INTERVIEW: Allison Ponthier talks her debut EP and coming of age: "Making this project has made me feel a lot better about being myself in general"
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Weslee Kate
America’s Allison Ponthier makes the kind of gorgeous music you wish you had in your life before now. A little bit country, a little bit pop, a little bit indie her songs capture the pain and beauty of growing up, new experiences and growing into yourself in a way that connects intimately with your soul.
Growing up in Dallas, Texas in a musical family, she sung in church and became obsessed with self-recording as a child, creating music by herself in her bedroom. After becoming more immersed in song writing while at university, Ponthier abandoned her studies mid way through and moved to New York all alone to pursue songwriting as a career. After struggling to make headway, a flash of inspiration produced ‘Cowboy’, a song about coming out, and she soon had a management deal and a record label with ‘Cowboy’ released as her debut single earlier this year.
Ponthier’s debut EP Faking My Own Death was released on August 6, featuring her four singles plus two new tracks including the acoustic beautiful, melancholic ode to her childhood home, ‘Tornado Country’. Ponthier makes such heartfelt, mesmerising music that stays with you long after you have finished listening to it and she is primed to make even more incredible music in the years to come. We recently caught up with her to find out more.
Allison, what an absolute rhinestone crusted nugget you are, thank you so much for your time today. How are things with you?
I'm great! Since the EP came out, I feel so relieved in every way. I've been writing a lot of songs recently, I'm on a writing trip. So I’m doing all my favourite stuff right now.
That's perfect. Well, you do such an incredible job of it. The title track of your EP 'Faking My Own Death' is your latest single: 'you're swimming through my wake, and I'm slipping through your hands'. This song catches like a silent sob in my throat while my heart kind of breathes. It's incredible. Where did the song originate?
Thank you so much. I always wanted to write a song about just things that I would do every few years, which is just totally change everything about me. I used to change jobs or partners or careers and I would always ask myself why. When I was in high school,I had a horse girl phase. I had like a Zooey Deschanel phase, I had an emo phase - I had every phase, especially the embarrassing ones. Because of that, I had always questioned what am I going to land on? When am I going to be happy? And why do I keep trying to change things about myself? Faking my own death was a phrase that just got stuck in my head, usually all of my songs are phrases that just get stuck in my head. When I really thought about what that meant to me, it was this cyclical phase that I kept going through. I wrote it with Ethan Gruska and Adam Melchor, who are two of my very good friends, and it's always easiest to write with your friends. I'm very proud of the song I love it so much. I am so glad that I wrote it, because it totally defines the EP.
I'm so glad you said that because it really does. As soon as you wrote it, were you're like ‘this is it, this is the title track’?
I love the title so much. What I usually do is go out on walks and I'll come up with song titles, just randomly. I had faking my own death as a title for a long time. When we wrote the song, I immediately loved the song, it was the last one that we wrote for the EP. I had a really, really hard time naming the EP, I didn't want to name it after a song title, but the more and more that we had talked about it, the more 'Faking My Own Death' was perfect. It is exactly what I wanted, a little spooky, which is something that I always love, and it is what the EP is about. It's about self acceptance and breaking bad habits.
I am a huge fan as well of 'Tornado Country' which ends the EP. It really is like a love letter to the past, which I think is so beautiful. There's something so incredibly warming with it that just reminds all the listeners, ‘hey, you know what, you can go through stages, but you're still going to be yourself at the end of it’. If you could describe this collection as a whole would it be like ‘this is me up to this point’?
Oh yeah. I didn't have a theme for the EP, I just was like, here are the songs I love. And then when I took a step back, especially when we wrote 'Faking My Own Death', I was like, 'Oh, I get it now'. Because they were all songs about what kind of person I wanted to be, or things that I had gone through. It's all really about identity at the end of the day. At first I was like, maybe I can just only write songs about identity, but really, that's just what was taking up space in my mind at the time. When I moved to New York, I came out and that was very difficult for me, and then when you move to a totally new place and you start over you can kind of be whoever. For me, not being around everyone that I had ever grown up around made me feel a little bit more empowered to figure out who I actually was underneath everything. 'Hell Is a Crowded Room' is about me having anxiety attacks, 'Harshest Critic' is about me being super hard on myself, 'Cowboy' is about how hard it was to come out. So they're all kind of connected in that way.
As a listener, we take on your beautiful songs and that people come of age constantly. It's not just like, ‘bam, it happens when you stop being a teenager’. This thing keep happening all the time. And if you've got some music to see you through it, what better way?
