Interview: Angus & Julia Stone

For almost two decades, Australian siblings Angus & Julia Stone have built a singular musical world – one defined by intimate songwriting, instinctive harmonies and a sound that can feel both deeply personal and wonderfully expansive. Since the release of their debut A Book Like This in 2007, the duo have amassed more than three billion streams, an ARIA Award for Down the Way, and a catalogue that has taken them from Life Is Strange soundtracks to sold-out stages around the world. Following their 2024 album Cape Forestier and its international tour – the pair return with Karaoke Bar, a record shaped as much by the places they travelled through as by the time they spent creating together.

Written and recorded across Greece, France and Australia, Karaoke Bar captures a period of movement, reflection and creative exploration, with the spaces between touring and recording allowing the songs to evolve organically. At its heart is a familiar Angus & Julia Stone quality: music that finds emotional clarity in shared experiences, memory, distance and connection. I connected with Julia Stone to talk about the making of Karaoke Bar, the places and moments that shaped it, and how the duo continue to find new territory within their unmistakable sound. Here is what she had to tell us…

Brendon Veevers: How are you Julia and where in the world does this interview find you?

Julia Stone: I’m really good, thank you. We’re in the middle of a lot of travelling at the moment… I’m currently (happily) at home in Australia. Enjoying a week being home before everything ramps up again around the album release.

BV: We are a couple of days away from the release of your new album, Karaoke Bar which arrives on Friday. Why did you land on the title of Karaoke Bar for this new set of songs?

JS: I really love the process of figuring out what the title is gonna be. We go through the songs and try to feel what represents the music from the record.

In the end, Karaoke Bar felt like the right title. We grew up in a home that always had live music inside of it. Our dad plays in a covers band and they would rehearse at our house. Singing other people’s songs and making them their own. Whenever people were over, they would encourage them to join in. Our parents instilled this idea that music was and is for everyone… that everyone has a voice and has a right to be heard (if they want to). I suppose we grew up seeing that music brought people together and dissolved loneliness.

When we were making this album, we were touring The Living Room Sessions, which was all about that time back in our living room growing up, and it felt amazing to be in those old theatres around the world with people coming together and singing all the songs from over our twenty years of making records. The crowds were singing a lot of the songs back to us.

We were writing and recording these songs between shows on that tour and… so yeah, it felt like Karaoke Bar (the song and the title) what it represents as a place and experience is the energy of this record.

BV: The title track of the record was written on the Greek Island of Hydra, near Leonard Cohen’s former home. What was it about that place and moment that sparked the song, and how much did the setting influence the wider album?

JS: Hydra was so incredible. Very cinematic. Cats roaming around the studio and the streets, cigarette smoke moving through the walls, big tall windows looking out over the Aegean Sea. From memory we wrote Karaoke Bar, Celestial Bodies and the start of The Start and Brightest Place there.

Places always find their way into music somehow, but I don’t know that the setting or any of the places we recorded consciously influenced the whole album. The places just kind of become a part of the music in the same way a conversation or a feeling can get into a song… it’s all happening by symbiosis most of the time without really noticing how.

Being near Leonard Cohen’s old home was special for sure. He had such a big impact on us as young people. I remember listening to Bird on the Wire in my room as a teenager and feeling like I wasn’t alone in the world.

We had the good fortune of spending an evening with his son Adam at the studio, who had popped up to the studio to say hello. We ended up sitting around the kitchen table chatting and drinking wine into the night. A beautiful night.

BV: Many of your previous records have explored longing, reflection, and vulnerability. What emotional thread would you say connects the songs on Karaoke Bar?

JS: I feel like so often with songwriting, you’re drawing on memories and feelings without necessarily knowing exactly where they’ve come from. Then later you listen back and realise there’s a thread connecting everything. Or maybe never finding that thread. Some songs that I wrote twenty years ago have shifted and changed in meaning and the original idea I had, about what the song was about, is completely void.

But to answer your question, I currently get the sense that this record has a thread of joy through it. We still are singing songs about loss, home, vulnerability but I guess it leans into something light within that.

BV: Looking back at the writing and recording process, was there a particular song on Karaoke Bar that you have fallen in love with more than others?

JS: At the moment, the song I’m loving the most is Brightest Place. It almost didn’t make the record.

It started in Greece, got tweaked in France and then finished in Australia. It travelled with us from the beginning to the end and, for me, it was one of those songs that never felt quite finished. I just never could settle on the verse. I tried about six different versions and then right at the end I ended up choosing the first verse I’d written at the beginning.

I love when that happens. You can spend all this time trying to better something and then realise the first instinct was actually the one.

BV: You and Angus have been making music together professionally for nearly two decades. How has your sibling dynamic evolved creatively since your debut in 2007?

JS: I think we’ve grown up a lot. When we started, we were learning everything at the same time… songwriting, performing, running a business, figuring out who we were as artists. It was a very raw time.

Now there’s more freedom in the way we work. We can make different choices because of those years of experiencing the world and its ups and downs. And, it’s not like advice I could have given my younger self and she would have been able to understand or even listen to what I was saying.

You just have to live through stuff, make mistakes, get hurt, fall in love, get broken a few times… and I guess knowing that the journey just keeps going on and on. The seventy year old me telling me stuff now, I don’t know that I’d be able to hear those lessons either. I’d probably at least try to listen now.

