“I think making music in general is just an endless process of being so deep within yourself, but then you have to get over yourself to actually put it down,” Julia Jacklin tells Apple Music. “You can't take yourself too seriously and you can't feel anything is important, even yourself, because then you're just going to be too paralysed to actually put anything down in a recording. You have to lose the ego in the studio, but you need the ego to write the music in the first place.” The Blue Mountains-born, Melbourne-based singer-songwriter let herself—and her ego—free on her third album, PRE PLEASURE. There’s a sense of thrilling musical freedom throughout, partly because she took melodramatic inspiration from Céline Dion, partly because it's what she calls her “most-produced” album yet, with new sounds, instruments (including an orchestra), beats and melodies throughout. Still, the emotions, the stories and the intimacy within her music are every bit as affecting, personal and often heart-wrenching as ever. PRE PLEASURE contains songs that reflect on love, friendship, growing up around religion, her relationship with her mother, and how art and artists were perceived during the pandemic. With production that reflects the thematic versatility throughout, no two songs sound alike—but they all fit together into a cohesive, enveloping release. Here, Jacklin dives into some of the tracks. “Lydia Wears a Cross” “This was a nice little gesture to my child self. As I get older, I think a lot more about that time in my life and how it impacted me in the long term. I grew up in a family that wasn’t religious, but it was one of those families where everyone had been raised religious, so the rituals stayed. And with school, you’re praying every morning, during every assembly you're singing worship songs. I really enjoyed a lot of it because I loved singing and I loved community. But it just seemed quite negative as well. It was very full of shame and blame. Mass felt like it was supposed to be difficult and punishing; you were supposed to leave feeling bad about yourself. When I was a child, I had no control over my own life, and that's when organised religion was the most prevalent. Whereas now I can make my own choices, I can choose to stay out of those places.” “Too in Love to Die” “This was the first song I wrote for the record. It signalled for me that there was a new chapter about to emerge, because it was the first song I'd written in quite a long time that I actually liked and that felt worth recording. I’ve never really been able to write a love song, I’ve always found them quite difficult. So this was my first kind of straight-up love song, even though it sounds super sad. The first section of the song was written on a plane—I remember just sitting on a plane and thinking, like, ‘It'd be such a shame if this plane went down, because things are going well for me right now.’ It’s about that feeling when you're in the early stages of being really in love. For me, loving someone is so closely tied to the fear of losing them. Mortality is the other side of love, or something like that.” “Moviegoer” “I wrote this in Walkerville, a beach town in Victoria. It was informed by the time—I wrote it in 2020. I was getting sick of how much the discourse at the time was talking about how important music is and how important artists are, while at the same time, so many people were being asked to work for free. I was at a stage where I was questioning whether or not music was actually that important. I was feeling very down on art in general—the place I was staying at had no Wi-Fi, so I was just watching DVDs, and a couple of those films were just pointless and pretentious, and I knew they must’ve cost a lot of money to make. I was also thinking about the idea that art is supposed to be very cathartic for creators and very therapeutic to its consumers, but it's just not always the case. A lot of people who create art live quite sad lives. It can be very soothing for people, but people also need community and support and a good health care system and good mental health resources. We can’t just rely on art to pick up the slack.” “Magic” “That one happened very quickly. I wrote it in my apartment in Montreal, and then just brought it into the studio the next day. I wanted a song that gave a lot of weight and respect to how much negative sexual experiences affect us and the negative views around sexuality and sensuality we often grow up around, with no sex education whatsoever. The first half of the song is me, or the character, psyching myself up to be this really incredibly amazing sexual partner to someone, and trying to psychologically gear myself up for that, trying to put all of your history and past traumas and negative messaging out of your head while in the act. And at the end of the song, I’m just being like, ‘It’s okay, you don’t have to do it if you're not feeling it.’ I think it's a song about being pressured into having sex when you don't want to. When I was younger, I don’t think I realised that I could say no. I just felt like it had to be part of every experience. I didn’t understand my own boundaries.” “End of a Friendship” “I gave it that title because I wanted to guide the listener and make sure they knew it was a song about a friendship ending. It's not a break-up song. I think it's really hard to write friendship songs—the language that we use is identical, it’s like a loss and a personal grief in the same way that the end of a romantic relationship is. So a lot of the time, those songs just read as romantic break-up songs. I wanted to write a song that gave the appropriate amount of weight to the feeling of a friendship ending. I really indulged on that song, in terms of having a drum machine, an orchestra, a distorted guitar solo and harmonies. I just kind of threw everything I felt like using on the day; I wanted it to feel really lush and big and kind of cheesy, but in a good way.”