oh! DEAR EMILY by Drea
Very excited and happy I was that the algorithm (which isn’t always good for something) showed me my new favorite artist: Drea. Her debut single Let Go got a lot of media recognition & made everyone even more excited for the second single Dear Emily. A song to the scared little child that lives inside my head and feeds me lies about myself and the world around me (source: Drea’s Instagram).
I felt very honored to meet with her via Zoom to discuss everything Dear Emily-related and she also talked about her EP letters to my bitter self - which is out now.
Bonnie Orbison: What’s your name, pronouns & birthday?
Drea: My name is Andrea or Drea, the artist's name. I go by she/her and my birthday is the 27th of December. Born in 1998. So I just turned 25 and I'm like a Christmas baby. I always get like one present for my birthday and Christmas, but it's good though. You get a big present.
Bonnie: Who is your legend?
Drea: This is so hard, I have so many like musically I love Phoebe Bridgers, her lyrics and her whole sound has really, really inspired me, especially with this solo project. I've been doing a lot of band projects before, but trying to find my own voice and my own sound as an individual artist was really hard. I spent a lot of years just experimenting with different kinds of sounds. But I always came back to her music and thinking like, if I just could make something this good, if I just could write lyrics that make people feel what I feel when I listen to this, it would just be like… wow. I feel the same about Joni Mitchell, I feel like she’s this phenomenon, sorta outer space I don't know, she doesn't feel like a person to me she feels more this like artistic phenomena.
Then I also feel like I should say my mother is a legend because I really like look up to how she's been going through life and being a stay-at-home mom and also an artist like she does paintings and and I feel like she devoted her life to giving us, me and my siblings, a good upbringing. We’re a big family as well like I have six siblings, so it's a full-time job. I really look up to the way she's always so forthcoming and everyone is welcome in our house family means the world to me, so I wanted to say that as well.
Bonnie: Do you want to introduce yourself a bit? Do you want to talk a bit about your journey?
Drea: I grew up in Bergen, in Norway, in a big family, as I said, and music was a big interest in our family. My mother and father were very keen. All of my siblings had to play an instrument growing up, so music was really important. I think my mother, she never played an instrument when she was younger or she doesn't now as well. I think she felt a little bit bitter about that, not being a part of that music. When she met my father and his family, they were really into music, I guess she really wanted all of us to experience knowing music and knowing an instrument. I picked my instrument, it was the violin and I played till I was 18, actually. Because they're also a little bit strict, so when you started something, you had to finish it.
I went to high school, music high school, right outside Bergen. It was this boarding school so I moved out when I was 15 years old. I really wanted to change my main instrument. I tried to switch but my mom and dad were like no you're not allowed to. I really love to sing like since I was like five years old. Growing up, the dream has always been to be a performer in any type of way, I thought like maybe a musical artist because I like to act and also dance but I soon found out that like singing was my forte more than acting and dancing.
When I finished high school, I applied to this music college, the Grieg Academy in Bergen. The study is called Jazz Vocal and I think it’s really weird, it's only a band a year that gets into the college, six people or maybe only one or two singers. I don't know what I was thinking applying to the college. Because when I got there, I was just like, there's no freaking way, but I got in. I went there for four to five years. I did an extra year for training to become a music teachers if I wanted to.
It was a bit hard to do jazz vocals, it's really practical and there were mostly just guys and boys in my school. When I started we were two girls in the jazz class. And everyone was like, yeah, Andrea, she listens to pop music. And I was just like, no, I quite agree with the topic of jazz. We had to choose a topic and I chose jazz, me and another guy, we were the only one from, like, 80 people choosing jazz, because everyone did classical or something else. So we were the freaks and I was even more the freak because I listened to pop music, it was wild.
It was very scary. I was like crying after class, going How can I do this? But then after a couple of years, I had better contact with the people at my school and started a band. After I finished, I started working a year. It's always been my dream to have a solo project, but I've never known just quite what's it going to be. I found it hard to trust my own musical intention or like a sound. It felt safe to stand with a group and for something together. It took a lot of years of experimenting and then the last three years now, I've been really focusing on figuring it. It kind of landed a year ago. I had two songs that felt like me, I started to record them with a couple of producers in Bergen.
I figured out what was me and what was my sound when I allowed myself to just write alone and then bring my finished song to the producers, because then I felt like this is mine. That was really important to me, like finding my voice that it had to be a hundred percent my voice and that I didn't want anyone to do anything with it until the song sounded like mine.
