Rina Sawayama shares a birthday with Madonna. It’s "quite a vibe," she tells GRAMMY.com over Zoom from London, noting their shared "Leo energy." Like the icon, Sawayama is vibrant, artistically fearless, a pop chameleon pre-destined for stardom. But whereas Madge celebrates her birthdays with lavish bashes in international locales, Sawayama’s ideal day is a little more low-key: an intimate gathering at home with some friends, over dinner and a movie.

Life leading up to Sawayama’s 30th birthday two years ago should have given her reason to go all out if she wanted. She had just released her debut album, SAWAYAMA, an all-acclaimed collection of songs discussing topics such as capitalism, intergenerational trauma, and making one’s own family, all over an equally wide-ranging soundboard of nu-metal, dance, pop, and R&B. An international tour had been mapped out. But a month before the album’s release, the pandemic hit. 

Stuck inside with little to do between Zoom calls, Sawayama struggled to adjust. As a result, she added more intensive therapy to her regimen to address resurfaced traumas. From those sessions, Sawayama molded her second album, Hold The Girl, which arrives Sept. 16 via Dirty Hit. 

Like its predecessor, the LP is a blender of maximalist sounds and styles, this time bridging industrial, rap-rock, and stadium-sized trance with pop, indie, and even country music. Here, Sawayama is more introspective, her rawness and vulnerability an attempt to make peace with her past. The title track is both haunting and uplifting as she vows to protect the young past-self she "left…spinning on the carousel." On the darker and more frantic "Frankenstein," she begs someone to "put me together, make me better."

Beyond its individual songs, Hold The Girl's beauty lies in its overall arc: an emotionally intense trek through stretches of sorrow and then engulfing rage to finally reach the peak of light and healing. For Sawayama, the latter part has been long overdue: "I think it was in my thirties that I truly felt this moment of relief from depression," she tells GRAMMY.com. "I was able to look at little things like leaves or trees…It was a childlike joy that I was able to feel."

Sawayama spoke with GRAMMY.com about creating Hold The Girl, an album about "holding your inner child and allowing the child to feel loved and thrive and feel pure joy — something that I felt [throughout] my entire twenties and late teens I wasn't able to do."

Since you started touring again, how did it feel being in this overlapping space where you're still performing your last album from two years ago for the first time while finalizing your new one?

It made me feel really sad because I wanted to perform it so many more times. I wanted to perform it to more audiences, to different states, even Europe. 

I feel sad because there's just no space in the next tour set to perform most of the songs. I think we're gonna pick up three or four songs. I feel a little sentimental about it but, you know, we gotta move forward.

What motivated you to start working on Hold The Girl?

I didn't want to! I was completely uninspired. But time was passing and I was having a chat with my label and my management and they're like, Look, if you work on it now, then by the time everything opens up, there'll be a new record and then there'll be momentum. And I was like, Oh, God, I dunno. I don't feel ready to move on. I think people were feeling so unmotivated in general throughout lockdown because we had no release. There was nothing to be excited for. 

I actually read, on recommendation of a songwriter friend, Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert and she talks about how you get through your creative blocks. That in conjunction with seeing artists like Charli XCX and Taylor Swift releasing lockdown albums was really inspiring because I was like, you have to think of another way. I really was digging my heels in. I just didn't want to write. I just wanted to sit at home and be sad, basically.

So how did you overcome those blocks?

When I don’t know how to do something, I always look to books to find out how to do it. And there are so many books on creative blocks. When I was really young, I read The Artist’s Way because I didn't know how to write songs. But yeah, Big Magic, I read Tunesmith, which was also a really good book. 

Listening to podcasts about creating, and just speaking with friends who are in the industry being like, "How do you feel?" And them being like, "Yeah, I feel the same way, too" was really encouraging because I didn't feel like I was being stupid by not wanting to write. It was books and just kind of necessity: I had to.

As a person who is also in therapy, since therapy plays a role in the album, listening to this album was both an arrow to the chest and a hug.

Oh, wow. That's so amazing. Thank you for saying that. That's so heartbreaking but amazing. I feel seen.

I felt seen! So I have an idea of what it means to hold the girl, but I’d really like to hear in your words what it means.

It’s addressing the things that I went through when I was a child and a teenager up until now, turning 30 and finally feeling like an adult. I have perspective towards my younger self. I felt like I had given myself away in the sense that I've done so much people-pleasing in my life. And it's led to people taking advantage of me or some really precarious situations. It really left some scars.

