SHOWS // Stella Donnelly @ The Bootleg

Post by Misha

Stella Donnelly’s music doesn’t sound like protest music. Her jazz-influenced melodies don’t hold the kind of brash punk acidity that we typically expect from political music. Standing in the low five-foot-somethings, with straight brown hair and kind, mirthful eyes, she doesn’t fit into the box made for angry troublemaking girls. The ones with lip rings and shoplifted drugstore hair dye jobs who teachers warned would be a “bad influence.”

And yet here she is, making a career of soft, lilting, political, angry music.

Before she released her breakout single ‘Boys Will Be Boys’, Donnelly explained from the Bootleg stage in Los Angeles, she was playing open mics in her home country, Australia, and working as a bartender to make ends meet. She expected to play the song – a fiery rebuke to an abuser set to the tune of a lullaby – to an audience of open mic attendees, and move on to writing the next one. Then, soon after writing the song, the Harvey Weinstein story broke. Suddenly ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ found a much wider audience – an audience who, in addition to being angry, was also tired, traumatized, and in need of soothing.

Listening to Stella speak about her songs onstage I was struck by how necessary it is that we leave room for all music be political, because life itself is political. She talked about a song written for an ex employer who took advantage of his workers, and about reassuring her dad that he was not the subject of ‘Old Man’, a searing indictment of chauvinism and the old guard of masculinity.

Of course, not all of Donnelly’s songs are about politics. She also writes love songs, and breakup songs, and tells jokes about vibrators on stage. Her melodies range from lilting jazz to uptempo synth-tinged pop. Her performance is a microcosm of the female experience – deep and profound unfairness alongside friendship and love. Rage alongside humor and silliness. Tragedy alongside tenderness.

This is important, I think. It is important that we recognize all the ways we can participate in the conversation, not just the loudest or most aggressive voices.

Stella Donnelly’s Beware Of The Dogs is out now on Secretly Canadian. Buy it here, along with a ticket to one of her upcoming shows.