Linda Perry is a legend and working with her was just a dream come true. But her melody and her lyrics are so "rock girls are great. It really attracted me. The past decade, I've done some movies. A movie called Home Again. It's a foreign film, Jamaican. I did a Christmas movie actually called Christmas in Compton. I've been writing. I'm actually writing an album right now with Jim Jonsin.
So we're working on that at the moment, but I've written a lot throughout the years. I've had a family life, I've been just growing up. I moved to Nashville from Toronto. And it takes time. I just started working on Austin Mahone's album. I was out with Jim [Jonsin] with a couple of other writers out in Nashville for about two-and-a-half weeks, and we were working on Austin's album.
That happened three weeks ago. We've made a couple of songs together. That was produced by Diplo. We've done a couple of other things together. The song on the Riverdale soundtrack on season one, episode seven, he co-produced that with me.
We try to work together as much as possible. Your debut album had such an impact on early s culture. What happened when it was released and you found fame?
What was that experience like for you? Well, it came out in with "Take Me Away. When it came out, it was just such a crazy experience. I remember just being in the parking lot of some radio station when I heard it for the first time on radio in the U. And I think everybody around me was flipping out way more. I didn't understand, I was so young. I was 17 years old, so the impact didn't hit me so much until I started doing a lot of TRL and things like that and traveling. That was my goal as a kid, to get out of the situation I was in as a child and just try to make something better of myself.
How different do you think things would have been if you were starting out today as opposed to 17 to 20 years ago? I definitely think there's no such thing as genre these days. When I was coming out in , I remember people saying to my manager, like "Do you really think this Black girl's going to do this rock-pop stuff and this is going to work?
I think that's a big difference. There are no boundaries with genre, and you can do anything you want, and you can have one record with a punk song. Then, the next couple of songs down on the tracklist, you can have a country track. I think that's what's so amazing about music right now. What challenges did you face as a Black woman putting out punk rock music on a mainstream label back then?
Well, just naturally being a young teenager, you are still trying to figure out who you are. And then when other people are trying to figure out who you are on a different scale, on a bigger scale, it gets hard.
Being a Black girl doing pop-rock in the early s was definitely interesting because people were curious like, "What is this about? Why is this happening? I loved Avril and we're both from Canada obviously, and we were compared all the time. It didn't really make sense to me. We were so different. My manager got questions all the time like, "Do you really think this Black girl is going to do pop-rock and this will work? That's an insane question, first of all.
When I had first come out, they'd see me and they'd be like, "Okay, we get it. It was very weird. But then they'd hear me and they were like, "Wow.
It took several years for the second album you recorded and the third one you released Sunday Love to come out. What happened there? So, the first album was the debut album, and then we made Sunday Love and it got shelved because certain people had left the building and there were budget cuts and whatnot. While making Sunday Love , I was dropped [by my label] and had to go back [to Canada] and try to figure it out. I just knew then that I had to keep going.
It was a stressful time not having the label and whatnot. I don't even know when it was put out because I wasn't told. It was just put out. You put so much time into something and it's like, why didn't someone say anything from the beginning?
Why did y'all let me spiral? Still, they forged on with a lead single, "Don't Let It Go to Your Head, " which blends the best of Dobson's pop-inspired songwriting with anthemic rock-ballad sounds to create one of the most "easy-listening" tracks on the record. But Dobson says the oddball music video stoked further conflict behind the scenes, and did little to ease tensions about her image. It was a lot of tug-of-war," explains Dobson.
If you look at the last single before that [on 's] 'Don't Go,' I had straight hair and light makeup. It was a very sweet image, but I wasn't putting it on. It was real for me at that time. Dobson knows "this side [of me] kind of freaked the label out," which, coupled with waning public interest single number two, "This Is My Life," also fizzled during the album's revival campaign in March , ultimately led to one of the lowest emotional points in her career. I went back to Toronto.
It was devastating," she explains. The album was eventually independently released in June , and made its way to streaming in I shut off for a while. I put Sunday Love on the shelf, emotionally. I couldn't listen to the music.
I was mad at it. I was mad at the album, the creation, everything. Dobson felt a mini miracle, then, as she was watching Canadian TV broadcast a "new" Miley Cyrus song , which she immediately recognized as "Start All Over," a scrapped Sunday Love cut: "I got super emotional," she says. It was like a blessing that came out of nowhere, and it gave me this fire again and reminded me that maybe I'm not s at this.
Dobson says the tracks were given to those artists unbeknownst to her. But instead of getting bitter at the Frankensteining of songs she wrote for herself from a place of singular emotion, she let it carry her confidence back into the music industry: "That's when I started making [my album] Joy , and that's why I called it Joy ; I was in a completely different place," she recalls. I needed it. It confirmed that I'm not crazy. There must've been something there, and it made me appreciate Sunday Love again.
Joy set a new phase in motion for Dobson, and gave her several major hits in her home country "Stuttering" and "Ghost" reached the top 20 in Canada, and "I Want You" was featured in promos for Elliot Page's film Whip It.
Now, continuing her self-assessed reputation for coming "back from the dead," Dobson has been "living life and writing for other people, transforming all the time" as she readies her first new album in 11 years.
The first single for the currently untitled album, "FCKN IN LOVE," marks a sonic departure from her previous work, with fizzy walls of electro-rock riffs and echoey tinges of new-wave flair driving its anthemic verses to pop perfection.
0コメント