FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Debby Friday

FEATURE:

Spotlight: Revisited

Debby Friday

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THIS is a fabulous artist…

that I spotlighted back in 2023. I might included parts of an interview that I included in that first feature. However, as Debby Friday has announced a new album, The Starrr of the Queen of Life (a title I am not especially keen on), that arrives on 1st August, it is a good time to feature her again. The Nigerian-Canadian artist is someone I have loved for a while now. I am looking forward to her new album. Even though, as she said in an interview I will end with, the album is a sign from the universe (I do always cringe when people talk about the universe/fate/God when it comes to meaning and inspiration), you cannot argue with the music calibre and excellence! Debby Friday is one of the best artists out there. I do hope that she plays in the U.K. soon enough, as there are a lot of her fans out here. I will start out with an NME interview with Debby Friday. We get to revisit a time when she was promoting her debut album and that was still quite new. This Electronic producer and artist was defying genres and scooping awards:

“Debby Frioday is beaming, still. It has been less than a month since her debut album won the coveted Polaris Music Prize and judging by the elated expression on her face on our video call, she’s still basking in the afterglow. As she should. The annual award is given to the best full-length Canadian album of the year, regardless of genre or sales and fully based on artistic merit, an accomplishment that blows the mind of the Nigerian-born, Montreal-raised artist. Previous winners include Arcade Fire, Caribou and Kaytranada.

“It’s not the only place I get my validation from but I think it’s important that they recognise art that’s different, especially if we’re talking in the context of Canada,” Friday tells NME from her home in Toronto. “Like, I make weird electronic music in Canada,” she says with a laugh. “It’s not common, so this is very encouraging.”

Friday’s award-winning debut LP’s ‘Good Luck’, moves seamlessly from house music to industrial rock, delving into melodic and surreal pop territory that sees the electronic producer defying any expectation of genre. Though the bold debut has been a career inflexion point for Friday, as she tells NME, multiple things had to fall into place for her to be where she is now. “I see everything as this domino effect,” she says. “It’s only in retrospect that you can see all the pieces falling together.”

Friday’s first foray into music was as a self-proclaimed “party girl”, pulling all-nighters at Montreal clubs and cutting her teeth by spinning energetic DJ sets in crowded rooms. Despite enjoying the experience, the late nights, drugs and constant clubbing started to take their toll. “Nightlife involves a lot of sacrifice,” she says. “You’re basically sacrificing your daytime life. Some people are able to figure out a healthy way to engage with it where it doesn’t affect the rest of their life but I was not one of those people.”

In 2017, when she was ready to step away from her DJing, fate landed her in Europe touring for a month, an experience she says “opened up this new part of my brain”. As the child of immigrant parents who worked in nursing and real estate, art never seemed like a viable option for Friday, who was on track to put her bachelor’s degree in political science and women’s studies to good use. However, that month around creatives completely shifted her perspective. “I saw groups of young people who were able to build community and have careers in the arts and I realised that I could do this too,” she says. “I realised that it was possible to make a living being an artist”.

The tour left an indelible mark on Friday, but the road from realisation to actually manifesting her own music wasn’t a smooth one. “I came back to Montreal and played a few shows, but then I had what I refer to as my nervous breakdown,” she says. “Essentially everything in my life started going to shit. It’s like where you can’t hold anything up anymore because the foundation is not solid. I quit nightlife, I quit doing drugs, I quit Montreal,” she says. “I’d had a substance abuse problem for many years at that point in my life and that was the first time I ever got sober.”

Friday decided to rebuild her life on the other side of the country in Vancouver, spending her now seemingly infinite amounts of free time teaching herself how to produce music by watching YouTube tutorials. “I was living in mom’s basement with no job and no money,” she says. “I had nothing else going for me but I had this outlet”.

I am going to move on to a feature from February. CRACK hosted an interview between Debby Friday and Lex Amor. Quite similar artists, Lex Amor, like Debby Friday, “writes creative poetry and prose to bend space and explore personal philosophies”. I am a fan of both. It is an interesting conversation. I have selected a few questions that were asked of Debby Friday:

“How important is space and environment to you, both when you are performing and as a source of inspiration?

Debby Friday: I move around a lot when I perform. I remember once I played in a venue where the audience was 360, all around me. It almost felt more ritualistic or communal because you don’t have the same divide of like, OK, I’m the performer here, and then the audience is there. It was like I was connecting with more people, and I was seeing different aspects of the room from different vantage points. I felt like I got a 360 view and a 360 experience.

L: Yeah, space is super important. Anywhere I can be comfortably and safely myself is where I’ll be my best self, but there are spaces that require you to contour a little bit. Sometimes creating a little bit of tension in your body can be interesting as well.

Do you think that poetry and creative writing offers more freedom than music does? Does music feel more commercial?

