My brain ran a full defense case for someone who made me feel small for nine months and I was the one presenting the evidence. Humiliating to admit, but here we are. After my last one ended I spent five weeks grieving a version of him that was mostly my own invention, playing the highlight reel on repeat, the good mornings and the inside jokes, while everything else blurred conveniently into the background. I’d be fine all day and then some random trigger would drop and the whole damn thing would restart. His cologne on a stranger. A notification from his city. Every time, I’d end up right back at the question of whether walking away had been the catastrophic mistake I’d half-convinced myself it was. The imaginary good version would show back up and I’d be building his case all over again, starting from zero, arguing for someone who had never once argued for me. Tullara wrote ‘Never Been Loved By You’ from inside that particular mess, and the way she pulls you from selective memory into full, unambiguous clarity is something this song does with devastating efficiency.
The song opens with that very specific loneliness of the week after it ends, when you’re doing fine but also checking his location every six hours to confirm he’s not having too good a time without you. She starts with “Living by yourself I wonder if you’re ever thinking about me? / If you ever get a little lonely? ’cause we kind of ended suddenly.” and Tullara’s vocals, warm and just a little husky, make even the doubt feel like something you’d want pressed close at 2am. Then she gets into the actual cost of him. “I hope you’re doing better now that I’m not around to make you insecure. / Hope you know I’m doing better now that I’m not always having to / Reassure you baby, / Don’t you know that you kind of made me crazy?” Oh, THAT guy. The one who needed constant reassurance while handing back absolutely nothing, and you kept giving it because he was fucking magnetic and you’d convinced yourself it was going to even out eventually. That “baby” she drops at the end, still soft, still with a flicker of something real in it, is embarrassingly accurate.
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Then the chorus comes in and goes somewhere genuinely brutal. “After all this time it’s like you never wanted me, like you never met my family. / How could I be so blind sighted? Misguided, baby. / All the plans we talked about, have all just left me filled with doubt. / When suddenly before I knew, you withdrew / It’s like I’d never been loved by you,” Men like this specialize in the quiet disappearing act, pulling back from the inside of what you had until you realize you’re the only one who’s been showing up for months. The family dinners, the future plans, all of it apparently just scenery. “Withdrew” is such a cold, specific word and she delivers it with this warm disbelief that makes the whole thing sting somewhere personal. The production keeps everything breezy and light through all of it, which is honestly a little cruel and I’m here for every damn second of it.
The second verse is where she stops being generous about any of it. “Living by myself I wonder if I should have stayed a little longer? / Could we have worked it out if we’d only, maybe, tried a little harder? / But then I remember all the times you’d try to put me down, / And then I realize that I know I made the right decision now.” That “maybe” she slips into “tried a little harder” tells you she was already half out the door even while asking the question. Then “tried to put me down” surfaces and the whole case dissolves in real time. I had this back and forth with myself for a solid month after mine ended, the spiraling what-if loop, until one specific memory would cut through and I’d go completely cold. The thing about men who make you feel small is that the attraction doesn’t turn off when the damage does, which is the most infuriating shit in the world, and Tullara sits in that tension without flinching.
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Then the bridge comes in and she has completely run out of patience for being measured about any of it. “I should have known you were desperate, / I should have known you’d screw me round. / Like I’d never been loved by you” and then the outro tears it wide open. “Well as I’m looking back now I know that loving me was only for the show, yeah / And as I’m looking back now I see our loving as a distant memory. / And though it’s taken me a while to find the beauty in the shell you left behind, / As I’m beginning to love the view” “Loving me was only for the show.” He gave her the declarations and the future planning, performed the whole fucking relationship like it was an audition, and she believed him because why wouldn’t she. Tullara sounds genuinely free on the outro, the production opening up warm and wide around her, and “I’m beginning to love the view” is the sexiest possible ending because it has absolutely nothing to do with him anymore. She walked out of the wreckage looking like that. Good for her.
Tullara grew up on an actual parrot farm in rural NSW, which is the most unhinged origin story in Australian music, and everything she has done since has been fucking audacious. She dropped her debut EP ‘Better Hold On’ in 2016, walked away with Best EP at the Australian Roots Music Awards in 2017, and has been running a self-managed career with 1.7 million Spotify streams and not a single label anywhere near her shit. Her festival passport is obscenely stacked, Woodford Folk Festival, Queenscliff, stages across Canada, Ireland, Sweden, Slovenia, and she’s shared bills with Xavier Rudd, The Waifs, Ocean Alley, Bernard Fanning, Ian Moss, Andrew Farris of INXS, plus a national tour support slot for Donavon Frankenreiter she earned and then completely made her own. Now she’s dropping her debut album ‘Rebound,’ recorded in Vancouver, and holy shit, this is what a pop pivot sounds like when an artist has the actual chops to pull it off, her lyricism sharp as ever over production that sounds genuinely expensive and infectious in a way that gets into your blood. First single ‘I Don’t Believe in Giving Up’ drops January 30 with Celtic-pop production and her electric banjo doing something so goddamn arresting it feels like cheating. Live, she commands a main stage with raw vocal power that hits you somewhere deep and stupid, and a presence so magnetic you’ll forget you had other shit to do tonight.
The defense case I’d been building for the guy who made me feel so damn small for nine months rested the night I found someone with the same eyes and spent three hours in his bed reminding my whole nervous system what it feels like to be worshipped. He gave everything he had and I was gone by 4am while he was still reaching, leaving him three days of unanswered messages and zero explanation. ‘Never Been Loved By You’ gets that energy completely. Tullara said she’s beginning to love the view, and honestly? So am I. A fucking perfect Sunday.
