Isaac Dunbar Takes Our Pop Quiz
office gave Isaac an impromptu pop quiz where there are no wrong answers... except, of course, the wrong ones.
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office gave Isaac an impromptu pop quiz where there are no wrong answers... except, of course, the wrong ones.
At the intersection of Broadway and Lispenard, he says that the music is what makes it all worth it. It seems so. He spends the photoshoot with a pair of overhead studio headphones draped around his neck, and whether talking through his distrust for wireless earbuds in the elevator, analyzing the structural makeup of my tape recorder in the office, or bemoaning the hordes of sound equipment littering his apartment in the lobby, every time it’s slightly applicable for him to geek out about something sonic, there’s a riveting mini-monologue that follows. In a recent piece he wrote for Medium — his first after being banned from the site for a militant essay its editors didn’t take well to a few years back — Dirty Bird asserted, in parentheses, as side-commentary to a larger story about a hypothetical man who forges a license plate, that “(being a nerd really comes in handy).” With the looming shockwave of a push his career is foreseeably bound to undergo in the coming months, being the nerd he is about his job certainly wouldn’t hurt. “It’s been hard to disengage and just be a regular n***a,” he says, leaning back on a couch inside. “I used to have those moments where I would come home from my tour and go to my friend’s house, and we would smoke on his grandma’s porch. And I’d be like, Yes. Now I’m just me. I can just chill. I’m not a fucking superstar, I’m not a DJ, I’m just a regular n***a who’s smoking weed on his friend’s grandma’s porch. Those were the moments that I really cherished last year. This year I haven’t really had those.”
And with the way things are going, he likely won’t have them again for a long time. The past few months have been fast. In May, he played two shows in Montreal, then came home for a week or so before packing up for Portugal in early June to perform in Lisbon, after which he trekked to California for a pair of concerts in Los Angeles and Oakland with fellow tech-savvy ravers Swami Sound and Daze, only recently venturing back across the US in time for the East Coast leg of his high-energy international antics. (Did you have trouble reading the previous sentence? Now try living it out.) The premise for his being in New York was last night’s aforementioned 4 AM bash — an event dubbed “Shrek Rave,” the tagline of which was “It’s dumb, just have fun!” — and as soon as he finally gets to leave here and spend a few weeks at home, he’ll find himself right back in the Big Apple for a pop-up event, after which he’s slated to begin putting the pieces together for his upcoming tour. A lyric that comes up in conversation is one from Earl Sweatshirt’s “Burgundy,” where the young phenom, then grappling with the trappings of newfound stature, spits: “My grandma’s passing, but I’m too busy getting this fucking album cracking to see her.” Dirty Bird relates to this on two fronts: (1) his grandmother recently passed away, and (2) things are about to start moving so quickly — if they haven’t already — that extremely personal priorities like, say, mourning the death of a family member, might just wind up taking a forced backseat… one where the crazed driver, who may as well be blindfolded, is an industry drooling for more of what Dirty Bird calls "cultural product." The only time to figure it out is while it's happening. Whichever way you cut it, he's going to have to walk a thin tightrope covered in fog — and much sooner than later.
Something he's working on is the ability to ask for help. “I’m glad I’m able to make relationships like that — I’ve been chopping it up with KeiyaA lately, I’m trying to link up with her today, hopefully — and I think what will have to happen is that I will have to become more comfortable asking them how to deal with stuff like that,” he says, after running through a list of idols, including Earl Sweatshirt and Black Noi$e, that have become his friends in “full-circle” moments spanning over the past several months. “Or just learning to be more vocal about how I’m feeling. Maybe just with my friends. Like, Yo, this is how I’m feeling. I think talking about it more would make it easier. I’ve been definitely working on that lately, working on telling my friends how I feel about stuff. I was very private for a long time — which was healthy for me, growing up — but now I think I need to re-evaluate.”
