After a busy festival summer, having performed at Latitude Festival, Victorious Festival, SXSW Festival, and The Great Escape, North London newcomer Natalie Shay is back in the studio, working on her third EP ‘Champagne’, set to be released next year. Excited about her most recent single ‘Figure of 8’, which was released on October 6th and deals with being trapped in an unhealthy relationship, we spoke to Shay about her early beginnings at BRIT school, the unexpected heartbreak of losing friends, the fascination with toxic partners and growing up as a creative.
Being born and raised in North London has definitely had a big impact on the kind of music Shay creates. “Music from London definitely has a sort of identity. It’s a mix of loads of different genres and influences,”, she states. “And I went to the BRIT school. I think going there has been a huge influence! Just the collaborating with other people from the age of 14, with other artists and other musicians, and meeting people from all over London and kind of all over the UK,”, she continues. “The people that I worked with, the sheer amount of different artists that are in London, I think have definitely influenced by music”.
Another takeaway Shay has from having been a student at BRIT school is that it taught her to be herself, earlier than she thinks she would have found herself otherwise. “I was sort of dropped in there and almost forced to grow up at 14, which in the UK is a weird age to move schools. You normally don’t move schools until you’re 16. So it was a weird age to start again and not have a uniform and just be dropped into this environment where I was expected to do music all the time. And so I think it forced me to grow up. And to become independent and start believing in myself earlier than I think other people get the chance to. I will always be grateful for the fact that it gave me a little bit of a head start in believing in myself and my career,”, she explains.
However, Shay also thinks that the school itself helped other students more than it helped her, as they offered lots of opportunities but never to her. “Certain other people got to meet with labels and stuff. I don’t really know how they picked who got to and who didn’t. I never really had any clear understanding of who got picked and what for,”, Shay admits, further illuminating how she then came to self-release her music. “But if it wasn’t for BRIT school, I wouldn’t have known how to self-release or how to do any of that stuff. They teach you most of it. It’s a very vocational qualification, so I definitely was prepared to go straight from school to trying to figure out how to do music full-time. It has definitely helped me, but I think it also helped other people a little bit more”.
Shay’s earliest memory of making music dates back to when she was three or four years old and learned how to play classical guitar. “My dad wanted me to do guitar because he thought it’d be cool”, she giggles, “And then I think what inspired what I do is when I saw Taylor Swift in concert when I was about 10 or 11. I had never seen a girl play guitar live before, and I was like, well, I play guitar! This is cool!” Shay remembers coming home after the concert that night, knowing exactly that this would be what she wanted to do when she grew up, and she started writing songs right after: “I think that’s literally how it all started.”
Taylor Swift has stayed her biggest role model to this day, as Shay exclaims: “She’s my leading light at the moment. It’s not just her music. I think, obviously, her music is incredible, and she’s the best writer ever, but I think, for me, it’s also the business side of things. I think it’s nice to see someone who presents themselves in a way that I want to present myself and gives the message that I want to give. She’s inspired me and kind of every artist coming through at this point, like Olivia Rodrigo. We all say that Taylor Swift is our biggest inspiration. I hope to inspire even just one person in that way. I think that’s a really powerful thing, to empower people to do the thing that you do.”
When asked if there is one Taylor Swift song that Shay wishes she wrote herself, she immediately replies, “Oh, all of them!”. Yet, there is a specific song on Swift’s most recent album ‘Midnights’ that Shay particularly relates to – ‘You’re On Your Own, Kid’. “When I first heard that song, it was so freakishly accurate to my life, like, very specific things. For example, some of my first gigs were in a car park, like she sings about in the song. I think anybody who has tried a creative career or done something independently will really resonate with that song. That’s the song of my life, I feel very seen and understood through those lyrics.”
Shay’s own songwriting process mainly stems from personal experience: “It’s always something that either happened to me or somebody I know. I never really try and make up something. I know a lot of people do that or they go like, let’s write about when that thing happens. I’m more like if it hasn’t happened to me or someone that I know, then I don’t really want to perform it because it doesn’t really mean anything to me”.
Having written songs about different forms of heartbreak before, the question remains of whether Shay experiences breakups with friends or partners as more difficult to get over: “I’ve got this one friendship I’m still not over. It’s been a year and a half and it’s so hard. I think because you don’t expect friends to leave your life. Like you go into a relationship and you’re like, “Oh, I hope it works out, and I hope we stay together”. There’s always a part of you that’s not going to be so shocked if you break up because relationships break up, whereas in friendships, you don’t. You go into them thinking, you’re gonna be here at my wedding, we’re gonna be here forever. You don’t really plan, ever. So when a friend leaves your life, it shakes everything up. It shakes up your plan and the way you see your future and certain things. It’s definitely hard to be carrying on with stuff that I know my friend would have liked to have been a part of. And she’s not there.”
