ME: It was one of my friends who told me about you and your music so I wanted to ask her if she had a question for you personally - she wants to know what is the inspiration behind your music because she finds it so fascinating and unique?
LF: thanks to your friend, that's kind to say:) musically my two main inspirations are the bossa nova I grew up hearing from my mum's CD collection, and the 60s-70s pastoral folk vashti bunyan/nick drake type stuff i got into in my late teens as a general nostalgiahead
M: You have almost 2 million streams per month - with only several releases, and starting a few years ago, how does knowing so many people listen to you frequently feel? LF: it's a surreal delight and a little nerve-wracking too. i'm half-convinced i'll blink and it'll all vanish again, with how fast the internet moves on. i'm immensely thankful for my luck with the TikTok stuff and the connection the music is making with people right now, i'll always keep that with me.
M: The art for all your releases are so beautiful and unique. Is it you who creates them/the idea for them? If so, how do you come up with ideas for said covers?
LF: thankyou! album covers have always been a bit of a crux for me. i can be a terrible perfectionist, until lately i was doing everything by myself on no budget and never felt able to connect the look to the sound entirely. so that's lovely to hear.
The Water's Fine cover is from a painting i did for my art GCSE. i was just like, i don't have any other ideas and i'm impatient to get this out so that'll do lol. 'recently' has been through about 3 album covers before i landed on one which feels right. but thankfully i did! i came across Sabrina's (@comfortablefields on instagram) work on instagram, adored it and fortunately she was available to do the current cover with the crying moon. honestly i'd attribute the sudden interest in 'rises the moon' partially to that redesigned cover, it's so beautiful.
a friend of mine from uni is a film photographer so we had a lot of fun doing the Sign shoot. that was very inspired by these photos we saw on pinterest of a 60s Joan Baez looking aloof on the beach with her guitar, and i love how it turned out.
M: Your last release I believe was in 2020 - was the pandemic a factor in no current releases? I ask every artist these days how it affected them because of how surreal it was for all of us!
LF: i had the privileges of safety and time during the pandemic; so as much as i'd like to pin things on covid to absolve myself of responsibility, i think a protracted writer's block and the pressure of having an audience have been more of a factor.
M: Can we look forward to any releases coming up soon?
LF: nothing certain's in the pipeline. i have been writing though, and i'd love to get something out this year.
M: What pushed you to release music those years ago?
LF: music making is first and foremost one of my greatest joys:)
i got started on a YouTube channel which i'll now admit to being a little embarrassed by, but back then that gave me some confidence that music might be something i was alright at, and that someone out there might want to hear it
i think also just to have something definite to work towards. the first EP came at the end of a gap year where i was very much clueless as to my future. personal malaise in a series of kitchen jobs, none of which i lasted at for long, leading me to try my odds at making money off something i enjoyed instead.
M: Had you always seen yourself pursuing music?
LF: it's always been something i was going to do for the fun of it, the luck i've had to be able to try it professionally is unexpected but freeing
M: personally, the titles to your songs are spectacular, like mother tongue, papercut, rises the moon. Do you come up with titles before lyrics, or the other way around?
LF: thankyou! it varies but a title tends to be the last thing to reveal itself after melody and lyrics are done.
M: Who would you say inspires you the most musically these days?
LF: Caetano Veloso. his 1986 self-titled especially
M: I like to end on a fun one - if you could go back and change any of your songs, would you and which one? If not, what is something you wish you’d have released but haven’t/won’t?
LF: over lockdown i did this disco epic about a human who gets abducted to the kingdom of plants. like a human soul trapped in the body of a plant. it's a little existential and there's a killer guitar solo. got a bit carried away with it so it took me a year to finish and it's like 8 minutes long. when i exported it from garageband my laptop destroyed itself in protest. evaporated in a puff of smoke. the song's quite bad so i'm fairly certain it'll never see the light of day but from time to time i'm like what if it did
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