Stella Donnelly’s multigenerational joy

When Donnelly was appointed to DJ a friend’s wedding last month, she took her duties very seriously. Having spent her twenties missing out on loved ones’ various milestones, she wasn’t going to squander another second. Her teen years were spent in a covers band performing to lairy sales reps at conferences, so she’d also earned the right to pull the plug on certain songs – “Love Shack”, and anything by Black Eyed Peas.

You could argue the phrase “multigenerational joy” goes some way to describing not just her party playlist, but her third album. It’s a record that looks with love on her parents, friends, the child she once was, and the small moments that make life worth the trouble. Add to that a backdrop of heartache and loss and you’ve got Love and Fortune.

From first track “Standing Ovation”, with its mix of bright, jangling guitars and stately, sombre synths, Donnelly finds herself in reflective mode – playing back memories from how a loved one seasoned their food, to school-leavers signing each other’s shirts on “muck-up day.” “It’s when students mow a giant phallus into the lawn, or let goats into the school,” she explains. Australian sixth-formers like to go out on a high.

Opening the album with a farewell was no accident, it turns out. “I feel like I’ve put the ending first,” she agrees. “It's a protective way of telling people I’ve written a sad album about all these different things, but I don’t care any more.”

Recorded by just Donnelly and three bandmates, Love and Fortune was an intimate affair from start to finish – partly due to financial constraints, partly because these are delicate songs that required careful handling. “It felt like a big deal to be writing these songs, so making the record was a closed-door situation,” Donnelly says. “In the past, I’ve welcomed lots of strangers into that world to enhance it, but this particular time, it’s been more important to have my loved ones around me.

Two years earlier she had taken a break from music, wondering who she might be without it. “Things happened that I didn’t want to write about: they were too heavy, too real, too complicated. So I decided to get a job in a bakery, ride my bike to work, start studying. But then I got a little bit sick of all those things, because I wasn’t any good at them. I’m now accepting the fact that this is who I am, and I have to write about my life, and it’s very unfortunate for the people around me sometimes.”

It sounds as though Donnelly didn’t have much say in the matter. The song “Baths” came to her mid-swim, as though through divine intervention. Tuning into the hum of the pool filter, its single, mournful note began to sound like a bagpipe, and by the time she reached the changing rooms, she had the bones of a song. Though perhaps it had been brewing much longer: “I used to sing a song with my dad called ‘Dark-Eyed Sailor’, and I think I might have borrowed a bit of that Celtic melody line,” she muses.

In “Baths”, Donnelly is an unborn child, silently accompanying her mother to union rallies. “My mum’s a nurse so she used to go to lots of marches for better pay,” Donnelly says. “I loved the idea that I was in the womb while all these other people, probably women, were all there screaming together. I feel very proud of that person I was inside.” Lyrics flit from the promise of new life, to taking a family photo for what “might be the last time” – trying to snatch at precious moments as they threaten to slip through her fingers.

Singing is a way to breathe life into memories, scattered as they may be among different time-zones. Donnelly’s early years were spent between Perth and Swansea, where her mother is from. She remembers being in Wales to usher in the millennium, dancing to Chumbawumba at midnight, and learning Welsh hymns in chapel with her grandmother. Lately, she has been rediscovering traditional nursery rhymes like “Mynd drot drot” to sing with her mum, unlocking old stories from childhood.

“Baths” itself sounds like a ballad handed down through centuries. Barely adorned by any other instrumentation, her voice soars with a haunting quality, pure yet bittersweet. “I feel like my voice has dropped since I put out my first EP. I’ve been grappling with how I feel about that, because it’s your instrument, you’ve trained it so hard and all of a sudden you don’t have a choice in what comes out,” she says. “But I’m trying to change my perspective, playing around with that register, with that depth I never had before. What I may have lost up top, I’ve gained down below – which sounds like a really creepy thing to say.”

