emails i can’t send

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This was finally the album where I got to just have fun and f–k around and not take everything so seriously, because it wasn’t like, you gotta go in the studio and make a song [in a specific way]… It was completely and entirely just me steering the ship.

via Teen Vogue

I started to realize that some of those lines and some of those words that jumped out at me from emails that I wrote to myself were songs: verses, choruses, bridges. There were all these things that I wasn’t afraid to say when I was writing an email that I knew no one was ever going to read that I was like, “Oh these are my unfiltered thoughts,” as opposed to when you go into a studio and there’s all these expectations for what you’re supposed to leave the studio with. When I was just writing to myself alone in my room, I wasn’t thinking about anyone hearing it or judging it or liking it or disliking it. It’s always been the hardest thing to name albums for me, so the fact that this kind of came somewhat naturally said a lot to me.

– via Rolling Stone

I started writing emails to myself in the beginning of quarantine as a way of kind of not going insane. And I realized the type of venting emails that you write out, but never plan on sending are the most authentic, real part of your brain that you can capture in that moment, because you’re not worried about how people are going to hear it or how they’re going to perceive you after they hear it… So, basically, the songs that I’ve been writing for the last year have come from the starts of those emails.

via “At Home With” on Apple Music 1.

I just went ham musically. Dolly Parton was a huge reference of mine during this album, but I also wanted it to feel modern at the same time.

–via Rolling Stone

I’ve learned a lot and, essentially, this next record for me, feels like the first one where I am myself… I just think that there’s a lot that I’ve learned and now a lot that I can kind of honestly reflect and look back on and see things with clear eyes and see people’s intentions with clear eyes and see moments where I could have gone left instead of right. And if it would’ve made a difference, doesn’t matter, you can’t change that. But it’s been that combined with, you said this earlier, but the music that I grew up on and how that’s really shaped me and working with these people that understand music better than anyone. And I think that it’s been a really beautiful, just fun process, which is all I could ever ask for.

via “At Home With” on Apple Music 1.

I was doing a run on Broadway [in Mean Girls] right before the pandemic, and once the shutdown happened, I sort of went into this mode of… I mean, everybody has their way of coping. Some people were like, I’m not going to do anything for however long, and I’m just going to take this time off for myself and recuperate. But for me, I was like, I’m going to start this process [of writing a new album]. I knew that it would take a long time, because I really wanted to take my time with this project in particular. I signed with a new label in the middle of the pandemic, and I think there’s so much that changes between the ages of 18 to 21, so I knew that this project would be very different. But the process kind of started there. It incorporated a lot of living life as well as it did actually working on the music—I was really writing through everything that I was experiencing.

— Via an interview for Vogue.

This whole quarantine, it has been like, ‘Well, you know what, it doesn’t need to be perfect. I’m just going to put it out as is, c’est la vie, and see how it goes,‘… Because I’ll put something out, and be like, ‘Ah I wish I could change that, just a little bit.’ So, I’m trying not to overthink it right now, but I am trying to make sure it tells the story I want to tell. So, I’m taking my time with it.

— via Flaunt.