Ahead of her return to the stage, Adore Delano talks David Cobbald through the songs that soundtracked her youth, influenced her music, and changed her life for the better
Adore Delano means business. There’s something about her that disarms any room she’s in, and she uses it, consciously or not, to her advantage.
As we talk all things Adore Delano, it’s evident that she loves her fans, she was born to be a musician, and she also does a mean Britney Spears vocal run impression. Most of all though, Delano is here for a real good time.
Alongside her appearances on numerous competition and reality shows over the last decade, Delano has consistently been releasing music and perfecting her craft. Now, a mere eight years since the release of her debut album Till Death Do Us Party, she’s on her way to the UK to tour and meet the fans that the pandemic has kept from her for what feels like too long.
“I've been writing poetry and trying to put some melodic energy into it” she says over the phone, in the hope of getting some new music created for her fans in time for the tour. Time is of the essence though, and she assures me “If it's not done in time, I have enough on my records to cover and do some covers of other songs too.”
Delano found the pandemic to be substantially eye-opening. Feeling like she was forced back to her childhood as she moved in with her mother for six weeks, she’s been re-evaluating the big things in life away from the glitz and glamour of West Hollywood. As she got closer to her family, Delano found solace in the bittersweet moments that the pandemic provided; missing out on the business of life but having the chance to take a direct look at herself and her path. “It didn't help with my social awkwardness” she laughs, “but it’s cool.”
As venues now open to full capacity, there is a noticeable excitement around her as she talks vibing out, partying up, and feeling the energy from the crowd. “The most comfortable I feel is on stage and that sounds weird,” she explains, “but like, it's my happy place.”
What’s noticeable in her Nine Songs choices is that Delano needs to intensely share the feeling of what an artist is communicating through their music. Much like her own work, there is a sense of hopeless romanticism (and not in the lovey-dovey kind of way) that flows through each of her selections. What Delano craves is the yearning and desperation from a love song, the timeless and powerful message from a classic, and the sheer loneliness from a track that her teenage self can relate to.
From the age of 12, Delano became an out and proud member of the LGBT+ community. This pivotal and formative time was also when music found its way into her life, and it pitched up a tent to stay. Each of the songs below were found around that age, and they left more than a good impression on her.
“Hands” by Jewel
BEST FIT: Tell me why this this one came first for you.
ADORE DELANO: “Well, this is Jewel in general. This was a hard one to pick. I knew I wanted to incorporate her into one of the nine because she's been such a big part of my life. I just finished reading her book as well, Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story, and it's such a beautiful story. It's very inspiring.
“I remember being around eight when the song came out, and the introduction to the song is ‘If I could tell the world just one thing / It would be that we're all OK’. Something like that speaks to an eight-year-old that was severely bullied in school, and having a singer that looked like and reminded me of my popular cousin Lilina just made me love her whole aesthetic of being this cool country folk singer.
“The melody to it, it's ‘in the end only kindness matters’ and I always wanted to go into my school years with that kind of motto. No matter how shitty people treated me or my friends, you still have to show kindness. I know that sounds hippie-dippie, but you can't really fight fire with fire when you're a kid like that. She really helped me a lot with that song.”
Were there any other Jewel songs that nearly made it or was it this one for sure?
“It was either this one or “Grateful”, which is a really beautiful one that I love, and I love “My Father's Daughter”. She's such a good writer. There's a lot of melodies that she writes that are beautiful, but “Standing Still” is one of my favourite ones as well.”
“The Hunger” by The Distillers
ADORE DELANO: “So now we're moving into my teens! I was super heavily influenced by Brody Dalle, she's one of my favourite songwriters and my favourite performers. I mean, I modelled my look after her when I was 14 - I wanted to be her! I got the pleasure to see her live at that age at The Henry Fonda Theatre here in Hollywood, and she really changed the way that I wrote music. I was in a band called Teenage Rampage in high school and we wanted to emulate her whole vibe.
“This song was a game changer in the punk community to me, because she put a ballad twist to this dark sound that she was going in. Their other albums were more street punk driven from, I think, her relationship with Tim Armstrong at the time, and she was heavily influenced by the sound of Rancid. So when she broke away into her own little window with this, because she had a lot to do with the writing process and this Coral Fang record, you can just hear her in it, and the song was a game changer for me, being a little punk kid like ‘I can do a ballad too!’
BEST FIT: She wrote the entire album didn’t she? In fact, she wrote all their albums.
“Yeah! I remember at the time Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together” was coming out. I was at Tower Records with my band and some other people that were in the punk community, and I remember they were making fun of me for buying Mariah Carey’s record alongside other punk albums. This [Distillers record] is such a good formula for somebody like me - who loves ballads and loves the grit of the punk sound. She emulated that really well.
“Instead of doing a crazy belt, she did a scream at the end of each hook and it really helped me when I was a kid. This song was very, very strong and it influenced me in my teen years from 14 to 16, but I still sing it on the car at the top of my lungs.
