“If I wanted to sing about this, I had to confront my own responsibilities and feelings of shame.” The result of this reflective period - her third full-length album, ‘Love and Fortune’ - is a collection that encapsulates both ends and new beginnings. It portrays the experience of standing at a crossroads, aware that returning is not an option, and having to gingerly navigate forward, taking one small step at a time. A lot of the content, she admits with a faint smile, revolves around the collapse of a meaningful friendship - a situation that “truly upheaves your world significantly,” but is seldom granted the same societal significance or public acknowledgment as romantic separations. “There’s a lot of shame [associated with them],” Stella points out, emphasizing that “a romantic relationship might end for various reasons, often due to [non]monogamy or external factors.” Friendships, on the other hand, are not exclusive in that manner, meaning a friendship's ending usually involves serious, weighty circumstances - ones that don’t allow others to share the blame. “I believe that’s why it took me some time to release this album,” she reflects. “Because to sing about this, I had to confront my own responsibilities and shame regarding what transpired. It’s far more intricate - it speaks to our humanity when a friendship falls apart, I think.”
In the realms of music, film, and online pop psychology (who hasn’t taken a quick quiz to discover their love language?), romantic breakups are enveloped in a rich cultural vocabulary and an array of framing tools and terms - like incompatibility, ghosting, and gaslighting - that enable us to categorize experiences, comprehend hurtful behaviors, and ultimately move forward in our lives. However, when it comes to other types of relationship breakdowns, no such guide exists. “That was tough,” Stella admits. “I often found myself attempting to tell the entire story in every song, but that approach wasn’t resonating with me, so I began to impose some boundaries: I treated each song as a chapter, which helped me start crafting the framework of the album.” From the self-righteous pettiness of ‘Feel It Change’, to the resigned acceptance of ‘Friend’ or ‘Ghosts’, to the haunting regret - still laced with a leftover sense of care - expressed in ‘Please Everyone’, the tracks navigate various emotions, providing an unapologetically honest exploration of blame, forgiveness, and acceptance. The song ‘Year Of Trouble’ stands out as particularly raw; over a minimal piano backdrop, Stella examines her guilty conscience in what is a heartbreakingly poignant tribute to lost love. “If I forgive myself / Will history tell it twice?” she inquires, “Your beautiful face to read / I never read it correctly.” “I felt quite self-aware about that,” she shares now, somewhat shyly. “I was a bit embarrassed by how intense I went, but that's probably just me overthinking it.” After a brief pause, she adds, “I feel both embarrassed and proud that I allowed myself to be that vulnerable.”
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