Debby Friday likes to craft music that seeps into the subconscious while being intensely physical. “Are you aware of my body? Do you like the way I dance?” she sings on ‘Arcadia’, from her recently released album The Starr of the Queen of Life, immediately following it with: “Could you cut to the core of my matter?” For the Nigerian-Canadian artist, the dancefloor not just a vessel for escapism but a sacred place, teeming with symbolic and actual possibilities, in the vein of FKA twigs’ latest album EUSEXUA. On the dizzying, starry-eyed follow-up to her Polaris Prize-winning debut, GOOD LUCK, Friday steps into the spotlight as a means of interrogating its very performativity, delivering sweaty dance cuts before urging you to see things in a different light. Having developed complicated ideas around success and artistry in the wake of GOOD LUCK, she channels them through the “feminine vision,” as referenced in ‘Arcadia’, of an alien woman falling to Earth like a star. Far from cold and unaffecting, though, it ends up hitting close to home.
We caught up with Debby Friday to talk about London, Under the Skin, Martin Buber, and other inspirations behind The Starr of the Queen of Life.
London, UK
Most of the album was recorded in London. What does it mean for you to go back there after touring?
It’s so weird, it’s kind of become a city that I’ve been back to a bunch of times now. I just keep finding myself there over and over again for one reason or another. I wasn’t a big fan of London the first time I went there, but it’s one that’s definitely grown on me. I put it down as inspiration, obviously, because we recorded the album primarily in London, and I think that that month that I spent there last year just working on this record was very transformative. I feel like I came out on the other side of it with a totally different mindset.
You’ve talked about coming up in the clubs, and I’m curious if you’ve explored nightlife in London in a way that fed into The Starr.
I wouldn’t say for the making of the album, just because we really did not spend much time outside the studio. But all the other times I’ve been in London, I’ve definitely engaged a lot with the nightlife and music communities. It’s such a big city as well, I feel like I’ve only gotten just little drops of it here and there. I don’t actually feel like I’ve fully been immersed in it. But I’ve gone out a bunch of times in London, and I have this distinct memory – it would have been maybe last year, if I’m remembering this right. I came to play Pitchfork Festival, and after the festival, I ended up going out with a bunch of people, and we ended up in Dalston at this random bar. And that night, there were a bunch of people DJing – Dinamarca and The Dare. To me, it was so random because it was really unexpected. But it was cool to see these different facets of electronic music and club music converging in this one place. I associate that with London – I think of it as a very postmodern city. It has all of these things going on that end up creating this very hybridized identity of the city and of the people.
Under the Skin (dir. Jonathan Glazer)
This was probaly the first avant-garde film I watched, and to me it’s inextricable from Mica Levi’s soundtrack.
Under the Skin is one of my favorite movies, and it’s one that I go back too often. I love all the performances in it, but also, it’s a movie that I really think of as being audiovisual in this way that’s very particular. The score is just as much a part of the film as the visuals are and the actual image is. I remember the first time I watched it and just being so transfixed by both what I was seeing but also what I was hearing. That definitely inspired a lot of the story behind The Starr of the Queen of Life in the sense that the album started off as this concept that I had of this alien creature woman falling to earth and learning how to be a human being. That’s basically what happens in Under the Skin – there’s this alien woman, and she’s learning how to be a human. She’s actually not having that good of a time, but I really identify with that for some reason. [laughs] I don’t know why I see myself as this alien creature woman, but I do often feel very foreign to Earth, and I like to explore that a lot in my work.
Dogville (dir. Lars Von Trier)
Essentially, the entire film takes place on a stage. There’s no real houses or anything, everything is on just this one stage set. I remember watching this right before I started working on the album last August, and I just was so taken by how immersed I was in the story and in the film itself. Even though it was all set on the stage, it pretty much all looks the same. There’s not really that much variation in terms of the images themselves, but it was so compelling. I got really obsessed with this idea of a stage play and the analogies between that and being a musician, these ideas of performance. That was something I really wanted to explore with the visuals for The Starr of the Queen of Life. I like to make everything really cohesive, so I had this idea to shoot all the videos at the same time, and I wanted them to be connected.
