Your new album, You Can’t Spell Sweetheart Without Thea, is a real statement of who you are as an artist right now. What challenges do you think come up when putting your whole self into a record?

Many people over the years have told me I needed to choose a genre. I finally realized I needed to take full control of my career and make the music I felt confident about. I just had to trust myself as an artist, and I’m excited to continue to do that. There are so many challenges I couldn’t begin to name them, but the only thing that matters is that I feel like myself again.

Thinking back to your double-platinum breakout single ‘Violent’, how has your approach to songwriting and recording changed since then?

I always wrote songs in a multitude of ways, whether that be on the piano, guitar, acapella, or on a beat. Today I still try to continuously switch it up and rotate between all these. I enjoy challenging myself as an artist and have recently been recording and writing more at home, like violent.

‘Baccarat Rouge’ is the entry-point into the album, a rich and romantic jazzy number. Can you explain Nina Simone’s influence here?

“Don’t Explain,” “He Needs Me,” and other Nina Simone songs have these tragic themes that resonate so deeply with me and with the woman experience. She was an artist that is once in a lifetime to me, and I wanted to create a song that had the imagery, the theme, all of an earlier time but with the modern words, the happy-sounding pop bossa nova vibes.

Another album highlight is ‘The Invisible Man’, which explores the deeper feelings behind loneliness than the obvious causes. Was this drawn from personal experience or did you draw inspiration from elsewhere?

Being raised Mormon and being the youngest of 10 siblings was a lonely experience for me. I never believed what my entire family believed, and after leaving, there was so much to unpack. I often felt alone within my own family, and I’ve felt that same disconnection in a lot of areas of my life. I didn’t grow up with money, and then all of a sudden I had a huge song at 17 and was thrown into this industry. I’ve been misunderstood and judged online from a really young age. My personal and family life have both been nightmarishly difficult for 23 years straight. You’d think I was repaying a terrible karmic debt. At the same time, I’ve also been incredibly blessed. I’ve had experiences most people never get to have. My life has been beautiful and incredibly painful, often at the same time. I am eternally grateful, and I accept my life as my own and truly make the most of it. Putting on my Prada heels, finding the beauty in the pain. I don’t know if it gets better or worse, it’s kind of both. The only thing I’ve ever really known how to do is keep going.

What do you hope that listeners will take away from these songs?

I hope they will be comforted by my music like it has comforted and saved me so many times

What’s next for the project?

I want to do a live recorded performance of “Tears On My Pillow” so people can see that moment. It’s one of my favorite parts of the whole project.

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