Angel Deradoorian, the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist known mononymously as Deradoorian, grew up in Orangevale, California. After leaving school to pursue a career in music when she was 16, she moved to Brooklyn and joined Dirty Projectors, appearing on their 2009 album Bitte Orca, which came out the same year she released her first solo EP, Mind Raft, produced by the band’s leader David Longstreth. Before releasing her debut album, The Expanding Flower Planet, in 2015, she guested on records by acts including U2, Flying Lotus, Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks, and Discovery, and followed it up wth the ambient folk collection Eternal Recurrence in 2017. Mirroring her spiritual journey, her next album, the meditative and jammy Find the Sun, saw her working with Samer Ghadry and Dave Harrington in New York. Between that album and her latest one, Ready for Heaven, Deradoorian teamed up with Russian musician Kate Shilonosova (aka Kate NV) to release Ticket to Fame, their first album as Decisive Pink, via Fire in 2023. She developed, reworked, and tinkered tirelessly with the new songs, which in their recorded form remain fluid and kinetic while carrying a blazing, prickly intensity all the way through. Even at its most despairing and subconscious, Ready for Heaven feels like a wake-up call.
We caught up with Deradoorian for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about the challenging process behind Ready for Heaven, having faith, her spiritual inspirations, and more.
After embracing a collaborative spirit on your last album, Find the Sun, and teaming up with Kate NV for Ticket to Fame, did you find yourself wanting to go back to a more solitary approach with Ready for Heaven? How do you remember the early stages of the project?
I write all of my own music, and it’s all solitary in the beginning. This was no different, but it was challenging because I started writing it in early April 2022. I was really having a hard time because of COVID. I released an album in 2020. I couldn’t tour it. I played maybe five shows in the US playing the songs from the last album in 2021, and then that was it. When I started writing new music, I knew what I wanted to go for: really high energy, more fun, playful elements, some stuff that’s funny at times. And then I went through a breakup. I moved to New York for a little while. I started writing music in upstate New York by myself in a really small, uninhabited town – maybe hundreds of people. And that was really not healthy, either.
I wrote some stuff up there, and then I recorded the album. I tracked a bunch of stuff in early 2023, and then I restructured all of the tracks after that. The songs changed because I re-edited a lot of it because I wasn’t really feeling the songs I had written at that point. It felt like a really slow process. For me, I want things to be immediate sometimes. I want it to just come to me. I’ve had those experiences writing music. But this was like, no – it’s gonna keep evolving as I keep evolving through a really sad period in my life. Although, I think a lot of musicians’ lives are hard all the time.
It changed a lot, and by the end of 2024 – another year of working, trying to finish the album, doing Decisive Pink stuff – everything just took so much time. Then I finished these tracks in 2024. It felt so chaotic because musicians, unless they’re kinda set up, don’t have the luxury of just focusing on a project start to finish anymore. It’s so disjointed. I know that’s how some people work; it’s not how I like to work. I would rather be in the zone and really focus, but that’s never been the case in reality, except for Find the Sun. Find the Sun came really fast, actually, and it worked out very quickly. But not this. So, yeah. It feels okay now. You have to accept what you make.
Was there a moment where your faith in the songs was rekindled, that made you feel like the time and disjointedness were ultimately useful?
Definitely. A lot of that had to do with the vocal melodies. I wrote so many different melodies, and it’s very strange – you can have an idea for a melody, and then it just doesn’t feel right. And then you do another one, kinda doesn’t feel right. The worst part for me is lyrics because they come out of the vocal melodies usually. They’re very syllabic. I usually start by just making sounds and then hearing the words come out of it. It just took a while for certain things to feel okay, to feel correct, to sit well, and also feel new but not contrived. There was a reason it had to be processed this way.
One melody that’s really stuck in my head is from ‘Set Me Free’. It feels like the centerpiece of the album, but also a bit of an oddity in the way the lyrics and melody take shape. Was it a turning point while making Ready for Heaven in any way?
