ALASDAIR DUNCAN talks to brother and sister duo ANGUS & JULIA STONE about the strange and beautiful influences that shaped their hugely-anticipated second album, Down The Way.

The Emporium Hotel’s cocktail bar is all hard, shiny surfaces and pulsing house music, but as Angus and Julia Stone drift in, they bring with them a strange sense of calm and tranquillity. There is something mystical, even otherworldly about the brother and sister pair – Angus lithe and handsome behind a scruffy beard, Julia smiling sweetly in a flowing hippie dress. She is the more talkative of the two, holding forth with tales of life on the road as he sits back, nodding knowingly and occasionally offering a story of his own.  I’m sitting down with them to speak about their hugely anticipated second album, Down The Way, and the road that brought them there. 

Down The Way was recorded at Sawmill Studios in Cornwall, an idyllic setting fitting of the pair’s gorgeous, pastoral-tinged music. The studio, where the pair lived and worked for the duration of recording, is set on the river Fowey, a few miles from the town of Golant in Cornwall. “The town has a pub and a grocery store and a couple of bed and breakfast places and that’s it,” Julia tells me. “The river is tidal, and our place was only accessible at high tide – when we pulled up, we had to wait because it was low tide, and the river was virtually a mud flat.”

The pair made it to Sawmill eventually, though, and found it breathtaking. “The place is just beautiful,” Julia says. “It’s a former sawmill, but it looks like a ramshackle old mansion – it’s a faded pink colour, with a big window that looks like a spider’s web on the top level. The studio’s underneath it all, in an area set in sandstone, almost like a cave. There are beautiful, big, green trees around it – it’s very picturesque.” Sometimes, the beauty that surrounded them proved a little too much to take in. “There were days when we didn’t even leave the house,” Julia says, “where it felt like we just wanted to hide from the beauty of it all. We’d sit inside, watch television and play pool, or just stay in the studio all day.”

Unlike many duos, Angus and Julia rarely write songs together – instead, the pair will go off to their separate spaces and dream up songs on their own, presenting them to the other near the end of the process to work on arrangements and harmonies. “Song writing for me is something somewhat like meditating,” Angus tells me. “I need to be alone to write, so I can disappear into that place where you look up and four hours have passed and it feels like five minutes. We haven’t really delved into writing together. All the songs on the album were written over a stretch of time on the road, just slowly collecting and offloading them along the way, at friends’ studios and places like that.”

Many musicians say that, when they’ve released a successful album and toured it, they think a lot more about the live setting when they’re writing songs for the second – as Julia explains to me, though, this process was a little different for her and Angus. “When you’re writing a song, you’re not thinking about the next record or even whether what you’re writing is going to be on a record at all – you’re just writing a song because it feels natural and normal,” she says. “When it came to putting together Down The Way, we had to choose thirteen tracks of the twenty-five or something we’d recorded, so that was when the idea of playing live became important. We liked all of the tracks we had, but we asked ourselves – which of these songs will we be happy playing over and over again for the next year?” 

I’ve never heard this sentiment put quite like that before, but when Julia says it, it seems obvious that of course musicians like her and Angus must choose their songs carefully, because after all, they’ll be living with them on the road, potentially for a long time. “We learned that from doing A Book Like This,” Julia says. “We recorded that album over six days and then put it out, and all of a sudden we were out on the road, people were asking us to ‘play this song, play this song’, but I often just thought ‘I don’t want to play that song – I wrote it for whatever reason, but I don’t want to play it live’.”

All told, the pair really only played six tracks from their debut album at shows – this time around, they won’t have the same problem. Down The Way contains thirteen tracks that Angus and Julia genuinely love, so the issue this time will be what to leave in. “It’s going to be hard for us now to jot down the set lists,” Angus says, “because there are so many songs now that we like – we have the two EPs, the first album and the new one, and we’re constantly writing every day. We have a lot of material to cram into our shows now.”

As far as new songs go, the one Julia is most excited to play is Santa Monica Dreams, written while she and Angus were staying at a friend’s house in Battery Park, Manhattan. “The guy who I was staying with plays guitar and he had a beautiful Dobro tuned in drop b,” she says. “I’d never played in that tuning before, so I started mucking around with it. We had been in Santa Monica for a period of time and I fell in love with the place and the people – one person in particular, who I was really missing. This person was still in contact and still saying ‘come and hang out’, but there was a part of me that just thought, no, I can’t do that. That’s where the song came from, feeling that and thinking about that, but also from the tuning. Sometimes a different tuning on a guitar will just bring about something like that.”

“We’ve had a funny relationship with instruments,” she continues. “We grew up in a house where there were always instruments lying around, so we have this attitude now that whatever instrument you happen to pick up will do the trick. You form a relationship with any instrument that’s around. We don’t really form special bonds with guitars.”

That may be true, but it doesn’t mean that the pair don’t love instruments. “You walk into a house and pick up a guitar,” Angus says, “and that guitar will have so many stories to tell – songs and feelings will just be drawn to a guitar.” In fact, Angus recently found a guitar by the side of the road, and is excited about what might come out of this. “It was beautiful – it was perfect, it old and vintage, and it had all these marks on it, obviously from another life. It was a nylon but I put steel strings on it and it sounds beautiful. It’s going on the road with us – it’s going to be another member of the family.”

DOWN THE WAY is out this Friday on EMI. ANGUS & JULIA STONE play at The Tivoli on Saturday Mar 20, but unfortunately, tickets are now sold out. Go to www.angusandjuliastone.com for more.

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