Bad Religion: Julia Jacklin Can’t Quite Find Heaven

The Australian singer takes on  Catholic guilt, Jesus Christ Superstar, and prayers for Princess Diana on PRE PLEASURE and beyond.

Written by Anjali Krishna

Photo courtesy of Nick Mckk

As a child, Julia Jacklin’s Sunday mornings began in church. She’d slip on her best “shoes and the dress,”  to sing a very different type of tune than the ones she does today. She enjoyed singing and she could get behind the dancing, as well. She could “pray for Princess Diana” and “listen to the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack” easily enough.

At the end of the day, Jacklin was “just a kid in a leotard beneath a technicolor dream coat.” Could God really hear the voice in her pretty dress and shoes? She wasn’t sure. But she did find the concrete elements of religion — parades and singalongs and crowds of dancing children — comfortable and real enough to justify the practice even if she couldn’t connect to the unseen above.  

In the song, “Lydia Wears A Cross,” and throughout her album PRE PLEASURE, Jacklin  explores life after her culturally religious upbringing, reflecting upon its impact. Though Jacklin’s parents weren’t religious themselves, she was sent to a religious primary school. On PRE PLEASURE, she reckons with the belief system she learned in those formative years that would subtly influence the rest of her life, sexually and emotionally.

Sonically “Lydia Wears a Cross” evokes Jacklin’s childhood through a repetitive distorted guitar line that provides a soundtrack for the tale of many children who grapple with their religious upbringing. Drums beat unendingly and watchfully over Jacklin’s quiet singing, as if condemning her secret lack of faith. When the pace of the drums pick up during the third verse and Jacklin sings with more strength, it feels as though she is explaining these realizations to her younger self as an adult.

According to Jacklin, the tangible aspects of religion are easier for children to comprehend. The chain Jacklin’s friend Lydia wears stands out to her as a great marker of religion, something understandable in its material desirability even if its intent and meaning is foggy. In other words, she doesn’t have Lydia’s religious faith, but the singer wouldn’t be opposed to playing along if it means also sporting a pretty necklace. If listening to church gossip (“Miss Brown was keeping score”) and waiting in line for communion was all Catholicism was about (“the line up, the quiet / the bleeding heart divided”), Jacklin could stay a believer. Yet even as a primary school girl, she’s too unmoved by the exterior of the religious world to believe in the interior, seeing the material aspects of Christianity as simply seeping elements of the secular worlds. Watching her friend’s unwaivering faith, Jacklin is all the more painfully aware of her doubt. They “sit back to back,” but they’re opposites; Lydia’s certain of something that Jacklin tries to find and comprehend. What’s hopeless to her (“I’d be a believer if I thought we had a chance”) is concrete to her friend. As she sings about Lydia’s surety, Jacklin wonders if she can get some of that clarity herself. 

Two albums earlier, Jacklin similarly expressed that she “was once a Sunday kneeler.” Not a Christian, not a Catholic, and not a believer, but simply a former subscriber to a religiously- associated action. Just like on “Lydia Wears a Cross,” on “Leadlight”  she retrospectively sees herself surrounded by the pieces of faith yet unattached to the faith itself. Able to disentangle the two parts mentally — separating church actions from church spirit — the detachment appears uniquely childlike in terms of puzzling together how the world works as a young girl.

However disconnected she finds herself from it, Jacklin’s religious background creeps its way into her bedroom as she seeks pleasure. On “Ignore Tenderness,” Jacklin’s attempts at bodily vulnerability are thwarted as her “education creeps in.” Over a deceptively twinkling guitar and strings, she remembers being told to “Let them slap you about / Go on, choke yourself out / But leave no room for doubt that you are brave” referring to conflicting advice from teen magazines like Cosmopolitan and church youth leaders. 

Jacklin is certainly aware of the church’s teachings influencing kids in later life: she asks a lover to share when things get hard on “Be Careful With Yourself,” as she “Knows you were raised by the church and / Encouraged to keep it all in.” Though Jacklin and many others may not have believed in the religions of their childhood, the culture of its structure was prominent in their formative years – especially the emphasis on what would be called “proper behavior.” She talks over her full band’s sound like an older sister; her vocalization between verses makes her sound almost preachy. What was taught then, Jacklin acknowledges, is not so easy to forget. 

She proposes a different sort of religious belief, more palatable to her generation, a few tracks earlier. “Too In Love To Die” is produced like a church hymnal with a sole organ backing  Jacklin’s angelic voice. Though she may not believe in God in a spiritual sense, she feels the “Powers that be / Would understand / That I’m too in love to die.” She suggests that God may not exist for her regularly, but the love she feels might be significant enough for him to acknowledge it. She proposes love as an alternative sort of God, praising her relationship in hymnal form. Not religion, but love, thus, is a fate-changing factor in Jacklin’s life. In this song, she confronts past religious guilt and trauma that has affected her life thus far, and she’s ready here for love to guide her forward and away. She has faith in a different sort of religious belief here: one in a love so strong that a religion she doesn’t believe in would come to existence to help her keep being loved. 

PRE PLEASURE is the first album on which Jacklin speaks more openly on religion. She’s more well-known for writing about “Coming of Age” as a woman in the world, and is often categorized with the new so-called genre of “sad girl musicians” like Phoebe Bridgers and Faye Webster. Jacklin worries the categorization reduces her to being only an emotional word vomiter, and that her capabilities as a songwriter are forgotten. Jacklin writes with an aching vulnerability at 31, as she would to a priest in the confessionals of her youth. One thing religion offered her was the ability to spill truths from her lips as if God himself pulled them out. Yet they come out carefully. Jacklin constructs curated realities that pull listeners right back to their own childhoods, into pews and onto knees — confused about whatever the hell they were praying to, but enjoying the hell of it all.