Julia Cumming
Drop the needle on Julia Cumming’s solo debut Julia and the very first notes you hear are her voice. A clear, and unadorned declaration of stepping out on her own. Within seconds, she sings her agency into being, fingers meet the piano keys, striking just the sparest of chords.
I sing these words for me
To hear the sound
To let them ring
To drown you out
As the hi-hat kicks in, Julia sweetly recites a litany of ways that she has been told she’s too much or not enough, wrapped in halcyon production that has echoes of Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick. Album opener, and debut single “My Life” packs a punch in a warm embrace. A belted-out proclamation of liberation – doubters, misogynists, and the industry be damned. Not only is she not too much, but she has always been enough.This thesis statement of a song was the key that unlocked a creative door that New York City-born multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, and Sunflower Bean’s bassist, Julia Cumming, had been waiting for since her teens.
Julia shares, “The first song that got written was the first half of “My Life.” I was living in the home that I grew up in, and I got on the piano and started playing. The chords arrived in this way that felt very familiar to the ear, but I was so connected to this not giving a fuck-ness that it brought out a different voice and allowed me to go deeper in myself in a way that I think a lot of people, especially women, can relate to. It’s this feeling of not being enough in any direction, or you’re too much. You’re cloying or you’re performative, or you’re pretty, or you’re ugly, and there’s no perfect way to be that will allow someone to perceive you the way you wanna be. So the idea that you could allow yourself to do it just to be connected to your free will, that it really doesn’t matter what someone else thinks or even what you think, just really opened a door for me. Once I wrote the first half of that song, I knew that I had found it. I knew that I had started a new journey, and that this voice and this idea that I had been looking for had arrived, and I knew I had to adjust my life to develop it.”
The path to finding that voice has taken nearly two decades, two bands, four EP’s, four albums, three labels, and relentless touring to come to fruition. Ever since she was a kid growing up in the East Village, Julia had wanted to be in a band like the Beatles. At 13, she made that dream come true with her first band, Supercute! and Julia discovered that she loved being in bands even more than she imagined. “I loved that you always had a team. Even if you’re unsure about your decisions you weren’t alone”, Julia says. “And when you’re making art and putting it out in the world and opening yourself up to that kind of criticism, knowing that you are in a family is this fortification, it’s a strength.”
The trio Sunflower Bean was formed in 2013 with her friends Nick Kivlen on guitar and Olive Faber on drums, and Julia as their bassist and lead vocalist. They released their first EP, Show Me Your Seven Secrets in 2015. As the band took off, so did Julia’s other job as a model, and ironically, she began to get asked about starting a solo career. In hindsight, Julia muses, “I think it seemed like the obvious thing, because maybe I appeared flashier, but I always took that as an offense. By suggesting that I should go solo, there was a fundamental misunderstanding of what my religion was, which was bands. And yet, I think deep inside, I knew even then that if the idea came in an original, authentic way, I would do it.”
That authentic idea began to take shape during intensive writing sessions for Sunflower Bean’s third album, Headful of Sugar, which accelerated Julia’s experience and confidence as a songwriter. But while her creativity was flourishing, disillusionment with the music industry was hitting a breaking point. She remembers, “I just reached this place where I was like, you know what? I really don’t care anymore about not being enough, and the constant battle of trying in every way, shape, and form to get people to get me, or us, or what we’re doing.”
And then Julia had an epiphany. Chasing success by industry standards has very little to do with why she is a musician. Which led to the hard question: why am I a musician? And the answer was this: “I want to be writing the kind of music and seeking the kind of music where if I got hit by a car tomorrow, I would know that there was nothing that I didn’t seek out. I would know that I searched under every stone and I went all the way.”
