If you send BLOND:ISH a DM, there is a good chance she’ll respond. No matter how busy her schedule, the DJ, producer, nonprofit co-founder, and labelhead wants to provide support to her global fanbase.
"Everything I do with music is to help people live their best lives. That's the whole point of this album," the artist born Vivie-Ann Bakos tells GRAMMY.com.
The album in question is her fittingly titled sophomore release, Never Walk Alone. BLOND:ISH is rarely alone — if her inbox is any indication. In fact, Never Walk Alone was born from the artist's commitment to connecting with her community via social media DMs. "Whenever I'm on a flight or I have a spare moment, I'm in my DMs, " she says. "That could be hundreds of messages a day. I don't get to all of them, but I do my best."
As Bakos' responsibilities grew — including remixes of Taylor Swift, the first-ever long-term residency held by a female artist at the club Pacha Ibiza, and new motherhood — she had to shift perspective. Instead of answering hundreds of DMs, the multihyphenate decided to create Never Walk Alone as a tool to guide listeners as they navigate the highway of freedom.
"This highway that we're all on right now is the system we live in. We're always stuck in traffic with our thoughts, with our endless to-do lists. Gridlock. Beeping horns," Bakos says. "But there's actually this other highway that exists. There's no traffic. I hope, in listening through the album, it can open up more people to that free-flowing highway."
That supportive energy can be felt throughout Never Walk Alone, which bursts with sonic positivity. "Higher" features sunny synths and jovial string flourishes, while the Afro house-influenced "Self Love" oozes with warm choral harmonies and soaring soul vocals. Bakos also adds layers of electronic and lyrical tension to the latter track, symbolizing the difficulties of building true self-love: "And I try to fit myself into the mold/But that don't leave me any room to grow/I guess I'm one of a kind/Hope someday I can find (Oh, self love, self love)."
While Bakos pours intention into her music, her supportive efforts go much further. She is helping rid the music industry of single-use plastics with her non-profit Bye Bye Plastic. Through the org, Bakos has organized beach clean-ups, created a plastic-free vinyl for Never Walk Alone, and launched Zero Plastic Club, a coalition of 24 clubs in France that pledged to cut down on single-use plastics.
Bakos has created space for virtual connection through her label/event series/Twitch community Abracadabra. She launched the Twitch channel during the pandemic but, unlike many of her colleagues, continued to host the space after events reopened. Today, her channel continues to run hers and it still has programming seven days a week.
"I’m a visionary. I just want the world to be in balance and for everyone to live their best life. How do we make that happen? Then I leave these seeds and create mini movements. But then the community has to let it live on. I come in and add gas to the fire, then I'm on to the next thing," Bakos says.
Read on to learn about how Bakos balances her time between these movements, connects with her audience around the world, and continues to make real change for the environment through innovative activities.
You’re releasing Never Walk Alone on vinyl made of used cooking oil. How did that come about?
Bye Bye Plastic is all about helping festivals get rid of single-use plastics. But what if we could actually come up with a plastic-free vinyl that actually sounds good and is in the circular loop of nature? We started R&Ding with Camille, my co-founder. We were playing around with some bacteria-based materials. We found a company in the UK, Evolution Music, and we asked them, "Hey, can you make a bacteria-based vinyl for us?"
It's been a three-year process to make this bacteria-based vinyl because you have to actually flush out the entire vinyl factory of the fossil fuel material so that [the pressing process is] truly bacteria-based. We only get slots a couple of times a year to do our R&D.
I don't have our bacteria-based vinyl yet, but my fans are asking me for vinyl, but I can't just print on a regular vinyl. It doesn't fit my ethos. So we did some research, and we found this company that does it out of used cooking oil. That's the circular loop in nature, more or less.
This work ethic emphasizes the fact that you’re actually making change rather than greenwashing like many organizations in the music industry and beyond.
I'm not a good liar. I always got in trouble in school for being honest and not thinking before I spoke, but I didn't have bad intentions with that. It's just who I am as an individual.
People greenwash because of a lack of education. You think you're doing something good, but you're not. You could replace a can or a plastic cup with a compostable cup. But then you just throw it out. If the person doesn't understand what to do with a compostable cup — get it into the circular loop of nature and the waste management part of it — then it's greenwashing. That's where we come in.
You’re a new mother. How has having a child affected your perspective on saving the environment and creating music?
There are 24 hours in a day, and when you have a kid, you don't have time for everything that you used to. But the beautiful thing is that you figure it out. Time is an illusion, so you restructure your life so you can still get everything done.
Then the good thing about having a family is that you weed out what's not important anymore, and you find more efficient ways to do things, which is an awesome exercise. I want to be present with my family. These years are the most important, and being connected with your family in this day and age is the most important thing to set them off on the right foot.
With Bye Bye Plastic, for instance, we figured out how to get to our goals faster, and I go through those exercises with everything I'm doing.
What are some of your methods for reaching goals faster?
We could take more action by seeing how movements are created. You only need a rallying cry, and then you need to get people around it; people who are passionate about that rallying cry. Then those people make the movement happen versus us as Bye Bye Plastic gathering people.
For instance, in France, instead of going to each club and saying, "Hey, we can help you go plastic-free," we reached out to 24 clubs and started the "Zero Plastic Club." So we had one big voice together. That voice resonated a lot further. A lot more people wanted to get involved.
Why did you keep your label, Abracadabra, running on Twitch after most professional DJs left the platform when live events returned following the pandemic?
The community. We got lucky. We got a pretty big partnership with Twitch during COVID. We produced all those festivals with Snoop Dogg, Aloe Blacc, and John Legend. And again, the DMs. The community. The chat on the side. People were loving it.
That energy lived on even past COVID. We grew a really tight-knit community on Twitch [who] travel all around the U.S. together. They all come to the events, and a lot of them are single, and they're meeting people. Community members run the Twitch now. I show up a couple of times a year. This is for them. Abracadabra was so needed at the time. They're dedicated to it.
Abracadabra’s Twitch account is now a space for people from all over the world to join in your ethos of how to live your best life.
I'm also seeing how I can connect [these projects] together so it becomes a bigger one. You have the environmental stuff, which is bringing the festival industry back into balance. You don't want to be stomping on plastic in the middle of the jungle at a festival. That's not balance.
During COVID, people were not happy. People were lonely. We created [Abracadabra on Twitch] so the music brought people together. People feel connectivity and inclusiveness. Twitch is pretty segmented until we have an Abracadabra event, so I'm trying to figure out where we can live so that we're all communicating all the time. That's how you can create more movements because they're talking all day.
Even beyond your touring schedule, you do a lot of traveling. How does that influence your multidisciplinary career?
Every single city has a different culture. When you start to absorb and learn about 100 different cultures, you realize that we're all just the same person going through the same stuff. I'm all about how I can connect with the person without using words.
If I'm traveling, I always like to go on a deep dive into [the city’s] history of music or songs they grew up with so I can get that connection point right away on the dance floor. I make edits, and I'll play it in the first few songs, and then we have a baseline connection, and I can pretty much go in any direction.
I try to figure out how I can talk to that person on the dance floor without knowing them. How can we break the ice without me playing songs I think they're going to want to hear, or that I want to hear at the festival? So, in terms of playing gigs. That's how I open up the conversation, and then afterwards we follow up in DMs.
That kind of flow is what inspired the album. I want to be there for everyone. But I just don't have the time to be. I want the music to give that same inspiration and support system.