Even for someone as comfortable with switching things up musically as Dirty Bird is, it’s an awkward development to suddenly have to translate a similar structural malleability to real life. In explaining to me the “mission statement” of his sonic footprint up to now, he thinks a bit for the right analogy, then settles on the “Polymerization” card from Yu-Gi-Oh!, which fuses two monsters together to make a bigger and more powerful one — a comparison Justain pauses his Nintendo Switch to express emphatic agreement with. The track that introduced most to Dirty Bird is “Expensive Taste,” a bouncy number featuring benchday that oozes with the ebbs of fleeting nights spent in rented Cadillacs, carried by a slap-bass sample as buoyant as the high-heeled legs it's hypnotized into gyration on countless (and counting) underground dance floors across the globe. Dig deeper through his geekily-expansive catalog, though, and “Expensive Taste” looks less like a microcosm of his sound and more like one of its several limbs — the Roy Ayers-sampling “2000,” from his 2021 project Time Traveler, hits like something a Moodyman-mentored Gil Scott-Heron would release in 2050; 2020’s “E-Dating” sounds like music your old-school hip-hop loving, Higdon-hat wearing Black grandfather would have sex with your grandma to after you put him onto lo-fi; early deep cut “Bushwick” sounds like the stuff of a hornier Les Sins toting a Daft Punk-informed penchant for underwater-sounding bass notes — which, in the grand scheme of things, comprises a body hellbent on reckoning, or “polymerizing,” the past with the future. He isn’t satisfied until he’s made as many cultural lines intersect as possible, and whether you understand the end product or not doesn’t concern him nearly as much as whether he did what he set out to do.
Wagenmuzik, the danceable EP Dirty Bird’s slated to put out this week, is a notable step away from the experiment-based approach he’s taken to music in the past, and into a mode of intentional palatability. “It’s a little bit more accessible — when people say ah, this music’s accessible, what it really means is that it’s easy to listen to, and it doesn’t challenge your listening palette,” he says. “...Which is not usually something I try to achieve with my music. Sometimes, I want to have the most esoteric thing possible. I want to be a little challenging. I’m okay if people don’t like it on the first listen. But this– it’s easily likable, it’s fun on the first listen, it’s fucking poppy dance music. And usually, I don’t like making poppy dance music, but this is fun, it’s cool, it’s summer. It’s a cool project and a cool point in my life.”
The record is something you can get away with playing front-to-back at a DJing gig without anyone batting an eye, and, both sonically and thematically, it feels like a newer, more self-assured lurch forward for an artist formerly revered for his scatterbrained sonic habits. In a sense, Dirty Bird seems to have put in the time — four years to be exact — to do his artistic homework, and on the tail end of an extended period of trial-and-error, experimentation, and self-scrutiny at every misstep, is finally getting things in place to brace for the hyper-commercial turning point his studious approach has earned him. For now, in the calm before he takes on the trappings of blowing up, he has material things to hold close: “I got the BMW!” He exegetes Wagenmuzik’s namesake with a lofty laugh. “So it’s kind of, like, commemorating this summer of my life on a high note. I have the material happiness and the existential happiness.”
Dirty Bird has always been happier than most, but for him, this is a new kind of joy. Born in North Carolina, he lived in poverty for most-to-all of his adolescence, although he doesn’t remember ever feeling particularly sad about it — a detail he credits to the hard work of his parents to ensure that his childhood was a positive one. He grew up with a passion for technology, and planned for years to go to school for computer science, only to change his mind at the last minute and study studio art at New York University. As much as it upset mom and dad, it grew to be a crucial turning point in what had been, up to then, an existentially-challenging journey to find out what he wanted to do with his passions, and, especially in the South, how to make it happen. “My parents didn’t get it for a while,” he explains, “until,” much like Black moms and pops nationwide, “I started making money.” He continues: “I would literally rather be a broke-ass n***a trying to be an artist than to be in spiritual pain trying to do some shit that I don’t want to do.”
