In Conversation with Julianna Riolino
by: Sophie Noel
Julianna Riolino played a knockout show at the Marquee in Halifax on May 19, opening for Daniel Romano’s Outfit (of which she is also a part). I got a chance to catch up with her over the phone a couple of days later.
Can you tell me a little bit about how you found your stride vocally?
I tend to gravitate towards music that I enjoy singing. If a song is good, I want to dissect it and figure out the melody and, you know, mess around with it. I listen to a lot of Fairport Convention, so I'm a big fan of Sandy Denny.
I think I gravitate towards cool phrasing in songs.
You're a visual artist, and wordplay is also really prominent in All Blue. Do you draw inspiration from visual art or other forms of word media?
During the pandemic, I was doing stained glass. I like to put colours in and take colours out until something feels satisfying. When I'm writing a song I do the same thing. It's all kind of like a puzzle, until my brain feels like it's compositionally balanced.
I'm kind of a scatterbrain, so it's hard for me to focus. But there are a few things that I can do where I feel like I can really focus all my attention and like, shut off and not be distracted by things. And that helps to inspire me in other ways.
In a Talk House piece Carson [McHone] mentioned that collaging was something that was part of her practice as well for vision boarding music. Do you ever do visual art in a complementary way to the music that you make?
Yeah, we did a magazine that's like an art collective called Hidden Star Magazine, which was basically a collection of everybody's different works. And I made a collage for one of my songs called Hark, which is on All Blue. But that started off as a poem. And then I made a collage, to represent that poem. And then I turned it into a song.
That makes me think of how when Bobbie Gentry wrote “Ode To Billie Joe”, it started off as a short story. And that lent so much more richness and complexity to the song it eventually became.
Yeah. It's interesting to me how all those things are intertwined. And I think, like, maybe sometimes people have a hard time seeing how everything is connected. Ultimately it's your subconscious working things out.
I'm curious about your relationship with creating in collaboration versus creating in solitude.
I tend to write alone. But I live with my husband, so he'll often hear me in the kitchen writing something and then be like “whatever that was, that's really good. Keep that.”
I'll bring whatever I have to the table and collaborate from that point, which is very similar to the way that it works in the Outfit. Daniel will write all the material and create the concept, and then we'll all get together and try to make it the best it can be.
Songwriting is really cathartic. It's such a balancing act between being present and being so removed. It’s like making a collage or doing something with glass; it's kinda like meditating, so I can get rid of all the chatter in my head. And then when you get together with your colleagues, people have ideas or supportive energy to send it home.
You recorded All Blue in August 2020, over two years before you ended up releasing it. Did your relationship with the record change between recording and releasing?
Holding on to a record for two years is difficult. I wanted it to have this moment, and I wanted to respect the body of work, and everything was shut down. I thought, “Well, I'm not going to release something if I can't perform it live for people”. I think I definitely had moments where I was like, “is my record awful?”. But, you know, it ebbs and it flows. Some days, I love the record. And some days, I toil over it. And some days I'm sick of it. I'm on to the next thing, in my mind.
Tell me more about this next thing!
Diving into new music and concepts and frames of minds are exciting! I love the process of songwriting, and recording too, because it helps you figure out who you are in that moment.
Yeah, kind of like in real time figuring out what’s going to be in the time capsule of that moment.
Exactly.