Her most recent single, ‘Figure of 8’, was written with the help of two girls, another artist and a producer. Lyrically, Shay drew inspiration from a friend who had just broken off her engagement “with this guy” and how she first found out all the stuff that had been going on in their relationship that she wasn’t aware of before, “how awful he’d been to her for so many years”. She told the girls her friend’s story and they told her stories that happened with their friends in return: “We were discussing everything for two hours, so it was obvious that this was what we were going to write about that day. It was very much a team effort on that one.”
As toxic relationships have been such a big part of Shay’s lyrical path, it’s hard not to wonder why they appear so fascinating in the first place. “I think when you’ve been damaged from childhood, and you’re either anxiously attached, or you’ve got some sort of you-need-to-be-taken-care-of thing because somebody abandoned you at some point in your life, it’s very easy to get stuck in this mindset. And I think I definitely have that kind of part of me. That part of me that would be drawn to seeing pain as love sometimes,”, Shay ponders and carries on, “I think it’s because of stuff that happened in my past. It’s a reaction to stuff we went through, and some people figure it out and they manage to heal themselves so that they don’t end up in these situations. But some people, unfortunately, don’t realise before it’s too late and end up in these kinds of relationships. And sometimes they don’t even realise while they’re in them that they’re bad because maybe they grew up their whole life in a similar kind of environment and still haven’t realised that that was bad. I found it very interesting trying to sort of research all of that this year, like trauma bonds and all these control dynamics and relationships and learning about it myself. I think a lot of my friends are a bit like me, we’ve had troubled things happen to us, but we’re very emotional people who have a lot of love to give.”
Shay’s next EP, titled ‘Champagne’ – “literally because my last EP was called ‘Milk’ and I thought you go from drinking milk to champagne” – is coming out next year and is mainly written to enlighten fans and listeners about the kind of person Shay has become, instead of her singing about other people like lovers or friends. “On this next one, there are a few songs that are just about me, as a general person. I’m a bit more open about myself, and a bit more honest. But I think that comes with age and me figuring myself out so that I can translate that into a song and actually understand who I actually am,”, she explains. “The last EP was about growing up, whereas now, even though I know I’ve got loads more growing to do, I think I’m definitely grown. The EP is about my perspective as an adult, as somebody who has an opinion and has formed an understanding of life, whereas the last one was about discovering that. So that’s the concept. And sonically, none of the songs really sound the same. There’s not really a theme going on there. Just that I’ve had every song produced in the way that I think it comes across best, rather than trying to put them all together and make them sound similar.”
Sonically, Shay doesn’t think her songs have changed a lot over the last few years. “I’ve always written on my guitar, and I still do that. There’s a B side for this track, for ‘Figure of 8’, called ‘play’, and that’s one of my self-written guitar ones. I’ve always done that, and when I first started out, that was mostly all I did. It was stuff I wrote on my own on the guitar, the slow stuff. Now, I guess my primary thing is doing the big singles and having a good time jumping around on stage,”, she reflects with a smile.
Performing her self-written songs live is Shay’s favourite part about being a musician. “It’s the whole process of writing something that means something to me and then getting to share that with an audience. Being able to sing my feelings to people is just a very weird thing to do with your life. I love it so much. But it is very strange,”, the London-based artist chuckles. Within a whole series of live performances lined up this past year, Shay names her support slot for Caity Baser at the famous O2 Forum Kentish Town in April this year as her favourite moment. “As a North London girly, it ticked off a big box for me and my career. I said a little bit on stage about that and how this was a North London artist’s dream venue. That was a very special show”.
When asked if there was one advice Shay could give to any recent art or music school graduates, she opens up about having had “a difficult period of eight months where music was sort of neither here nor there” after her education ended: “It wasn’t full time, but it was still taking up a lot of my time. I would tell people that it was normal, but I don’t think I was very prepared for that. I wasn’t really aware that there would be a period where I’d have to figure things out for myself. I think a lot of people come out of art college or training, and because they don’t go straight into full-time working their dream, a lot of people give up or lose hope in that period. But people have to keep going and not let that faze them!”
Finally, as the spooky season has officially started, what are Shay’s Halloween plans looking like? “I’ve got a group of friends, and we always do everything together,”, she states in excitement. “So we’ve got a Halloween plan and it also falls on the same weekend as Bonfire Night. We’re going to the fireworks display in costumes. And currently, the costume plan is to go as each other. There’s a fine line between trying not to make fun of anyone, but you’re also trying to make it funny and to caricature everybody.” Sometimes it’s good to go back to a child-like state and take a break from trying to navigate newfound growth and adulthood. And sometimes all you need is to surround yourself with people that show you healthy love and that make you laugh.
Written by Vicky Madzak
GEM Magazine 