Elana Stone - Kintsugi (2015)

You wouldn’t guess it from meeting her but it seems Elana Stone IS one for doing things by halves!

This Friday the multi-talented Sydney songstress will release just the first half of her much-anticipated third album Kintsugi. The title refers to ‘golden joinery’ – the art of fixing broken pottery with lacquer that has had powdered gold, silver or platinum added to it. This process makes a feature of breakage and repair, rather than seeking to disguise the history of objects – in much the same way that many of us celebrate our scars as a storyline. So it’s fitting that Elana, after years of twists and turns in the music business, should piece together her album in portions.

In a way this is an assertion of identity over an industry that cannot contain, or market, complex characters too easily. Aside from exploring countless musical genres personally over the years, Elana has featured as a guest, collaborator and band member for many other acts (in fact the day after the release she’ll be dashing from duties with All Our Exes Live In Texas at The Basement to a very different atmosphere in the bowels of The Marly, when she performs her only free Sydney show as part of Jack’s Shithouse at Sing Song shenanigan).

This creativity isn’t confined to Elana in her family either, as you’ll discover in the conversation below. Despite not having particularly musical or artistic parents, she has one sibling who is something of a rock star in Australia (Jake Stone of Bluejuice) – and another who is a globally acclaimed actress (Yael Stone of Orange Is The New Black).

Listen in for a fascinating, sometimes reckless and even ribald chat between Elana and Jack, peppered with two outstanding live performances that could not be further apart in terms of tone and technique: one a profoundly beautiful acoustic rendition of her original song, ‘These Days’; the other a live-looping electronic cover of Mariah Carey‘s ‘Emotions’.