An Inner Compass, a Personal Emotional Logic: An Interview with Ella Ion

Illustration by Taya Welter

Ella Ion’s music has many temperaments. Honeyed melodies can collide with thunderous guitar riffs, only to give way once more to her silk-smooth vocals as a song evolves. The Australia-based singer-songwriter channels several of alternative music’s deeper undercurrents: Elliott Smith’s bruised sentimentality, flashes of dissonant rock, and an almost Interpol-like darkness in Waiting, her debut album, where the drums seem to brood beneath the surface.  Having been an avid music fan all her life, she began listening "seriously" at nine, when she fell in love with Spanish and classical guitar during family travels. She still writes on that same guitar, the one she first learned to play on. That’s where the magic begins for her.

“For me, writing a song starts with exploring sounds on my guitar until I land on something that excites me or sparks a chain reaction that leads to a song. I really just have to play around to find what I want, that’s a form of experimentation, and that’s where the magic happens,” she reflects.  "To me, starting to write a song starts with exploring sounds with my guitar until I land on something that excites me or sparks a chain reaction that leads to a song. I truly do just have to play around to find what I want, which is a form of experimentation, and that's where the magic happens!" she reflects on her writing process.

She certainly honors her influences, not just by channeling their timelessness, but by softening them with her own gentle shimmer. Her lyrics carry an earnestness that feels like it could have been lifted from the margins of a school notebook during the last class of the day. Most of her songs sound as though they’re written to herself; even when she’s addressing others, the pursuit of self-understanding, in true know-thyself fashion, glows through every line break. Tracing her path, where she’s been, and where she might go next seems to be central to Ella Ion’s work.

On her song Map, even when she sings about love and what’s been lost, she treats heartbreak as something larger, an emotional vantage point from which everything comes into focus, in real time, as the song unfolds. "When you leave love behind, it’s easiest to demonize the relationship or the person to justify that decision. Map is a sort of closure letter you’re writing where halfway through your frustrated outpouring you realise that you still have so much respect for the person and remember how much they taught you." she recalls.  "I think that’s why there’s a sweet melancholy to the arrangements and melodies on that song. It’s not quite grief, but it’s not quite moving on. The cello was played by Lucinda Machin (The Tullamarines) and the piano by Stefan Blair (Good Morning). I’ve gone through this process a few times where I send the raw guitar and vocals to Lucinda and let her do exactly what she feels so she can connect with the music unhindered, and then go back and put in the piano (or other accompanying instrument) and chop up/ mix and match the takes myself to attain the dynamic I’m hearing in my head."

There’s an unmistakable inward gaze running through her discography, a quiet introspection that also shapes the way she collaborates with others. " I think it’s apparent that my music is deeply personal to me, I can’t just hand someone a feeling and expect them to understand on a psychic level."  she admits, hinting to preferring to work alone and strengthen the foundational pillars of her universe herself. "Collaboration is about trust. When you have that trust and admiration for someone else’s artistic ability, it’s easier to let them leave their mark on your music. I feel excited at the prospect of meeting and collaborating with people on the writing front too though, I’ll just be hinging on a bit of telepathy and a lot of trust."

The brand new singles that Ion released this year sees her softening her hand, lending each song a softer hue in contrast to her debut album Waiting. "Despite my heavier leanings on my debut album “Waiting”, I am a soft person!" she reitirates. "My earlier songs were guitar songs that I took to a producer and a band who helped me jam them live to create demos." Whereas now, the result is her wanting to do things in her own way. She experimented with the instruments she didn’t know how to play through a midi keyboard.

On Blue Black Crows, the contrast, much present in Ion’s song writings reveals itself in a much more spiritual way. "I’m always battling along the spectrum of self-preservation and some level of hedonism." she says. Growing up somewhat atheist and being introduced to church around when she was 19 and soon after leaving it, she had to come back to a place of neutrality between good and bad. Shame is one clingy bastard and according to Ion, it was quite hard to shake, in her experience too. " Christianity was a quick fix for me to feel okay with myself, to have moral guidance in a morally confused society. But there was so much I didn’t agree with that pushed me to question everything that I did agree with." she admits. "When you’re feeling lost, it’s really easy to abandon yourself and blindly follow whoever seems good-hearted and trustworthy." Blue Black Crows, along with a lot of her other music written around that time, deals with that reestablishment of Ion's freedom and trying to distinguish learned shame from real shame and freedom from overindulgence.

From what can be gleaned from her songs, it seems she’s found an inner compass, one that transcends the simple binaries of good and bad, steering instead toward a more personal, intuitive sense of what those things mean. Her writing doesn’t moralize so much as it maps the terrain of her own emotional logic: moments of doubt and clarity, tenderness and dissonance, all orbiting around a quiet pursuit of self-understanding.