So, he went the route with less spiritual anguish. For the first two years of his career, he sought to prove to himself that he had “made it” via material objects, a habit he links to a long Black lineage of motions to ventriloquize one’s actually-fictitious social mobility through the acquisition of physical markers. It would be wrong to call his next move an “odd job” — a term music journalism loves to slap onto whatever it is artists do before they make it big — though, because it was another calling of his, and one all of his art somewhat serves as a living testament to: education. He taught at a local middle school that, especially because it was a sister institution to the one he attended growing up, placed him in the strange position of looking into an existential mirror every day. Everywhere he turned, he saw himself. He quickly became a favorite of his students, partly because of the chill older cousin-esque power dynamic created by his young age (22, when he first started). But that only made the dread of not being able to help them worse. “They’re reflecting my traumas, and I’m reflecting their traumas, on a daily basis,” he says. “It wasn’t healthy. It’s not healthy for any Black person to be in that kind of situation, I would say. Especially when neither party has had the time to have the therapy necessary. The kids needed therapy, I needed therapy. It’s rough. Because everybody needs help.”
Dirty Bird eventually left his teaching job to pursue music full-time. (He remains in touch with former students, one of which he helped with an early-college homework assignment two weeks ago.) As much as he’s escaped the version of it that existed within that school’s walls, though, he still hasn’t entirely cleared the mantle of being the helper who also happens to need help. The clean-cut, newly-palatable sonic approach he’s taking with both Wagenmuzik and the full-length LP slated to follow it will serve as a “helper” to ears ill-trained for his archivist machinations at full strength — which, at the same time that it creates a wider audience, also creates the burden of dealing with it. For the moment, the assistance he’s getting is on the management side of things. “I think I definitely will be in a different stage in my career,” he says of this next stretch of releases, “at least PR-wise. And I think that is going to feel weird to me. Just because up until now, I’ve been kind of freestyling. I just got my first real manager a couple of months ago. I’m about to get a booking agent after this month. Shit is about to get a little more serious.”
It’s not like he doesn’t already take his work quite seriously. A spiel he’s heard, and grown to increasingly bemoan, over the past several years — from casual web interactions to meetings with record labels — is one that goes something like You’re so funny on Twitter and to our surprise it turns out you actually make music too and we’re big fans and you get the idea. Dirty Bird has had thousands of followers on Twitter since high school, and has been living almost exclusively on the internet since he was about 4 years old, but as the spotlight ever-so-gradually grows brighter and hotter, he’s begun to reckon with what it means for his artistic and human identities writ large. “It actually freaked me out and I had a panic attack for, like, a week, and I drove to the beach and slept in my car for two days,” he says of prior struggles with his online presence. “Because I was just so freaked out by the fact that I was so hyper-visible and not knowing it… How the fuck was I supposed to know that n***as and all these record labels in Beverly Hills and shit knew me because of some bullshit stupid shit I tweeted high at 3 in the morning?” As things get more serious, and the pairs of eyes on him multiply, Dirty Bird is looking to take every opportunity he can to slow things down. A day after our interview, he’s set to go on a fishing trip with his closest friends — and no business talk will be allowed.
Although it is, incidentally, a great marker for where Dirty Bird is in his career — when business talk is allowed, it’s usually two things at once: (1) laudatory, and (2) coming from other people. Something he’s intent on is the idea that you must have a level of ego to be an artist in any capacity. “If you don’t have ego, you can’t make artwork,” he explains, because “making artwork is a very selfish endeavor. You’re wasting resources to make something that nobody asked you to make. And then you’re going to ask people who never asked you to make that thing to give you money for it.” Ego certainly shouldn’t be an issue by the numbers — whether you’re looking at his Twitter following, or the monthly listeners on his Spotify page — but rather than actively do business by giving himself certain titles, he’s grown to simply pick out whichever of the various anointings constantly being thrown at him fit best, and embrace those callings as his own. When publications began dubbing him “Afro-futurist” early on, for instance, he assessed the mantle for a bit, made a decision as to whether it applied, then began to proudly don the inscription. He resolves that “Now I’m in the embracing stage of my career. I’m embracing all the things that are true about me.”