I would say no. I didn’t even know if it would end up on the album. It’s a well-written song. It came very fast. And sometimes when that happens, I’m like, “Okay, it feels too easy.” So I don’t wanna use it. But when you have the experience of a song coming to you immediately – and you know it’s connecting with other people – that’s the power of music. Being able to transmit some amalgamation of sounds that really hits for a certain reason. The dominant theme of a lot of my lyrics is about escaping the human prison complex of being on Earth. [laughs] I never try to make songs negative, but they are about a struggle to be allowed to live your life as who you are. That one was about surrendering to a higher power and trusting you’re doing the right thing – having some kind of faith in something. I’m not religious, but the lyrics talk about having experiences that feel special for me, that no one else gets to have. Other people get to have those spiritual experiences for themselves too, and learn how that affects them and what they want to do with it. I’m glad it’s on the album and people responded well to that song. That’s the kind of songwriting that I’m very natural at writing, and it’s the kind of music I don’t put on my records, usually.
So there’s usually a lot of songs that come naturally in that way, but you end up discarding or not honing them?
Yeah, I think because they’re kind of solemn-sounding. I see music as an alchemical process where you’re pushing yourself beyond your unconscious. Sometimes I experience writing songs that come naturally as an unconscious experience – and not that there’s anything wrong with that, but a lot of that music is very emotional. I know that’s what people like. I know that’s why popular music is popular these days, because it’s touching on emotion or this connection. And a lot of the time that’s around relationships – we’re feeling lonely. And I don’t wanna talk about that in my music. I think people need to definitely experience their emotions and feel what happens for them, but also, it feels like a strange wallowing in a realm that I don’t really wanna get caught in. I don’t feel it’s what I’m here for. It’s this aspiration in the sense of recognizing that I’m good at that, I’m a very emotional person, but it’s through sensory sensitivities. And then just thinking: When you’re a person here and you’re creative and you’re trying to make something, you’re making your art – are you making it to perpetuate what already exists, or are you trying in some way to add to the idea, to a conversation, to continue to challenge the status quo and open up new topics of discussion for people to see inside themselves?
‘Digital Gravestone’ doesn’t have the solemn mood of ‘Set Me Free’, but it also touches on this faith and the human desire for it.
The songs are really emotional. I mean, I couldn’t write lyrics to that song until what was happening in Palestine. [pauses] These interviews I’ve been having have been very emotional too, because it’s not about me. It’s about humanity. It’s about watching so much happen and people pleading and fighting for peace, and no one gives a shit. And that’s what that song talks about. It’s really intense because it’s a survival energy. It’s not so solemn as much as it’s like, you have to be so strong to survive and to keep finding hope when everything around you is being destroyed. And it brings into question religious faith or your own spiritual experiences through trying to survive something so horrific. Religion is both this savior for many because the tenets of all religion are the same, and they’re good, but there’s the trappings of religion and the non-questioning that can happen as well, that keep people divided, and we forget our humanity and our connection. And that is what that song is saying in very few words. It’s intense, and it’s fucking sad. A lot of this record’s sad, but it’s not about me. It’s about the world, and that there’s another way that people could experience their lives.
It feels significant that that was the first song that I think you released from the record, and it sounds like that emotional weight was energizing in some way, as opposed to drowning out the intensity of the whole album.
I started writing that song a long time ago, actually, because it just started out as a loop. During COVID and lockdown, I was just playing in my house because I couldn’t go anywhere, and I just played bass through my loop pedal. I was auditioning, actually, to get into school here. Probably while I was just messing around, figuring out ideas, that loop started, and then I kept building on it and building on it and then performed it in various kinds of ways. And then by the time I had to write the context for the song through the lyrics, it was a year since watching what’s going on in Palestine. It’s even fucking scary to talk about what the song is really about now, in 2025, but that’s what it took. That’s what was happening.
