Brett Callwood“I fell in love with her set – just the look, the lighting, how everyone in the audience was feeling this collective emotion,” Current says. “So I would stand on the coffee table with a broomstick or a piece of paper stuck to my face as a microphone and I would copy her every move. I knew that I wanted to pursue this as a career. Just be a performer.”
That EP is Virgo, a sweet and introspective body of work that highlights her glorious blend of R&B, jazz, pop and neo-soul. She thinks of the EP as a “Sonic Diary.”
“It’s a timestamp of the point in my life a couple of years ago when I was writing it,” she says. “I was so desperately longing to find love and validation through other people that I noticed this pattern around that time where I was losing a lot of relationships, whether that be friends, romantic relationships or family members. I realized along the way that what I was looking for was the love that can only come from myself. So all of the songs are talking about a specific relationship that has ended, but me choosing myself and that’s the only thing that matters in the end.”
New single “If I Fall” is a great example of that journal approach, resulting in a conclusion of self-love.
“There are five tracks on the EP, and I placed them in order,” Current says. “The beginning of the EP is clinging on to this relationship, and as we get towards the end, it’s when I finally realized ‘OK, I am all I need.’ So ‘If I Fall’ is towards the end of the project, and that is talking about a relationship that has ended but I am able to reminisce on it and find that it wasn’t so bad that it ended because I was able to gain an understanding of that person and myself, and why I’m better off being on my own because what I needed in that moment, that relationship was no longer serving me. I was able to feed that love and freedom within myself.”
Current was born and raised in L.A., and she says that it’s inevitable that the city would have an influence on her sound, style and vibe.
“I think just being young and surrounded by entertainment every single day, this city is dominated by it, so it definitely has inspired the sound whether it be through the visuals or what I was writing about,” she says. “I feel like L.A. is such a crazy melting pot of people that you meet along the way, so it’s those relationships that you get into. It feels like everyone is in their own world, and so it’s meeting those different people and writing about it, almost like a diary.”
Gabrielle Current’s EP is her Diary: The Virgo EP is out May 27.
