Stella Bridie Lives!
It’s been years since Melbourne-based singer-songwriter Stella Bridie came through with a new song, but on her new single “Alive,” she’s bringing her passionate indie-rock excellence back — wiser, sharper, and catchier than ever.
Life is for living, and Stella Bridie knows as much.
It’s something she hadn’t quite worked out in her tumultuous teenage years, when the chaos of the everyday seemed a small sideshow to the inflexibiliy of school. In her room on one of those days off, she put down a lyric that spoke to a passing anxiety: “I am gonna feel alive someday for the first time.”
A lot has happened since then: rehearsal spaces, studio sessions, a new familiarity with the stages of Melbourne’s north. Her debut single, “Dog Bite,” told a vivid and sometimes scathing tale of disillusionment, putting a physical wound to the invisible scars of trauma. That rollicking indie energy subsided some on “My Girl,” the sore ache of heartbreak backed by soft orchestrals and tinkering piano. It was soon after that that life set in — the virus-riddled variant of it, anyway — and things got a little muddy.
Stella’s long forgotten whatever all-engrossing crisis inspired it, but those ten words have stuck it out. On “Alive,” Stella’s first single in two years, the adolescent aside turns into another potent upstart anthem.
Over coffee in a Carlton café, Stella admits that, though the turn of phrase has endured, the sentiment has shifted since she first put it down. “It's kind of funny because the point that I'm making, I don't agree with anymore,” she eagerly explains. “It was a feeling of like, once I get through this, and once I'm better, and once I'm not feeling like this everyday... then I'll start living this life.” You live and you learn, and few lessons come on as fast as the indifference of time. “I was like, ‘okay, my real life has to start when all of that feels like it's sorted,’ which is stupid,” she admits, “and I actually feel like maybe in COVID, I got to let go of that.”
“Alive,” her first single since that disruption, pits a relentless reality against an ever-distant dream. The verse picks up momentum as it speeds downhill, a run-on sentence that evokes a distracted panic. Stella explains it as “being really verbose and non-stop, because that was like the feeling of, ‘Alright, if I think too much about the present moment that I'm in, I'll spiral’.” That day-to-day cavalcade presses up against the spacious chorus, hopelessly waiting on an idealized future. It’s not hard to see how “Alive” might speak to this prematurely post-COVID world, where gratification is ever delayed, the virus pervades, and the best-laid plans always seem to go astray.
In one way, “Alive” is a consequence of those shifting sands, with Stella’s usual songwriting process upended by Melbourne’s uncommonly hard restrictions. “I was writing it on acoustic guitar, but I knew it wasn't going to be a guitar song,” explains Stella, a string of voice memos documenting the long-distance songwriting of mid-2020. The melody was finessed on lockdown exercise breaks: “you don't want to lose the melody, so it's just me kind of, having been half-jogging, out of breath, ‘na-na-na-na-na’,” she says, half-humming the melody through breathlessness. “Back in another lockdown, I came up with the outro vocals. I think the Fiona Apple record had just come out at that time, and she's got a lot of those tracks that are just drums and vocals,” says Stella. “She's just such an amazing songwriter… I was just completely in that album.”
The song shuffled back and forth between Bridie and frequent collaborator Eugene Argiro, who added flairs and sketches to the central idea. “A lot of the time I'll come with something that's really fully finished to Gene, and then it's just about production ideas that we're going to do,” she reflects, “but with Alive it kind of changed as we worked on it together, and as we were sending it back and forth, by virtue of the way that we’d see each other.”
“It was a lot sadder sounding when I wrote it originally, and then I sent the voice memo to Gene, and I was like, I think I want this to be like synthy,” explains Stella. “He sent it back with some stuff over the top and instantly it was completely different, like the mood, instead of it being exhaustion and devastation, was just kind of like, 'alright, actually, things are fucked, but in a we're-still-chugging-along type of way.”
That communal hope finds an unlikely expression in the record’s striking single art, designed by Edie Johnston. A stone angel, flanked by a cross, sits under a crescent moon, the high-contrast black and white evoking the texture of weathered stone. “I was probably raised anti-religious if anything, like critical of the major religious institutions,” says Stella, the direct inspiration taken from the opening: “I walked up to the church with no shoes on to look at the moon.”
“I think I find religion really interesting because it's like a failed project, in a way,” says Stella of the image. “There's so much potential in the idea of people feeling community with something, and this idea that you look after each other, and there's a certain code of values.” The execution is “absolutely horrible,” but from that religious ostentation springs another interesting idea: “we can do some cool stuff with this, if you guys want to stop being freaks about it!”
The aesthetic is furthered in the “Alive” music video, directed by Liv Fleming, which sees guitar-slinging ladies and sword-weilding knights play out chivalric scenes. “I've always been of the belief that I think that anyone, all communities and groups who have been harmed by Catholicism, get to bastardize its imagery,” she adds dryly.
Stella’s not one for comparisons — “I hate that kind of stuff, but it's important for music,” she says of her ‘brand’ — but the algorithm slots Stella in somewhere amongst Lucy Dacus, Indigo De Souza, Babygirl and illuminati hotties. That her bass is named Mitski suggests this mix is more than a little flattering. Her mission statement, “music for the long walk home for the party,” speaks to the duelling threads of buzzing high and crushing come-down. The pained retellings offer catharsis; the catchy refrains and strong arrangements a guise that cloak the harsh edges. You mightn’t even clock the inherent snarl of a lyric like “I’ve got a vitamin D deficiency now / I hear guys like girls who are prone to passing out.”
That doesn’t make hindsight any less searing. “I love playing gigs, but then the next morning is always like two hours of that feeling that you get when you've gotten too drunk, and you've got too personal with people, and you've said stuff that you wouldn't have otherwise,” she admits with a laugh. “The next morning, you just have to take some time out to just think about your life and what you've done.” That her gigs continue to bubble with a keen excitement — they’re amongst the best I’ve ever been to — is testament to the powerful performances at the centre. “Sometimes I think I don't realize the gravity or the reality of the lyric until I'm singing it, and then I'm like, ‘Oh, I I just said that!’”
“I’m always at least starting from a place of reality, and maybe I'm building in a couple of details that are just artistic license,” says Stella of her writing, “like, ‘it would have been more poetic if this thing had happened.” It’s a creative impulse that, burnished by her “ADHD brain,” makes for a potent string of intense imagery: “I'll have an idea, and I'll be powered by it for a bit, and then I'll be like, 'Alright, I'm bored of that, next thing,’ and so I'm searching for the next memory or interaction that is interesting to me.”
That she’s well-read helps Bridie’s pen — illustrative, brisk, clever — make the most of life’s messiest moments. On “Dog Bite,” vivid memories and deft metaphors fuse into a sharp melancholy. They’re specific enough to evoke the unmistakable but cryptic enough to pique the interest of fans, an element Stella relishes. “I love that aspect of people messaging me,” she says with a smile. “A lot of people message me wanting to know what a particular thing's about, and I'm always like, 'Well, first, what do you think it's about?’ People have like interpretations I would never have thought of, and as soon as you give something over to an audience, it's theirs.”
And so “Alive” joins the fray, a long-awaited gift from one of Melbourne’s best up-and-coming singer-songwriters. Now that she’s back, it seems Stella is here to stay: she’s already thinking on her next single, albeit with the flexibility of someone who knows better than to plan too far ahead. If you’re eager to hear the fan-favourite candidates, like “He Didn’t Mean It” and “Box Dye Black,” you’ll just have to get a ticket to her next incredible show.