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After three years out of the spotlight, singer-songwriter and bird enthusiast Stella Donnelly is back with a new album and fresh inspiration. By Kye Halford.
Singer-songwriter Stella Donnelly is back on her own terms
“I think that’s a willie wagtail,” whispers Stella Donnelly as she fixes binoculars on the small theropod in question. Two dozen other pairs of binoculars follow her line of vision to a nearby thicket of bushes. A morning runner halts and removes his earphones, curious to know what could possibly engross a crowd on a Sunday morning along Melbourne’s Merri Creek trail. A collective gasp. The bird hops out from behind the leaves and into plain sight. It’s a yellow-rumped thornbill. “Cooooool,” says Donnelly.
The day before, as an ambassador for BirdLife Australia’s Backyard Bird Count, the singer-songwriter posted a self-recorded video on Instagram, swaying to Alessi Brothers’ “Seabird” while sharing the time and place for the birdwatching tour. Fans and fellow twitchers heard the call – from environmentalists to indie kids seizing the opportunity to spend the morning with their favourite artist. One birdwatcher arrived wearing a T-shirt listing “Stella Donnelly’s favourite birds”.
“My first issue was that I thought no one was going to turn up. My next issue was that 30 people turned up,” Donnelly tells me a few days later in Brunswick’s Project 281 cafe. “It was like, oh my God, now I actually have to do this.” It’s a striking reaction from a musician who is no stranger to performing for large crowds. Over spells of relentless touring, she has built a reputation as an artist at ease with her audience, known for comedic interludes that offset some of the weightier themes in her songs.
Donnelly has kept away from crowds for almost three years. Since touring to support her second album, 2022’s Flood, she has played only a handful of small shows. She took a break from songwriting, citing burnout. Looking back, she says her career had reached a point where the music was written largely to serve touring – a framework fundamentally at odds with her artistic philosophy. Now, with a new album titled Love and Fortune and her first tour in three years beginning in February, she’s eager to set a new precedent.
“I’ve reframed my thinking so that any touring I do must be in service of creating more music,” she says. “I’ve put that into practice by making the tours smaller. The Australian tour is only five shows, the UK run is only a handful, and there’s time in-between to reground – come home and ride my bike, go to the pool, go to the library – which will also make touring so much more fun. I’m really looking forward to playing these shows, but I just feel like I was hitting the quantity-over-quality pinch point for a while. Now, it’s like, ‘Let’s just play five shows really well and not get sick.’ ”
Donnelly has re-entered the music industry on a wave of inspiration and signed with a new label, Dot Dash Recordings – but her efforts to retain creative autonomy extend to fields beyond songwriting and recording. She still works at one of the jobs she held during her time away, writing gender impact assessments at a Melbourne cemetery (“for those who are still alive”, she’s quick to note), and is also studying for a bachelor of counselling, with the intention of completing a master of music therapy.
“I just want to find ways for me to not be shaking my creativity like a moneybox and being like, ‘What’s next?’ ” Donnelly tells me. “So if I can find more interesting ways to use what I have – which is only music; I’ve tried a bunch of other shit and I’m really bad at it – then I can put music in a place that’s purely creative expression, because I’m not going to change the way I write just so I can make some bank.”
Donnelly was still a small child when she moved with her family from Western Australia to her mother’s home town of Morriston in Wales, known in Welsh as Treforys. The lush, winding landscape, steeped in its own history, was light years from Perth’s suburbia. Enrolled in a Welsh-language school, she was required to learn a new language and she attended chapel to find community and appease her grandmother, joining the choir and singing hymns in the native tongue. It was the music rather than the sermons that struck her.
“Even in English, I don’t really know what’s going on in chapel,” she says. “It’s pretty old-school – God and all this stuff – but as soon as the singing started, I felt something, and all of those songs really stuck with me still.”
Donnelly’s music education was shaped just as profoundly at home, primarily under the influence of her father. “Dad’s a primary-school music teacher, but before that he would play gigs and would also write songs. He couldn’t get a job as a teacher while we were in Wales, so he became like a stand-up comedian singer, probably writing extremely offensive songs about Princess Diana.”
Car journeys with him became a space for discovery, where she would relentlessly request he play Welsh band Catatonia on cassette. Lead singer Cerys Matthews, with a voice that teeters between sweet and snarling – but is always unapologetically Welsh – made a seismic impact. Her father also introduced her to Billy Bragg and Paul Kelly, two artists she cites as crucial in shaping her development as a songwriter.
