Written by Tyra Buckley
Girlhood bites. It’s a fever, all-consuming, that sets in motion an uncomfortable transformation: the growing pains that bridge the gap between childhood and womanhood. A metamorphosis, the transition into girlhood is challenging but liberating, a plane of existence we as children didn’t know and as women, mourn.
Few here and there have been able to properly communicate the feeling of girlhood in media, but when they do, it’s beautiful. Take Jo Hill, for example. It’s “standing with your boobs out in granny pants in a dirty pond,” so says the singer-songwriter from Cheddar, down-to-earth and luminous, discussing the image fronting her debut album on the one shared experience that ties all women together, “girlhood.” — “don’t you think that’s part of what being a woman feels like? Oh, I’m so exposed and uncomfortable, but I’m doing it anyway.”
Hill, encouraged from an early age by her opera-trained grandmother who introduced her to Any Dream Will do (Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat) and booked her first gig in a care home back in Lewes, brings this raw, quintessential album to us with a piece of cover art; her and two friends in nothing but granny pants, reflecting the openness of her ‘coming of age’ album. “The funny thing about the album cover is that it wasn’t planned or anything. I planned the whole day with my creative team of we went round loads of different basically, the dream was to have this image of me and my bassist, Scarlett, sat on the toilet with our pants down, laughing, because I found this amazing image on, and I just feel like toilets are girlhood. Like, you cry on the toilet. You laugh on the toilet. You start your period. You open up to each other. And so that was, like, the dream. And we weren’t quite nailing those images. And this was the very end of the day — we’d been shooting for, like, 8, 9 hours. We were all really tired. And I was like, I just wanna get a picture of us in granny pants by water.”
“Because I just think most girls live in those pants. Let’s be honest,” she says, beaming with joy at the memory. “So, we ended up just me and my mates just getting naked in this manky pond at Hampstead. And it was the one moment of the day where I totally let go, and there was no plan.”
In line with this sense of freedom, the idea of liberation being nurtured in friendship amongst young women, sets the theme for the album almost immediately. It’s inherently nostalgic, making you yearn for the past moments that you never thought you’d miss, the ones you were waiting to just be over. It’s a story; a narrative following the journey of Jo and other women alike, shedding their girlhood to become the people they are today. A journey of self-discovery inside and outside of the music industry.
“It’s the record I wish my mum gave me growing up,” she tells us.
Beginning to find her sound, guided by the eminent showmanship of Freddie Mercury and storytelling of The Police, Jo embarks on a new mission to ensure “every song is one I would take a bullet for.” Even in the face of adversity, after being signed and dropped by a label – something she openly claims had an impact on her mental health and taught her to not get overexcited in advance – as well as “growing up, anxiety, self-discovery, illness, learning what it is to be a woman, quite a lot of self-doubt, but kind of bathing in that and then coming out, getting through that and feeling liberated by that,” Jo manages to spin her self-discovery album into the memoir of a young woman, essential reading for any girl, really. Because there is no cipher, rulebook or guide. All we have is other women, and Jo perfectly demonstrates that no one woman is alone.
“I think it’s like a discovery record. I wouldn’t lie to you and be like, this is this is it. This is me. It’s like, fine. It’s testing out different sounds,” she expanded. “I think when the label stuff happened and I was left this year, I was like, I’m gonna release an album that’s phenomenal. And I have to know that it’s, like, totally worth all the energy that goes behind being an independent artist. So, I’d say the motivation is just creating really quality art behind this one.”
It’s clear to me immediately that Jo is kind-hearted and open, with something distinct about her that makes you want to spill your guts like you’ve been best friends forever; incredibly patient, she has been working towards this debut for longer than we can imagine. Having had her earliest memories in music around the age of 4, moving on to jazz bands and choirs, and even operating a music centre out of a refugee camp, music has essentially been written into her DNA.
“I actually ended up going to Jordan, to study Arabic at university. And I think I kind of always wanted to be a performer, but I had a very weird journey into getting into music. I knew I wanted to be a performer of some sort. So I trained to be an opera singer, applied for all these drama and music schools. And then, age 18, I went out to Calais to work in a refugee camp and run a music center out there. And I was suddenly like, oh my god, I need to go and learn Arabic, but go somewhere that is like full of music and does all of that kind of stuff, so that I can kind of keep that going on. But I still need a degree to fall back on,” she says. Her adventure has been long, but is that not the essence of girlhood? A long, winding road to unbridled passion?
“I was like 18, 19, and just thinking I wanna be something creative, but I don’t quite know what yet I’m gonna pursue. And then I think it was when I moved to Jordan, when I was living out in the Middle East, I basically got Lyme disease. I got bit by a tick, and I was so poorly. But what this did mean is that I basically ended up falling into songwriting, and that’s kind of all I could really do. And I just write songs and songs after songs. And I think that was for me when it clicked, I was like, oh my god. I find writing and singing really healing.”
“Girlhood.” truly is the album for anyone who is finding themselves, with tracks like “Diary of a 15 Year Old Girl (Interlude)” and “ALL MY GIRLS ARE TOMBOYS,” tales of finding your own place in the world in what seems like an almost competitive and transformative era of your life, as well as “BIG BOYS CRY TOO,” a nod to the struggle with reconciling emotions with masculinity; it’s an essential storyteller, brimming with nostalgia and raw honesty that many musicians tend to shy away from.
Odes to family members struggling with mental health, poems for the young girls we used to be, tucked away at home in our journals, and alt-pop with a smattering of country, it should absolutely be on replay.
(Elton John agrees – he played “ALL MY GIRLS ARE TOMBOYS” on his radio show, Rocket Hour).
The solidifying of Jo’s space in the music industry and her ability to truly tell a story in a melodic and engaging way is what fills the gap in the industry that has been missing—she has created a safe space for men and women everywhere, coming to terms with the events of their youth and how its formed who they are today.
Thought-provoking and insanely catchy ballads of youth, “Girlhood.” is sure to be stuck in our heads all winter, especially with Jo’s upcoming tour, where she brings a community together performing in small, intimate record shops and secret locations.
