“That was one of the craziest shows I’ve played in the past few years! I think they shut it down halfway through because it was so much chaos, but it was so much fun energy,” says GRAMMY Award–winning, 4X platinum recording artist Daya of her experience performing at UPenn’s 2024 Spring Fling alongside Metro Boomin (Read all about it here.). At the time, the artist’s 2015 debut single, “Hide Away,” was enjoying a revival while trending on TikTok. “There’s something nice about playing a song that everyone knows and everyone can sing along to. I’ve been playing a lot of college shows recently, and those are people who would have listened to my music when they were like seven or eight,” Daya tells me during a February phone chat, reflecting upon her experience of being a teen pop star a decade on.
Daya is currently just 27, despite more than a decade in the business, and “Hide Away” was the lead single from her 2015 self-titled debut EP, before going on to be included on 2016’s Sit Still, Look Pretty, her debut full-length, which lead to a whirlwind of crazy experiences. “There were so many amazing radio events I got to be a part of in just my first year of performing, like Jingle Ball, where I got to perform with so many amazing artists that I looked up to,” she tells me, before mentioning one exceptionally notable day: “A huge one was when I was invited to perform at the White House, which was like six months after ‘Hide Away’ broke. That was pretty insane, getting to meet the first lady and President Obama.”
Last October Daya released her sophomore LP, Til Every Petal Drops, with a mere two EPs (2021’s The Difference and 2022’s In Between Dreams) between to keep fans up to date on her artistic evolution. “It feels a little bit more personal and introspective in terms of lyrics and storytelling, and it also has this density that I haven’t always tapped into with my music… Some of the outros are pretty crazy [laughs],” she says of her evolution since In Between Dreams, going on to explain, “Someone said it was like a different genre with every song, which I was trying to do, merge all of these different things and sides of music that I love and have been listening to for years… I learned to tap into all these different sides of pop, soulful pop and alternative pop and electronic pop.” And when I ask how she feels like her approach to music has evolved since Sit Still, Look Pretty, she says that there’s a lot to consider.
“In so many ways. For one, I was 15 or 16 when I wrote that music and I didn’t have a good grasp on what I wanted to say or how to manipulate my voice… I was young and it was like a boot camp on how to become a pop songwriter, and I learned so much, but I wasn’t really tapped into my inner creative voice.”
This past weekend Daya kicked off the Til Every Petal Drops Tour, a seven-date jaunt of relatively intimate rooms, including a stop at The Foundry at The Fillmore this coming Monday, April 27th, her first headlining date in the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection since her February 2017 show at The Trocadero. “It’s gonna be smaller venues than I played on my first tour, which is so much fun for me because I haven’t played venues like this in a while. You can really connect when you can look right into their eyes and see them dancing with you,” she explains. And while she says she’s super excited to see the organic reactions to the new music, she tells me she is also happy to be revisiting some of her classics.
“I will, yes! My relationship has changed so much with those songs… It’s a core memory for a lot of people, so it adds a new energy to these songs. It’s part of my history, part of my past, part of what got me where I am today… With the arrangements, it’s been fun to try and find a way to fit all the sounds together.”
In addition to exploring the connections between all of her sounds, Daya also says that she’s excited about the visual elements of the live show: “I’m really looking forward to having a visual theme, going off of the Til Every Petal Drops theme, with lots of flower visuals.” You can see a bit of this theme explored in the Official Videos and Visualizers for album tracks (There’s one for each of the LP’s 12 songs.) “I love to have a narrative, but I also love to have shots that capture the feeling of the song and bring out the beauty in the music,” she explains, going on to discuss one of the three Official Videos directed by Hannah De Vries that she especially enjoyed: “We kind of pushed it and that was really fun for me, especially with ‘Infrared,’ which gets creepier, weirded, a little darker.”
*Get your tickets here.
**Listen to the latest episode of Philthy Radio to find out Daya’s favorite track from Til Every Petal Drops, now streaming via Y-Not Radio.