Describe your new song Dear Emily in three words.
It’s a bit sad, the lyrics and especially the ending of the song is hopeful.
Like a Phoebe Bridgers song: sad but hopeful!
Dear Emily definitely goes into that category.
Tell the story behind Dear Emily. What inspired it?
I told you before that I started working after my studies. I had a hard time adjusting to the full-time work kind of everyday life because my dream is to do music full-time so doing something else I was a music teacher and also doing some administrative work at a music school, it felt as though I was holding myself back a bit and taking the safe option like a backup plan. Not believing that I had what it takes to go for it, trust and better myself as an artist and a musician.
I feel like everyone has this negative voice inside themselves like the little devil on your shoulder. This scared little girl - that’s how I see it like that. I try to not use the word anxiety, but just like telling myself that there’s a little girl inside of me telling me that I should be afraid of this or that, that I can’t do all of that stuff. With the song I just really wanted to personify or put a name on that voice. A character almost that I can sing a song to. I named my scared little girl Emily because my parents actually discussed that name for me when I was born. That’s why I found it really fitting and it's also a really nice name to sing on, it has a nice tone. What’s really funny was that a couple of months after I had written the song, boygenius released a track called Emily I'm Sorry. People actually reached out to say it as well.
They can be sister songs.
Exactly. The song is actually a song to my scared little girl or my anxiety, more like a call-to-action song like get out of my life like I don't want to listen to this voice anymore, I don't want to be held back by my fears. It’s a letter to my stupid inner voice telling me I'm not good enough.
How did the process of writing and making this song look like and how long did it take?
It came from a moment where I thought I can't go to producers. There were like maybe six months where I went to a lot of a lot of producers, it was so much and I got really tired. Which led to me and my manager deciding that I should write more on my own and write more with people I knew well. Like taking it down a notch and not going out on different sessions with different producers every week.
After a few months of doing that, the song kind of came to me. All of my songs are ideas that I write on my own, like I'm just sitting on the guitar playing a little bit and just improvising a melody on top and then a line or two of lyrics comes to me and then I just work with that and develop it.
One day, there was a moment where I was like Oh, that’s a nice line. I should write it down. It got more and more and more and more. So I wrote quickly everything down, I actually found a recording of it and it's really different to the version out now as well. But the first lines of lyrics that’s where it started.
I was going to play a little concert at a mental health festival in Bergen. It was my first gig with the solo project. I had a lot of songs that I put together because we have to play something. I really liked the idea for Dear Emily though, it felt like my sound. I wanted to finish it, so I wrote some more lyrics and brought it with me to a friend that plays guitar in my band. I played it with him a couple of times and we found the structure and I finished the lyrics. We played it at the concert and that’s where it found its form. By just playing it at the concert with two guitars.
We took it to the studio two months later with the two producers that also have done the rest of my EP letter to my bitter self that's going to come out.
This song was really where we found our sound. It was the highlight and favorite for all of us. It felt like we had found the code after many days in the studio. Dear Emily set the tone for the rest of the songs.
What is your favorite lyrics from the song?
Cause you’re the splinter in my toe
If a splinter was made of self-doubt
This one got some mixed reactions by friends.
You’re the scared little girl
That I’m leaving behind
Don’t be afraid
It’s gonna be alright
It talks to some sort of inner child that I have. It’s so soothing that the song ends on that tone, like it's going to be all right.
The song that follows Dear Emily and is the last track of the EP is called Alright which is a song about accepting that life has two sides. You can be sad and happy at the same time. It’s like either way I'm happy that I am able to cry because I rather cry than to not feel anything at all.
You mentioned your upcoming EP again. Do you wanna talk a little about the name and what it’s about?
I'm really really excited for the EP. It's called letters to my bitter self. It's story from start to end. It starts with getting inside one’s head and thinking one is a loser to why it’s so hard to let go, then Dear Emily and the last song is to see the beauty in tears and having those emotions even though it feels hard living through it. I'm hoping that it gives people hope.
I really wanted the EP to feel like a story and having a vision as well. I had to stand my ground a bit with managers and also trying to get a label on the release was a bit hard because I felt like people wanted to involve themselves a lot in the music choices and I knew these were the songs, not one more or one song less. This is the story that I want to tell, but I found a label that wanted to support me.