As touring with Sunflower Bean to promote Headful of Sugar drew to a close in 2023, Julia had compiled enough songs to begin the process of figuring out what to do with them. She flew to Los Angeles without much of a plan, only the desire to try out working with an assortment of producers to bring the songs to life. The creative partner she had hoped to find surfaced when she reached out to bassist, guitarist, and producer, Brian Robert Jones (Vampire Weekend, Paramore, Hayley Williams, MUNA, Remi Wolf) who she had met at a mutual friend’s birthday party. Within two days, everything clicked into place. Over the next two years, the album coalesced, with Julia carving out time to sit alone at her piano for hours, and once a month, taking the songs from New York to LA to spend three or four days in Brian’s living room, fleshing out her ideas. The trust that began to build track by track was not only musically gratifying for Julia, but also profoundly healing. “As someone who had such a deep-seated belief about myself that what I wanted to pursue was inherently lame and dorky and boring, this was so positive and thrilling to me. Nick (Kivlen, of Sunflower Bean) called this journey for me my ‘second artistic puberty’.”
Indeed, for the sonic palette of these songs, Julia gave herself permission to lean into some of her most formative influences. “My dad is a Burt Bacharach historian and I wanted the recordings themselves to be coming from a love of recorded music and the history of classic American songwriting. So Burt Bacharach, Carole King, Neil Diamond, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and, my one-and-only-and-always, Brian Wilson, were the people that kept showing up in the songs that I was writing, and I allowed myself to be inspired by them.”
One of her all-time heroes served as not only an inspiration, but also brought about a personal revelation. “Please Let Me Remember This,” which Julia calls one of the most challenging songs to write on the album, was born of the tiny, mundane details she noted in “Busy Doing Nothing” from the Beach Boys album Friends.
Musings on memory became an obsession for Julia. ”One of the things that came out of that process was the song’s concept of how disproportionately we remember the good times and the bad times. Especially as an artist, my understanding of the sadnesses of my life are so in-depth. And the bright spots just float away, like a daydream. They just dissolve. And so I used these little snapshots through the lens of relationships that I had been in, to name things that I wanted to have the chance to hold on to.”
Please let me
Remember this
More than our reflection in the glass
Please let me
Hold on a little longer, darling
All these good things
They fade, they fade, they fade so fast
Another song from Julia that looks back at a past relationship is one of Julia’s favorites on the album, “Fucking Closure,”which features Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on guitar. Speaking about the song, Julia explains, “I really love that Gwen Stefani song “Cool”, because if you look at it on paper every single lyric is directly saying that you and your ex are cool. But getting to that level of nuance through the context of the production and the chords and the melancholy is something that only a song can do. And so I thought of the concept of ‘You’re somebody else’s problem, I’m somebody else’s problem, We’re somebody else’s problem’, and that should be something that I’m happy about, right? But I liked when we were each other’s problems. I miss that responsibility, even though it was rough.”
To bring the album to completion, Julia doubled down on her autonomy and self-funded the recording over a six week period in 2024 in Los Angeles, enlisting producer and engineer Chris Coady (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV On The Radio, Grizzly Bear, Beach House), and an ace studio band including Garrett Ray (Olivia Rodrigo, SIA) on drums, Roger Joseph Manning Jr. (Beck) on keys, Nick Zinner (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) contributed guitar to two tracks, Andrew Lappin (Lucy Dacus, L’Rain) on percussion, and Brian Robert Jones handled the rest. Julia Cumming’s debut had become a reality, completely on her own terms.
Now as this transformative three year journey of self-actualization and dream fulfillment moves to the rearview, and Julia readies herself to unveil the fruits of her labor, she reflects on what it means to her, and what she hopes it will mean to her fans:
“This record is a coming out of the dork, a coming out of this truly nerdy person that I’ve always been, that has been obscured through how I related to the media, and who I thought I was supposed to be. I think that all of us – men and women, everyone – we constantly try to play into these roles that other people put on us or that we put on ourselves in the hopes of being enough. To use this music as a way out of that story is my dream. A huge part of this record is allowance and acceptance, and love is everywhere. It’s a love of the craft, love of the art of recording, a love of the art of playing, of singing, and a love and acceptance of the person that I’ve been in the past. One of my main goals with this record was for it to be fun – an anti-cool album. So this album is a joyous space for the misfits, and in particular, an album for the girls in middle school who don’t fit in. They take on the pain of their homes. They take on the feelings of others and they want so desperately to be good. I want this record to be a place where those girls can find solace. It’s an album that lets them know that even if they don’t fit in in the ways that they think they’re supposed to, that they are completely enough.”
