willingness to explore new terrain as both a producer and songwriter, but ultimately PRE PLEASURE presents Jacklin as her most authentic self; an uncompromising and masterful lyricist, always willing to mine the depths of her own life experience, and singular in translating it into deeply personal, timeless songs.

 


In the past few years, 25-year-old Sabrina Teitelbaum has transformed into a songwriter without fear. The loud-quiet excavations that comprise her hook-filled debut as Blondshell don’t only stare traumas in the eye—they tear them at the root and shake them, bringing precise detail to colossal feelings. They’re clear-eyed statements of and about digging your way towards confidence, self-possession, and relief.

Teitelbaum grew up in a classic rock-loving household in several Midtown Manhattan apartments, raised primarily by her single dad. During an era of sleek teen radio pop, her most formative childhood obsession was the Rolling Stones. Piano and guitar offered a means of processing the instability around her. “I had a lot of really big feelings, but I had learned as a child that I couldn’t really express them,” she says. “Performing and writing ended up being the only place where I could get any feelings out.” In high school, she discovered new indie-rock bands by scouring the websites of Bowery venues with her fake ID in hand—teen fascinations that instilled in her a love for lyrics with specificity and intensity, particularly as learned from The National, whose lyrics “informed a lot of the way I write.”

But when Teitelbaum moved to Los Angeles for music school in 2015, she began forging a different path. Entering USC’s Pop Program, she was swept into a context where the brooding pop legacies of Lorde and Lana Del Rey reigned. She dropped out after two years, but Teitelbaum studied classic and jazz theory, the art of harmonies, and found herself writing songs inside the world of pop studio sessions.

The biggest gift the pop machine gave her was the stark clarity of realizing that she didn’t quite belong there. Her music was increasingly too raw and intense to easily categorize, and after finishing her last full-on pop EP with producer Yves Rothman (Yves Tumor, Girlpool, Porches) at the start of the pandemic, she gave herself permission to write without expectation. She began penning songs just for herself, with no thought that she would release them. The process emboldened her. Subtracting self-consciousness became a catalyst for the lucid songs of Blondshell, on which her experiences all coalesce to form her truest expressions of self yet. “It was me, as a person, in my songs,” she says. When she showed a few to Rothman, he encouraged her to write an album, joining a chorus of friends saying, “This is you.”

This moment of creative self-reckoning was the tip of the iceberg for Teitelbaum during a season of profound change; she had also gotten sober in early 2020. “There was a rush of really intense emotions,” she says. “I was going through a lot of things that put me in a position to be as honest as possible.”

That bracing honesty charges every note of Blondshell. With the world at a screeching halt, she recommitted to guitar and revisited the galvanic 90s alt-rock of Nirvana and Hole, absorbing their simmers and explosions, the crests and contours that made their abrasive version of pop so potent. Immersing herself into books, too—particularly the writing of Patti Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Rachel Cusk, and Clare Sestanovich—she found patience and permission. “I loved how seriously she took her own experiences,” Teitelbaum says of Solnit’s Recollections of My Nonexistence. “It helped me not trivialize the things I was going through.”

Powered by brilliant, crystalline melodies, Teitelbaum’s eloquent writing takes root in the concrete: every line is literal, a keyhole to a bigger truth. “I think my kink is when you tell me that you think I’m pretty,” she sings on “Kiss City,” a witty expression of learning to state desire; “I think you watched way too much HBO growing up,” goes “Joiner,” a blunt address of formative damage. Blondshell is about learning and unlearning, about untangling the ways we’re taught to accept bad behavior, about peeling the layers back. These intelligent songs often contain the epiphanies of therapy sessions more than pop sessions, even when the hooks are simply a blast. “The lyrics are really vulnerable and they were scary to say,” she says. “I feel like the shredding guitars are a protective shell.”

When Teitelbaum sings “Logan’s a dick/I’m learning that’s hot” on the explosive opener “Veronica Mars,” there’s a subtly-stated depiction of how the media conditions us as kids. Later, in the gigantic chorus of “Sepsis”—“It should take a whole lot less to turn me off”—she offers a concise, mic-dropping summary of how those ingrained standards play out later in life, as the song chronicles the process of learning self-respect in the face of toxic behavior. (“It was about how it shouldn’t take as much gross behavior for me to be turned off,” Teitelbaum elaborates. “After one or two negative experiences with someone, I should be like, ‘OK, going to move on now, that’s too *bleep*ed up and disrespectful.’”) And when “Olympus” arrives at its refrain, “I want to save myself/You’re part of my addiction,” Teitelbaum vividly captures how addictions can be transferred from substances to people.

For all its complicated, soul-baring subject matter—processing post-lockdown social anxiety, her relationships with men as well as with women—Blondshell is a comfort, and its songs often contain the perfectly-calibrated humor and levity we need to survive. “There were a lot of things that I was running away from—mainly loneliness, self-esteem stuff,” Teitelbaum says.

It all left her yearning to make the kind of music that has helped her feel empowered herself—and the way there was in telling the truth. “I always want to make people feel like they have more power and control and peace because I know what it feels like to want that for myself. I know how music has helped me get there,” she says. “What I’ve realized I need to do is write realistically, and try to not bring shame into the writing. Each song gave me more confidence. I hope the songs help people in that way, too.”

 

 

 

Appalachian Popular Programming Society (APPS) serves as the primary student programming board at App State and is responsible for planning diverse, quality events for the entire community. Advised by the Campus Activities Office, APPS aspires to establish transformational experiences and a deep sense of belonging to all Appalachian students through educational and entertaining programs and events.