FEATURE:
Spotlight
to feature an artist in a Spotlight feature who has been recording for years now. To be fair, at twenty-two, WILLOW is still at the start of her career! Even so, Willow Camille Reign is the daughter of actors Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith. She has won many awards, including a Young Artist Award, an NAACP Image Award, a BET Award, and nominations for two Daytime Emmy Awards and an MTV Video Music Award. Many might recall but, back in 2010, Smith launched her music career with Whip My Hair. Known now simply as WILLOW, she comes from a hugely successful and talented family. In terms of her acting and music, she does not follow her mum and dad too closely. She very much has her own direction and career. A prolific artist and talented songwriter, she released lately I feel EVERYTHING last year. I shall come to this year’s <COPINGMECHANISM>. Perhaps her strongest album yet, I feel WILLOW grows greater, more assured and consistent with each release. She is at a point, at such a young age, when she is getting on the radar. The music radar that is. I think her acting work is more widely known. I am going to end with some reviews for <COPINGMECHANISM>. You can buy the album here. I want to start off with some interviews. GLAMOUR spoke with WILLOW (as ‘Willow Smith’ in this interview). Among subjects discussed was how, as a Black artist, she was discriminated against and pigeonholed when it comes to genre:
“Willow Smith is someone who is used to standing out. She is a Hollywood tale as old as time; daughter of superstars who has spent most of her life in front of the press. She is only 21, but there are already many titles in her orbit: singer, songwriter, actress, guitarist, spokesperson. It’s a place where many children of celebrities can crash and burn, jostling with the pressure of living up to the blinding star quality of their parents. But Willow seems to have found the antidote, and is making a name for herself, all on her own. When we meet on a Monday morning in June, speaking over Zoom, Willow calls in from her GLAMOUR cover photoshoot in a studio in Paris. Her settings are as expected of someone reared for stardom; she is surrounded by a flock of handlers, the styling team, her trusted makeup artist Raoúl, her management, assistants, PRs and more. She is also on duty today as ambassador for Mugler’s Alien Goddess fragrance; her second collaboration with the brand, fronting the campaign for the new Alien Goddess Intense Eau De Parfum – yet another marker of a mini-mogul set for growing fame.
“It’s no secret that Black artists in the alternative scene often suffer pigeonholing and discrimination in comparison to their white peers. Even someone as big a star as Willow has found herself constrained, and resisting unfair treatment has been something she’s had to become used to.
“When I wanted to do a rock album, there were a lot of executives that were like, ‘Hmm…’ she says, frowning. “If I had been white, it would’ve been completely fine; but because I’m Black it’s, ‘Well… maybe let’s just not’ – and making it harder than it needs to be.” That double-standard is something that raises concerns with her for her peers in the scene. “If I go through that, every single other Black artist is getting the pushback [too].”
In 2021, the artist dropped Lately I Feel Everything, an album that would largely define her as someone known to play with different genres. From acoustic down to nü-metal, it was Willow’s first professional foray into the alternative music scene.
“I love all different kinds of music, I don’t like to box myself into anything,” she tells me. “I was trained to be an R&B singer so I went in that direction. But I’ve always had a huge affinity for rock music ever since I was just a wee bean.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Thom Kerr
Lately I Feel Everything came as a result of pushing back with execs to make what was true to her – and of course, the record turned out as a success. But she held little surprise that it came out that way, crediting her “vision” in staying true to herself in the face of discomfort. “The most beautiful changes on earth don’t happen by being comfortable and expecting other people to change. You have to put yourself on the line sometimes. It’s not fair, but that’s how it is,” she says.
In her opinion, it’s a case of allowing “people of colour, women and all marginalised communities [to] step out of the boxes that society wants to put us in. Not even just in music, but in every part of our lives – that’s the special sauce.”
We talk about other trailblazers like Nova Twins, Bad Brains and Skunk Anansie frontwoman Skin, all Black artists who have pioneered a place in the scene. She is now one of those names paving the way for individuality as she gears up to release follow-up album Coping Mechanism this month,, but also feeding the resistance she witnessed from her mother into her own music.
“Music has been at the forefront of some of earth’s biggest paradigm shifts,” she states. “Part of the reason I love it is because it’s such a strong agent of change. I definitely think there’s always more to do in [terms of] the way that we do business in these artistic branches and endeavours. It’s systematic oppression. If we start to undo that, then hopefully real change can happen.”
I ask her how she thinks we can make better spaces for women in music and what can be done to make women feel more empowered in the music scene. “I think the music scene reflects the world,” she finally says.
“For a long time, women have been looked at and expected to be in these boxes. It’s up to the people who have been a part of the oppressing, but it’s also up to us to step out of that. That’s scary, and it’s sometimes dangerous.