Yeah, truly it feels both selfish and natural to say this, but every song that I wrote, whether or not I was doing it as a job, I would have written already. Every song I've written I've written for myself. And in a weird way, it's kind of the least selfish thing you can do, because a lot of people write songs to impress other people, or to seem cool or to prove something to people. For me, I was just like, ‘I need to write the songs that I would like to hear that would comfort me’. It's really helped my self confidence a lot. Making this project has made me feel a lot better about being myself in general.
And you've made a hell of a lot of us feel better about many situations. It's gorgeous. Not to mention, your ridiculously cinematic music videos that accompany everything you do. They are next level cool. Obviously music does more for you than just sonically, do you always see your songs when you're creating them?
Most of the time yeah. Songs that are my favourites, I always see a music video with them. It's like a vehicle for me to write good songs, picturing it like a movie. I love making the videos. I'm a huge movie fan, and I fell in love with music by watching movie musicals. It makes so much sense to me to pair music and visuals. Plus, it's so much fun. There's nothing like stepping on set and seeing a universe that you've created yourself, I'm very, very, very lucky that I am able to do that. whenever it's time to shoot music video.
You are a bit of an old soul with regards to your songwriting, but at the same time, it's so very now. And I think that comes a lot from this new generation of country music. It used to be a dirty word, and now everyone's like, actually, it's kind of cool. Everyone's admitting it now. Can you talk me through music as an influence in your childhood? And when was it that you started to create your own and put it out there?
Yeah, I love talking about this because there's a misconception that you have to be able to write songs from birth to be a good songwriter. I grew up listening to country music, my mum loves country music, and I actually didn't even know pop music existed. It was just country music and church music because I grew up singing in church. I loved country music, especially pop country like Shania Twain and Faith Hill. When I got a little bit older, I was like, ‘well, I'm a preteen, I'm a rebel, I no longer like country music, and I only like indie and alternative music’. Discovering that Pandora existed changed my life, Regina Spektor 'On The Radio' 24/7. I loved Paramore, I loved Imogen Heap, I love Fleet Foxes. It was me trying to find music that made me feel like I could be bigger and better than what my life was in that moment. But I didn't write songs, real songs, until I was 19 or 20. I was so embarrassed to write songs, I wrote one song when I was in high school, it was for a project about the Salem witch trials! My first real artist song happened when I was 19 - and it wasn't good! And it's because I was just learning. It takes time to develop your artistic voice and I didn't really know how to do that. I didn't know how to be vulnerable, I was just trying to sound cool instead of trying to really express myself and tell my story. It's really important that people know that you don't have to write songs forever to be good. It's a skill like anything else and I've been very lucky, I do a lot of co-writes with people I really love and care about and I've learned so much from them. Also on top of that, if you tell unique stories, if your voice is unique, that's the way you're supposed to tell the story, the way that's natural to you.
That's so true. And there are quite a lot people that apparently came out very talented. You have to wonder what was happening when they were younger!
Everyone's written bad songs, every single writer has written a bad song. I don't know a single writer that's not like, ‘I hate this one song that I made forever ago’. It is a skill. I would also argue that singing is a skill that you can improve on as well. A lot of people have this misconception that you need to be expert level at something and have just pure talent from when you're a kid. I actually disagree with that, because I did not sing like this when I was younger. It took time and experience. And I definitely didn't write songs like this. I will never share those!
Ah one day you will!
Yeah one day! It's a deep cut! Maybe like Lana Del Rey's first record, it'll come out, although it probably won't be as good as Lana Del Rey…!
That's the thing. Eventually people go back and they look for those terrible songs. They're want to see where it all started, and then it's celebrated.
I'm sure one day it'll come out and honestly it's kind of silly being precious about those things. The most important thing is that you like what you're doing now. Everyone gets to their own place in their own way. And, you know, you got to write a few bad songs before you can write a good one.
Before I leave you Allison, what is coming up in your technicolour world?
I am going on tour in September with Lord Huron, I'm very, very excited. I've never been on a real tour like this, it's my first time. I am very good friends with them and the rest of the band, so I'm just excited to hang out with them, honestly. Other than that, I'm writing a lot of songs for the next project - nothing ever ends! I love doing this so much, I never want to stop. So I'm working on the next thing immediately.
Faking My Own Death is out now Interscope Records. You can buy and download here.
To keep up with all things Allison Ponthier you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