Donnelly’s family have an anchoring effect across her catalogue, making frequent cameos (who could forget the putdown “my mum’s still a punk and you’re still shit?”). She recalls flipping through photo albums, seeing her mum’s travels, and longing for an equally adventurous life: “I always love thinking about my parents before I was around. It’s a beautiful thing to imagine them in the world without us,” she says. Her musical success granted that wish temporarily, dispatching her on a relentless touring schedule. However, living out her dreams also meant missing too many birthdays and weddings to count.

2020 offered a dubious solution, forcing her to slow down and contemplate what she really valued. Among other places, it brought her to Melbourne, where she still lives – though her description of it is surprising. “Winter lasts a long time here. Everywhere else in Australia is sunny and beautiful, but right now I’m freezing cold,” she says. “And when summer does come, it reminds me of Manchester. I remember playing in Manchester one hot day, and seeing people with a barbecue in the middle of a roundabout, in their underwear. And then I moved to Melbourne and understood completely.”

Lockdown was also the catalyst for her second album Flood, which was created “from a very still, quiet, isolated place. It was hard to imagine being on stage, so it was hard to write songs for a stage. I couldn’t even imagine that we’d ever have concerts again.” That period also consisted of “doing a lot of things I wasn’t good at. I tried sewing for a while, and surfing. I sewed a vest out of an old sleeping bag and, honestly, it’s the ugliest thing. I can’t get it over my head. And I worked a few days a week at the cemetery, which I was hoping would have some interesting stories, but it was just admin,” she says.

Released from routine, Donnelly could write unfettered and without hard deadlines. She and her bandmates challenged themselves to play instruments they were less proficient in, which in her case meant gravitating to a piano for the first time since childhood. The resulting record dealt with themes such as eviction, domestic abuse, and the loss of her grandmother. With its astute storytelling and emotional depth, it led Donnelly down increasingly introspective paths, but after becoming estranged from a close friend, things ground to a halt.

Though she distracted herself with new pastimes, she knew deep down that writing would be the only way through. Feelings she’d buried had to be held up under the light, as she carried out an inventory of her life so far. “I’m really good at holding onto little things,” she says. “My dad is someone who will keep the corner of a piece of wood, just in case it’s the perfect fit for something in the future. I also have a few of those tendencies.”

“This record is touching on a friendship break-up, so obviously I want to be respectful and make sure I’m protecting that person and myself when I speak about it, but it’s absolutely around that lack of closure,” she adds, carefully. “When you break up with a romantic partner, it’s bad. But when you have a friendship break-up, that speaks to your soul. There’s so much shame I still carry about the fact that I could let a friendship end.”

It’s a raw sentiment that, ultimately, she doesn’t flinch from. But she retains that lightness of touch, an instinct for punctuating earnest moments with humour. Like “Ghosts”, which is full of tenderness and wisdom up until the last line: “Buy my new book and I’ll show you.” This irreverence has always been a part of Donnelly’s artistic make-up, particularly in live shows, which in the past could feature anything from synchronised dance routines to passionate speeches from her bandmates about the life-sustaining qualities of a Greggs pasty.

“Well, that’s all we were eating at the time,” she says. “But the use of humour probably started when I wrote ‘Boys Will Be Boys’. I remember performing it at shows, then feeling the need to immediately lighten the mood and create a safe space for people where it’s not just doom and gloom. I think that has slowly come through into other songs too.”

“Boys Will Be Boys” is, of course, the beating heart of her debut album, the spiky, lo-fi Beware of the Dogs. She wrote that record thinking only people in her hometown would hear it, and it crawled with outrageous male figures, from drunk dinner guests to ageing predators. But “Boys Will Be Boys”, written about a friend’s sexual assault, is devastating in its composure; pitched somewhere between empathy and ice-cold fury, a protest against men who take what they want while their victims are cast aside.

Six years on, terrible men are still having the last laugh. However, Donnelly’s material has entered more unresolved territory, with fewer punchlines or clear-cut villains. “The first album was me being so mad for the first 18–20 years of my life – about how women were treated, how I was treated, and how I treated other women. It was a compounding explosion of all my experiences. But with this album, I set out to capture one aspect of a break-up in each song, and try not to venture too far from that feeling,” she says.