We need to make better spaces for each other and stop expecting other people to make spaces for us. We need to start holding our sisters, and start listening to each other the way that we wish other people would.”
Though we keep silent on recent familial issues, Willow does not have a problem being candid. Publicising issues of mental health and her own experiences with anxiety is something important to her. Sharing advice for how fans and others can alleviate symptoms is something she’s passionate about, and she talks to me about her own mental health management.
“Sometimes [managing your mental health] is so overwhelming that you can’t really bring yourself to do much else besides reminding yourself of the things that really matter,” she says. “For me, I love a good mantra. Recently, my mantra has been, ‘I accept everything as it is, and I’m grateful for it.’ Repeating that over and over again; that’s been really helping me”.
Having made an impression at such a young age, WILLOW has maintained this incredible career. It would be easy to compare her To Will Smith, but you feel this conscious effort to push away from that and do her own thing. In this Billboard interview, WILLOW was asked about her family and recent controversy. She also revealed a particular artist that she would like to work with:
“Though she may have first gained fame as a 9-year-old, Willow’s current cavalcade of music firmly sets her apart from child stars who withered on the vine, burnt out by a demanding industry or left unable to nimbly evolve into compelling adult creators. She never resigned herself to becoming a novelty act or coasted on the credentials of her megastar parents, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith.
And despite the constant scrutiny of her family, Willow has stayed above the fray — even, most recently, this past March, when her father slapped Academy Awards host Chris Rock following a joke he made about her mother’s alopecia. The ensuing media firestorm, Willow says, didn’t derail her creativity or “rock me as much as my own internal demons.”
“I see my whole family as being human, and I love and accept them for all their humanness,” she says. “Because of the position that we’re in, our humanness sometimes isn’t accepted, and we’re expected to act in a way that isn’t conducive to a healthy human life and isn’t conducive to being honest.”
Perhaps because she knew this early on, Willow learned the power in a judicious “no” and steered her career in a direction that always felt true to her, even as it changed. Today, she’s in complete command of her musical fate. Perched on the couch, as she prepares for her Billboard photo shoot in a humid warehouse near her Los Angeles hometown, she doesn’t miss a beat discussing her art, speaking with her hands and disrupting her own train of thought to gush about her latest inspiration: “I think the monks have it right.” Witnessing her independence and authoritativeness, it’s easy to see why Willow’s team follows her lead, even if it means working on a new marketing plan every few months to keep up with her steady output.
And when it comes to delivering her message, Willow says that any oft-repeated clichés about her current musical medium are beside the point. “People only say rock is dead because rock was so influential in a political way,” she says, punctuating her speech like a preacher on a pulpit. “Right now, it’s not serving the same purpose as it did in the past.” She sees a resurgence in people of color injecting it with purpose, like Kenny Hoopla and Nova Twins. And Willow’s own credibility in rock is increasingly undeniable: Lately I Feel Everything landed in the top 10 of Billboard’s Top Rock Albums chart, while her MGK collaboration “emo girl” did the same on Hot Rock & Alternative Songs. She has worked with rock stalwarts Travis Barker and Avril Lavigne, the latter of whom says she was “blown away by” Willow and her “clear vision of who she is and where she wants to go.”
Willow never imagined Lavigne would agree to collaborate (“I really didn’t think she was going to say ‘yes’ ”), but when they linked up in the studio, they bonded over the skepticism they both experienced as women in rock. “You’ll kill yourself trying to be perfect for the masses. Bunk that. That’s a losing game,” Willow says, tossing her hands up with indifference as she thinks about the people who called Lavigne a poser in the early 2000s. “If you don’t like me, I’m grateful for you, because it shows I’m authentic enough to not be for everyone.”
At any rate, she is interesting to plenty of musical contemporaries who matter much more than any passing naysayers — like, for instance, Camila Cabello, who met Willow when they meditated together with former Hindu monk and British author Jay Shetty. After, Cabello reached out to Willow to collaborate. “We had very beautiful spiritual experiences together and we had connected. That was the only reason I was down to do the song,” Willow says. That, and the track “goes hard”.
Prior to moving onto reviews for WILLOW’s latest album, this NME feature interested me. <COPINGMECHANISM> was discussed, but the topic of festivals also was introduced. WILLOW talked about playing Reading & Leeds. For a festival that still struggles when it comes to gender inequality, it is good to know that she got to wow the crowds and add something incredible to the weekend this year:
“It’s only been just over a year since WILLOW released her critically acclaimed fourth album ‘Lately I Feel Everything’, which furthered the pop-punk renaissance with the likes of ‘Grow’ and ‘Gaslight’ and featured guest appearances from Travis Barker and Avril Lavigne. Not wanting to let the momentum dip, the 21-year-old has swiftly returned with the crushing brilliance of her new LP, ‘<COPINGMECHANISM>’ (out October 7).
Asked by NME if she feels like she’s on a creative roll, WILLOW replies: “I really do. After ‘Lately I Feel Everything’, I said to myself I wasn’t going to make another album for a while. Even when I got [in the studio] with Chris [Greatti, producer], I was still telling him that I wasn’t going to make an album. But, slowly but surely, it became a very strong project.”
For the latest in NME’s In Conversation series, we caught up with WILLOW in London to discuss her new album, dream collaborators, her debut novel and more. Here’s what we learned.
‘<COPINGMECHANISM>’ might arrive just 14 months after WILLOW’s last album, but its genesis goes back much further than the fast-paced follow-up suggests. “I was always looking back at some old notes in my phone, and I had a folder and it was called ‘Coping Mechanism’,” she explains. When the star looked at the date on the folder, which at the time contained just three songs, she realised she’d started it all the way back in 2018: “This idea has been with me for a long time.”
The inspiration to reignite the work in that folder, though, is more recent, and finds WILLOW doing something she thought she’d never do. “I hate to say it, because when I made music when I was younger I really wanted to stay away from the idea of heartbreak and romantic love,” she says with a wry smile. “I felt like it was so played out. I just felt like everyone talks about that, and it’s just boring. But then your girl got her heart broken. And you know what, I said, ‘Maybe this is the time for me to make that album’. This is that album.”
WILLOW has often spoken about her love for metal and her desire to dabble with the genre. On ‘<COPINGMECHANISM>’, she finally gets her chance: the likes of ‘Perfectly Not Close To Me’ (feat. Yves Tumor) find her turning her vocals into a scream, while a host of abrasive, heavy guitar riffs fill the record. Stepping into that zone on this album made the most sense, she says, because of her producer, Chris Greatti.
“Greatti plays the guitar like a freaking titan,” WILLOW explains. “He just plays like he’s in the music. I feel like the music he likes to play the most is metal, and so that’s his forte. We just worked really well together. I wanted to do that and he was like, ‘Oh, I know how to do this – which direction should we take it?’”
Although WILLOW says she felt “so comfortable” working in that area with Greatti, she does note that metal is “not my forte”: “I can play some metal riffs, I can. But it’s not the thing that I do the best. I wish it was, and soon it might be.”
This album might not be the last time we hear the young artist experiment with metal sounds, either. “Oh, 100 per cent,” WILLOW replies when asked if she feels like she has more to explore in the genre. “I was actually playing a lot of seven-string [guitar] last year, I was super, super-obsessed. I need to get back on that because once you commit to something, you really do get better at it fairly quickly. So it just takes the commitment.”
Take one look at WILLOW’s discography and you’ll notice an impressive list of bona fide musical legends within her collaborations. The aforementioned ‘Lately I Feel Everything’ featured Blink-182 drummer Barker and pop-punk queen Avril Lavigne, while over the years she’s also teamed up with Machine Gun Kelly, Nicki Minaj, Camila Cabello and more.
Impressive as that list may be, WILLOW isn’t done working with her heroes just yet. “Oh my goodness,” she begins as she flips through her bucket list of collaborators in her head. “I want to work with Les Claypool from Primus. I also want to work with the main singer of Hiatus Kaiyote, Nai Palm: she’s amazing. There’s so many people I want to work with, the list could be infinite.”
What, then, does WILLOW look for in a collaborator? “Someone [who] is open to being experimental, and to doing things that other people may not be into doing,” she says. “And I just look for a friend. Like, if I really love you and you inspire me as a person, I’m down. I love working with people who I love – that’s really the only criteria.”
WILLOW made her debut appearance at Reading & Leeds back in August, putting in an incendiary performance on the festivals’ main stage. “It was so crazy,” she says, looking back at the weekend. “There were so many people there. I was honestly like, ‘What is going on?!’ It was so much fun and I got to perform some new songs there – I felt like the reaction to them was better than I ever could have imagined, and I’m just really grateful.”
The history of R&L isn’t something that’s lost on the LA star, either. After all, WILLOW says that she always loves performing in Europe and the UK. “The way that people consume music in the UK is just different,” she explains. “I think people in the UK care a little bit more about the quality of the music and not just what it looks like [compared to the US]”.
