INTERVIEW: Jemma Siles on new single 'Tell Me All Your Lies': “It made me open up to the fact that I don't have to just do one thing, I can dabble in all types of pop and make it my own.”

Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Michelle Grace Hunder
Published: 16 July 2025

Independent singer/songwriter Jemma Siles launched her career in 2017 with a guest vocal appearance on the multi-million streaming Nervo and Wolfback single ‘Like Air’. Her talent for songwriting was quickly recognised, winning Australian Songwriter of the Year (judged by APRA AMCOS) twice and making the finals of the prestigious Vanda & Young Global Songwriting Competition in 2020.

Her music is rooted in electronic pop with sidesteps into indie and altpop, with lyrical content that explores isolation, mental health and the breakdown of relationships.

She recently opened a new era in her music with the release of her new single ‘Tell Me All Your Lies’.. Written with and produced by Xavier Dunn (Jack River, Carla Wehbe, Gretta Ray), the song pairs brash electronic moments with gentler, acoustic sections. The chorus blends delicious call and response melodies and sparkling synths before breaking into a shuddering electro beat.

Written in the aftermath of a long term relationship breakdown, the lyrics celebrates the friendships that you can always rely on in your darkest moment: ‘I need you to know / I won’t let you down’

“It was a day or so before my ex and I of 5 years broke up. I was exhausted mentally, and I didn’t want to write about what I was going through anymore,” Siles says of the songs creation. “I was thinking about my best friend at the time – about those relationships where you can take off the mask, and ‘tell them all the lies’ you show to the world.” 

‘Tell Me All Your Lies’ is a song that hits in exactly the way you want your favourite pop song to - gorgeous melodies, addictive beats, a memorable storyline and that indefinable rush of joy you get when music really connects the right way. It is a welcome return for Siles, and augurs well for her upcoming debut EP. We recently sat down with her to chat all about her music career and the creation of ‘Tell Me All Your Lies’.

Hi Jemma, so good to chat to you. How is everything with you?
Good. Busy as always, but I like it that way!

I want to talk to you about ‘Tell Me All Your Lies’. What a glorious, glorious song it is, very polished, very dance floor, which I know is your forte. Tell me a little bit about the headspace you were in when you wrote it.
I actually had just come out of a five year relationship. Well, we were together, but it was rocky at the time. I went to Sydney and I had a whole bunch of songwriting sessions, but I got really sick and lost my voice [before] I had a session with Xavier Dunn, the producer of this single. I’d lost my voice, I was in a shithead space - I was freaking out. In all the previous studio sessions, I was talking about my then-boyfriend and all the issues that we were having, but I didn't really want to keep writing about how sad I was. So with Xavier I was like I'm gonna write about a friend of mine [instead], and that's how the song came about. Both of us were going through a lot of stuff at the time in high school and we were just there for each other. The friendship kind of faded out after high school. You don’t see each other often, but you know that you'll always be there for each other. And that's the headspace I was in, because I was going through another hard time, I was thinking about her.

That's really beautiful, and what a way to channel your own turmoil into something floor filling and incredible. I heard that this track almost didn't make the cut, though, what happened?
I've been developing my artist project for a very long time, and going into the sessions with Xavier, I wanted to do an EP. He was like ‘just give me ten songs and we'll cut it down to five’. I had heaps and heaps of songs at this stage, and I was like, how am I going to cut it down to just five? So I sat on a live TikTok with my fans, and they were texting in what songs they wanted to include, and ‘Tell Me All Your Lies’ wasn't one of them, they didn’t think it was the most catchy track, I guess. Then I started working with my team and I played the five songs we’d chosen for the EP, and they asked ‘do you have any other songs, just by chance?’ And for some reason I just played them ‘Tell Me All Your Lies’, I have no idea why. They looked at each other and were like ‘That has to be on the EP and that has to be the first single’. Then I spoke to Xavier, and we ended up doing six songs on the EP instead of five. So that's how it came about!

I do love that, I always believe that for every song that's released, there are, like, 300 songs that stay in notebooks and on voice notes. I like your gumption to turn it to a live stream with the fans and ask them to choose.
I had so many choices, I was like, no, I can't do it! At that time, I didn't really have a team, it was just me, and I’d talk to my dad all the time. I literally made my dad sit for hours just numbering songs, trying to cut it down! We couldn't do it. So it kind of came from the fact that I could not choose.

I think this is incredible, and of course you never know what's going to land, as we just learned with ‘Tell Me All Your Lies’. Now that it has been chosen and it's out there, does it suddenly make absolute sense to you why this song should be there?
Definitely. This song is special in many ways to me, but also because it was the first track I did with Xavier. I really heard the difference in the quality of all of my other demos, the demo with Xavier just felt like a finished song. Actually, it is pretty much the demo, he ended up fixing just he tiniest bit of it. We redid the vocals and mix and mastered it, but it didn't really change much from the demo. After that song, I knew I really wanted to do my EP with Xavier. ‘Tell Me All Your Lies’ was the first track we had written together, and I just had a really good time and the song turned out amazing. It does make sense now!

