F  L  A  U  N  T

Melancholic indie pop songwriter Flower Face has just released her latest single, “Back to You.” The single combines dark and delicate instrumentals and melodies to evoke the feeling of grieving a lost love.

The single represents the complicated and, at times, contradictory emotions that come along with mourning your first love. With haunting harmonies and lyrics that drip with a range of anger, forgiveness, fondness, and sadness, the structure of the song takes you through the journey of trying to get over someone, an experience that is both universal and isolating at the same time. Featuring sorrowfully symphonic vocals— including backup harmonies by the artist’s childhood best friend, Jane Mariotti— the song fully encapsulates the heavy weight of your very first heartbreak.

Flaunt spoke with Flower Face on her latest single, as well as the artist’s process at large.

How do you feel like this song reflects the feeling of mourning your first love, both sonically and lyrically?

So this song is actually technically the oldest song on the album because I wrote half of it back in 2015. And so then, I was in a relationship and it was my first love. And so the first parts are what I wrote back then. And I feel like those are kind of the more like, ‘We're in this and it's beautiful, just give up your job, give up everything, just be with me all the time.’ Like that kind of first love— very romantic, very idealistic.

And then the chorus is what I wrote later as I was mourning that first love and as I was trying to get through it, where it's kind of this feeling of like, this is literally never going to pass. And everyone says, ‘you'll get over it.’ You know, heartbreak is the most universal feeling. But when you're in it, you're like, I'm the only person who has ever felt this way before, and it's never going to end, and nobody understands. And I think, especially with your first love, I don't think that ever fully leaves you, especially, if it's at a very pivotal time in your life, if you go through a lot of different things together. It's not something that's ever going to completely go away. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think carrying a piece of your first love with you forever is important in your future loves, if that makes sense. 

It does, definitely. I think with any love, you know, you always have a piece of that person in your heart, no matter how it ends. You have really beautiful visuals in your videos. How do you go about creating those visuals and when does the inspiration come to you?

Sometimes it's when I'm actually writing it. So when I wrote “Cornflower Blue,” I feel like I had that kind of visual in my head the moment I wrote it. Like the color palette, the kind of general feeling of the video. I conceptualized that pretty quickly and it kind of obviously transformed over time as I collaborated with the director, but that was kind of right off the bat. As for this one, it was more of a feeling. And so this one is just sort of a lyric video.

But I wanted something like an actual visual piece to go with it, so the video is just this constant moving across this landscape. And actually, I filmed it out of the car window on the 401. I made my mom get up with me at like 5:00 am so we could drive down the 401 and I could film as the sun was just rising and get this beautiful kind of glowy feeling. And so it's sort of a feeling of moving on, you know, you're traveling through this space. But at the same time, it's kind of a loop, like it's the same thing over and over again. And so it's this— you know, it's always going to be there. You're never really getting away from that point. 

How do songs come to you? Do you usually start with lyrics, a main melody or instrumentals?

It depends, but I'm definitely more of a lyric person. Like I would consider myself more of a lyricist than a musician if I had to choose. So I just have notebooks that are full of one or two lines, little bits and pieces that will come to me, and eventually they'll end up put together as a song.

So it's kind of a mix. I'll have a phone note or a notebook with a ton of possible lyrics, and then I'll come up with a melody, and then it's a sort of fill in the blanks kind of thing. So it really just kind of all comes together at the same time in the end. 

Are there specific experiences or emotions that you most often draw from in your writing?

Most of my songs are pretty sad. I feel like it's a lot of reflection. There's a lot of ruminating. And so I think that it means that I have to get into this space of intense reflection on certain events, whatever those events are. Obviously a lot of my work is semi-autobiographical, but I have to embellish things or romanticize things or make things a little bit more poetic. And so I kind of have that power to change the story in that way. So it's a lot of reflecting on things and then seeing how I can make this into a more interesting story and more interesting song. 

As a survivor of cancer, how has that experience influenced your music in terms of your sound, but also in terms of your career choices? 

Yeah, I think that that's kind of... I mean, not the whole reason, but a big reason that I decided to pursue music in a serious way. Because it was always sort of just something I did. Music was something I did my entire life in various ways. When I was 14 is when I started writing and releasing my own songs, and then it was always just this thing I did on the side. And then when I was 17, that's when I was diagnosed with stage three cancer and it was, you know, a close brush with death.

And I was like, why would I do anything other than music? I could literally die tomorrow, who cares about a stable career? I want to enjoy my life while I'm here, you know? So I think that I struggle a little bit to write directly about those experiences. Obviously, they come through in various subconscious ways through all of my songs, and they kind of color all my different life experiences. So regardless of what I'm writing about, if it happened around that time or after, it's gonna involve that in some way. But in terms of thinking about those memories and writing directly from them, I think I need a little more therapy before I can do that.

You talked about “Cornflower Blue” as being about “loving or being loved to the point of exhaustion.” We often think of toxic love in these very extreme examples where it's very obvious that it's toxic, but that’s not always what it’s like. Can you expand on the idea of toxic love that, on a surface level, doesn't appear to be that way? 

I think that the thing about toxic relationships, abusive relationships, any relationships with issues, is that people who haven't been in something like that don't really understand that generally the highs are just as intense as the lows, right? Like you feel kind of just as much love as you feel fear. I mean, not in every single case, but in a lot of cases, especially ones where it's not extremely violent or extremely obvious. You get kind of addicted to the feeling of things getting better. So it's like this cycle of, you know, things are terrible and you're fighting and it's awful. And then you make up and it's this amazing euphoric feeling, and then it gets bad again. That can just go on and on and on. 

And as soon as you're in that euphoric feeling again, you're like, ‘well no, everything's fine. Why would I ever want to lose this?’ Like, I can't end this. And your friends say you should end it, and it's like, ‘you don't get it, you've never loved anyone as much as I love this person.’ And it's like— it's like heartbreak, right? You feel like you're the only person who has ever felt that. But I think it's a pretty common feeling. The thing with “Cornflower Blue” is, what I was trying to describe in that song is this barrier, this emotional barrier where it's like, no one understands me as much as this person, they see me like no one else does. But really, you aren't understanding each other at all. And you aren't seeing or hearing each other because there's just so much in between blocking you from having this real human connection. Like you're not even seeing each other as people, you're seeing them as a part of you, right? And so you're not actually being understood or heard or seen the way that you feel like you are, if that makes sense. 

You have a Bachelor's of Fine Arts, and as I mentioned before, you have beautiful visuals. How do you think that your education in that area has aided you in your abilities as a multifaceted artist?

I love painting and drawing, but my main visual work, I would say, would be video, in terms of editing and filming and design and stuff. I actually went to a high school that was sort of arts based, like they have a specialized arts program. And when I went in, you had to audition. So I auditioned for piano and for visual arts. And so I was in fine arts classes, but you also had to take a media arts class. I loved it so much that I ended up taking media arts every year, and the teacher and I were really close and we still keep in touch now. He was such a big part of my development as an artist. So then when I went into university, there was another professor who— her specialization was digital arts. I took all of her classes, and she was my supervisor in my thesis year. So that was not something in the basis of my art career that I thought I would be into. And then it ended up being the main thing that I love to do, because I was kind of forced into it at the beginning of high school. So yeah, and I think that also just having a very broad— like, it was a very general kind of arts degree. I had to take everything. I had to take painting, drawing, sculpture, audio and visual art, all of that. And so I think that I'm able to draw from all those different things when I'm designing album art. So I think that it does help me in maintaining total creative control of what I'm doing, which is really important to me as an artist.