Drop the needle on Julia Cumming’s solo debut Julia and the very first notes you hear are her voice. A clear, and unadorned declaration of stepping out on her own. Within seconds, she sings her agency into being, fingers meet the piano keys, striking just the sparest of chords.
I sing these words for me
To hear the sound
To let them ring
To drown you out
As the hi-hat kicks in, Julia sweetly recites a litany of ways that she has been told she’s too much or not enough, wrapped in halcyon production that has echoes of Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick. Album opener, and debut single “My Life” packs a punch in a warm embrace. A belted-out proclamation of liberation – doubters, misogynists, and the industry be damned. Not only is she not too much, but she has always been enough.This thesis statement of a song was the key that unlocked a creative door that New York City-born multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, and Sunflower Bean’s bassist, Julia Cumming, had been waiting for since her teens.
Julia shares, “The first song that got written was the first half of “My Life.” I was living in the home that I grew up in, and I got on the piano and started playing. The chords arrived in this way that felt very familiar to the ear, but I was so connected to this not giving a fuck-ness that it brought out a different voice and allowed me to go deeper in myself in a way that I think a lot of people, especially women, can relate to. It’s this feeling of not being enough in any direction, or you’re too much. You’re cloying or you’re performative, or you’re pretty, or you’re ugly, and there’s no perfect way to be that will allow someone to perceive you the way you wanna be. So the idea that you could allow yourself to do it just to be connected to your free will, that it really doesn’t matter what someone else thinks or even what you think, just really opened a door for me. Once I wrote the first half of that song, I knew that I had found it. I knew that I had started a new journey, and that this voice and this idea that I had been looking for had arrived, and I knew I had to adjust my life to develop it.”
The path to finding that voice has taken nearly two decades, two bands, four EP’s, four albums, three labels, and relentless touring to come to fruition. Ever since she was a kid growing up in the East Village, Julia had wanted to be in a band like the Beatles. At 13, she made that dream come true with her first band, Supercute! and Julia discovered that she loved being in bands even more than she imagined. “I loved that you always had a team. Even if you’re unsure about your decisions you weren’t alone”, Julia says. “And when you’re making art and putting it out in the world and opening yourself up to that kind of criticism, knowing that you are in a family is this fortification, it’s a strength.”
The trio Sunflower Bean was formed in 2013 with her friends Nick Kivlen on guitar and Olive Faber on drums, and Julia as their bassist and lead vocalist. They released their first EP, Show Me Your Seven Secrets in 2015. As the band took off, so did Julia’s other job as a model, and ironically, she began to get asked about starting a solo career. In hindsight, Julia muses, “I think it seemed like the obvious thing, because maybe I appeared flashier, but I always took that as an offense. By suggesting that I should go solo, there was a fundamental misunderstanding of what my religion was, which was bands. And yet, I think deep inside, I knew even then that if the idea came in an original, authentic way, I would do it.”
That authentic idea began to take shape during intensive writing sessions for Sunflower Bean’s third album, Headful of Sugar, which accelerated Julia’s experience and confidence as a songwriter. But while her creativity was flourishing, disillusionment with the music industry was hitting a breaking point. She remembers, “I just reached this place where I was like, you know what? I really don’t care anymore about not being enough, and the constant battle of trying in every way, shape, and form to get people to get me, or us, or what we’re doing.”
And then Julia had an epiphany. Chasing success by industry standards has very little to do with why she is a musician. Which led to the hard question: why am I a musician? And the answer was this: “I want to be writing the kind of music and seeking the kind of music where if I got hit by a car tomorrow, I would know that there was nothing that I didn’t seek out. I would know that I searched under every stone and I went all the way.”
