tiLLie interviewed by TJ Martinez for Ellis Music Magazine on July 29, 2017 at Vans Warped Tour in San Antonio, Texas.
I want to kick it off by diving right into “Save Yourself”, your latest single. It's been out for about two weeks now. How does it feel?
It feels really good. Save Yourself is definitely, I think it's the most important song to me at least personally that I've written to date. I usually feel this way toward most songs but this was one of the ones that the day that I recorded it I was like “oh my god, can we put it out tomorrow?!”. There's always a waiting process, you have to have it mixed and master it and shoot the video so it feels awesome that it's finally out there in the world.
Being that the song is of personal nature, were there challenges creating and releasing it?
Yeah… I like to get real as fuck with my songs, you know some people, they try to leave stuff to be ambiguous or open to interpretation or leave some mystery and I'm just not that person, you know. I like to put it all out there. Because I think a lot of people think that they’re so different from everybody else, but at the end of the day we’re all so similar, we’re all feeling the same things and we put on these faces that we pretend like we’re happy or better off than we are but it just ends up making all of us feel isolated so I like to be real no matter how I'm feeling, just totally put it out there. So it felt good to do that but it was definitely one one of the more emotional songs for me cause it's about uh a breakup that I went through in January and my ex was actually landing back in L.A. on the day I was recording vocals for it and I was even more angry about that and I was getting into singing it that I actually pulled a muscle in my foot because I was so tense when I was singing it and it was in the arch of my foot and I was like “I didn’t even know that could happen” so it was intense but it was worth it.
You're on your first tour right now. How is that going?
It’s awesome- honestly I mean it's been my dream to do this since I started writing songs when I was 14 and I remember being in high school and I saw a singer of one of my favorite bands at the times, which they were called the Hush Sounds, she was in some teen magazine and I remember her saying that she missed her high school prom because she was on tour and I was like “Uh goals! I want to be that” and I didn’t get to do it and I've been wanting to do that for so long and it's amazing to be able to finally be able to really connect with fans because at the end of the day this is why I do this- to connect with other human beings and I think of myself as a storyteller first and foremost and music is just my vehicle for that and stories unite people and connect people and can break barriers for religions and languages… that so it's awesome to finally be able to not just be writing these songs, but to be sharing them with people directly and getting to meet all these different kids and it's just amazing.
In a world where lyrical content is often sacrificed to create popular music, how important is lyricism to you when writing your music?
Lyrics are 100% top priority for me.I will never ever compromise on a lyric, ever because to me it's just like “what's the point?”. Like I said earlier, I’m a storyteller first and foremost and pretty much all of my songs start from lyrics. I'm always constantly observing everything around me- the people around me and the relationships around me and relationships my friends are having, so I mean without lyrics, I don’t even know what I would say. I always start from there and I build everything else around that. So, nope, never, never will happen, there’s no point.
What do you want to convey with your songs?
I just really want to say that we’re not alone individuals. We’re more alike than we are different and especially being a female, I really want to convey a sense of empowerment, self empowerment with girls and other women. Especially in relationships and stuff. Its very rare that you’re going to hear me write a lovey dovey sweet song about someone. Don’t get me wrong, I mean I’m loved, I’ve experienced great love, I’ve experienced bad love but I think there’s enough sweet songs, and I want any woman or any guy or anyone that's in an abusive or unhappy relationship to know that they’re not alone in that. It’s okay to be brave and to face it. That change is always going to be hard and I think that’s why a lot of people stay in bad situations because of they're so afraid of the change but when you do it, it's always worth it and I just really want to convey that to any of my listeners and to just be strong and be self empowered.
Who is your dream collaboration?
6 minutes: Oh shit! Dead or alive?! Oh no! Uhm… alive? Probably Shania Twain. A lot of people think that it's so weird that I'm so influenced by Shania Twain but a lot of people don't know this part of her but when she recorded her first big album with “That Don’t Impress Me Much” and all those, her label heard it and they were like “We don’t believe in this, we don’t back this, it's not country, no one's going to listen to this, no one's going to like it” because it was so pop for country back then and she was such a trailblazer and her label was like “no” so they put very little money into her first single but her producer was luckily, a really successful guy so he put half a million dollars into marketing it and it blew up and now she's an icon, she’s had longevity thats lasted years and years and years because she stood for something and created something different and that's how I’ve always kind of felt- it’s been a little bit of a struggle for me, cause what I do is never perfectly fitted into what's happening. I’ve always just been adamant about sticking true to myself so i really admire that about her. Uhm, Gwen Stefani is another one that I would like to collaborate with. Those are the two. I always feel like I’m like the baby of if Shania Twain and Gwen Stefani were lesbians and they would like somehow could procreate together, I would be their daughter. That’s my vibe. Dead? I don’t know- there’s not really that many dead people I want to collaborate with.. or Paul McCartney from The Beatles but he's alive still so Shania Twain, Paul McCartney, Gwen Stefani.
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