During therapy, what was amazing is this idea of, now that you're an adult, you're able to see your younger self as a child slightly separate from you. It's this beautiful moment where you're able to hold your inner-child and give them the love that they didn't have when you were younger, whether it was the parenting you needed, or the general support that you needed, or the friendship you needed.

That was the therapeutic process that I went through, and what I really wanted to trace narratively with this record. It starts off by being like, this is what's wrong, and then it goes into this moment of chaos, a real self-punching moment where you are letting yourself be swallowed in the chaos of it and emotional turmoil, which is like the middle of the album after forgiveness. Then it kind of ends in the euphoria.

Can you tell me about the catharsis of recording that stretch from "Holy" to "Frankenstein"? Those are screaming and crying records to me.

It was really fun. So it starts with "Holy," which — I went to a Church of England school and I think that was very impactful to me. There was a church attached to our school and we were allowed to perform there, so that was one of my first experiences with music and performance. At the same time, it was a girl's school and it was very savage. There were so many things that happened that were not okay and probably quite traumatic. I wanted it to be a crying-in-the-club kind of song. 

So it goes from that to "Your Age," on which…I can look back and think generally how badly behaved adults were and how unchecked so much behavior was when we were younger. Just thinking about the ‘90s and 2000s and the behavior that so many people were able to get away with — think about Britney Spears and what happened there, and the #MeToo movement. 

"Imagining" is this chaos. We were having so much fun with the sound and making it very industrial and very frantic — I love the idea of thrashing around in a club, which is what I used to do when I was 15. Then it ends with "Frankenstein," which is about expecting your partner or those close to you to put you back together, and realizing the only person that can do that is you.

I had so much fun doing that section of the record. I love writing pop, but I also really love the bold sounds. So in terms of sonics, there’s a marriage of those two vibes.

Exactly, you're known for mixing sounds from R&B and pop to dance and metal. With songs like "This Hell" and "Send My Love to John," you've invited country music to the party. What drew you to the genre and what made it right for this moment?

Kasey Musgraves. I didn't know about Kasey until she won Record Of The Year at the GRAMMYs. I've never heard music so pure since the Carpenters; I had never heard a voice so crystal clear. It was so to-the-point and refined in terms of the songwriting and production. I was completely enamored with that record for, like, two years. Then I went down a route of listening to country singers like Dolly Parton. I listened to Trio, which is by the band [Parton] had with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris; it's just amazing, the harmonics and just the simplicity of the songwriting. 

I think at the same time, being locked down inside the house, I had dreams of writing the record in Nashville, because at that point I'd been so obsessed with the country style of writing. I just wanted to be authentically writing with those people. And I couldn't, obviously. In my head I had this vision of wanting to be in a place that I didn't have any cultural connection to, and that’s country.

You've previously talked about challenging yourself to turn really difficult topics from your therapy sessions into pop songs. Do you view these songs as extensions of your therapy? Do they provide any closure once those experiences are immortalized into song?

It's definitely provided closure, and I'm so grateful that I get to have these two ways of dealing with my trauma, which is doing therapy and also having amazing collaborators that I get to write with and be open about my experiences — and for them not to be like, "this is heavy, this is weird." All of them were like, "Alright, let's go."

I always strongly recommend therapy. I think if we learn anything during the lockdown it’s that you have to be comfortable just sitting there with yourself. I think therapy is the first step in that.

Given that the album is so deeply personal, what would you say is your favorite or most resonating lyric on it?

I think some of the most simple ones resonate the most. "Blue sky is always there behind the rain," which is in "To Be Alive," is a common meditation mantra. The lyrics just really distill everything, all the therapeutic process and amazing quotes, into one. I also love the lyric "Flowers still look pretty when they're dying," which is the last line of the record. It's haunting at the same time as validating. I really wanted to end on that nuanced lyrical vibe.

Is it too early to ask what's next? Maybe the better question is, what are you looking forward to most once the record's out?

Having these kinds of conversations with people who really resonate with it on a very, I want to say different level, because I can tell when people resonate with it on that kind of level—when they feel seen. The great thing about therapy is that you don't feel alone when you start doing it. You realize that there are other people who feel similarly to you. I can't wait to meet my fans and chat to them about how they've resonated with the record because this one, compared to the last one, is definitely more hard-hitting. It comes from a much deeper place.

Having talks like this is definitely what I'm looking forward to, and also to be able to do that in shows through singing it back to people. That will be really amazing.

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