Getting To Know Flower Face
Flower Face is set to release her new single and album this month. We asked her to tell us about herself:
I am… Flower Face, but my real name is Ruby. I just turned 20 last weekend, the day my record came out. I’ve been recording music since I was 14. I’m a student right now, studying fine art at the University in my city. I also work part time in retail. It’s not too glamorous yet! But the goal is that it will be, eventually. I listen to kind of a big eclectic variety of music, mostly stuff that sounds absolutely nothing like my own. It inspires me more than listening to someone who sounds like me.
“April to Death” is… a sarcastic depressing look at human nature and our coping mechanisms, disguised as a fun pop song. I like it! It is fun. It’s a little bit country almost, which is weird for me. The song is about being totally disillusioned and disappointed in your life – when you kind of take a step back and see what you’re really doing. All these things we do to cope with our pain, trying to ignore it or cut it out, end up being really empty and sad. “We’re always on the upswing” is a pretty sarcastic line. We get through things by forcing them out of our heads and filling ourselves up with other things, drugs and parties and people, and then end up questioning everything. But in the moment it feels good, so maybe it’s just fine.
Baby Teeth… isn’t just a breakup album, but it is an album about a breakup. It’s about the unreality of losing your first love, the denial and heartbreak that feels impossible. When you’re like, no, you’re with me, you can’t not be with me anymore. I tried my best to arrange the songs in an order that made sense but also that flowed in a mostly chronological order – it opens with the title track, which I see as being in the midst of breaking up, when you refuse to accept that it’s happening. “I won’t let go, no, I left my baby teeth in your drawer”. I gave you parts of myself, you can’t leave me. Essentially. From there, it cycles through all the stages afterwards – depression and rebounds and distractions and at one point, I get a little creepy. You’ll have to listen and hear where that is! In the end there’s kind of this uplifting moment of acceptance and understanding. I think that’s all we can really strive for.
Home is… in Windsor, Ontario. I talk a lot about wanting to leave and go somewhere new, but this is my home. My family is here, my friends are here. My producer is here! I’ve done great things here and it carries a lot of memories. I think eventually I will leave, once I’ve got a better idea of what I’m doing. I’ve always wanted to live in Montreal. I travel as much as I can, I go on little week-long trips by myself when I have the opportunity. I love it, I love wandering around airports alone and I love exploring new places. But right now, Windsor is home.
I spend too much time… doing nothing. Honestly, for someone who’s so artistically driven and has constant ideas floating around in my head, you’d think I wouldn’t waste so much time. I mean, I’m a musician, writer, visual artist – I draw and paint and take photos. But I swear to God I can spend an hour staring at a wall. I get really lost in my head, I daydream too much. And then I realize I’ve just lost a good portion of my day.
I’ve never… been on tour. I really want to! I’ve played some shows in different cities – even Houston, Texas and New York City. But I’ve always wanted to go on a real tour, it’s kind of this big dream. I have a lot of romanticized ideas about it, I know it’s not really that glamorous. But I think it would be fun.
It might surprise people to learn that… this record took over 2 years to make. I started writing it in 2015, we started recording it in 2016. I’ve never spent this long on an album, I’m the type to write it and record it all within a few months. I get too excited. Working with a producer this time definitely helped – I’d always just done everything myself. This time my friend Josh Kaiser and I co-produced and he played on the record too. It was a lot of fun, and our collaboration brought out some really interesting stuff. In the studio, we had this unspoken agreement to just go wherever the songs took us, regardless of if it seem to “fit” my style or sound or the album. We were like, “hm, we should get some banjo in here” or “what if you whistled over that line?”. At one point we were hitting pots with scissors and shaking pill containers filled with uncooked barley as percussion. Or he brought all the equipment out into the stairwell of his apartment and recorded me stomping my boots. Some of the songs have 6 or 7 layers of the main vocal. Whatever sounded right, we just did it. And in the end, it worked! I expected there’d be some disconnect between the songs but I think it all flows really well and I’m so proud of this album.
Keep up to date with Flower Face on Twitter.
Interview by Bobby Townsend.