As touring with Sunflower Bean to promote Headful of Sugar drew to a close in 2023, Julia had compiled enough songs to begin the process of figuring out what to do with them. She flew to Los Angeles without much of a plan, only the desire to try out working with an assortment of producers to bring the songs to life. The creative partner she had hoped to find surfaced when she reached out to bassist, guitarist, and producer, Brian Robert Jones (Vampire Weekend, Paramore, Hayley Williams, MUNA, Remi Wolf) who she had met at a mutual friend’s birthday party. Within two days, everything clicked into place. Over the next two years, the album coalesced, with Julia carving out time to sit alone at her piano for hours, and once a month, taking the songs from New York to LA to spend three or four days in Brian’s living room, fleshing out her ideas. The trust that began to build track by track was not only musically gratifying for Julia, but also profoundly healing. “As someone who had such a deep-seated belief about myself that what I wanted to pursue was inherently lame and dorky and boring, this was so positive and thrilling to me. Nick (Kivlen, of Sunflower Bean) called this journey for me my ‘second artistic puberty’.”
Indeed, for the sonic palette of these songs, Julia gave herself permission to lean into some of her most formative influences. “My dad is a Burt Bacharach historian and I wanted the recordings themselves to be coming from a love of recorded music and the history of classic American songwriting. So Burt Bacharach, Carole King, Neil Diamond, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and, my one-and-only-and-always, Brian Wilson, were the people that kept showing up in the songs that I was writing, and I allowed myself to be inspired by them.”
One of her all-time heroes served as not only an inspiration, but also brought about a personal revelation. “Please Let Me Remember This,” which Julia calls one of the most challenging songs to write on the album, was born of the tiny, mundane details she noted in “Busy Doing Nothing” from the Beach Boys album Friends.
Musings on memory became an obsession for Julia. ”One of the things that came out of that process was the song’s concept of how disproportionately we remember the good times and the bad times. Especially as an artist, my understanding of the sadnesses of my life are so in-depth. And the bright spots just float away, like a daydream. They just dissolve. And so I used these little snapshots through the lens of relationships that I had been in, to name things that I wanted to have the chance to hold on to.”
Please let me
Remember this
More than our reflection in the glass
Please let me
Hold on a little longer, darling
All these good things
They fade, they fade, they fade so fast
Another song from Julia that looks back at a past relationship is one of Julia’s favorites on the album, “Fucking Closure,”which features Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on guitar. Speaking about the song, Julia explains, “I really love that Gwen Stefani song “Cool”, because if you look at it on paper every single lyric is directly saying that you and your ex are cool. But getting to that level of nuance through the context of the production and the chords and the melancholy is something that only a song can do. And so I thought of the concept of ‘You’re somebody else’s problem, I’m somebody else’s problem, We’re somebody else’s problem’, and that should be something that I’m happy about, right? But I liked when we were each other’s problems. I miss that responsibility, even though it was rough.”
To bring the album to completion, Julia doubled down on her autonomy and self-funded the recording over a six week period in 2024 in Los Angeles, enlisting producer and engineer Chris Coady (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV On The Radio, Grizzly Bear, Beach House), and an ace studio band including Garrett Ray (Olivia Rodrigo, SIA) on drums, Roger Joseph Manning Jr. (Beck) on keys, Nick Zinner (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) contributed guitar to two tracks, Andrew Lappin (Lucy Dacus, L’Rain) on percussion, and Brian Robert Jones handled the rest. Julia Cumming’s debut had become a reality, completely on her own terms.
Now as this transformative three year journey of self-actualization and dream fulfillment moves to the rearview, and Julia readies herself to unveil the fruits of her labor, she reflects on what it means to her, and what she hopes it will mean to her fans:
“This record is a coming out of the dork, a coming out of this truly nerdy person that I’ve always been, that has been obscured through how I related to the media, and who I thought I was supposed to be. I think that all of us – men and women, everyone – we constantly try to play into these roles that other people put on us or that we put on ourselves in the hopes of being enough. To use this music as a way out of that story is my dream. A huge part of this record is allowance and acceptance, and love is everywhere. It’s a love of the craft, love of the art of recording, a love of the art of playing, of singing, and a love and acceptance of the person that I’ve been in the past. One of my main goals with this record was for it to be fun – an anti-cool album. So this album is a joyous space for the misfits, and in particular, an album for the girls in middle school who don’t fit in. They take on the pain of their homes. They take on the feelings of others and they want so desperately to be good. I want this record to be a place where those girls can find solace. It’s an album that lets them know that even if they don’t fit in in the ways that they think they’re supposed to, that they are completely enough.”