Her lyrics across the album probe at ideas of failure, evil, and worthlessness. All I had was this conviction that I can make music and that it will propel me to be somebody that I wanted to be when I was younger.” I was really desperate to get to a place in my life that I felt safe in, and comfortable. I think I was really obsessed with like, I’m almost an adult, I’m almost at this place where, when I was younger, I had imagined myself being something great. It was really hard to make friends and have a network of support. Vu felt ungrounded in many ways: “I moved three times in one year or something. “Self-storage is just a collection of my things that I accumulate over time, and that’s what songwriting is to me – notes back to myself of experiences, and stuff I was feeling.” The building felt like a looming metaphor not just for her transitory circumstances, but for the stockpiled emotions in the songs she was writing. Writing the album (which follows up two EPs, 2018’s ‘How Many Times Have You Driven By’ and 2019’s ‘Nicole Kidman/Anne Hathaway’), Vu was moving between neighbourhoods in Los Angeles and at one point living in the shadow of a huge self-storage building it was this structure that she named her album after. That was sort of the ethos for that song.” “I was thinking that New Years Eve is kind of everybody’s birthday you’re reflecting on your life and you have hopes for the future, but you’re ultimately sad every time the year passes and you aren’t who you wanted to be. Take the menacing ‘Everybody’s Birthday’: with striking vocals and subtly stubborn melodies that evoke Lorde and Lana Del Rey, she pulls you into a dimly-lit New Years Eve party that’s more depression than debauchery. But on her debut album ‘Public Storage’, Vu captures that disillusionment so vividly and viscerally that it’s brand new all over again. It’s an age-old feeling – superstars like Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish have encapsulated it on a mainstream level in recent years – and one that stings even harder after key years and moments have been lost to the pandemic. “Now I feel like I’m finally as old as I ever thought I would be, and I wanna be younger again.” “I really was trying to grow up all the time throughout my teenhood,” says the LA singer-songwriter, just out of bed and chatting via Zoom from her sunny home. Now, at 21, she’s had to find that adulthood isn’t quite as freeing as it sounds.
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