Juice Webster grew up surrounded by music. The youngest of four kids, she was constantly hearing the tunes her parents played – Fiona Apple, Aimee Mann, Nick Cave, Dusty Springfield, Etta James – as well as bands like Radiohead from her older siblings.

“There were always CDs on in the kitchen or in the car,” the Melbourne muso remembers. “Both of my parents were quite active listeners of music as well: my mum would often point out a lyric that she loved in a song, and my dad is just the most passionate music fan so it wasn’t just that it was playing in the background – they were talking about what was going on.”

So it’s no surprise that Juice – whose nickname comes from her brother’s childhood mispronunciation of her first name, Julia – became a lover and thoughtful appreciator of music, too. She learnt violin and saxophone as a kid, and picked up a guitar at 14 – “I really wanted to learn an instrument that I could accompany myself with,” she says. Juice started playing along to her favourite songs by Avril Lavigne and Taylor Swift, and tried to write some of her own.

“They were obviously terrible,” she laughs about her first songwriting attempts. “I always latched on to lyrics, so lyrics felt really important – when I started trying to write songs, I would actually write new lyrics to existing melodies.”

Juice kept plugging away at her own music, writing largely in the folk style and taking it more seriously as she reached her late teens. Wanting to expand her horizons and incorporate new techniques, she went to uni to study music composition.

There, she met Robert Downie, and together they started an electronic duo called Hemm. “I didn’t know much about electronic production. I really wanted to learn more, and Bobby was so proficient at it,” she says. “We ended up making some things together, and it felt like a cool way for us to both make music that we wouldn’t be able to make with anyone else.”

While Juice’s solo music is very much still in the folk world, you can hear those electronic influences, especially on her debut album, Julia. It’s a beautiful collection of songs, circling the same themes Juice keeps coming back to in her songwriting: love of all kinds, longing, yearning and always looking back.

“I find it really hard to stay in the present – I was an anxious kid,” she shares. “Always worrying about what’s ahead or yearning for what’s past is very deeply ingrained in who I am, and really governs how I move through the world.”

These songs pinpoint very personal moments and feelings – they feel like flipping through someone’s diary. In a way, they are exactly that, as songwriting helps Juice make sense of the world around and inside her. “For me, lyric writing is a form of journalling – I often figure things out as I’m writing songs,” she says. “It’s just a beautiful sort of catharsis and uncovering what I’m feeling.”

Julia was inspired not only by the music of Juice’s childhood, but her current favourites, too, including Big Thief, Lomelda and Tobias Jesso Jr. The first gig Juice attended after lockdown was Wolf Alice, and that powerful performance became a reference point for the album – she admired “the light and shade in their music, and they don’t seem to feel like they have to fit into one specific genre.”

Each of Juice’s releases – her two EPs, 2019’s You Who Was Myself and 2021’s More Than Reaction, and now Julia – sees her moving towards the truest expression of herself as an artist. While she says some of the early songs make her cringe a bit to listen back to, she’s proud of it all – but she’s most proud of Julia.

“This album has really felt for me like a point of arrival,” she says. “It felt for so long like I was trying to combine my tastes in music with my skill set – I was like, ‘This is all the music that I love. I don’t feel like I’m there yet, but I hope to get there one day.’ I feel, with this album, like it’s there or it’s really close.

“With the other EPs, I’ve put them out and felt like I can’t listen to them straight away whereas with this album, I really like it and I could listen to it and feel the same as I did when I was making it, which is a really nice feeling.”

When it came to naming the record, it was a no-brainer – she’s been called Juice all her life by family, friends, teachers, you name it, but Julia is just as much a part of her. “It just felt really right to call it Julia,” she says. “I don’t necessarily feel like Julia and Juice are different people, but I love the idea of this album being personified in a way, and I think it just feels very me. Adding another element of who I am and my identity to the whole package felt really important.”

So does she ever get called Julia, or is that reserved for when she’s in trouble? “It's funny because the brother who started calling me Juice is pretty much the only person in my family who always calls me Julia,” she laughs. “It’s like he’s still trying to prove that he can say it!”

This interview comes straight from the pages of issue 117. To get your mitts on a copy, swing past the frankie shop, subscribe or visit one of our lovely stockists.