When we’re used to the hustle and bustle of everyday life, having all that noise taken away can leave a silence that’s just as loud. For South African-born, Berlin-based artist Alice Phoebe Lou, it was an opportunity to articulate her deepest thoughts and emotions into a new album, Glow.
“I went through a lot this year, like so many people,” Alice says. “I spent more time alone than I ever had. I shaved my head. Had an ego death. Fell in love. Had my heart broken. I was a raw little mess. And that was what I wrote about.” The album provided an outlet for Alice to “blow off steam”, and one into which she poured a series of memories, thoughts and experiences. Before, she’d thought that songs needed to “say something”, to deliver some kind of profound message. The very idea of a love song seemed overdone, or trivial. “But this album simply poured out of my heart and my subconscious, and there was no stopping the lovestruck nature of them,” she says. “Sometimes love, love lost and the ways in which these matters of the heart affect us, are the most relatable feelings in the world.” She was going to be as honest as she could bear.
There were times when Alice wondered if it might be too much. Glow is a breathtaking work, full of visceral, star-dusted songs delivered in her crooning tones, against a backdrop of scuzzy guitars, sauntering bass grooves and mesmeric piano sequences. “I used to feel quite self-conscious about writing love songs,” she says. “But now I like the idea that your music can be a friend to someone, and make them feel as though they’re being related to.” Glow is Alice finally allowing herself to write about those more personal subjects, in a very raw way. “I didn’t worry about how it would appear to other people,” she says. Fortunately, this staunchly independent artist feels no pressure to bend to the whims of a fickle industry: “I don’t feel the urgency that I think a lot of young female artists do, like there’s a time limit on my career,” she says. “I reject that concept, and the way the music industry pushes it on women.”
Born in Capetown to documentary filmmakers, who filled their home with the songs of Patti Smith, Cat Power, Portishead and PJ Harvey, Alice fell easily into the creative scene. Some of her favorite early memories are of her mother playing the piano each evening; she studied dance at school for nine years then, aged 16, journeyed to Paris on her own and fell in with a group of street artists who performed outside the Notre Dame. They taught Lou how to do fire dancing: “Performance art with an element of danger.” She was fascinated by this way of life, of living day by day in a foreign city. “Those people were the happiest, most generous people I met during my time there,” she says. She lived in Paris for two months, finishing school before returning to Europe for a year of traveling.
“I went without a plan, without any idea of what I was doing,” she explains. “I thought I could just perform on the street and make money that way. I spent a month in Brussels, which is where my mother was born, then wound up in Amsterdam for about two months.” Alice found this experience rougher than Paris, surrounded by performers who were mostly “embittered, older men”. She was threatened on more than one occasion, and also had to deal with stag parties who travelled there in their hordes from the UK. “When you’re 18, playing with fire and dancing for money, people look at you in a certain way,” she says.
She moved on to Berlin, where she struggled to make enough money to get by until she met a busker from Algeria. He invited her to perform to a crowd with his guitar, after Alice’s friend told him that she could sing as well. “It was f***ing terrifying,” she recalls, laughing. But she caught the bug, and every now and again she’d perform original songs alongside the covers. A group of young Israeli men who’d skipped army service introduced her to the music of Fleet Foxes; she returned the favour by letting them crash in her apartment for a month. She was busking when she was spotted by her now-manager, who offered to represent her for free, at first, so entranced was he by her unique sound.
That sound has developed exponentially since those early days. Lou’s debut album, Orbit, was released at a time where she still lacked confidence in her abilities: “I struggled to choose what sound or direction I wanted to go in,” she says. She formed a band of musicians who “saw me for who I was”. Working with Grammy-winning producer Noah Georgeson (Devendra Banhart, Cate Le Bon, Joanna Newsom), Lou created last year’s Paper Castles, a critically acclaimed record praised for its “era-less” sound and beautiful vocals. Georgeson had suggested recording at a studio in Northern California, which Lou feared would be too expensive, “but the owner was amazing and wanted it to be used by people other than aging rock stars”. She and Georgeson had hit it off immediately, and she reveled in the experience of having a producer who didn’t try to push her in any one direction. “He just wants to bring the album out of you,” she says. “And even though I’m not a trained musician, I bring something else to music. I create a mood and an environment.”
The ensuing tour for Paper Castles launched the busiest year of Lou’s life. She played more than 100 shows as a solo artist, and more with another band. “It was insane, but also I was so lucky that 2020 was the year I was supposed to make a new album,” she says. She knows plenty of other artists whose careers were derailed due to tour cancellations this year: “I’m a lucky mother***er.” She managed to make time to organize her own festival back home in South Africa, at the beginning of this year. “It’s really important to me to help uplift the local music scene,” she says. “There’s not enough support for artists and there are still a lot of racial issues – the people who can access music are generally more privileged, and white.”
By the time it came to making Glow, Lou had been awarded a musician’s grant from Canada, and was due to travel there to record with David Parry of the folk-pop group Loving, from British Columbia. Of course, the pandemic scuppered those plans, and Alice found herself searching for a studio in Dresden, instead. Fortunately, she found a space last-minute, and there she worked on Glow with Parry, her bassist Daklis, and her longtime collaborator Ziv Yamin on drums and keys. Parry also provided those blissful guitar lines that Lou says the songs were “begging for”. “I couldn’t have asked for more inspiring people to create the record with,” she says. She’d fallen in love with recording to tape by this point, and to bolster this warm yet gritty sound, Parry sourced decades-old mics and gear for the studio.
Most of the songs are about love; outpourings of intense feeling. “I realized that instead of making people think, I wanted to simply make people feel,” Alice says. Some songs showcase a new style of writing, where she would play the music and just sing the first thing that came to her. “In some moments, it’s almost embarrassing how vulnerable I’m being,” she says. Yet there’s nothing embarrassing about songs such as new single “dusk”, written as a tribute to friendship. Nor “dirty mouth”, which is loaded with perky guitar lines and a fun, summery vibe. On “how to get out of love”, her gentle croons recall a young Judy Garland; soft reverberations give the song a beautifully vintage yet timeless feel. On “lover // over the moon” she sounds painfully fragile, redolent of Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker, as if the very lilting tone of her voice is a plea to her partner to be tender to her.
“Those songs have really deep honest things in them, and I think that’s the most important thing with this album, is that I could access that part of myself,” Lou says. “It feels really good to be unfiltered.”