Something he’s also embracing is that, sometime soon, to some extent, he’s going to have to give up complete control over his artistry and the management of it — a process he’s already started. Dirty Bird vehemently admits that he prefers to manage most things on his own, and one of the most telling testaments to this nature is the website he’s put together, gum.studio, as a means to give fans a single place to buy his tickets, cop his crafts, and get timely updates. His display name on Twitter is a golden minidisc, something that doubles as yet another indicator of his nerdiness for sonic paraphernalia, and also a bit of an unlikely trademark. A trademark, because he prides himself on what’s become a signature custom to purchase, prepare, and package his own CDs for sale directly from his home — a pursuit just as nerdy as it is profitable. “I am absolutely a control freak,” he says, laughing. “And it started because I was using a bunch of really– I’m a nerd, obviously, right? There are these CDs called Taiyo Yuden, Japanese-based CDs with blue dyed ink on the side that you print data on. They’re extremely high quality, and they were the industry standard for a couple of years, but not anymore, so they’re kind of hard to find. I was very intent on using those CDs specifically. And that’s why I was making the CDs myself. It’s just some fucking stupid nerd shit.”
Nerd shit and material objects are two vital factors to Dirty Bird’s growing lore, and the only element that was missing beforehand — money — is soon to come rolling in more than it ever has. “Until my order numbers get too high for me to keep doing it on my own, I’m going to keep doing it myself,” he says. Production of Wagenmuzik physicals has already been outsourced.
Empress Of has an affinity for working in isolation. Her debut album “Me” was made over the course of a month spent alone in Mexico, while this time around she moved into Sonic Ranch — the world’s largest residential recording studio complex. Located on a pecan farm in the border town of Tornillo, Texas, she says that many of the residential engineers were confused as to why on earth she had come completely alone, used to seeing a team of musicians and helpers arriving together on site. But the flip side of self-inflicted isolation is the vulnerable internal dialogue it stimulated for the artist— a concentrated iteration of the depth and rawness she has conveyed through classic pop sounds, eclectic inspirations and cutting lyrics since her start.
In the world of Empress Of, geography isn’t just a physical space, but a character that pulsates within the music. She considers this musical relationship to location and travel to be an exercise in recontextualization — a greater theme that plays a huge role in her process. By consciously changing the locations in which she works, she effectively forces herself to approach existing ideas and feelings in new ways, letting the organism that is setting and place to play a decisive and often subliminal role in her creative process.
Tell me about the making of this EP.
I like to make music in many different ways, but one of my favorite ways is to travel somewhere and like, have that be a part of the story. I love traveling different places and writing music in different elements. So for “Save Me” I went to Tornillo, Texas, which is like on the border of Mexico and Texas and the recording studio I went to used to be a border patrol jail. It was crazy. And you could feel the like ghost energy, it was just intense. Yeah. And it was also a farm, it was a pecan farm. So there were beautiful stories and visuals throughout —riding pickup trucks in the desert and like, you know, walking around a giant pecan farm. And making music by myself in a recording studio for two weeks is so idyllic. So amazing and such a privilege to be able to make music like that. That's how “Save Me” came about. And for some other songs on the record, I worked with my friend BJ Burton and Jim-E Stack.
What was it like making music at Sonic Ranch, how did the geography specifically affect your writing and music making process?
That specific desert was just so intense because it was on the border of Mexico. And I had just gone, like I had just gone through a breakup and I was in this farm by myself and it was, it was cool. I felt very in my element, you know? Going to the studio. They just like throw you a pair of keys to a pickup truck and you drive yourself to the studio every day. So I'm like driving around this, this farm on a pickup truck, listening to cassettes. It was just very romantic. And I've written like tons of songs about love but to me this project has a different energy than any of my other music. It sounds way more confident, way more horny, way more feminine. Did you go into the project with some sort of thesis statement? The last song on the EP is called “Cry For Help.” And I was looking at the vinyl and the first song is “Save Me.” And the last song is cry for help. And when I saw this I was like, wow, there's such a full circle element to this project, of just like, wanting to be healed. I make a joke about like healing girl summer a lot, instead of hot girl summer, because instead of focusing on how much someone hurt me, I want to just heal.
