Spanish born singer songwriter Ali has delighted fans with her dreamy electronic pop. Her new eight track album Mirage is infused with melancholy and nostalgia. She tells Entertainment Now the story so far:
When you were writing your debut album ‘Mirage Vol.1’ did you ever feel like you were chasing your own “mirage”? What was that like?
Everything has happened to turn differently than I had ever expected or imagined. From moving to London, to start writing songs to now
having released an album. I feel there’s always a sense of this ‘Mirage’ effect in life, we all have dreams and expectations that might turn
differently than ever planned, but there’s kind of a beauty in that.
Was there a moment during the making of this album where you thought, “Yes, this is me as an artist”?
Everything started to connect when I organized all the songs I wrote through the last years in a way they told a story and reached the idea of splitting ‘Mirage’ into 2 volumes where all the songs are related to each other, the same story told from two different perspectives.
What’s a lyric from the album that you’re most proud of, and what’s the story behind it?
Every song has a lyric that I sometimes go ‘Wow! Did I really write this?’. As a non-native english speaker, I sometimes surprise myself when I write something really poetic. I think the line ‘Even the ghosts from this place packed their stuff and just left’ from ‘Like A Thousand Days’ is so simple but beautiful. I wanted to reflect about that loneliness you feel when you’re down that not even the spirits want to stay beside you.
Being an indie artist means wearing a lot of hats. Which hat is your favorite, and which one makes you go, “Why did I sign up for this again?”
I’d say all the music related hats like composing and recording are my favourites. I feel like the ‘being-constant-in-social-media’ hat is the most painful one. Though I enjoy shooting photos and videos, it’s so time consuming that I feel I could just be using it to write more music instead.
‘Vol. 1’ hints at more to come. If you could describe ‘Vol. 2’ in one emoji, what would it be?
I think I can describe it with the puzzle piece emoji ‘🧩’ as even though I’ve just released a whole album, I feel the ‘Mirage’ is still incomplete as there are some stories have more to tell and some others are missing a proper ending.
What’s the most surprising thing in your Spotify Wrapped this year? (Be honest—was there a guilty pleasure on there?)
That even though I heard less music than previous years, I still have listened to almost 800 different artists this year. My guilty pleasure’s that I got to be on my top 10 most listened artists!
Describe the perfect day you’d spend listening to your own album—where are you, who are you with, and what’s the vibe?
It’s me, my producer Yuriy and my cat, in our home studio listening to the album like we’ve never listened to it before, trying to enjoy it as consumers instead of creators, though having listened to it in the car with our families and getting to see their reactions’s also a wholesome memory.
Listen here:
