jo from school confronts outsider feelings with rousing relief on “Julia Roberts”

Succeeding her debut drop “Chicken”, running through “Julia Roberts” is a quiet fragility, carried as much by what is left unsaid as by the lyrics themselves. Even the title emerged by chance. “It was just a misheard lyric, and I loved it,” says Jo Geller. A misunderstanding with producer Hugo Hardy ultimately gave the song its name. Vulnerable songwriting steers a textured guitar-led track between warm tenderness and raw emotional exposure.

Growing up in North London, Jo started writing songs at the piano when she was nine. “I felt very different and very scared of a lot of things around me. [Writing songs] was my way of being melodramatic and making sense of the harsh times of the primary school playground.” Drawing on influences such as David Bowie and Elliott Smith, she has continued to write songs from the itch to express those feelings. “I look at how someone tells a story and encapsulates those very internalised feelings,” Jo explains.

Jo's soft, intimate vocals carry lyrics that land like pages torn from a diary, and linger like ink etched into skin. The line “I haven’t felt this way since I got here” arrives with urgency. A sense of quiet observation sits at the heart of the track’s origins: the initial inspiration came while she was sitting on the tube, watching a man only a few years older than herself cry, while drinking a tinny at nine in the morning. “I realised that I was also crying,” she reflects. “It was weirdly reassuring to me that it, kind of in a morbid way, doesn’t matter really where you’re ending up. Everyone feels like a bit of an outsider in the path that they’ve chosen.”

The percussion on “Julia Roberts” is as steady as a heartbeat: “It was just me on guitar and Hugo on drums, just going around the same chord. In the least cliché way possible, it was kind of like meditation.” Restraint eventually breaks in the closing chorus, where the arrangement swells toward a moment of release, and Jo's vocals dissolve into a scream. “It’s because of all the tension that was built up until that moment,” she explains. “In a way, it was building up for myself to get to a point where I am comfortable being loud, from being quite anxious and introspective to learning to actually voice my fears.”

“Julia Roberts” is taken from Jo’s debut EP, Grace, Flair and Distance – the title draws on childhood memories of a game invented by her father. Though the jo from school project is rooted in personal experience, she is careful to resist any definitive reading of the work. “I want it to resonate with people and have it mean whatever they want. I’m not too precious about the meaning of it for that reason, because it’s bits of my life, but I want it to look like a different mosaic of things for everyone.”