Music
Juanita Stein: ‘The alluring Jewish songs that inspire me’
Juanita Stein, singer with the Howling Bells, has a solo album out, written as she mourned her father
October 22, 2020 10:31
By, Elisa Bray
3 min read
Juanita Stein, singer with the Howling Bells, has a solo album out, written as she mourned her father
October 22, 2020 10:31ByElisa Bray, Elisa Bray
You had spaghetti for dinner, and you picked up a guitar; it was a normal thing to do,” says Juanita Stein. That becoming a singer songwriter was a natural path, Stein credits to her bohemian upbringing in Sydney with her father Peter, a musician, her mother Linda, an actress, and younger brothers Joel, who would become a guitarist and Ari who runs the online magazine 52 Insights. Four albums with indie-rock band Howling Bells and numerous tours (including with The Killers in 2018) later, she is now releasing her outstanding third solo album, Snapshot.
Having used songwriting as her way “to express my anguish and my angst” since her early teens, writing Snapshot was Stein’s instinctive response to her father’s sudden illness with untreatable acute myeloid leukaemia, and devastating passing, last year. It began with the song Lucky, written on the day he was admitted to hospital, she recalls as we talk over the phone after she’s taken her two daughters to school. “It was all so sudden, and we were so unprepared, emotionally... It just annihilated me. And the only way that I could deal with that was to sit down and start writing a song.”
Since leaving London five years ago, Melbourne-born Stein has lived in Brighton with her family. There was never any doubt that brother Joel — lead guitarist in Howling Bells — would contribute to the album. “I wanted the listener to be able to feel the panic and the anguish that I was going through, and Joel is pretty good at that as a guitarist,” she explains. “Also, he was experiencing the same thing I was. There was no one else who could have captured that.”
Music was always playing in their family home: Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and other blues and folk artists. Stein’s first musical memory is of standing on telephone books in the recording studio aged five to contribute vocals to her father’s song, and she went to his gigs. “All that informs who you are as a songwriter, as a person.” Her bohemian upbringing — which included a year on a kibbutz — was at distinct odds with her strict education at a religious Jewish school.
“That’s the insane contrast that I’ve spent my entire life trying to balance: my home life, which was totally undisciplined and filled with rock and roll, and then somehow I ended up at this extreme Orthodox school. I didn’t realise at the time that I was struggling to figure out what it all meant. But now I’ve got some perspective.”
There was no rebellion, however; her parents had done that for her. “There was nothing to rebel against,” she says with a smile. “I was getting the Orthodox thing at school, and then I was going home and my dad would be drinking whisky and blaring rock and roll in his attic and nobody cared. So I just had to find somewhere in the middle, I guess.”
She recalls going to gigs, writing music and starting bands — all hugely contrasting with what she was being told at school. Watching the television series Unorthodox, about a young woman who escapes her Chasidic life in New York, Stein had a moment of identification with the lead character Esty as she sings in front of a mixed audience for the first time.
“I cannot tell you how much I was able to empathise with her, simply because I desperately wanted to sing growing up. I did some concerts for school, and they were for women only. I could not get with the idea that I wasn’t allowed to sing for men. All I wanted to do was tour and play music and I remember one of the first times I got in front of a mixed audience. It’s super intense looking back on that.”
What Stein did gain from a schooling immersed in Judaism was being constantly fed old, deeply melancholic Jewish music.
“Those songs are incredibly alluring, and they’re sung not just at the saddest festivals of the year, but the happiest ones. And you’re still dipping into minor chords, dissonance and strange melodies. When that becomes so ingrained in your everyday life, you don’t think twice about going to those places as a songwriter yourself. That had a lot to do with how I started writing songs.”
While that melancholy can be found all over Snapshot, especially in the heartbreaking Hey Mama, tenderly written for her mother, there is also positivity, no more so than in the country-flavoured finale In the End.
“One hundred per cent,” she agrees. “I was very mindful of ending the record like that because that’s who my father was. You could throw anything at him and he’d throw a positive tint on it.
“I think it’s crucial to frame those loved ones who you lose in a beautiful light. What was their life for, if not to be remembered with value, joy and beauty? The record is an ode to a magnificent person. ”
Snapshot is out today
