ALI: From Barcelona to London with a Dream and a New Single

Following her previous singles "When the Summer's Back", "Hourglass" and “Lonely”, ALI returns with "Trick of the Light", a rendition of her personal journey since leaving her hometown in west Catalonia, Spain. The song is the last preview from ALI’s upcoming debut album set to release later this year. Highly influenced by artists such as LÉON and Taylor Swift, her new single is another testament of ALI’s main craft: writing mellow pop tracks with stories inspired by her everyday experiences.

After pointing out how much “Trick of the Light”’s intro sonically drew upon Swift-esque landscapes, ALI replied, "Okay, this one does sound like 1989Taylor Swift. I really love her; I'm not going to lie. So, it's obvious."

Miriam Boulos: I mean, drawing inspiration from artists is always going to be there. But it's quite interesting when we can hear it so thoroughly. Were there any other artists you were listening while crafting the song?

ALI: I really listen to a lot of music. I don't have a specific favorite artist. I do listen a lot to Post Malone. There's a song called “Chemical” that I love and that was on replay during all of this. I always say I’m gonna do rock songs but with pop sounds.

MB: Your new single “Trick of the Light” is a reminder that nothing is as it seems or as it looks. Is there a particular event in your life that triggered you to write about this?

A: My family is from Spain, I'm Spanish and I moved to London when I was 18. I've been there for five years, and there's been moments when I just don’t want to worry them. On video chat I'm like, “Oh yeah, everything is fine, and I'm okay,” and then you hang up and realize that your day was shit and I just lied to them. Somehow, I'm pretending and making it all up by telling them “Yeah my day was great how was yours” but I’m actually not lying. It’s simply that I don’t want to make them feel upset or worried about me. So, I go like, “No everything is fine,” even though I might be dying inside. It's really difficult to be away from home and there are moments that hit harder. This song is about that moment when you're just pretending everything is fine.

It’s also about and how everybody thought that I was gonna last a month in London when I moved there. I was inexperienced and everybody was like: “You’re gonna stay for a month and then you're gonna come back.” That's what the lyrics say, “They all come to see me falling”. Everybody was expecting me to fail, even myself. But I didn't have much of a plan, I just made it happen and that’s what this is about.

MB: You originally moved to London to study songwriting. Do you write all of your songs on your own?

A: To be fair, my producer Yuriy Salud and I have been writing songs since 2020. My English was a bit shit so I used to tell him, “Oh I want to write a song about this”, and I explained to him what I wanted to say in Spanish. It took maybe a year or two to be confident enough to write. So, we co-write everything. We do the songs together. He does the production, but I'm always there saying what I like and don’t. When we write the lyrics for any song, we work together on the piano. He makes the sounds and the melody and then we start writing about it and we usually write everything together. It's not just me, it's the both of us. From the lyrics to the music, we do everything together.

MB: You're releasing your next album this year. Can you give us any further details about the themes of the record perhaps?

A: So, it's all about how my life turned out since I moved away. I'm gonna split the album into parts. The first part is going to be about the expectation that I first had about how my life was going to be when I first moved to London and the second part is going to be released next year. It's going to be more about how it actually turned out, so like the reality.

Everything is still in my brain but it's gonna come out.

MB: What is something you found pretty challenging while breaking through in the screwface capital?

A: I mean it’s the way we have to do everything by ourselves, as an emerging artist. I think the music industry is really big and everybody can release songs independently like I do. We just publish our songs. I think the worst thing is that it's not just about music anymore. Now you need to have numbers on social media, and you need to be someone to be listened to by people from the industry. I personally do everything at home. I record at home. I make songs at home. We need people to help us doing publishing, for example, but it's a bit challenging because you need to have time to do all these things and be present on social media. It takes a lot of time and I'm very specific when it comes to the things that I want to publish on my Instagram. I'm really picky and that takes time, too. We're going to release an album and that needs a lot of work.

So, the challenging part is that I need more time and more people helping us. But it is what it is. I'm an independent artist and I love it. It's really good because I'm learning a lot. I had no idea about anything related to releasing songs and how royalties worked and now I know a lot and I could even help other people. So that's really fun, too.

MB: Independent artists are everything today. They put so many different hats on and I’ve heard this from quite a lot of other artists as well. It's a struggle to manage everything at once. To end on a nicer note, what is one thing you'd really like to achieve as an artist?

A: I would love to live by making music. It would be the best thing ever. I would love to sing in a huge place and hear people scream my lyrics. But for the moment, I just want to live and be stable with music.