SONGS FROM ISOLATION
Scroll through to read the stories behind each of the tracks and click on the bold titles to hear the songs.
The first track on the Songs From Isolation EP, I wrote Tuscany on a typical quarantine night when we were FaceTiming my grandparents in Slovenia. We were talking about the crazy world we live in right now, the long-lasting impact this will have on our lives and how summer vacation could potentially play out. The song started to form in my head - I wanted to write something about spending the end of the world in Tuscany, daydreaming the troubled reality away.”
With global lockdowns, people were suddenly confined to their homes and life changed dramatically. Surrounded by four walls and a door, we were sort of forced to turn inwards and start focusing on our true selves, free from all of the distractions and busy schedules of life as 'normal'. With so much going wrong this year, I wanted to write a song about all of the good that has come out of it. I've always believed that one of the greatest and most useful skills to acquire in life is the ability to find the brightness in the darkest of spots and Simple is my musical version of that.
I got the initial idea for Alone Together during the first round of lockdowns in California, back in March of 2020. I wanted to capture the feeling of hope - staying inside sitting by the window and dreaming of better days. Almost a year later, that feeling seems more present now than ever. With everything I do (but especially during this pandemic), I try to find the positive, bright aspects, but that is very often easier said than done. With months of life in lockdown, all of us have experienced emotions that come and go as waves - from moments of acceptance to feelings of frustration and a feeling of helplessness. I wrote Alone Together for those low moments - starting off as a raw and vulnerable ballad, the song turns into a hopeful anthem.
The concept of life feeling like a movie is something that has been on my mind a lot over the last year; from seeing empty shelves in grocery stores to the idea that it now seems outrageous to take the bus and sit side by side with dozens of strangers without a mask. These are all scenes we used to only see in movies and seemed completely impossible for us to experience in real life. I wanted to write a song that would capture this idea, but also do so in a more lighthearted way, looking at it from the lens of living inside of a movie. I remember I had also just watched Contagion on Netflix the night before writing the first demo and it was eerie how many parallels there were between that movie and our current reality. The next morning, I went to the piano and wrote what is now the chorus of Movie.
With not much else to do during quarantine, I started watching a lot of films (mostly romantic comedies) and started fantasizing about the perfect
meet-cute. I’m a huge romantic and I always envisioned love like in the movies - deep and authentic, finding your ‘the one’ person in the most magical,
beautiful way. I started writing Love Song as sort of my thesis on how I view love, how I one day hope it turns out for me.
I hope that one day I get to play this to my husband and say: ‘see, I always knew it would be like this’.
Make it stand out
Midnight in Paris is a vintage French chanson-inspired Pop track about the celebration of post-Covid life, portrayed as dancing through the night streets of Paris. I like to think of it as a sister song to Tuscany - that one opens the album and Paris closes it off. Tuscany was written very soon after the gravity of this pandemic started dawning on the world and served as a daydream escape from the increasingly gloom reality. Midnight in Paris, on the other hand, comes at a much more hopeful time when there is a light at the end of the tunnel. After enduring through a year of lockdowns and our lives being turned on their heads, now, dancing through Paris seems less of a mental escape and more of a reality in planning.