And with <COPINGMECHANISM>, WILLOW has certainly achieved just that. From her vocals to her songwriting, the musician calls the 11 songs on the album the “best representation” of who she is as an artist today, with the former in particular giving her the most amount of pride. “One hundred per cent,” she nods cheerfully of her performance in the studio. “It’s undeniable. When I listen, I’m like, ‘Wow.’”
And there’s still much more to be done. At Reading & Leeds, she told the audience from the stage how she hoped to make a “rock opera” one day. Meanwhile, she reveals to Kerrang! that another musical aspiration is playing the cello, which she’s started learning. And down the line, even more albums will surely follow.
“I wanna be like [U.S. singer-songwriter] Ani DiFranco; Ani DiFranco has, like, 20 albums!” she enthuses. “She has such a cult fanbase, and the core of her has always been her musicianship, and her love for the craft, and I just think that’s so sustainable and authentic, and how it should be. I really love Ani DiFranco, and I aspire to have a discography as expansive as hers one day.”
Any and all kinds of music, then, is WILLOW’s future.
“I thought I was going to do something different for a while – after I stopped doing the Whip My Hair stuff, and I was just going to school and I wasn’t really in the studio, I was just being a regular kid, I really thought to myself that I might just do something random,” WILLOW admits. “But then music kept coming back to me and I was like, ‘Darn it! I can’t say no this time!’
“It’s just stuck with me.”