Julia Cumming Is Ready for the Spotlight

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nyone who’s seen Julia Cumming perform knows she’s a star. As the lead singer and bassist of the New York rock band Sunflower Bean, she has spent more than a decade commanding stages with confidence, her vocals ringing out loud and clear across the din of countless clubs and theaters. But for most of that time, if you tried suggesting that she go solo, she was adamantly opposed.

“My response would be, ‘Fuck you,’” says Cumming, 30. “It would piss me off.” That advice, which she heard often in her late teens and early twenties, always felt so presumptuous to her — the implication that, as a young woman, she didn’t know what was best for her. “All I wanted was to be in a band,” she continues, “and getting to be in a band was the entirety of my artistic fulfillment.”

That’s changing this spring with the release of Julia, the stunning solo debut she never thought she’d make. With its sleek Seventies singer-songwriter sound, carrying strong echoes of Carole King and Carly Simon, this album marks the beginning of an exciting new chapter in Cumming’s rock & roll story. “The songs came to me and they told me that they were ready,” she says, “and I was like, ‘Shit. I have to change course.’”

A few weeks ahead of the album’s April 24 release on Partisan Records, Cumming is explaining this surprising development in her career over a thin-crust pepperoni pizza on New York’s Avenue B. It started just a few blocks north of here, in the downtown Manhattan apartment she still calls home (though she spends nearly as much time in L.A. these days). She was sitting at a piano in between Sunflower Bean tours, feeling frustrated with the industry and what she calls “the pageantry of cool,” wondering why she made music at all. 

Suddenly, she had her answer: “I sing these words for me/To hear the sound/To let them ring/To drown you out,” she says, reciting the opening lyrics of “My Life,” the defiant statement of purpose that became her lead single from Julia. “It felt really radical in the moment,” she says.

Those words turned out in time to be the beginning of something big — a story full of emotional highs and lows, and a search for something to call her own. But right then, she just knew she had a new song to write. 

LIKE MANY GREAT musicians, Cumming began life as something of a misfit. “My mom was a very working mom,” she says. “She didn’t necessarily even have time to brush my hair, so she would take me to the men’s barbershop on 14th and First, where they have pictures on the wall and you point to the picture. And I had, seriously, for the entirety of my childhood, a little boy’s haircut.”

She wasn’t much of a dresser in those days, either — “I had absolutely no relationship to clothes” — and she could hear the other kids whispering behind her back at school. “And what happened was, I started to like the feeling of standing out,” she says. “I enjoyed making people feel uncomfortable.”

After a brief spell in Miami, where she moved at age 13 for her mom’s job and found an even less forgiving social environment than the one she’d left behind, she returned to live with her dad in New York and got down to the serious business of starting a band. “My mom let me go, and she really did not want to, but she said that she wasn’t going to be the person that got in the way of this dream,” Cumming says. “That was huge. That was when I stopped being a kid, really.”

Within months, she had formed a duo with an old friend, Rachel Trachtenburg, and they began performing together at open mics alongside anti-folk acts and performance artists. It was a rigorously DIY scene, and she loved it. Once, she and Trachtenburg picketed the CMJ Music Marathon, a new-music festival run by an indie magazine, on the grounds that it was an event for sell-outs: “They wouldn’t give us any shows because we were kids, and we stood outside of the Living Room with a piece of cardboard that said ‘CMJ: Corporate Music Joke.’”

Cumming had grown nearly seven inches while she was in Miami — “a genealogical roll of the dice,” she says — and she found that her height made her stand out in a new way, especially after she decided to bleach her hair at age 16. “When I went blonde, my life started getting massively better,” she says. “People wanted to pay me to wear clothes. It’s really different for blondes. You enter a different blonde atmosphere that you don’t know exists as a brunette. It’s crazy.”

Soon she was being offered modeling gigs, starting with shoots for local boutiques. “You’d get 30, 35 bucks in cash an hour. It was already better than any other job you could do,” she says. “I was like, I’m tall, now I’m blonde. People give a shit for some reason. I don’t know why, but I know that I gotta do something with it and make some money so I can do music.”

Her fashion career took off at the same time as Sunflower Bean, which she joined in 2013 after connecting with guitarist Nick Kivlen and drummer Olive Faber, two kids her age from suburban Long Island who were more experienced rock musicians. “I was scared to play with them,” she says. “I looked up to them. We would play for five, six hours a day, and they let me grow with them. It was priceless.”