The amazing <COPINGMECHANISM> is among the best albums of the year. I would urge everyone to listen to it. It is clear that WILLOW is a megastar-in-waiting who is creating unbelievable music. Kerrang! had their say on <COPINGMECHANISM>:
“2021’s lately I feel EVERYTHING was a fine maiden foray into the realm of alternative music from WILLOW. A record that leaned on the pop-punk revival in both sound and personnel (Travis Barker was a collaborator on a number of tracks), it proved she had something to offer the rock world, and in its at times unconventional delivery, it suggested its young creator had the potential to become a serious creative force with the guitar. With <COPINGMECHANISM>, that promise is realised through 11 tracks of eclectic, interesting and (largely) collaborator-free rock that see WILLOW well and truly come into her own.
The intentions are clear from the outset. Within its first minute, opening track <maybe> it’s my fault goes through three stark stylistic changes that run the gamut of indie-rock to metal, but it all hangs together well, as does the similarly eccentric Falling Endlessly, where WILLOW’s excellent grasp of vocal melodies come to the fore. Like lately I feel EVERYTHING, the songs don’t hang around – of the 11 songs, only a couple cross the three-minute mark – but its fast becoming an admirable trait of her music that its able to get the job done so convincingly in such a relatively short amount of time.
Lyrically, plenty of youthful angst remains – ‘I’ll never be fine if you won’t be mine,’ she cries on the sprightly hover like a GODDESS – but there’s zero temptation on <COPINGMECHANISM> to take the predictable route and pair such words with standard pop-punk fare.
Smart, confident and put together with a real sense of intrigue, WILLOW’s latest record is a testament to having the belief to forge your own path. As coping mechanisms go, this one sounds like a winner.
Verdict: 4/5”.
I will finish off with a review from NME. Maybe not quite as known as some of the biggest albums this year, <COPINGMECHANISM> is an album that stunned and engrossed me the first time I heard it. So many people are looking forward to seeing where WILLOW heads next:
“The album’s closer ‘Batshit’ is a sweet-sounding realisation. Clanging drums and screeching guitars ring out before a brief ethereal vocal harmony from the 21-year-old floats across them, and she details a story of her seeing through time wasters and liars she’s come across in life. “If I was you I would watch out / Whatever you do, it better be true, I’m coming for you,” she warns. It might seem like she’s singing to someone else, but she could also be directing those words to herself, shedding the things she no longer likes about herself and taking accountability for her actions. It’s as though the teenage angst WILLOW once harvested for her previous album is starting to transform into mature life lessons for the punk rocker.
On all her albums, WILLOW shares honest reflections of herself, lovers and friends in her music. That’s no different on ‘<COPINGMECHANISM>’. After “taking this adventure on [her] own”, the star’s loving ethos is now all she tries to preach on ‘curious/furious’. During her Reading main stage debut back in August, she shared a similar message, getting her fans to call back to her, “I am love… You are love… We are love,” knowing how much that affirmation has helped her heal.
Curious/furious’ is also a feel-good release of the sadness and confusion WILLOW used to present on her tracks and highlights her dynamic musicianship too. Its timid verses are in stark contrast to the track’s chorus; being muted and vulnerable while explaining her past inner turmoil makes the brightness of the chorus’ riffs all the bigger and better. It’s almost like there’s a poetry behind her musical intentions – you can’t have highs without the lows.
Throughout her recent exploration of rock music, the 21-year-old artist has mainly tapped into the nostalgic nature of the ‘00s punk she grew up on and saw her mother do in the band Wicked Wisdom. On her last album, she collaborated with multi-generational superstar Avril Lavigne on ‘G R O W’ and Lavigne’s sound is heavily used throughout WILLOW’s recent work. That doesn’t mean she can’t have her own moments of genius and uniqueness, though.
On ‘<COPINGMECHANISM>’, you can tell the star is using her influences to make her own seminal sound. Playing around with nostalgic sounds of ska and pop-punk, ‘hover like a GODDESS’ shows off her idiosyncratic fusions. The verses are jerky and bouncy, taking on the fun found in a Reel Big Fish track. As soon as the drums and bass come bursting in, though, it flips back into the punk-rock sound she’s become known for. It’s tracks like these that show what the sonic future of this bright young thing’s sound could be.
Over a relatively small number of tracks compared to some of the bloated albums that get released today, WILLOW has opted for quality over quantity once again. However, despite utilising a similar premise as on her last album by plucking her feelings away on a guitar, ‘<COPINGMECHANISM>’ is still an important record in her musical progression. In the poetic and thoughtful nature of it, as well as the odd glimpse of where she could go next, WILLOW’s fifth record should be noted as her breaking sonically mature new ground”.
An artist who has already broken through but someone not known to all, the incredible WILLOW is going to have a very prolific and fascinating career. Already influencing other artists, the twenty-two-year-old is bound for glory! Many might try to compare her to her parents or other artists, but the brilliant WILLOW is…
IN a league of one.
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