Tuesday, June 28, 2022

Tuesday Tune - She


Alice Phoebe Lou (born 19 July 1993) is a Berlin-based South African singer-songwriter. She has released three EPs and four studio albums. In December 2017 her song "She" from the film Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story was included on the Oscars shortlist for Best Original Song. Since 2019 she had also been active in her side project Strongboi.

She has released four studio albums to date — Orbit (2016), Paper Castles (2019), Glow (2021) and Child's Play (2021) — alongside two live albums and various singles.

Lou spent her childhood in Kommetjie on west coast of the Cape Peninsula in South Africa and attended a Waldorf school. Her parents are documentary filmmakers. She took piano and guitar lessons as a child. When she was 14 years old she was fond of trance music and started to take photographs from concerts, sometimes even getting paid for them. In 2010 she spent her summer holiday in Paris living first with her aunt but soon moved to live with a friend and started earning money by fire-dancing. 

Having a gap year after graduating from high school in South Africa in 2012 she returned to Europe, first to Amsterdam and then to Berlin. In Berlin she started to sing and play guitar as she found out that this was more lucrative than fire-dancing. After her gap year she contemplated attending university in South Africa, but eventually decided to purchase a battery powered amplifier and return to Berlin instead. In Berlin she performed on S- and U-Bahn stations and parks. After one month in Berlin, she played on a television programme. In April 2014 she self-released "Momentum" EP. The song "Fiery Heart, Fiery Mind" from the EP featured in the soundtrack of the 2015 released film "Ayanda". She also started to play in venues.

After a performance at TEDx in Berlin on 6 September 2014 she started to get offers from record labels, but she wanted to stay independent. In December 2014 she released a live album "Live at GrĂ¼ner Salon" as means to fund the recording of her debut studio album.

In 2015 she started to tour and played first time at SXSW festival in USA in 2015. She has returned to SXSW every year after that. She also performed in TEDGlobal London in 2015 and opened for Rodriguez on his 2016 South Africa tour. 
















 


2 comments:

  1. Guess I know who will sing the soundtrack of my suicide.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Steering clear of a label deal is the right call. Of course, it's the 99&44/100ths percent of bad apples that give the rest a bad name.

    ReplyDelete