The next few years were full of thrills: playing dozens of shows in the New York area with Sunflower Bean, flying to Paris to walk the runway for Saint Laurent, and releasing a debut album with the band, all before she turned 20. But while Cumming’s dual career helped them get lots of press, it also led to some early blowback. “We were a model band,” she says. “People thought that was a very hateable quality, which I can understand. One of the best things about music is that it doesn’t need to be a place for beautiful people. I can’t even blame people for it. But I had to survive.”

A decade later, Cumming thought back to the critical voices she’d unwittingly internalized in those days: “My band is not hard enough to be loved by the people that love hard shit. It’s not dream-pop enough to be this, I’m not pretty enough to be that. I’m not enough of anything for anyone. I’m kind of a total failure.” On some level, she realized, her entire career in music had been an attempt to get enough applause and validation to block out those fears. 

Even the blonde hair she’d maintained through years of expensive salon sessions felt like part of the problem. “You have to sit there with bleach on your head. It burns your head, it itches your head,” she says. “You sit there and you do this, because I thought that the only way to be acceptable was to be something else. I didn’t even think about not doing it, because to not do it would be to ruin everything. ‘It will be terrible for my career, and I’ll lose everything, and I’ll be ugly, and nobody will like me…’”

Around the end of 2023, she’d had enough. Letting her hair go back to its natural dark hue, she headed to L.A. to start work on Julia.

WORKING CLOSELY WITH multi-instrumentalist Brian Robert Jones, a skilled sideman who became a trusted collaborator, Cumming explored new ideas without worrying about how they would be received by the world. (For a glimpse of what Jones can bring to a song, catch him shredding on tour this spring and summer in Hayley Williams’ band.) Later, in sessions at the historic EastWest Studios with producer Chris Coady, she kept going, building up a lush, multi-track pop sound with roots in Burt Bacharach and Brian Wilson’s mid-century masterworks. Songs like “Revel in the Knowledge,” “Ruled by Fear,” and “Forget the Rest” feature radiant arrangements that show off her most expressive vocals ever. 

So does “My Life,” the song that kicked it all off. “Being able to say, ‘I don’t do music to impress you. I don’t wear what I wear because I want you to fuck me. I do it because it’s fun and it’s who I am’— in a Seventies easy-listening style?” she says. “It felt like the most rebellious, punk-rock song I ever wrote.”

The music was flowing forth in a heady, exhilarating rush of creativity, but there were times when she felt herself getting carried away beyond her control. “I started having these thought patterns that were really, really crazy,” she says. The song “Please Let Me Remember This,” where she got stuck on the idea of writing about a moment in time, became a focal point. “I was like, ‘How small can I think? Could I write a song about a second?’ I drove myself into some kind of mania about this song, talking to myself, pretty intense… It was a wake-up call.”

Cumming has dealt with mental health challenges on and off since her teens. “I’ve been attempting to get help medically for depression since I was 13 or 14 years old,” she says. “Many different meds, never found anything that really worked.” Now, a new diagnosis of OCD brought clarity. “It has this fun, sexy name — they call it Pure O,” she says. “I ended up seeing a psychiatrist, and I got some good medication that I’m still on.” She also ended up finishing “Please Let Me Remember This,” one of the highlights of the album once she got her head around it. “I’m so happy that song made it on the record, because I’m like, ‘This song nearly killed me.’”

She spent some time shopping the album around before signing with her new label. “I had to do a lot of pitching, I had a lot of rejection,” she says. “Sometimes major labels would be like, ‘You should start teasing it, get it successful, and then we’ll think about it.’ Partisan is like, ‘You can make good art that is exactly what it’s supposed to be, and we can sell it.’ And you’re like, ‘Oh!’”

Her labelmates now include Cameron Winter and Geese, and like that slightly younger gang of New York indie phenoms, she has no intention of breaking up Sunflower Bean just because she’s made a solo record. “Our goal is always to be making records together when we’re in our seventies,” she says. “How cool would that be?… This is more than a side project of Bean. It’s a new road. But that doesn’t mean there can’t be two roads.”

A few days before we met for this interview, Cumming taped her first-ever late-night TV performance, crooning “My Life” on The Tonight Show. (The performance at 30 Rock came together quickly. “When you come from ‘New York’s scrappiest band,’ you have the skillset to pull it together,” she says, quoting an old Rolling Stone print headline about Sunflower Bean.) In many ways, the watch party she convened with old bandmates, high school classmates, and other friends felt like a more momentous event than the 30th birthday celebration she had earlier in the year.

“I don’t think there’s ever been a group of people so locked into Jimmy Fallon in the back room of a bar,” she says. “People knew how bad I wanted it. They knew how much it meant to me.”