I feel like that should just be an inherent part of each summer and every month.
I know, but sometimes you need a hot girl summer sometimes, It’s all about the balance. Yeah, that’s one of the nice things about getting older, you get to know yourself better and figure out that balance. Like this is my chaos phase and this is my healing phase.
So now you're in your healing phase for this project?
Yeah, pretty much.
Speaking of phases, how have your past projects influenced this one?
The reason I’m putting this EP out is because it's like an in between step from my last album “I’m Your Empress Of” to the next album I eventually put out which will be my fourth. It’s gonna be like a big fucking deal, so I wanna have just a stepping stone sonically and songwriting wise. And EP’s are fun because every song is almost like a single, so it’s really just about trimming the fat. There aren’t interludes or vibes or moods — just songs.
You recently went independent, what’s that been like?
It's been a learning process. Learning to have a lot of faith in myself cause I'm like investing a lot of my own money into things like the technical and backend stuff. So I just have to be a bit more intentional now about what I’m doing.
Who are some artists that inspired this EP?
Robyn for sure. And for the strings and stuff, just listening to records with really sick string arrangements. Also 70s and 80s disco, a lot of disco — the EP is very dance based.
Something I really admire about your work is how you’re able to strike a great balance between pop, concept, and experimental sensibilities.
I feel like it's because I never fully go in one specific direction, so I’m inspired by so many different types of music, like Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, loads of pop and dance music, Ryuichi Sakamoto. I just love so many different kinds of music. I would find it hard to make very genre specific music, and I think that that definitely comes out in my music and is what makes it interesting.
But you aren’t pretentious about your eclecticism, it really feels authentic. You’ll bring up Julee Cruise, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Ariana Grande in the same breath. There isn’t any elitism to it.
It’s such a strange time in music because everyone’s attention spans sucks. I miss music that captivates for minutes at a time, you know? Instead of 15 seconds, 30 seconds. It’s funny, I had a little bit of fear with “Save Me” because it has this slow intro, but it’s a pop song. It’s got a weird melody, but it’s very much like Brittany. So I was a little scared for it to be the first single because of the general lack of patience in this day and age. But, somehow people still listen to it. I'm super lucky to have that, but it’s interesting to be an artist that doesn’t make homogenous music necessarily.
How are you able to translate these varying inspirations into your own work?
I just like learning. And I like how not knowing how to use something can make you do things you haven't done before. So like accessing new gear kind of makes me write new songs like that. I wouldn’t have written before. It's just like the freshness of learning something new, hearing your voice through a different reverb that you've never used before, hearing your voice on a microphone that you've never heard your before. It forces myself to think of music differently. So as I get older and continue to make records in this way, I wanna discover new ways of making music. It’s interesting because most analog gear stems from broadcasting in the forties, for the sole purpose of broadcasting. So when you put a synthesizer though like a broadcasting board you’re giving it a new purpose, a new life. So all the sounds become recontextualized.
You make a great point about recontextualization, and I think that it’s a good analogy for your music and process in general. It seems to me that an integral part of Empress Of is that act of recontextualization. Recontexualizing your inspirations, your influences, your gear, your themes and feelings, the settings you work in. You channel the power of the “child at play.” Opening yourself to new and disparate worlds, using naivety to your advantage.
Absolutely. I've written a bunch of love songs, but what makes this project different from the others is that the feeling has been recontextualized to reflect my present self.
She even sings in Japanese on this album, something that she had been manifesting. Her Black and Japanese heritages have been a big part of her music. UMI’s Forest in the City is an album that can transport you straight to stillness and quietude in the midst of chaotic energies. Her most recent music video for "wish that i could," a sonically and visually gorgous story on a love and desire that we love to say we don't need, but deep down are longing for. On a rest day during her tour, she spoke with office on her process, spirituality, and her inspirations.
First of all, how was your day? How are you?
I’ve been good, this is an off day. I just got to this hotel and I’m going to go to the science center after this call. It’s been a good day, I’ve been taking it really easy.
