STACK #232 February 2024

FEATURE MUSIC

light and fluffy, but there was also a kind of fear – like I’m scared to fall, scared to hit the floor really hard.” At this point we’ll mention that Mauboy is an occasional speak-singer. It’s a conversational habit we’ve seen her execute in other interviews, where she’ll sing certain words or phrases within her sentences

Having travelled to so many different places, and meeting so many different people, and absorbing that energy and advice – what to do and what not to do – I carried all that stuff. Then I was able to access the sphere, and place them, and allow them to go in any place they needed to be. It felt like coming home, and those experiences being

JUST BE, JUST BREATHE Yours Truly was written while Mauboy was still ”unpeeling” herself from the effects of the COVID pandemic, just prior to which she had released her critically acclaimed fourth album, Hilda (2019). ”I rediscovered how to be open again,” she smiles. ”I realised a whole new way of re-opening, reconnecting. Because [COVID] really shut me down hard, as it did many. But then, I learned how to cook again. I stayed at home. I was with myself, and present, without having to be in different kinds of rooms, and flying everywhere, and being forced into so many different faces and places. I could just be.”

Two of Jess Mauboy’s most cherished collaborators, Shungudzo (above) and Nick Littlemore (below)

– just for funsies. It doesn’t happen precisely this way during our chat, but we do get an off-the-cuff peek into her talents when she refers to a lyric from Flashback ’s chorus, opting to sing it – ’Standing right in front of the one I’m going to love’ – before returning to her thought as if she didn’t just casually deliver two seconds of melodic divinity. ”I’m connecting with someone who I’m meeting for the first time,” she continues of the song’s arc. ”’It’s happening, I’m in it.’ And [in the studio] I felt like, ’Oh gosh, that feeling! Wow – I’m reliving it.’” The ability to mentally transport ourselves through time – and the way time moves in our minds and memories – is a theme laced throughout Yours Forever. The album’s opening song is also its title track, and it builds like a hymn, without any percussion (which makes its beauty more impactful). In a neat sonic handshake, the final track on the record is Yours Forever & Ever . This thematic bookend is a remixed reimagining of its twin song, rippling with harmonies that layer and echo back over themselves, as if into eternity. ”Ye-e-e-es, sis,” Mauboy smiles. ”This record, it felt like a sphere.

like ornaments or books that I could look at. It’s like, ’Damn! I can revisit that, I can go back there in time... but it’s on your time. ”And there is time,” she says. ”There’s so many people that could maybe learn to think that way: that there is time. It’s so wonderful to

think that you don’t have to rush, and that’s what I wanted for this record – for it not to be forced, and to have its moment to just feel. You’re just figuring it out as you go. ”I think it was me reflecting on that, telling myself: ’Girl, calm down! You’ve got a lot of room. There’s so many people in your life, you have so many friends, a big family. Go and spend time with that – go and reconnect with that.” Listening through Yours Forever, it’s clear Mauboy

these tracks – but there’s one person whose impact the singer obviously felt in the cockles of her soul. ”Oh my God – the most amazing being that I’ve ever worked with,” Mauboy says with awe when we mention Zimbabwean-American legend Alexandra Shungudzo Govere (known mononymously as ’Shungudzo’). ”Just full of thought, and wonder, and adventure! And she’s lived many lives; she’s studied law, was an Olympic champion in gymnastics, and now wants to be an artist and writer and painter. Learning from her, and having such an empowering woman in the room – I just felt so complete having her come into my world. I felt spoilt. I’m really, really, really, super grateful. I’ve been grateful before in my life, and to be alive. But I really, genuinely felt grateful to have this other woman right there beside me, writing all of these amazing songs, and just feeling like I’ve known her forever.” The track which the two wrote, Goodbye, is one of Mauboy’s favourites of the record. ”It has that real country influence, that I grew up listening to,” she explains. ”I didn’t want it to be over-vocalised, or have too many instruments, I wanted almost a classic Trisha Yearwood, How Do I Live . We finished the song, and then – we just started talking about life. That’s when I feel like magic really happens, truly, in the room. It doesn’t feel like you’ve

gave herself the time to dip her toes into several different stylistic oceans. There’s Tell’ Em , a Tkay-esque nouveaux-trap belter; Never Giving Up , a colossal dance anthem worthy of its own pride parade; the stirring Give You Love , a duet with American R’n’B maestro Jason Derulo; and Goodbye, a completely disarming lapsteel ballad. Mauboy is full of praise for the collaborators she worked with for

A LITTLEMORE MAGIC

The influence of Empire of the Sun and PNAU musician Nick Littlemore on Yours Truly is something Mauboy cannot overstate. ”It was so pure, and really in-the-moment,” she says of the time the two spent

together in-studio. ”I guess a little bit of spiritualness came through, and just almost ugliness, too, that I wasn’t aware that I had. I think a lot of those things really drive the force of actually just singing what you feel, and trying not to

suppress or shut down things that I’m way too scared of. I’m the kind of person where I take on people’s energy and that affects me greatly. I feel overwhelmed, and I do that thing: ’I’m just going to hide under the doona for a bit.’”

just worked on anything ... It doesn’t feel like a job. It felt really big, but super, super quiet. I feel that when things go quiet, you have something.”

Yours Forever by Jess Mauboy is out Feb 9 via Warner.

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