BV: When you’re writing together today, are there roles that each of you naturally fall into, or has that balance shifted over the years?

JS: Yeah, there are definitely some roles that we naturally fall into now, mostly because we’ve figured out what each of us is stronger at. I’ve become more of the main engineer for vocal tracking. I prefer to engineer my own vocals, and I also like recording Angus’s vocals because I understand how he works and he likes that I can move quickly with the way he tracks.

Angus almost always plays the bass parts for our songs. He has a really clear way of building the rhythm and helping define the foundation of a song.

But there’s also a lot of flexibility. We’ve both become much more confident as artists and producers over the years, which means we’re more comfortable letting the other person take an idea somewhere without feeling like we need to control it. We used to have songs individually fully written before we came into the studio, whereas now we’ll often just show up and see what happens. I think that’s been a really big shift in the way we work together.

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BV: Having experienced the highs, challenges, solo projects, and reunions that come with a long career, what has been the secret to keeping Angus & Julia Stone creatively exciting for both of you?

JS: Angus always says, “the best rest is a change of work,” and I agree with him. We’ve always felt that change is something that feeds us and, in turn, feeds the project. We love creating music together, but I think that’s partly because we also have periods where we don’t… where we’re creating things with other people or working on other projects.

I think because we’ve always had quite a loose grip on working together, it gives us the freedom to come and go as we please. Neither of us feels bound to the project… I think that freedom has actually been a really important part of why we’ve been able to keep creating together for so long.

BV: When people think of Angus & Julia Stone, “Big Jet Plane” is often the song that immediately comes to mind. Looking back now, what does that song mean to you and how do you view its legacy?

JS: I think once you release music into the world, it becomes a shared thing. It’s no longer just a song that you wrote, but something that people have their own memories and feelings about.

Big Jet Plane has been that with a lot of people and so that song feels like something else altogether now. It’s become all these individual people’s song…  part of their lives, part of their soundtrack but it’s also something that connects them to each other and to us. You feel that most acutely at shows, when everyone in the crowd is singing together and the song back to us.

A friend of ours explained it to us in a nice way. A song like that becomes a doorway into the house of art that you’ve created. Big Jet Plane is like the front door to our house. To have a song like that, we’re incredibly grateful. We love all the songs we’ve made, and this one so often becomes a way for people to discover the wider world of music and art we’ve created together, as well as our solo projects.

BV: You’ve now reached your seventh studio album – a milestone few artists achieve while remaining creatively relevant. Has your definition of success changed since those early days, and if so, what does success look like for Angus & Julia Stone in 2026?

JS: Back when we were starting, success was really about continuing… just getting to the next thing. There were lots of little wins: getting to a point where the microphones weren’t feeding back on stage, learning to tune a guitar quickly between songs while still talking to the crowd, getting people to sign up to a mailing list, selling out a 100-cap venue, selling out our homemade merch we made in the garage. It was all these small moments that allowed us to keep going.

I suppose success feels much the same now, just on a different scale. It’s having the freedom to make music, to keep learning, to work with people I love, and to still feel genuinely excited about what we’re doing.

BV: As you prepare to release Karaoke Bar this September, what do you hope listeners take away from the album after spending time with it, particularly in the world we’re living in today?

JS: It’s an interesting question. I don’t really hope for anything in particular. I think the beauty of releasing music is that it’s such an individual experience… what people take from it depends on when and how they hear it, and what’s happening in their own lives at that moment.

All I can really say is we had a lot of fun making it, and I think that feeling is in the music for me.

BV: You played an intimate evening at KOKO in London a couple of months ago. How was the show and how does an intimate setting change the way you approach a performance?

JS: I love intimate shows because you can really feel the audience. They’re right there… you can see people’s faces, see people crying, smiling or just staring intently. It’s sometimes more intense than bigger shows because you can see peoples faces so clearly. But I like it_ I like connecting directly with people like that.

BV: You’ve played a long list of highly celebrated venues around the world in your career. What is it about London audiences – and KOKO specifically – that makes returning to the city special?

JS: We started out in London, almost twenty years ago. We lived in London for just over two years. We made our first record here and got our first record deal in London. We did all the open mic nights, the acoustic nights, and the long tours around the UK playing to half-empty rooms. We really cut our teeth here, and because of that there’s such a deep appreciation for this city.

I also think London audiences are really into music. They really listen to the songs, and I think we can feel that people are genuinely excited for us to be here and playing the music.

We’ve played the Royal Albert Hall and we’ve played The Betsey Trotwood, and everything in between. It’s probably the city where we’ve played the most shows and in the most different kinds of venues and they’ve all given something back to us.

Angus & Julia Stones brand new album, Karaoke Bar is out this Friday. 

Brendon Veevers

::: RenownedForSound.com’s Editor and Founder –
Interviewing and reviewing the best in new music and globally recognized artists is his passion.
Over the years he has been lucky enough to review thousands of music releases and concerts and interview artists ranging from top selling superstars like 27-time Grammy Award winner Alison Krauss, Boyz II Men, Roxette, Cyndi Lauper, Lisa Loeb and iconic Eagles front man/songwriter, Glenn Frey through to more recent successes including Newton Faulkner, Janelle Monae and Caro Emerald.
Brendon manages and coordinates the amazing team of writers on RenownedForSound.com who are based in the UK, the U.S and Australia.