This album feels like you're coming to terms with a lot and explores some different themes. What is Forest in the City all about?
Forest in the city started with me in the park one day, about a year ago. I was sitting there and I was hearing bird chirps, and I was hearing sirens, I was hearing dog barks, I was hearing honking. I felt like I'm in this intersection between forest and city and wondered if being in this intersection, and like not fully being in a forest environment has an impact on the mentality of people and the way we connect with each other, and the way we feel about ourselves. And I guess just like, what impact does that have on the human psyche? And then, with that thought, in the back of my mind, I just started finishing this album. And when it got to the point where it was time to choose the songs for the album, and figure out what message I want to share that question came back to mind. I think that it's possible to feel peaceful, while you exist in the city because it's like ‘forest peace’ exists within me, I know it because I can meditate and I can find it again, no matter how chaotic the city feels. And I was like, I'm gonna make a project that can help people access that space inside of themselves. So even if they're stuck in traffic somewhere, or they're in a busy subway, or anywhere, they can put on this album and remember what it's like to feel peaceful again. And that's why it's called forest in the city. It's like, the album itself is this forest and it reminds people of that forest that exists within them, which I think is like this collective, big, lush forest that we all can walk in together. So, that to me was the message behind the project.
You sing in Japanese for a bit in “everything will be alright,” what was that experience like recording in a language that’s part of your heritage?
I love that song. It's so fun. It's funny too because I have finished the album and I was mixing it. I had maybe a month before the album had to be delivered. And I was like, “I don't have any songs in Japanese, I need to write a song in Japanese.” So I spent two weeks doing sessions to find the song. And this was the very first session that I did, and I remember the second verse literally just came through me so easily. And when that happens, I’m like, that's the one. And I never really had the chance to sing in Japanese so, it was fun to approach a sound like that. I really love Japanese because you say a lot less with a lot more space. So, I can really take my time explaining something in Japanese versus English.
I feel like that's something that doesn't really happen anymore. But there've been a couple of moments where I feel like everybody kind of lets go and your shows definitely emulate that. Your music has been described as healing. Do you treat your performances as spiritual experiences between you and your audience?
It's such an exchange that happens. I open every show with meditation and at that moment, I feel people's hearts open up and people be like, “Okay, I'm safe in this space.” I think it helps people to just sing louder and be freer after shows and I see it. I see how open people feel and I know it's our spirits communing together. It's like ego is gone. Nobody's worried about what people think anymore. It’s just like, I just want to have fun. I think that's a spiritual experience right there. So, I witness it every night seeing people connect so deeply.
What is it about musicians like SZA and Eryka Badu that inspire your own music and how do you implement those inspirations?
I love their creativity. And the fact that they're unafraid to just be themselves in their music. Both of them I see it in the words that they use to write like, I'll be like, “What you could use that word in a song?” You can talk about that in a song?” I just feel like they can continually expand my mind and the musicality to it so them, and it inspires me to just be me by myself and not be bound by anything, any rules.
What was the hardest song to write on the album?
Two songs. “100 days” is this really gospel-inspired song. Writing it was really easy. I wrote the whole song in one day, but it was everything else. Because I knew I wanted a choir section in it. I knew I wanted to add an organ. There are all these things in my mind, but it was very meticulous to finish and that was one of them. And then there's a song on the project called “synergy.” That song took so long to finish to where I wanted to give up so many times but I'm so happy I did it because people love the song. The song started in a completely different key and I wrote it with my friend. His name is Shaka. So it was a duet between me and him and then at first I thought I wanted to add somebody else to the song and then I was like, I'm gonna do it by myself. So I'm gonna pitch the key and like, I pitched that song up and down so many times, I rewrote the verse so many times. It's funny because I ultimately finished the song. I went to Coachella this year, and literally, on the drive back to Coachella the second verse hit me in the head, I was like, “Oh, my God.” I was with my friend Vron, who helped me executive produce the album, we were driving back together, and I was like, “We can't go home. Go, we gotta go to the studio.” So we went to the studio, and I finished a song right there like a week before I had to submit the album. That was a fun song.
