Photo: Pitchfork
Japanese-British Rina Sawayama has dropped a new single from her upcoming album, Hold the Girl. The song “Catch Me in the Air” was written as an honor to her mother, who was a single mother as she raised Sawayama.
“I really wanted to write about this weird relationship with single parents,” Sawayama said about the single. “You do catch each other in the air.”
The visual for this song has been made by fans who submitted their footage of the singer playing live.
“Catch Me in the Air” is written by Sawayama, with Oscar Scheller, Gracey, Clarence Clarity, and Stuart Price. They wrote it “in-between lockdowns,” according to the musician.
“I wanted the whole song to sound like it was on an Irish coastline, like a Corrs video. We put in a key change to go into the chorus at the end of the pre-chorus to make it lift and soar like a bird. I then worked on it more with Clarence before taking it to Stuart Price,” she said.
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“This was the first song that Stuart and I worked on together, and it was the most incredible experience. I’m such a huge fan of his work with Madonna and Kylie, so it was a dream come true. We would send each other stock images of coastlines, people doing yoga on a pier, meditating in the middle of a field, hay bales, etc., to get inspired sonically,” she continued.
Sawayama told Zane Lowe that Gwen Stefani inspired her.
“I was like, ‘Why don’t we just pretend to write for Gwen,” she stated.
“But after that, I was like, ‘Ooh, I’m so about pre-chorus key changes at the moment. So, I think it was going into the chorus or maybe even going into the pre-chorus. But anyway, I was like, ‘Oscar, come up with a key change, please.’ And he was racking his brains because doing a key change is really hard… and what’s harder than an obvious key change is a really subtle key change.”
The long-awaited Hold The Girl release from Sawayama is finally here – it drops September 2 via Dirty Hit. Last month, she revealed her new album and its lead single, “This Hell.”
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