Life Taught Willow a Lot in Recent Years. You Can Hear It on Her New Single
Grasping the difference between loneliness and solitude was a game-changer for Willow. Loneliness, she realized, was something that often sent her running in search of distraction from the overwhelming emotions that live in that silence. Solitude, on the other hand, was a teacher. “When we’re alone, when there’s nobody there to distract us from our own thoughts, we try to run away from it,” the 23-year-old tells Rolling Stone over Zoom. “But I feel like it’s a really interesting practice to understand and to really see what changes when you don’t try to push it away.” Willow sat with her emotional discomfort on her latest single, fittingly titled “alone,” allowing suppressed memories, trauma, and intimidating thoughts to wash over her.
Handing herself over to that experience taught the musician a lot about herself, including how she knows whether she’s heading in the right direction in life and how to prioritize compassion and gratitude. Now she’s learning how to apply those same internal lessons within her personal relationships — including with her mother, Jada Pinkett Smith, who recently released the memoir Worthy, which features bombshell revelations about her marriage to and quiet separation from Will Smith and her young encounters with the drug epidemic in Baltimore while growing up. “I really started loving her with so much more tenderness and way less expectations, which allowed her to see me differently and to love me differently,” Willow says, “and to love me with a little bit more allowance for the parts of me that remind her of the parts of herself that have always caused her pain.”
The first offering from her forthcoming sixth studio album, “alone” marks the departure of both an old mindset and an old sound. Gone are the remnants of the pop punk and brash rock of 2021’s Lately I Feel Everything and 2022’s Coping Mechanism. In their place, she explores new pockets of her vocal abilities through more intricately and intentionally crafted harmonies and rhythms. “For Coping Mechanism I was almost never sober in the studio. And for this new album, I was sober for every single recording session,” she explains. “I feel like my mind state was extremely different.”
Willow tells Rolling Stone about the new beginnings “alone” represents on both an artistic and personal level, defending her work as a producer, and the strange way Ella Fitzgerald’s music shows up in her dreams.
You celebrated your 23rd birthday on Halloween. I was thinking about the lyric in “alone,” where you say: “Everything falls away in time.” There’s the hope of possibility within that, but also a sense that nothing lasts. What is your relationship like with time and aging?
That line is one of my favorites in the song because it’s kind of taken both ways. It’s coming from that human side of like, “Damn, if everything falls away in time, then why are we trying so hard to make this work?” Whether it’s in a romantic sense, or whatever it is. But then there’s another aspect of where it’s like, “Everything falls away with time, so why not give our full self?” Why not make every single moment that we have either in this relationship, in this moment, whatever it is, to really feel what it is to be alive?
There’s this concept on the single about wounding people and being wounded. What are some lessons you’ve learned from other people and from yourself?
There’s a specific lyric in the song that I want to repeat, “Nothing is intact to speak to the wounds that I gave and I have.” It’s so interesting because before I’m almost talking about like, “Yes, tell me it’s something that I can’t define. Give me a little peek into that divine world, into that truth that I’m so desperately seeking.” So much of the time, we’re looking outside of ourselves for validation, for others to make us feel a certain way. But we also look outside of ourselves to test the waters of like, “What do you think about my decisions? What do you think about the way I’m living my life?”
Sometimes we forget the only person who really knows what’s going on and who can really see the truth inside of you, is you. You can obviously go through other people who have experienced more things than you have, or have a deeper understanding of specific life concepts than you do. And that’s beautiful. But to constantly be trying to outsource this necessary information — we can only get that if we sit with our emotions, if we sit with ourselves, and really understand what it means to be in solitude: to be alone without that sense of loneliness.
What are you striving for as a musician on “alone”?
I had always seen music in my own abstract way, but making Coping Mechanism blew my mind open to the science of harmony and rhythm. I feel like “alone” straddles two worlds. It has that intense relief moment at the end, but there are some really interesting time-signature variations that happen in the song that you don’t really see anywhere in Lately I Feel Everything or Coping Mechanism. There’s some quintuplet beats that are just really different from rhythmic expressions that I’ve used before. It’s this amazing bridge of a song because it has a heart of vulnerability, and we have the guitars that are driving feeling. But there’s this underlying complexity that is just such a great foreshadowing for what’s to come.
As you’ve produced more of your own music — alongside Tyler Cole on Lately I Feel Everything, then Chris Greatti on Coping Mechanism, and now with Eddie Benjamin on “alone” — how has that helped you in communicating your musical ideas?
Sometimes I get a little insecure because I’m like, “Damn, I know so deep in my heart the sound of what I want, right?” But it’s a great challenge to be like, exactly how do I express this in a way that any musician would understand me who’s really studied the science of music? Obviously there’s very complex things that are happening on this song that I still have to sing ideas and sing lines because my understanding of music theory isn’t 100 percent yet, but I was really, really proud of myself with this song that I could like challenge myself a bit on that language and that expression.
How has your creative process shifted as you’ve moved away from the rock sound that defined your releases over the past three years?
During that time, emotionally, I was going through so much. There was so much anger. There was so much resentment. There was so much need to just express myself. And those two albums helped me get it out. For Coping Mechanism I was almost never sober in the studio. And for this new album, I was sober for every single recording session … I feel like my mind state was extremely different. There was so much more gratitude, so much more resonance with myself, and so much more coming back to my roots with these new songs that are coming out.