This was something that I had tried to do with GOOD LUCK. I made the GOOD LUCK short film, and then there were the music videos, but I think that was my first attempt to try to create some cohesion with the visuals for an album. But it’s actually quite hard to do, just because of time, money, so many factors. But this time, I was like, I want to make something cohesive, and I saw this idea of the stage setting as a way to create that cohesion. So all the videos for The Starr of the Queen of Life, it’s all part of essentially this performance that’s happening, and I’m playing the character of the alien woman who’s fallen to earth, and I’m performing for essentially what is an empty theater. I’m not sure how well it comes across because I do think the videos do this thing where they can stand alone as works, but they also, if you read into them altogether, there is this narrative that’s part of them.
I wanted to investigate this idea of, what does it mean to be a performer? Is it only when you’re performing in front of thousands of people in a full house? What if there’s no one? Just investigating being alone with your performance and all these ideas and thoughts I had in my mind. I wouldn’t say that they were fully fleshed out through the music videos, but I’m satisfied with my attempt, I’ll say that.
I’m curious if that was also inspired by the highs and lows of being a touring artist – I think you’ve mentioned once performing to an empty crowd at a festival.
Oh, yeah, for sure. I remember that, actually. [laughs] I kind of repressed it, but I remember that performance. It was very strange and surreal in this way, and it did make me reflect a lot on so much of my own artistry. I think it really influenced the sound of this new record. I think for the first time, I started thinking about sounds that either attract or repel. And I don’t think that it’s as black and white as, things that are discordant or nonharmonious are the ones that repel, and the ones that are harmonious or whatever are the ones that attract. I think it’s complicated.
Dry, desert heat
When I first started conceptualizing the album, I wanted to make it in a place that was really hot. I was so fixated on that, and I did partially – I worked on the record in Mexico City. I did some stuff there and I had this fantasy of, Heat is the name of the game for this record. I feel like you can hear that on some of the songs, like ‘Leave.’ and ‘Arcadia’ and even ‘In the Club’. I just had this idea of heat, so I put that down on the inspirations list, but I think the record took on a life of its own because, in a lot of ways, it’s very wet as well too.
Why do you think heat was the starting point?
I think to me, it’s because GOOD LUCK felt very cold as an album, just emotionally, so I wanted to go in the opposite direction. I also associate it with wintertime because I made it in the winter during COVID, I shot a lot of music videos in the dead of winter. I knew that I was going to release this album during the summer.
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
This is my favorite Clarice Lispector book. I just remember the first time reading it – it was one of those books that just gets you right in the heart. It’s basically the story of this young woman who’s living in poverty in Brazil. It’s not a long read at all, but basically throughout the book, she kind of dreams of how she is ignited with the spark to dream of a better life. You see her go through the motions of her life and just kind of feeling complacent – maybe a better word to use would just be she’s so oppressed by the circumstances of her life. She’s been through a lot of trauma – you could just tell this is somebody who’s never felt true, unfiltered joy, so the idea of even dreaming of a better life is something that felt so far away.
But then as the book progresses, you see her get ignited and activated by this dream, and it ends so tragically. I don’t want to give it away, but it ends so tragically and heartbreakingly. I really connect with stories like this that feel melancholic – not cynical, because I would never call Clarice Lispector cynical, but it’s devastating, it’s tragic. But there’s so much realization and crystallization that happens during her tragic end. I think that’s just because so much of my philosophy and what I believe about the world is that that there is goodness in suffering. I think that suffering can really act as this illuminating force. And throughout The Hour of the Star, Maccabea – that’s the name of the narrator – she just suffers so much. And I think that there’s still goodness in that. There are things that she learned and gained from that suffering that she otherwise wouldn’t have. It’s just a beautifully written novel, it’s so poetic and philosophical at the same time. I feel like what Clarice does with writing is partially what I’m trying to do with music, which is to create something beautiful but also true. And because it’s true, that means that it’s not always going to be pleasant, and there might be suffering involved.
Do you sometimes find it daunting sometimes, given the added layers of sonics and visuals, to communicate these philosophical and poetic ideas?
