Betty Who makes return to familiar indie world
At least initially, Australian export Betty Who might put you in mind of fellow artists Robyn and Pink. She’s Amazonian (6’2” in her bare feet), translucently blonde and generally imposing, a pop star who isn’t afraid to take up space.
Who, born Jessica Newham, is a former preteen cello prodigy who moved to America as a teenager to pursue a music career. She attended Berklee College of Music, began releasing songs and EPs, and became virally famous-by-proxy in 2013, when a video of a marriage proposal, set to her first single “Somebody Loves You” and featuring a dancing mob in a Home Depot, was uploaded to YouTube (he said yes; Newham cried when she saw it).
Newham, 26, began as an indie artist but soon signed to RCA Records, where the usual things happened: She issued two successful but not worldburning full-length albums (her latest, “The Valley,” was released last March), landed opening slots on tours for artists like Katy Perry and Kylie Minogue, and toured exhaustively.
She recently left RCA to return to life on her own and just dropped an attention-getting video for her first post-RCA single, “Ignore Me,” filmed in one exhilarating take.
In a phone interview from tour rehearsals, Newham talked about getting into, and out of, her label deal, and the complicated realities of an independent life. The following are excerpts from that conversation: sounds a little dramatic, but there were signs. I was a baby, I was 20 when I signed my record deal. Anybody who’s been in the record industry for longer than five years will tell you all of this stuff, and you go, “No, no, I know better.” That sort of naivete is what gets a lot of people signed when they’re not ready.
I can’t tell you how many times I was in a room full of people who made me feel really stupid, telling me that they knew better, and I should shut up and listen. And six months from then, we wound up doing exactly what I had wanted to do. There was such a tug of war for no reason. I feel like I have become a businesswoman, an entrepreneur in my own field. I don’t know of a lot of really, really successful independent pop artists. You know of rappers, but in pop it’s really difficult to succeed as an independent artist. I’m really swinging for the bleachers here.
It’s really exciting for me to be releasing music on my own terms, and shedding the weight of an unhealthy relationship. That frees up so much space in my life, to bring all my joy and light and passion to the project again. I think I expended a lot of energy trying to make something work that wasn’t working for a long time. Now that’s gone. I feel like I have all this new excitement. I’m looking forward to bringing all that to stage, because I think that’s where it suffers the most.
It is definitely healthier for me in a mental way, not because it feels like Betty Who is a different personto me, but there are parts of me I don’t want to put into Betty Who, that I don’t want to share.