Music
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Pain and pleasure. The highs and lows of life. Fae addresses it all on her fourth EP, the deluge.
The Los Angeles-based artist is the sole songwriter on half of the project’s six songs, which brings a poetic and visual quality to the storytelling only Fae can capture. But don’t expect a soft lullaby.
“I love the sonic landscape to be a little bit more intense and aggressive,” Fae says.
The EP opens with “Drown” — “a song that is just very desperate and fleeting” — and closes with “Surface Tension,” a victorious song where Fae declares she doesn’t want to drown anymore.
Related: Fae Is Ready to Break the Surface Tension
Still, the tracklist leads listeners through the EP’s theme in a nonlinear way. As Fae says, “healing is never a straight line.”
The inspiration behind the project’s name comes from singer-songwriter Regina Spektor’s 2006 song “Après Moi.” In it, Spektor sings, “Après moi, le deluge / After me comes the flood.”
“I have loved that line ever since I heard it,” Fae says. “To me, what that line meant was that the impact of your choices comes after what you do.”
The title also sets the scene for the water motifs to come.
While water is a source of life, many people forget about its destructive power, Fae says.
Although Fae is the creator of the art, she doesn’t expect listeners to apply her interpretations to their experience of it.
“I get so much joy out of getting my own interpretations from other artists’ music that I don’t necessarily know if I want to dictate the outcome,” Fae says about letting people find their own meaning in the songs.
“My main goal is always to make people that don’t feel as connected or understood by other people to feel a sense of connection and understanding.”
There was even a time when Fae didn’t feel connected to fellow artists — she started her music career without any formal connections to the music industry. She remembers producers and songwriters ignoring her outreach.
“I have this community of people that I am a part of and can reach out to and I have this network. I have no idea how I made that from nothing, but I did,” Fae says.
Perhaps the deluge is a reminder that we can all start again.
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