The Howl Belongs to Everyone

By Alina Halai for Young N’ Loud Magazine

There is a version of this story where Julianne Q becomes an actor. Where she finishes college, follows the path she’d been building toward, and steps into the career she prepared for. That version exists. She considered it seriously.

She chose the other one.

During Christmas break of her senior year, she looked at the fork in front of her and picked music. Not because it made more sense. Because not picking it made less. That decision, made quietly over a holiday, became Jules & the Howl.

The Naming Philosophy

Jules is not a stage name. It never was. It’s what the people who love her call her.

Only her family uses Julianne. Everyone else — friends, collaborators, fans — gets Jules. And there’s a logic to that, one she built consciously into how she presents herself: when you call someone by their nickname, it’s a sign of closeness. Of affection. She wanted her audience to feel that from the start. So, she gave them the name that means something.

The Howl took longer to arrive, but it carries more.

Part of it is lineage. The Chicago blues tradition, Howlin’ Wolf, the raw sonic energy that traveled across the Atlantic and became the backbone of 1960s rock. Jules grew up in the Chicagoland area, and that history lives in her sound whether she reaches for it consciously or not. But the Howl is also something more personal than influence.

Jules has always been on the outside. The weird kid. The one who didn’t quite slot in. And instead of making peace with that quietly, she decided to build something around it – a community for the people who know exactly what that feels like. The Howlers, as her fans call themselves, aren’t just an audience. They’re the wolf pack. Outsiders who found each other and stopped being alone in it.

That’s not a small thing to offer someone. And it’s not something you build unless you’ve actually needed it yourself.

Two Cities, One Turning Point

The early version of Jules & the Howl would be unrecognizable to anyone who knows her work now. She started solo, just Jules behind a piano, performing pop covers. It took a cousin’s offhand suggestion – why not form a band? – for something to click. The ensemble made sense to her in a way the solo setup never quite had. She’d grown up doing musical theatre. She knew what it felt like to be part of something larger than herself on a stage.

She honed that instinct in Chicago, playing across the city’s neighborhoods and suburbs. There’s a particular kind of work ethic that comes out of the Midwest — unglamorous, head-down, no waiting to be discovered. She has it.

Then 2018 happened.

The band she had built, four equal members and people she considered brothers, fell apart. She doesn’t dress it up. The fallout nearly ended everything. The thought of quitting was real and it stayed for a while. But instead of stopping, she did the harder thing: she left. She moved across the country to Los Angeles and started over from scratch.

That kind of decision doesn’t come from optimism. It comes from knowing yourself well enough to understand that staying would cost you more.

Three People Who Changed How She Sings

Jules knows exactly who shaped her. Aretha Franklin, Freddie Mercury, Janis Joplin. She doesn’t hesitate.

From Aretha, she learned that impact doesn’t require setup. That first note of “Respect” hits before you’ve had time to prepare for it. Jules wanted that: the ability to reach someone immediately, before the song has even properly started.

From Freddie, she got permission. Permission to be theatrical without apology, to let the musical theatre training she’d spent years building actually show up in her live show instead of being something she hid. The Live Aid performance is what she points to – Freddie and 72,000 people in genuine, electric call-and-response. She wanted to understand how to create that.

From Janis, she learned that a voice doesn’t have to be clean to communicate. The growl, the rawness, the refusal to smooth over the edges – Janis showed her that there are multiple ways to sing, and therefore multiple ways to reach a person. Not every emotion fits neatly into a polished delivery.

All three show up in her work. In the technique, the staging, and the underlying conviction that performance is about genuine transfer – you leave something of yourself on that stage, and the audience receives it.

Behind the Process

Jules describes her music as cathartic and anthemic – theatrical rock with a punk edge. Ask her what it looks and feels like, and she’ll tell you: purple leather. Royal, confident, loud, and not particularly interested in being subtle about any of it.

The creative process happens mostly in the studio, between Jules and her producer Tom Chandler, with writing from Linn Holmstedt woven through. Sometimes Jules arrives knowing exactly what she wants. Sometimes Chandler brings a concept and asks her to sit with it. Sometimes it starts with a voice note, a riff she can’t shake at an odd hour. It begins differently each time. It always ends in the room, the two of them working through it together.

Her team is small and deliberate. Chandler and Holmstedt are collaborators but also close friends. Her husband is her business manager. For someone who lost an entire band in one blow, that tight circle isn’t just a professional structure — it’s something she built carefully, and it means more because of what came before it.

What Actually Happens at a Show

Jules will tell you, with some amusement, that most people don’t know what they’re walking into until they’re already in it.

The live show is where the anthems become physical. Where catharsis is no longer a word on a page but something that happens in a room to a group of people at the same time. Before she walks out, she says the same prayer she’s been saying since her first high school play – a quiet thanks, a request to do her best. It’s a ritual. A way of marking the transition from the person offstage to the performer onstage.

The milestones have been accumulating. Two nominations at the 2025 Hollywood Independent Music Awards, for Best Rock/Pop Song and Best Female Vocal. A headline set at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, the end point of her first independently funded and organized tour. Women Rock LA, the series she co-founded in 2024 to put female-fronted rock bands in front of LA audiences — two sold-out shows and counting.

But she’d probably point you to something smaller than any of those. The moment on stage when she stopped measuring her new life against the one she left behind and simply understood, without having to talk herself into it, that she was exactly where she was supposed to be.

What She’s Building Toward

There are tours coming – shorter runs through May and June, a longer stretch in September across California and the Southwest. A collaboration with an artist she genuinely admires, details still to come.

Further out, she wants to write a musical. Possibly adapting her own work, possibly something new entirely. She wants to play Maureen in Rent. The theatre background was never really set aside; it just found a different stage.

The musical direction she’s most excited about right now runs through “Boys Club” and “My Turn” – harder, more assertive, the kind of songs that change how she holds herself when she performs them. Songs about who gets to be in the room and who keeps having to prove they belong there.

Success, in her own terms, is straightforward: sustainable income from touring, tickets, merch, and eventually streaming – when platforms work out that artists deserve more than a fraction of a cent per play, but that’s a longer conversation. It’s a practical definition. The kind that comes from taking the music industry seriously rather than romanticizing it.

When she’s onstage, she feels electric.

The Howl is where the outsiders belong. Jules built it after losing almost everything, in a city she moved to alone, starting from nothing. It took years. It’s still going.

Jules & the Howl is currently touring California and the Southwest. Follow @julesandthehowl for show dates and updates.