One day you wash up on the beach, wet and naked. Another day you wash back out. In between, the scenery changes constantly.
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.
Guess I know who will sing the soundtrack of my suicide.
ReplyDeleteSteering 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.
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