Learning to let go
EP arrives next week but she’s already thinking of her next — and her next. The Auckland-raised singer-producer has already written 55 songs in 2019 and is preparing to release a threeEP trilogy over the next year.
It all begins with The Breakup EP, which, naturally, is about an intense break-up Navvy endured last year. Lead single 100 Thousand is a fiery pop tune that reveals the catalyst for it all: her boyfriend’s infidelity. The chorus finds Navvy dreaming of all the ways she could get even, before deciding it’s not worth it and dancing away over a series of fluttering “la la la“s.
“I just came from this place of being like, ‘What’s the most childish thing I could do to get back at someone that did something so terrible?”’ she says. “And I was like, to tell his mum, she would be so upset. And then she heard the song and she messaged me being like, ‘I’m so sorry that he did that.”’
The song is a delicate mixture of rage and hope. “I used to tell my friends who were breaking up with people, ‘There has to be 100 thousand people for you’ — that was my way of making them feel better. And when we broke up, I was like, ‘But I’ve already found one of them — it feels like a lot of admin to go find another.’ And then I realised I need to listen to my own advice. I’m going to be okay.”
The Breakup EP is beautifully confessional, charting the range of brutal emotions that arrive in the fallout of a relationship. Navvy poured her heart into it — but she’s ready to have it out of her system.
“I think I’ve had enough of writing about it now,” she says. “I’ve written so many songs about it and I actually am in the space where I’m free from that and I like being on my own. So that’s what I want the next EP to be about. I want to write about moving on.”
Navvy craves the thrill of collaboration, working with friends as well as acclaimed songwriters such as Starsmith (Ellie Goulding), who she teamed up with on a recent writing trip to London. It’s an evolution from her early songwriting days, in which she would try to track and record every part of a song on her own. Classically trained for 10 years before studying pop music at the University of Auckland, Navvy had to learn to expand her reference points beyond the operas and musicals she grew up on.
“I didn’t listen to any pop music growing up — except for Taylor Swift,” she says. “And now I love all pop music.
“I referenced Hannah Montana in a session the other day and the song sounds nothing like Hannah Montana, but it just made the room really fun. We were dancing to
Nobody’s Perfect but we wrote a sad ballad — we were just really comfortable with each other.”
It’s a joy hearing Navvy talk with such infectious excitement about her own music. She wants more Kiwi artists to back themselves in the same way.
“I think it was cool to hate yourself for a while, and I think that needs to go,” she says.
“We need to be like, ‘I’m amazing, I did that, that’s me.’ I heard 100 Thousand on the radio for the first time the other day, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I made that and now people hear it — that’s crazy.’”