Q&A: googly eyes Reminds Us To Be Grateful For Ourselves With Debut EP ‘Starlet’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY SYDNEY TATE ☆
Photo By Talia Stewart
POP MUSIC THAT DOESN’T TELL YOU EVERYTHING IS OK — googly eyes greets hopefuls with a meta-charged look behind her vision of dreams and success in her debut EP, Starlet.
Starlet breaks any predisposed assumptions of experimental pop with a gallivanting tenure — promising total enchantment and an uplifted spirit while investigating confidence in a self-produced wonderland. googly eyes is the first outside artist signed to Tove Lo’s Pretty Swede Records.
This collection of tracks is fearless in its approach to commercial ideas and highlighting googs’ innermost wondering, impeccably complemented by a soaringly sweet vocal tone.
Luna had the opportunity to discuss what it means to perform and fit in, artistry as cartography, and the perfect ice cream flavor to represent Starlet. Keep reading to explore googs’ inner stage.
LUNA: “Brand New Bitch” is such a wonderfully charged anthem — have you always felt confident in yourself? Have you ever struggled to feel understood? How does this play into how you present yourself as a performer?
GOOGS: Thank you so much! Both yes and no. You do have to have a borderline irrational sense of self-belief to do this for a job, but truthfully, “Brand New Bitch” is an aspirational song more than anything.
I pretty consistently have felt misunderstood, both by others and by myself. I’m brassy, confident, and ambitious, but I’m also quite sensitive and introverted. These felt impossibly contradictory for me for a long time. In a lot of ways, I wrote this song as a mantra to help me embrace my complexity as a person.
For the last 4 years, navigating Los Angeles and my early 20s, I’ve often felt like I needed to do XYZ…say yes to everything, smile big, love the things I hated, be pleasant, and suppress those sensitive and introverted parts of myself as best I could to be seen how I wanted to be seen and make the career moves I wanted to, but I just got to a point where I was exhausted.
I realized my attempts to be agreeable, pleased, and patient, were really having the opposite effect: making me angry, difficult, and resentful. I wanted a song to represent what it would look like if I allowed myself to exist wholly, imperfectly, and in a new light, with all my nuance. It’s a work in progress but we’ll see how it goes, fingers crossed!
LUNA: Are you a fan of disco?
GOOGS: The song Funkytown runs my life, if that’s what you mean. This probably tells you everything you need to know…my favorite disco song is from a Shrek movie. My music tastes are embarrassingly narrow!
LUNA: When do you feel most yourself?
GOOGS: Recently, it’s been when I’m a little stoned sitting in front of my Thomas Kincade puzzle, no joke. More earnestly, there’s a special kind of magic that comes in the flow state of making something that makes me feel very whole. It’s that paradox of forgetting I exist as an individual—just fully given over to the muse—that makes me feel incredibly myself.
LUNA: What flavors of ice cream best represent Starlet and what feels right about those choices?
GOOGS: I love this question. Starlet feels pretty light and emotionally haphazard, so maybe sherbet? The green and orange and pink one where it’s all mixed up, and it melts to this delightful frothy soupy thing. There’s a zing to it, but overall it’s light—which feels spot-on for Starlet (laughs).
LUNA: When did you first start producing?
GOOGS: I started when I was 18! My first DAW was actually a high school graduation gift from my parents. The rest is history.
LUNA: How do you know when it’s time to stop tweaking a track? How much time do you typically spend creating a single track from start to finish?
GOOGS: When I’m out of ideas on how to improve, or if the story is told and my emotion around it is processed. It’s a gut-feeling thing, really! Each song has its signs. [It’s the] same regarding the timeline: I’d say a few months on average per song, but I usually tap in, tap out, tap in, tap out, for mini micro sessions over the course of several months.
Up until this point, googly has been intensely auto-biographical, so songs tend to “go stale” in my brain if I lose my connection to the emotion or I’ve moved past its plot point. Sometimes, they serve their purpose and die on the vine - I’m always reaching for the new growths and starting again.
LUNA: List up to five albums that accurately depict your current music taste or moods and why.
GOOGS: A Portrait of June by June Calvan and the newest rendition of brat by Charli XCX have been on repeat. I’m notoriously terrible at listening to music, as I said earlier, so it’s rare that I actively seek out music to listen to. I know, I know, it’s awful!
LUNA: Do you feel inspired by the people around you? Whether it’s loved ones, peers, or total strangers, I’d love to hear your interpretation of this experience.