No, I don’t find it difficult. I think it’s my life’s work. I think what I’m supposed to be doing is trying to figure out a way of communicating these things through my music and my art. One of the things I’ve done on this record is I’ve explored pop music, and something that I respect about pop music is its ability to communicate complex human emotions in a way that’s so accessible and very open. Anybody can connect with it. I think that’s the true power of music, and it is part of my life’s work to try to do that. When I really get into talking about philosophy and stuff, it can be really quite dense and twisted up, but when you put it in music, the point is to make it so that people can hear what it is that you’re saying in a melody or a drum line or something that doesn’t necessarily require thought. It becomes more symbolic.
I and Thou by Martin Buber
Speaking of dense philosophical ideas – from what I understand, the essence with this one is that we, as humans, find meaning through relationships.
That’s definitely a complicated one as well. This is the only book I’ve read from Martin Buber, but it was one that really struck me just because, again, it’s this distilling of something that I knew inside of me, but I couldn’t articulate or name it. It’s exactly what you said – it’s this whole idea of we understand ourselves and we understand the world through relationships, and human beings are meant for relationships. But he has two philosophies around the modes of relating that people do with the world. The first one is I/It, which is where we relate to things as an object. It’s very consumptive. It’s like the thing is outside of us, and there’sa distance and a detachment with the world or whatever the object is. Then there’s I/Thou, and that is where we relate to things as true, full, sacred presence. We take that thing in as part of ourselves and we as part of it, and there’s this understanding of connectedness and togetherness. Those are the two pillars of his philosophy in this book.
I think about that so much in relation to how I really like albums versus singles. Making a body of work to me is having an I/Thou relationship. I’m not trying to downgrade on singles or artists who decide that they want to do a bunch of singles – there’s nothing wrong with that. But I love an album. I will always prioritize an album. There’s so much time, effort, energy, but also love that goes into an album. There’s no ability to make an album disposable in the same way that you can do with a single because you have to spend so much more time with it – all of its pieces, but also the thing as a whole.
When I was making this album, I was experimenting with pop, but at its core, it’s still electronic music. It’s still experimental because if you look at a lot of the songs, they’re not typical pop structures. A lot of the songs are actually structured very strangely. The arrangements are all over the place, and they’re not the typical way that things are structured. I did that on purpose because when you hear them, it just kind of soaks into the subconscious in a deeper way, because your subconscious mind registers it as being atypical. It’s harder to listen and be like “Oh, whatever.” You’re actively listening. And same with the album cover – I made the album cover in order to have people take a second look. When you first look at the image, it’s like, “Oh, a girl that’s upside down.” But then you look at it, you’re like, “Wait, how did she get in that position?” Again, tthat was because I wanted people to spend time with the record.
A Gerald Donald quote
The quote goes: “I do not wish to specify any particular ethnicity. I would state that all variations of humanity have contributed to the evolution of electronic music. Electronic music is the only music type that is global in scope and not specific to any particular culture. Granted, if a variety stems from a particular culture, then it will apply its own idiosyncrasies to the form. But in general it’s a universal sonic medium with endless contributions.” There’s different elements to this, but what resonates with you the most?
I think all of it. I really like that sentence where he says, “Electronic music is the only music type that is global in scope, not specific to any particular culture.” And I believe him. I totally agree. I do think that electronic music is global music. I think that it’s one of its defining points and one of its characteristics that makes me love this kind of music. It’s made everywhere in the world. If you have a computer or technology of any kind – you don’t even necessarily have to have technology in the traditional sense, because there’s electronic music being made with literally random scrap metal junkyard parts.
When I think about my own philosophies around music making as well, I aim for is this idea of making music such that anybody anywhere in the world is able to connect with. And that’s part of why I really lean into ideas of hybridity and genre-blending, and that’s also how I even came to music. When I was really young and finding music, it would be through the internet. Just these random just random bits and pieces of pop culture. Whatever I could get my hands on through the internet, through downloading or online forums, that’s what I would listen to. It didn’t matter the language. It didn’t matter the genre.
And I do think of electronic music also as “music of the future.” I say that in quotations, meaning, we are in the future now, right? So it’s the music of the now, and it’s the music of the people.
The phrase “endless contributions” implies endless possibilities.
Exactly.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Debby Friday’s The Starr of the Queen of Life is out now via Sub Pop.