You told Rolling Stone last year that Coping Mechanism represented, in some sense, the death of the person you used to be. Does this upcoming album place you in the space of rebirth, or is it a purgatorial?
This is a rebirth situation for me and almost me falling deeper in love with music again. I didn’t even know that that could happen. Coping Mechanism was a door opened. This next project is me taking my first step through that door. The amount of gratitude I have and the amount of excitement that I have for really studying and absorbing parts of music that I didn’t even think were possible — it makes me feel connected to this amazing lineage of so many beautiful musicians that have come before me and that will come after me that are holding this torch of service, and gratitude, and dedication to the craft.
The craft changes when you put the responsibility on yourself to give it that special sauce. I used to for a long time be like, “Oh, I’m not going to work with producers.” I always felt like they were trying to control me. But I needed that time by myself in the studio doing everything on my own to really be like “OK, this is what I’m capable of, and I’m very confident and aware of what I’m capable of.” And now that I know that for real and for sure, I can bring other people in the studio with me and feel like I can stand 10 toes down because I have had those years of experience by myself, not knowing what to do, having that trial-and-error process.
Wasn’t there also a song you had heard in a dream that you woke up and captured? What do you make of the way your mind is able to create even when you’re essentially on autopilot?
That has only happened to me one time where I could hear it and play it. I’ve heard so much music in my dreams. What’s crazy actually is that I started listening to a lot of Ella Fitzgerald three or four months ago. It was all I was listening to. I would go to sleep and I would be dreaming and in the back of my brain, I would be doing random things — like walking down the street or levitating or something — and it would be her voice constantly in the background. That stayed for a few months and I was like “Yo, what you feed your brain is so important.” We talk about diets for the body, but what you put in your mind — the music that you listen to, the content of that, the books that you read, the movies that you watch, the people that you speak to — all of that can either poison or cleanse your mind.
How do you know when you’re heading in the right direction?
When I was younger, I would feel this feeling of foreboding in specific directions and be like, “OK, I know that I’m not doing that. That feels extremely foreboding. So I’m just gonna go in the opposite direction.” And sometimes you have to know what you don’t want in order to know what you want. That’s really how it started for me. But now, how I know that I’m going in the right direction is this feeling inside. You know when you’re out at a social event and there’s people there that you don’t know and their vibe is really not right? And you just have this stomach feeling that’s just like, “I want to escape, I want to hide”?
But when you start to feel that opening, it’s like, “Wow, actually this is where I want to be; I actually don’t feel like I need to escape to anywhere.” There’s this quote I saw online that says, “Home is where all your attempts to escape cease.” And I feel like as humans, this world can be so dark and so unforgiving — we know how dark this world is, we’ll just leave it at that — and so our bodies are in this constant state of fight or flight. It’s a survival mechanism, even emotionally, but when we feel that survival mechanism relax, we are just aligned in this moment.
Has there been a time when you ignored that guiding instinct and regretted it?
Many, many times. I think in relationships, for me, it happens more than in situations with my artistry. I feel like with my artistry, I’ve had so much practice with saying no to things that don’t feel right. But when you love someone — whether it’s a friend, whether it’s a romantic partner, whether it’s your parents — and they are expecting you to do something so that they can have a sense of security in their experience but that’s not the right thing for you, it’s really, really hard to say no to that. You know that this person that you love and this person that you care about has this expectation of you, and it would make them feel more comfortable in this crazy life if you just did whatever it is that they want you to do. But that’s obviously a trap. We know that. I feel like in those situations I feel the most pressure to go against that gut feeling.
I’m glad you mentioned parents. I think the mother-daughter relationship especially is so complex. It’s very Barbie, but you get older and you look at your mom and it’s like, “Oh, you’re just a girl.”
You’re just a girl trying to figure this life out, exactly like me. Me and my mother’s relationships skyrocketed to amazing heights once I figured that out. I really started loving her with so much more tenderness and way less expectations, which allowed her to see me differently and to love me differently — and to love me with a little bit more allowance for the parts of me that remind her of the parts of herself that have always caused her pain. And that is a real deal one right there.
What’s a piece of advice that you find yourself frequently revisiting?
I had a ceremony with a really amazing shaman — and I’m prefacing this like it’s gonna be some super, super deep thing, but it’s super simple. He told me, “Stop ‘should’-ing yourself. Stop saying, ‘I should have done this. I should be more this way. I should have been more whatever.’” You can’t hate yourself into a better version of yourself. You can’t do that to a child. You can’t do that to an animal. You can’t do that to anything. Why would we think we could do it to ourselves? So I’ve been trying to be more compassionate with the parts of myself that drive me freaking nuts. And there’s a lot of them.
I feel like that’s what [“alone”] touches on, too. It’s like, no, I’m gonna sit here in this solitude. It’s just going to come to me, all of these traumatic experiences and emotions and thought loops that I have. And I’m going to allow myself to feel all of it, and I’m not going to judge myself for it. But I’m also going to align myself with the understanding that I need to come from this situation as a more compassionate and aware person. Then you end up just not checking yourself at those moments where it’s like, OK, you went to the depths. You felt what you needed to feel. Now it’s time to do the work to start healing this.