I’m just not okay with the world and what’s happening, with these hegemonic powers being completely destructive on so many levels, and we just have to sit here and – what? What am I doing? I’m just writing a song. I think a lot of artists feel this way. Putting out a record is not really that exciting for a lot of us because we’re feeling the pain of what’s happening in this world, and we’re the ones who are supposed to say something about it. And we’re the ones who aren’t getting enough attention, because why would we? Why the fuck would we? We can barely survive. It’s a really weird time, having been in this industry for this long. This is the stuff I’m really thinking about all the time, and I think a lot of musicians are.
How has the conversation shifted, at least in the community you find yourself in? How do you talk about it?
It’s very divided. These conversations are not divided in that people disagree, but in the music community, not everybody’s ready to talk about some of the heavier stuff happening in the world. I’m having conversations with musicians about Palestine, world events, the climate of the United States politically speaking, and just the dismantling of the government that’s happening right now. We talk about corporations stealing our music. All this stuff is very taboo to talk about in interviews – I mean, I go back and forth about it a lot – but these are conversations that some musicians are having. It’s important for us to know how much our music is being exploited for corporate benefit. There’s many musicians who are activists trying to just have their basic compensation for the art that they make. We’re just so worried about where we can thrive as musicians when we have to live in cities that we can barely afford to live in. And there were fires here, which destroyed thousands of homes, and now people are displaced – this is a complete climate crisis.
Sometimes I have to just go up to Altadena and drive around just to remember that that whole neighborhood is completely burned to the ground. The whole neighborhood is completely destroyed. It’s just so hard to – how do you be creative? How do you do anything that feels okay and relevant? I think a lot of people are having that kind of response. It’s really hard for people to be creative right now, and it’s very necessary. It’s very needed, but there’s just this whole complex thing of feeling like you have no value because your musicit’s all about your stats and your streams, and then people who really care about what’s happening in the world feel crippled because they wanna do something about it. And what the hell can we do?
That is a lot of what this record is about. It started out of COVID. ‘Any Other World’ is a COVID response. Watching people dissociate, watching people be lied to, the American dream lying to you. And everything’s being taken right now, pissing people off when they realize that they can’t meet the standard they were told that they could. We are the leading example for the rest of the world in the United States, and what we’re showing is that you gotta work hard to live that good life. And everything’s being taken right now.
I don’t know how much you’ve been writing or feeling inspired recently, but are there days when things feel so cyclical or hopeless that you’re afraid of mirroring these qualities in your music?
There’s days where I feel really, really inspired and wanna make music because I do have hope for humanity. I think a lot of the music that needs to be made right now is to heal people, so there needs to be elements of that found sonically or contextually in the music. We need to stop being so fake right now, so superficial in certain ways, and get younger people and the world to heal before we’re so indoctrinated that everyone feels hopeless. I mean, I love music. I think it’s amazing. It completely changed my life, of course, and there’s some music that is so important to me that it has been a spiritual light on my own mystical path. James Brown and Can and Alice Coltrane – music that locks you in and also frees you, too. There’s a part of me that’s like, “I’m gonna do this for my whole life. I’m gonna make music.”
I’m reading the biography of Can right now, and it’s amazing because I can time travel in my mind to where they are and what they’re doing and feel so inspired by that. And then another part of me feels so sad because it’s like, I could never do that in 2025. How the fuck could I find a group of people devoted to music who wanna play every single day and make really cool shit and find a really cheap space to work in that’s not far from the city? No way. Not here. Can found a spot thirty minutes outside of Cologne that was super cheap, and they could just live there and make music and record all day. And they made music that changed my life. From the very moment I heard it, I was like, “This is who I am. This is my spirit.”
So it feels bittersweet because this whole process of what’s happening in the world has been so insidious. In some ways we could see it coming, but you’re never ready for it. You’re never ready for the levels of control and change that are going to impact you. At this age, I definitely feel it. When you’re younger, it might not impact you so intensely because you don’t have certain experiences with life yet. That’s why I think it’s important that people make really sincere, healing, and unifying-type music. To get younger people to feel connected to each other and to know that we’re not here to just work our lives away for some corporation so we can have these material things that you’re interested in for, like, ten minutes.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Deradoorian’s Ready for Heaven is out now via Fire Records.
