Fresh Spark

- James Belfield

Although Julia Deans has lived with many of the songs on her new second solo album, We Light Fire, for almost seven years, she’s still waiting to grow into them in performance.

The oldest of these 10 tracks, Clandestine, was written in the winter of 2011, shortly after she and partner David Wernham had moved back to Auckland and built a home studio to record the follow-up to 2010’s Taite Music Prize finalist Modern Fables.

Despite the gap between releases, We Light Fire feels like a natural companion piece to Modern Fables, thanks to those signature pure, high and bold vocals familiar from Deans’ Fur Patrol days, and her thoughtful, honest lyrics, which have grown from introspection to a more outward-looking commentary on the world.