Q&A: Disco Shrine ‘xoxo, Disco Shrine'
☆ By ALEX FREE ☆
INTERTWINING THE HISTORY OF HER HERITAGE WITH AN ELECTRIFYING POP SOUND — Disco Shrine is creating music that is both liberating and refreshing. With her 2018 debut of “Up In The Air,” the song allowed Jessica Delijani to “take back what other people, culture and society” deemed as shameful and taboo: her family’s story of immigration. Now, with the release of her new EP xoxo, Disco Shrine, Disco Shrine is expanding upon this sense of understanding, exploring her identity, reflecting on past experiences and looking towards the future.
At the same time empowering and reflective, Disco Shrine’s intoxicating music traverses through her experiences as a young first generation Persian-American in the Valley and a girl enchanted by first-glance love — all the while navigating self-confidence and pining for independence. Originally feeling that her cultural identity was not something to proudly declare, Disco Shrine is now taking the opportunity to use her pop platform to expand representation within the artform, something further exemplified with her latest EP.
Read below to dive deeper into the history behind Disco Shrine’s career and album-making process, the artist’s take on being a young woman in LA and more.
LUNA: What’s the origin of Disco Shrine?
DELIJANI: I started Disco Shrine after I graduated from college. When I first started, it was more a passion project, and I was writing with one producer. It was fun, but I had a lot of growing to do musically. Somewhere along the way I picked up DJing, and that really blew up for me because I already had experience working events and behind the scenes in the music industry. When I let people know I was DJing, I got asked to do a bunch of parties, and I eventually started traveling with Dance Yourself Clean all over the country: from New York to Chicago, and around Australia.
I took that year to focus on Djing, and I came out of that year saying, “I know what kind of music I want to make; I know what my ‘why’ is and what my story is, and what I want to put out into the world.” That’s when I put out “Up In The Air,” which I consider the first real Disco Shrine single because it was completely from my heart. It was about my family immigrating to America, and it was the start of everything Disco Shrine.
LUNA: Where did the name Disco Shrine come from?
DELIJANI: I was talking with a friend about how he wanted to make this art piece where he shattered a mirror and put the pieces back together, and I was like, “Oh cool, like a Disco Shrine?” and it was like — light bulbs. It made total sense because a lot of the music I write is deeper (I’m kind of a sap) but it’s always disguised in a more upbeat, hopeful, dancey tone. Disco Shrine is such a good juxtaposition.
LUNA: You’re a native Angeleno, right?
DELIJANI: I’m first generation Persian-American. My family immigrated from Iran after the revolution in the late ’70s, came here [to LA], and had me: born and raised Valley girl.
LUNA: Can you tell me more about growing up here, and your relationship to Persian culture?
DELIJANI: I grew up in the Valley, and I feel really lucky because the Valley’s such an extreme melting-pot of every culture. I will say that growing up, there was still a lot of pressure to fit into pop culture, which at the time was cookie-cutter, white American families. I always felt a little self-conscious about being Persian, so I would always downplay my ethnicity and my culture.
It wasn’t until I was older that I learned my story — about my parents immigrating. It’s crazy how much they had to go through to leave the revolution. My dad was in prison at the time because he was a political journalist, and my mom had to get him out of prison with a fake note that their son was sick in Turkey, because only men could take care of situations like that. They left Iran and never went back.
LUNA: How do you feel about expressing that story and taking ownership of your heritage as Disco Shrine?
DELIJANI: When I released “Up In The Air,” I felt so liberated. I always felt shy, and that release was the first time I was able to say, “Forget what other people might think. I’m so proud of my family. I’m so proud of my culture.” It made me feel like I could take back what other people, culture and society were telling me I should be ashamed of.
LUNA: You’re a major representative for something that doesn’t really have a precedent — a female Persian-American Angeleno pop star is not common. Can you tell me about carving out that space within pop music?
DELIJANI: Everyone listens to pop music, and when people see others like them representing them in a space that normally doesn’t have that representation, it inspires a lot of excitement and happiness. I do think that it’s starting to change and open up, and people are realizing that there’s a need for that in pop culture. People need to talk about their backgrounds and their culture in pop music — they need to be able to relate.
LUNA: Tell me about the release that’s coming up — where it comes from and what you were going through as you were writing it.
DELIJANI: I wrote a lot of the songs last year. I’d really put my head down and was really focusing on myself. I wasn’t purposefully writing music; it was more so that I was living my life, and trying to survive: figuring out how to be a girl in her twenties living in LA, trying to make a music career, while managing dating, finding love and making money.
All of these songs have their own stories, and they’re kind of time stamps of different things that happened in my life throughout last year. A lot of what I wrote ended up being about the people I was with in those moments of time — or the people I wasn’t with, wishing I had someone to be there with me when there wasn’t.
LUNA: Can you walk me through xoxo, disco?
DELIJANI: In the beginning of the year I was feeling pretty lonely, so some of the music deals with that feeling: feeling like I could have my career, and I could be on top of the world — but at the end of the day when I went home, I didn’t have anyone to celebrate that with.
A lot of the songs are about lust at first sight and real excitement. When you first meet someone and you don’t really know them, they don’t really know you, but you’re already imagining your future together.
Other songs are about wanting to be independent.
“xoxo” is about being done. You just want to be on your own — you don’t want to change that. My future is what’s most important to me, and that’s what I’m focusing on.
I’m calling the EP xoxo, disco, because it’s my love letter to myself. It’s me saying, “You can feel loneliness, and you can feel love at first sight, and you can still be independent. These are the things that you’re going to go through that are going to make you who you are.”
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