GOOGS: Oh, absolutely, all the time. I could talk about this for hours! I think in another life I’m a sociologist. I love studying humans, and people in general. I often describe the job of the artist as a cartographer of sorts. I stand at the edge of the uncharted landscape of my feelings. As I begin to hack through it, I am detailing and reporting what I experience like a map or drawing of sorts, in hopes it can provide other people a blueprint to move through their own uncharted jungles.
Beyond my own, I love studying others as they navigate their lives. I’m consistently fascinated by the paradox of how we are so innately similar and connected and yet so miraculously set apart from one another. That also always leads me back to the deep well that is existing at all. This is a little meta, but bear with me here...I’m deeply inspired by the idea that we exist, and within that human existence, so much of it is shaped by the way we feel.
As an artist, I get to dive into that, try to name it, try to decode it, try to give it shape and sound and words. The human experience is the why. I find it incredibly inspiring to think about and to witness in others.
LUNA: Describe a perfect home.
GOOGS: Somewhere on a fjord in Norway or on a farm in Sweden with a garden and birds. But also there’s a teleportation portal in the basement to my family’s back porch in Texas.
LUNA: Are there any songs you always come back to or that you think you’ve listened to more than anything else throughout your whole life?
GOOGS: “First Train Home” by Imogen Heap, “Pre-Occupied” by Jon Bellion, “U (Man Like)” by Bon Iver, and “Slack Jaw” by Sylvan Esso. One of these always acts as a salve in any situation for me.
LUNA: Do you enjoy using social media? Have your feelings about this shifted over the past ten years?
GOOGS: Honestly, on the whole, yes! What a gift of this era we’re living in, truly. I love getting to connect and throw tentacles out into the ether and see what comes back. TikTok is the only one that threatens that relationship for me. It feels like it’s a beautiful place for fleeting moments of entertainment, like goofy videos or tabloid-style storytelling on the latest influencer’s f*ck up…or am I just outing my FYP?
I love it as a consumer. It can be hard sometimes how it’s still seen as this golden calf in the industry, even after it’s started to evolve past that. I feel the strain of “I can’t share my story here as well as I’d like to.”
All of this said, I’m painfully aware I have a huge bias. If I was already wildly successful on TikTok, I’d be telling you a different story right now. I genuinely am impressed by those who work hard to make it work for them. Teach me! That being said, I really love spaces like Substack and Instagram, where I get to exist in a more conversational, long-term way with my friends and fans. It’s really meaningful to me.
Photo By Talia Stewart
LUNA: Would you ever go skydiving? Why or why not?
GOOGS: Not in a million years. I hate heights! I’m all for mitigatable risk…risk that can be measured, planned against, and prepared for. Skydiving leaves too much of that out of my control.
LUNA: I love the wondering of the lyrics in “Starlet Sellout, Pageant Princess.” Is this song more focused on an internal experience or do you see it as a wider social commentary? How did you choose it as the final track for the EP?
GOOGS: Thank you! It’s built out of my internal experience, but what’s cool about this one is it evolved into something that can connect to broader cultural themes, similar to “Internet Star.” There is a certain loneliness that comes with this job that I wasn’t fully expecting. There’s a lot of sacrifices that are made, and I often think about the other versions of my life that I’ve chosen to let die on the vine in order to choose this one.
Have you heard the poem/prose “about the fig tree” by Sylvia Plath? That’s what this song feels like at the core: in choosing one life, we are ultimately denying ourselves another. It’s a panicked plea to the universe asking if I’ve made the wrong choice. It’s wondering if I even like the version of myself that crops up in this life. It felt like a good closer, a cliffhanger of sorts.
I don’t think it would feel true to me to include a song like “Brand New Bitch” and not show this other side. This very tender, very sensitive, very anxious side as well. They coexist within me and it’s important to me that I share both.
LUNA: Are you usually early or late?
GOOGS: Always early. Punctuality is a huge deal to me.
LUNA: If you could collaborate with any three artists on a joint album, who would they be and why?
GOOGS: Tough to narrow it down! Probably Caroline Polachek, Imogen Heap, and Lady Gaga. They’re all huge inspirations for me. All three ladies are so incredibly expressive and tap into different veins of music I love making.
LUNA: What would you like to say to people who are finding your music for the first time?
GOOGS: I’m so glad you’re here (smiling).
LUNA: Anything else you’d like to add?
GOOGS: Thank you for these questions! This was so fun. Hope to have more songs for everyone soon…
Starlet is out now via Pretty Swede Records. Her newest track, “Mid Leap,” is out today.