Like with any break-up, one of the lessons learned in Love and Fortune is that sometimes you have to go it alone. It tackles absence, the loss of a shared language and understanding, and how that same loss can catch you completely off guard: “I was at a random gig somewhere – I think it might have been an open mic night – and the person performing was so incredibly bad that I looked around for someone to make eye contact with. All it would take is one tiny look and we would both know what was going on. That was when some sort of grief started, actually – when there were these little moments I no longer had with this person.”

She explores that grief from every angle, scrutinising her own actions, too. “‘Feel it Change’ is spiteful and petty. There were moments writing it when I didn’t want to be spiteful and petty, and capture more emotions, but I told myself to save that for the next song.” Meanwhile, “Year of Trouble” is “very much heart-on-sleeve – an admission of all the parts I played in a break-up. I’ve actually felt a bit funny about the singles coming out on their own, because to me each song is holding the next song’s hand, and the whole record makes more sense if you’re listening to it that way. But releasing ‘Feel it Change’ as a single feels like sending my petty song into the world with no buddy!”

Whatever it took, making this record appears to have granted Donnelly some kind of peace. Even through a browser window, she radiates calm, as chill as the cycling baker she once tried to be. What kept her going through Love and Fortune? “Taking comfort in small moments of pure joy,” she replies. “Like my cat Neil, who’s an arsehole. He attacks me at any given opportunity, but he needs me. What else? My little vegetable garden. Going out like a crazy old woman and talking to the tomatoes – ‘oh my god, look at you!’ Dinners at friends’ houses, where you’re sitting around the table with a midwife, a schoolteacher, a landscape architect, a set designer, a builder – it puts my life into perspective.”

Donnelly’s self-doubt might have thwarted her at times, but in the end she made a more truthful album for it. “Getting out of your own way is the challenge in life. I definitely have a very loud inner critic, but I’ve been lucky with all my records to have my voice heard,” she says, before sharing an early experience which sharpened her resolve. “There was a moment when I was trying to record a guitar part, and it was a bit shabby. This person took the guitar out of my hands and gave it to someone else to play. What we got out of that was a very crisp recording – but it wasn’t me. I ended up ditching it and making Thrush Metal in the lounge of my ex-boyfriend’s house. Since then I’ve been very staunch on what I need, I learned my difficult lessons early on.”

It’s hard now to imagine anyone else grabbing the reins or interfering with Donnelly’s singular voice, as well as the tapestry of sounds she creates – things like hearing bagpipes in a pool filter, or stitching birdsong into final takes. Speaking of which, there’s one hobby that has served Donnelly better than surfing or sewing vests, and that’s birdwatching. She’s recently been leading bird walks round her neighbourhood, and even has a merch line featuring her favourite breeds. Are there any she regrets leaving out? “The jabiru,” she replies instantly. “It’s like a stork and is a very special bird here in Australia.” She also has a soft spot for seagulls, in all their hysteria and violence.

“Seagulls seem almost human, like we’re seeing all the bad parts of humanity in them,” she observes. “I stayed a few weeks in Brighton once, and felt comforted by the sound of gulls circling each night.”

“Where I live, we’ve only got little silver gulls, but every day a man down the road called Steve feeds them,” she continues. “There’s one, Sammy, who has a little hole in his foot, so you know it’s him. And he’s always down the street getting feed from Steve. Sometimes when I was feeling depressed in winter, I’d walk down to say hi to Steve and his seagulls. We’re not really close to the ocean at all, so I don’t know how he’s doing it.”

It’s definitely a bit jarring when you hear seagulls inland. They sound lost, as though flying south for winter wasn’t part of some grand biological design, but just a badly-executed road trip. Yet somehow those same gulls always find their way back, even if in the meantime they show up on a quiet street in Melbourne, taking some time out for dinner before bracing themselves for flight.