SXSW is one of those strange institutions that seems to increase exponentially, year on year, in terms of both its perceived importance in helping acts break through and also how closely controlled it becomes by sponsors and pre-prepared media interests. Jacklin, happily, managed to come through it without anything in the way of a horror story. “I’m sure good things would’ve happened for me anyway,” she says, before swiftly tempering the uncharacteristic bullishness with a hasty “maybe.”
“It definitely accelerated the process, because you’ve got all these people in the same place, but you know everybody’s probably having a very different individual experience. We were super lucky. We got good slots in good venues, and people actually came to them! We didn’t fuck up too much, I guess. You hear about that – people having nightmarish shows with technical problems or whatever – but we were good. Which was nice.”
Jacklin lives and operates out of the inner-western Sydney suburb of Glebe, where she spent her post-university years working a mundane day job on a production line, at a factory that turns out essential oils. It was that good, old-fashioned manual graft, though, that lent her the strength of conviction to record her first full-length record on her own terms, rather than just cutting tracks in her garage, as had previously been the modus operandi.
“I really liked this record by a girl from New Zealand called Aldous Harding,” she explains, “so I looked into who it was that recorded her, and he turned out to be really affordable.” Ben Edwards was the man in question, and Jacklin promptly decamped to his sitting room studio in Christchurch. “I just lived at his house for a month. I guess it sounds like a little bit of a stretch for my first album, but New Zealand is my favourite place in the world, and I’d worked very hard at a very shitty job for a very long time to get there, so I thought, why not? – I felt like I’d earned it.”
Not that, by the end of that four-week stretch, Jacklin was totally happy with the finished product. “It took a long time to get my head around,” she laughs. “We had to re-do one of the songs when we got back home, and I’m still not fully sold on the record. I mean, I love it, but I just can’t imagine that anyone ever finishes an album and feels like, ‘oh, yeah! This is definitely ready for the world to listen to!’ At some point, you have to draw the line. You could carry on tweaking and making adjustments for the rest of your life.”