Miya Folick is seemingly all over the place. Following the launch of her debut album Premonitions in 2018, The LA-based singer-songwriter shared one-off single “Malibu Barbie” in 2019, recorded a shocking cowl of Mazzy Star‘s “Fade Into You” with American Football, coated Death Cab For Cutie‘s “I Will Follow You Into The Dark” for Hulu’s Looking For Alaska miniseries and was featured in Petey’s tune “Haircut.” But with her new EP 2007, Folick is able to reintroduce herself.
Folick started penning this EP shortly after Premonitions, with the pandemic upending her plans to launch it earlier. While Premonitions was about her dynamics with folks and inspecting her boundaries, 2007 is about going inward, discovering the power to do what’s finest for herself.
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On opening observe “Oh God,” Folick second-guesses her route in life — notably in her profession. “I don’t ever want to be alone/Maybe I should call my mom and say I’m moving home,” she ponders, with a minimalistic drum machine and twinkling synths in the background.
Loads has modified in the past couple of years since she wrote the tune, however the sentiment nonetheless stands.
“I think I’m constantly having second thoughts about my career,” Folick admits over the cellphone, talking from her dwelling in Los Angeles. “I’ll go through periods where everything feels right and easy and moving forward feels obvious, and then I’ll go through [others] where I am struggling or frustrated or questioning everything, and then I may find some answers and move into the other phase.”
Folick recollects that just lately, she and her buddies had been having a dialog about the idea of regression, sparked by the realization that they had been reexperiencing points they’d encountered just a few years in the past. “We had to remind each other that that’s just the way life works. Things don’t go away. Just because it’s not as present for you for a while, it doesn’t mean that it’s completely gone away,” she says. “And when it comes back, that’s not a moral failure. It’s not a regression. It can just be that life is cyclical.”
Though she’s speaking about “Oh God” particularly, this may very well be the thesis assertion for 2007. Spanning practically 20 minutes, Folick contemplates how, when revisiting points from the past, she will be able to deal with them in a different way. Take “Bad Thing,” for instance, a observe about being caught in a cycle of being hungover after an evening of messy antics prompted by escapism. The tune, the poppiest one on the EP, was co-written with Mitski and Andrew Wells.
“We worked on a few songs together, and this is the one that ended up making the EP,” Folick says about collaborating with Mitski. “I think she and I similarly have a very intuitive approach to music. The sense that I get from Mitski in the studio is that she is extremely comfortable with exploring [new things] and comfortable being vulnerable.”
Like Mitski, Folick explores her personal vulnerability on “Nothing To See,” the place she seems to be again at a past relationship, the place she felt she misplaced her sense of company. The observe, pared down with acoustic guitar, lets Folick’s voice shine, as she processes how a lot this poisonous dynamic affected her: “Why did I do that?/Why did I do that?/Nothing has changed, I’m just sad and in pain/Said, I would never be desperate/Look at me.” Though Folick is singing a couple of relationship that ended years in the past, the particulars nonetheless really feel heartbreaking: the former associate chatting up teenage women on the web, Folick struggling with physique picture to suit her associate’s wishes, not correcting them once they mispronounced her title as a result of she did not need to push them away.
“I rarely talk about relationships in such detail on songs. More often than not, I just start writing and see what happens. It’s almost like the song asks to be written,” Folick says. “It was a relationship that really affected me, but I hadn’t written about in a couple years, and I think that that distance of time allowed me to be pretty honest about it in a way that I may not have been able to have been closer to when it had occurred.”
Though the lyrics really feel heavy, Folick brings some levity in the tune’s music video. Directed by her pal Noah Kentis, the video begins with Folick sitting at a restaurant, slurping a bowl of milk whereas dressed as a cat.
While attempting to come back up with the idea for the video, Kentis and Folick had been attempting to think about what a visible excessive would appear to be. “I think the real-life version of that song might be wearing a specific type of dress or wearing a specific type of perfume or talking a certain way,” Folick notes. “We were brainstorming different images that captured that kind of concept, and we thought of the idea of turning yourself into a cat because the person you’re with really likes cats, which is just a funny way of visually representing that.”
Those who’ve been ready for a follow-up to Premonitions are in luck. Folick shares that the EP is a part of a “larger body of work” she created in the past few years. She determined to launch an EP first as a result of she wished it to really feel “like the beginning of the story” that might be continued in an album, set to reach in 2023. “I’m very excited for it to come out,” Folick says. “It’s been a long time in the making.”
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