D: In a way, music can be more free. There’s more freedom to experiment in very unconventional ways. You can get really, truly experimental with the way that you make music and use your voice. But I think that creative writing and poetry is more freeing in a privacy sense. When it comes to being a public-facing musician, yes, you’re writing things for yourself, but there is always the subconscious consideration that other people are going to perceive this and respond to this, and this is part of your musical output, and now it’s part of your discography, and you’re going to put it online. There are these subconscious considerations. When it comes to creative writing, what I write down doesn’t feel as public in the same way. When you read, you’re reading alone and you’re reading in your head, so there’s privacy for the person perceiving it that you don’t always get with music.

L: I agree. It’s really dependent on the songs and it’s dependent on the writing style. I like what you said about awareness about being perceived. It made me think about how the music I make is so internal sometimes that I forget that an ear outside of me is going to hear it and develop a perception of me. I think the closer I can get to forgetting that, the truer the writing is. As you said, the songs I feel are most reflective of me are the ones where I felt confident enough to be super esoteric and cryptic with my writing in a way that maybe only I understand. Then the music adds in melody and other signifiers that are a little bit broader and more open to interpretation and acceptance. Maybe not everyone’s going to understand 100% of what you’re saying, but they’re feeling something and that’s powerful. That’s the truest way to communicate. Just feel it. Feel it before you hear it.

And what advice would you give to writers and musicians who are just starting out, particularly those who want to work across multiple creative disciplines?

D: Number one piece of advice; keep going, bitch. Just keep going. Never give up. There are always going to be obstacles. There are always going to be challenges. There is always going to be suffering, but you actually cannot give up. I think the only way to be successful at anything is through perseverance and resilience. Sometimes it means you might have to course correct and edit yourself and make little tweaks and changes, but never give up on yourself, your creativity and your expression. Always have your vision in mind and keep going towards it”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Lucy Mahoney

I am going to end with a recent interview from Rolling Stone. Earlier this month, Debby Friday talked about following her award-winning and acclaimed debut album, Good Luck, taking back creative freedom, and falling in love. If you are not already following her on social media then do make sure that you check out Debby Friday. A remarkable artist I was compelled to return to:

“The Starrr of the Queen of Life asks and answers the question, What do I want for myself? For starters, Friday wanted ample space and time to focus on her creative process without distraction. She waited until she was free from touring and holed up in a London studio with Australian producer Darcy Baylis. “We went out to dinner maybe twice,” she says. “It was true, like, boot camp, workhorse. That’s the way I like to work.” She barely got a chance to explore London, or hear how the city informs its sounds, the way she did in Detroit with HiTech and in Mexico City with Tayhana. It’s not like she would have been in the club, anyway. “I do not go out, like at all,” Friday says. “But I still feel very connected to that culture.”

At this point in her life, she prefers to stay home and make music for those nightlife spaces than to occupy them herself. She started “experimenting with pop music” — as well as what she calls “shoegaze dancehall” — and “flirting with DJing” more while making this record. “I stepped away from nightlife because it’s so intertwined with drug culture and stuff, and I just couldn’t be around that for the longest time,” she says. “When I was spiraling and having a really hard time before I got sober, it was discipline that changed me as a person, really saved my life, and stopped me from falling back into darkness in so many ways.”

Friday offers a multi-perspective interrogation of substance use on the album, recounting the highs and lows and the gray area in between. “I really wanted to channel this universal thing, because I understand that this is not an isolated experience,” she says. The Starrr of the Queen of Life is also full of love songs. “Here I go getting shy,” says Friday, who got engaged earlier this year. For the first time, she’s writing about true love, rather than pain and heartbreak. “I have my partner and I have this new experience of love that is just so much gentler and softer,” she adds. “There’s sweetness in this relationship, and there’s sweetness in my personal life.”

Friday might have been reluctant to express it before, but The Starrr of the Queen of Life is a declaration of her yearning to be a star — the truest, most creatively aligned version of herself, devoid of external pressures and perceptions. She wants to fill the empty space on her own terms with her own sounds.

Friday describes the record as “the most accessible album that I’ve ever made,” which was an explicit goal she set early on. “I don’t think it’s a crime to have mass appeal, as long as you stay centered in yourself,” she says. After Good Luck, she found herself wondering, “Am I going to reach these heights again? Am I going to surpass myself? Is my next work going to be as good as this?” They were impossible questions to answer on her own. She looked outward, instead.

“I’m a very spiritual person, and I like to think that I do get signs from the universe that I’m moving in the right direction, even if it’s things that are really hard,” Friday says. “It’s like, oh, this was actually for me, and this led me down the path that I needed to take. And I feel like this album was a really big sign for me to just keep going”.

I will finish up there. I was fascinated by her in 2023. Now, with an album out on 1st August, you need to follow the magnificent Debby Friday. So respected and loved as an artist and producer, I am really intrigued to see where she heads and how her career grows…