Premiere: Garrett Kato and Julia Stone unite for a dreamy duet, Breathe It In

There's a lot of beauty in stripped-back songwriting, and two musicians who know this better than anyone else are Garrett Kato and Julia Stone. The Byron Bay-based former name has been a mainstay in delicate indie for a few years now, both in the limelight - putting out his debut album in 2015, and a string of consistent releases ever since - and behind the scenes, where's he has worked as a songwriter and producer for tracks by Ziggy Alberts, Kyle Lionhart, Riley Pearce and more. 

The latter, meanwhile, is a musician who at this point, needs little introduction. For the last decade-and-a-bit, Julia and her brother Angus have carved themselves a status of Australian music essentials, with their subtle approach to crafty indie-pop being a country favourite time and time again. She, like Angus, also has a fair chunk of solo material too, namely a couple of albums at the start of the decade just gone, and collaborations with Elk Road, Golden Features and plenty of others.

Breathe It In, Garrett Kato's newest single, sees this dynamite pairing come together for the first time, and the results are as expertly beautiful as it promises. It's a largely stripped-back and refined collaboration between the two, that marries this ballad-ing guitar work with dueting vocals that seemingly perfectly compliment each other like jigsaw places clicking into place. Even though this is the first collaboration to be released, you can tell that there's a songwriting chemistry there - it's unmistakable, in a time where so many collaborations feel forged by label A&Rs and as a result, feel clunky and unnatural.

"Breathe It In is about meeting someone when you’re messed up. Julia and I carved out a narrative of a couples deteriorating life together from substance abuse; ultimately coming down to a choice: the substance or the relationship," says Kato on the single, which kicks off his 2020 after a streak of singles last year. "We spent two days together writing in my tiny house in Byron Bay two years ago. She was in Byron recording the Snow record with Angus and had a few days off. We were total strangers on the first day of writing so we spent a lot of time getting to know one and other.

We both were in what seemed like transitional periods of our lives. Me being a new father and her balancing some normality with an ever-changing life on the road. The song was born out of some old and new stories we’d been harbouring for some time and they came to life in this song."

Dive into the track below, and make sure there are a few tissues nearby - they'll be needed.

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