Angus and Julia Stone Sail into Our Hearts

Surfboarding Australian folkie Angus Stone and his guitarist/vocalist older sister Julia—who started out solo, but now perform as a duo—were raised on a narrow peninsula outside Sydney. “On one side is the ocean,” Angus explains, “and on the other side is a bay where all the sailing boats were moored, so we had the best of both worlds. And our family motto was, ‘A family that sails together, lives together.’”

Their grandparents were famous yachters who regularly raced their 60-foot sloop in Melbourne-to-Osaka regattas, and their folks also sailed competitively, often with their children aboard. Even after their parents divorced, recalls Julia, 24, “we went out sailing with them once, and they were both fighting over who’d be skipper, until the whole boat almost capsized.”

How did Angus—whose high, frail singing voice echoes Dewey Bunnell of ’70s folk-rock group America—wind up collaborating with the Marianne Faithfull-on-helium Julia? Angus himself isn’t sure. They were both still living with their father, he sighs. Julia was teaching music, “and I was planning on just sitting on the couch with my Wii and surfing. But I had my guitar and my notebook, and I just started writing.”

“And we were used to hearing each other’s voices,” Julia adds, “because we’d started at a young age, singing these harmony-driven camp songs our mom taught us. So when we started singing together professionally, it felt really good.”

Sadly, there are no sea chanteys on the pair’s whimsical debut, A Book Like This. But acoustic strummers like “Wasted” and “The Beast” (produced by Travis’ Fran Healy) feel quirky and forlorn, as if they’d arrived like bottled messages from some desert island. Which isn’t far from the truth, Julia swears: “The beach where we live isn’t like Bondi—it’s a lot more out-of-the-way.” “So you really get a feeling there,” Angus adds. “A feeling of being almost completely alone. It’s very cool.”