These threads of influence were woven into her debut studio album, 2019’s Beware of the Dogs, where she delivered sharp social commentary through biting one-liners: “Oh are you scared of me, old man / or are you scared of what I’ll do? / You grabbed me with an open hand / The world is grabbing back at you”, she declares in the opener, “Old Man”. The album cover is a photograph of Donnelly’s face with her hand gripping her chin while another hand, seemingly belonging to a middle-aged man, holds a bar of soap to her mouth.
“Boys Will Be Boys” remains the album’s emotional core – a devastating waltz where Donnelly confronts the man who sexually assaulted her friend and eviscerates the broader culture of victim-blaming abused women. First released on her Thrush Metal EP in 2017 only days before allegations against Harvey Weinstein emerged online, the song eventually broke Donnelly to an international audience and swept her into the turbulence of the #MeToo movement. Revisiting the song almost a decade later, as Donnelly’s gentle but commanding voice soars over delicately fingerpicked chords, her message has lost none of its power.
It’s clear the social issues close to Donnelly’s heart inform how she interacts with the world beyond her music, too. She touches on a range of these during our conversation, from Kneecap’s role in raising awareness of colonial occupation to her grandmother being subjected to the “Welsh Not” punishment for speaking Welsh in school. At one point, Donnelly reckons with her carbon footprint as a globetrotting musician who produces physical media. She’s since released Love and Fortune on regrind vinyl – essentially melted factory offcuts from the pressing plant floor that would otherwise be binned.
The inspiration for Donnelly’s latest album was drawn from a more vulnerable place than its predecessors, as she reckons with the void left by the breakdown of a close relationship. “The whole album is essentially me trying to find my way back to some semblance of myself while going through a friendship break-up,” she says. “It’s me figuring out how to process something like that, because there’s just not much out there about friendship break-ups.” She lays herself bare on these songs, turning her focus inward to take aim at her own flaws.
Donnelly wrote Love and Fortune without support from a label. She likens the experience to the beginning of her career, when she made Thrush Metal. “In my head no one gave a shit, you know? I was like, ‘No one knows I’m doing this,’ ” she says. “I often approach my writing in that way – pretending that no one has ever heard of me. It really helps to maintain integrity as a songwriter and not be pulled by the industry or the ‘what would work for streaming?’ mindset. In this case, I made my world as small as possible to tap into this record and what it’s about.”
Tucked away in her Brunswick share house, she read memoirs by women such as Deborah Levy, Amy Liptrot and Maggie Nelson – and began to find a structure for the album. “Once I wrote ‘Feel It Change’, I knew that I needed to set some limitations,” she says. “I found myself trying to encapsulate the whole fucking mountain of a break-up in one song, which is just impossible. So I decided, ‘You know what? I’m going to approach this like a novel, where each song is a different chapter that dives in on that one particular feeling, and not try and balance it out with an argument.’ ”
Donnelly allowed her creative process to move naturally with her grieving. “I was able to ride the waves of time in terms of like, ‘Okay, I’m actually starting to feel a sense of self-forgiveness now. I’m going to touch on that in a song.’ I was in real time grieving and healing, and then I got to soundtrack it.” She allowed herself to feel the full spectrum of emotions without judgement – from pettiness to guilt and, eventually, hope.
On “Please Everyone”, Donnelly captures the strangeness of grieving someone who in many ways remains so close. “You’re no longer in that person’s life, but you know them so well that you know exactly what they’re doing with their day,” she says. “It’s that feeling of living almost identical lives in parallel. I know that they are probably birdwatching somewhere and our periods have synced up, so I know that they’ve got their period this week, you know? Just knowing someone so deeply that you are never, never again going to have that sort of crossover … thinking of their existence all the time.”
On “Baths”, one of the final songs Donnelly wrote for the album, she proves she can reach beyond the confines of a single relationship. “When I first started humming the melody, I had an image in mind, and it felt like an image of lineage. I just tried to stay in that space to see what would come out, and I started to make it a bit of a timeline…”
That timeline unfolds as a series of formative moments: “There’s a long peace, when I hear my dad speak / Weaving comedy, through his teacher’s eyes.” Another image – this time of her mother, a former nurse, marching with the Nursing Federation for fairer pay while carrying Donnelly in her womb. Donnelly’s voice, almost completely unadorned by accompanying instruments, evokes the Sundays she spent under stained glass as a child.
In the music video, we follow Donnelly as she walks alone along Altona Pier, bundled in winter clothing. She stops at the edge of the jetty and strips off layers until she’s down to her bathing suit, peering at the cold water below. Then she leaps – and disappears. She’s shivering when she re-emerges on the pier, but her trademark grin returns just in time for the final line: “I drip dry, standing in my new life / Chemicals in my eyes, peaceful on the vine.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on January 24, 2026 as "Free as a bird".
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