You have already carved out a very interesting trajectory with your career. Award winning pop, you've been featured on massive EDM tracks, and now you're stepping into your own emotionally driven sound that is still giving the nod to what is clearly your love, the dance floor. I'm very curious, when you're looking back at those early collaborations, particularly even those songwriting moments, what do you think they taught you about your solo voice and where you wanted to go?
I came from a performing arts background, so I really like the performing side of it, and dance music allows you to stop thinking and just dance away. But my main thing is I love the lyrics behind the music, and merging the two really allowed me to do that, rather than thinking I had to write ballads all the time. When I was younger, I would just sit and write ballads all the time. Having the dance side made me open up to the fact that I don't have to just do one thing, I can dabble in different types of pop and make it my own, but still with the lyricism behind it. With ‘Tell Me All Your Lies’ it's got that balance of both, if you don't want to think about the lyrics, you can just sit and enjoy the song, and when you actually listen to the lyrics, it's got a deeper meaning behind it as well. So I like the juxtaposition of that.

Oh, and there's a lot of room for a ballad and a dance floor, Céline Dion has proven that time and time again! You just mentioned writing ballads and being a performance art studio, as it's been clearly such a successful outlet for you, has music always felt like home for you?
Yeah, I went through a lot when I was growing up and I started writing because it was cathartic, like a journal. I guess everyone says this, but it's just the life of an artist. It's like your journal, and you end up being able to process things and close a chapter. It feels a bit like therapy in a way, you get to think about what you're going through and the processes of that. When I was younger, it was part of what got me through. It allowed me to process what had actually happened, rather than just avoiding it.

You’ve said songwriting is cathartic for you, it's been a release, and it's possibly been a language as well, when trying to find a way to process certain moments. Was there a moment or a song that you yourself noticed it went from musical journaling to ‘Oh shit, this is it. This is what I can do.’
Yeah, it was definitely when I did the song with Nervo, I was like, oh, I can actually release my own music. I was doing covers a lot on Facebook, and then it went to YouTube, and then it went to Instagram, and then I realised I can actually write my own stuff and release my own stuff. The actual pivotal point of ‘I want this to be my career’ was when a song that I did a while ago got into the top 40 of the Vanda and Young Global Songwriting competition. It was just a demo, it wasn't produced or anything, and all of the other songs in the competition were proper, produced songs. And I just uploaded a demo, and it got to the top 40. That was when I was kind of like, ‘I need to take this super seriously’. So that's where I did take a bit of time to work on my music and make sure it's at that level that I want it to be at.

Oh my gosh. I love that. I always find that very interesting, particularly in today's world where the audience are, getting to know the artists, because the artist has spent time navigating the whole online space, uploading onto SoundCloud, or, as you said, Facebook to YouTube, and even though they are all very public platforms, you're not actually seeing anyone physically, so when you have a very real reaction, that must be so incredible and also bizarre.
It's funny you say that because I've decided to send off CDs of my music to people because I’ve had enough of the whole viral mentality. Obviously it helps artists careers all the time to have that viral moment, but I think we really do get bogged down by numbers. I don't think people understand that physical reaction, because now everything is online, and we're like, ’that didn't get a million views, or this didn't get that’. I think we get really confused by numbers, and oddly enough, doing these CDs have really helped me mentally as well, because I'm like, oh my God, I talk to this person all the time online, and now I'm actually sending something physical to them. And I'm sitting here till like 3am the last few nights writing little notes to them with the CDs and stuff! It’s so funny, because if you think about 300 likes, it doesn't sound like a lot, but when it's actual CDs, it feels different.

And also, imagine if you had 300 people coming up to you and saying, ‘I like you’ to your face, that's so much and it would get really uncomfortable! I just want to ask you a little Women In Pop question. Who were the women in music that sparked the fire for your musicality growing up and who inspires you now?
Obviously it's hard to not say Taylor Swift. I've been a Taylor Swift fan since the start of Taylor Swift, and it's actually not just her music, it's all of her business sense and everything that she encapsulates. She’s Taylor Swift for a reason, and I've been watching her for so long and I just love the way that she came in and shook up the industry and she really did pave the way for a lot of artists. You can see that coming out now with Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, Gracie Abrams, all of them wouldn't really be here without Taylor, and that's a real testament to who she is as an artist and as a business woman. I hate saying Taylor, because I know everyone says to not say Taylor, but of course it’s Taylor!

We don't say to not to say Taylor!
No, just in general, it just ends up being ‘oh yeah, of course, it's Taylor Swift.’ I've grown up around all the pop girls, like Ariana Grande. I was in a session with a producer, who told me I reminded them of Gracie Abrams, and that's where I started hearing her songs before she was big, I’ve also always followed Selena Gomez. They really have paved the way for young artists, especially with the whole thing of you can keep making music no matter how old you are, especially for women. That's a really big thing, because years and years ago you had to be 16, or very young to make it otherwise it was over. I do think they have really paved the way for that.

Awesome, these are excellent choices! Lastly, you’ve had this incredible behind the scenes success and awards, major collaborations, and now you're sending out your CDs for your fans. I'm curious, what has been the most validating moment so far for you personally?
There's so many answers I could give to this question. From a musical standpoint, I always wanted to find a producer that I could work with consistently and have a body of work that would become my sound. For my EP, the sound isn't the exact same for every single song, but you can see the cohesion behind it. And that is a really big moment for me, that I am able to make a storyline and a whole project. I think when I get to press it on vinyl, that will be a really surreal moment. Definitely finishing the EP has been a big one for me.

All of the awards and things like that, all that comes with it, but it's not really something I focus on. I really do miss being able to meet people after a gig and talk to people. My fans will know I literally sit there and talk to them for ages and that was something that was a big thing for me as well. When I went to Perth, one of my fans literally ran up to me and gave me a big hug and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, you know who I am?’

‘Tell Me All Your Lies’ is out now. You can download and stream here.
Follow Jemma Siles on Instagram, Facebook and her website