I love that. Do you have a church background or religious background?
You said you wanted to like a very gospel inspired song. On my dad's side of the family, a lot of them are Baptist, Christian. I just grew up going to church with them with my grandma and my dad, and to be honest, I feel like the teachings there, I'm sure some of them are in my subconscious, beautifully in my subconscious. I remember my excitement to go to church, especially as a kid was the music. I just loved music. And that sticks in my heart more than anything from church. I still love gospel music and listen to gospel music because it feels so good to listen to. So I wanted to write a song that had that vibe to it.
Do you feel like this religious background influenced you a lot within your music currently, and also with your spiritual journey too because you're very spiritual?
I would say, I don't really consider myself to be religious or feel particularly connected to one religion. I'm really grateful that my parents growing up always told me,” You can believe what you want to believe, this is what we believe, we're going to show you what we believe. But you can build your own beliefs.” My dad’s beliefs were rooted in Christianity, my mom's beliefs were rooted in Buddhism. So I feel like I blended the two to kind of create my own. And I read a lot of books and have formulated my own beliefs that definitely drive the music that I create, and just remind me there's more to life than what meets the eye. There's more to music than what touches your ear, there's so much depth to it. There's power in knowing how deeply you can touch somebody through music. That motivates me to want to make music to be like, “Oh, I can make people feel better. I can make people remember that everything will be alright, I can get a crowd of people to jump at the same time to something that makes them smile.” Like those things make me really happy.
Yeah, that’s a really beautiful thing. I remember when “Butterfly” came out I couldn't stop playing it. What song do you think resonates most with your fans from Forest in the City?
I noticed a lot of people love “sorry”. And I could just see people singing “I'm sorry.” And they’re so into it. We all got things to forgive ourselves for and I just see people embracing that when we sing the song together. I really think people love that one.
Is this album a meditation in and of itself?
This album is a top to bottom kind of album. There's a whole story and experience when you do it’s very meditative. So, yes.
You’re touring currently, how has it been performing new material to your fans?
How long has it been since you’ve toured also? Like three years, it's been a minute. It's been cool. It’s been really fun to see, as the shows go on, more and more people know more of the songs. So it's cool to see people learn more of the songs. And it's also cool because like, the songs everyone knows we all sing along, we all jam out to, and then the newer songs that I'm introducing to people, I just see people sitting and witnessing me almost like they're in meditation watching me perform. And at first I was like, I wish people would sing. And then I took myself out of it and thought to myself, people having such a good experience. It's a unique experience. So it's been beautiful to have that mindset switch and then to then really tap in and be like, wow, people are enjoying it in a different way.
What’s been your favorite part of the tour so far?
So many things. I'm on tour with people I really love. I feel like I spent a lot of time learning who to bring with me curating my family. And I think I'm in a really great place where I'm like, Ah, I love the people with. I love everyone I've toured with, of course, but it's always like a trial and error. I'm touring with people I really click with now, which is really beautiful. And also, I'm really enjoying people's reactions every night. People singing and like it doesn't matter what mood I am in before I go on stage. By the time I leave, I'm just happy and tired but in the best way and energized.
Do you get that kind of euphoric feeling after a show?
Yes! It's so real because you just shared so much and you feel like you’re floating.
What's the main takeaway that you would want from this album for others to be listening to?
I guess a feeling. Feeling good. My biggest intention is just no matter what song they click on, by the time the song ends, even a millimeter, they feel a millimeter better. I don't even feel like I have words for it. It's more of a feeling that I want people to take away. And I feel like once you feel that way when after listening to music, it's like your soul seeks music that makes you feel good. And I hope people remember the music you listen to does impact your state of mind. It does impact your mental health, it does impact your perception of yourself. And so I just hope people can know that like my music is safe to listen to.
It’s a safe space.
It’s a safe space. I thought about how you would feel listening to it. I’m not gonna do you wrong. You're gonna feel good.