Would you say it still influences your writing now?
“I would say so. She writes really poetically, in a way that Courtney Love does. They're very good lyricists, so if I feel like I'm writing deep, I try to go a little deeper because of songs like this. I think if they make sense to you, they'll make sense to the people that get it, and I totally got it at the time.”
“Back to Black” by Amy Winehouse
BEST FIT: So, this is one of, if not the, peak and pinnacle of her well-known songs.
DELANO: “Again, It's just the writing. These people write so well. I remember being in high school and this came out. I was hearing it for the first time, and it was just so different. She didn't sound like she was from another country, she sounded like she was from another time. It was a timeless riff, a timeless guitar, and everything was so fucking beautiful about this record.
“This was another hard one to choose because she has such great hits, but it's just that you can hear the sadness in her voice and the way she sang. I love the rawness of the melody. I don't want to quote her, but I remember she said she missed love songs where it was like, ‘I will pull my heart out in the middle of the street and lay there and bleed for you. That's how much I love you’. She was over this whole ‘I don't need you anymore’. The desperation and the beauty of this song really spoke to my little emo heart when I was little. She’s such an amazing artist.
Mark Ronson was a producer on this one, and I think he also co-wrote it. Would you say that 60s vibe spoke to you?
“Oh, totally, he’s amazing. I think that they were a power couple in writing. That was a beautiful collaboration, and you can just hear it. I mean, it's her biggest song for a reason. It's my one of my favourite songs to perform as well, I love that song so much.”
“Nothing Compares 2 U” by Sinéad O'Connor
BEST FIT: So this came out in 1989, right?
ADORE DELANO: “The year I was born!”
I personally love anything Prince writes.
“Well first of all, we have to give Prince his flowers. Everything that he touches turns to gold. Sinéad O'Connor’s vocal, her conviction and every type of turn and twist of the song really captures you and takes you on the ride. It’s one of my favourite karaoke songs to sing, but I wouldn't dare perform it on a worldwide stage.
“It's a song that speaks to me, as you can see with ‘Back To Black’, it’s the desperation of love and letting somebody know that ‘my whole life is gonna be for you’. It's unexpected writing which Prince does really well, like with Purple Rain too.”
What do you think of the Prince version of this song?
“I mean, I do love Sinéad O'Connor’s version, but Prince kills it too. I didn't even know he wrote the song until I was in high school. I was like, ‘Oh shit, Prince wrote this? Of course he did!’”
Is there anything else by Sinéad O'Connor that that speaks to you, or is or has this always been the one?
“That's always been the one. I also love her activism. She's always against the grain and before saying ‘fuck you’ to the media was accepted, she was the pioneer of being ‘I'm that bitch’. She's a very interesting pop culture piece of art that we’re gifted in this century.”
“Purple Rain” by Prince
BEST FIT: Staying on Prince then, this is possibly one of my favourite songs ever, so I was glad to see it on your list. I recently re-watched him perform at the Super Bowl in the rain.
ADORE DELANO: “I remember growing up with this song like no other, and I covered it in one of my other bands tours. It’s just such an emotional song. Again, it’s one of the most unexpected writings of an artist and it broke a lot of the rules when it comes to developing the skeleton of the song - letting loose, and not sticking to the formula of what a song really is. He’s really good at doing that. There's a lot of songs that he touches that I say turns to gold, but this one is probably my tippity-top favourite.
“I have lots of memories of singing this in the bathroom, and my mom telling me to shut up. I love the screaming parts of his voice, they’re very unexpected, and just letting his emotions out on the line.”
Would you say his style influences you and finds its way into your writing?
“100%. Being heavily influenced with this type of music growing up helped with my musical sense and my melodic timing. I write best to guitar riffs and melodies like that, just because these are the types of songs that shaped me growing up. When you identify with that and there's something in a song that speaks to you, then it's always going to be ingrained in the process of creating your own art. I’m forever grateful for artists like that, not only that paved the way, but literally made the concrete for people to follow in penmanship.”
Who was it that introduced you to Prince?
“My Mom! She has really cool music taste. My Dad too, he has impeccable rock music taste. He’s the one who introduced me to Zeppelin and would bump Prince and Queen. I didn’t know who Queen was until my Dad would pump it in his Bug. He has this ’68 Bug and would play 70s and 80s music. I would say I get my music influence from my Dad's side more when it comes to rock music for sure."
“Love of My Life” by Queen
BEST FIT: I probably only heard this song once before I saw it on your list. So thank you for reintroducing me to it.
ADORE DELANO: “Oh my God! No way!”
Where were you when you discovered this?
“It was probably in 2003? I want to say I was 13 or 14, and it was on YouTube, looking at their old performances. The song is a little unexpected, but again, I fell in love with the melody. There's a lullaby melody to this that really draws you in and it's a hypnotising love song. Like “Back To Black”, it's not shying away from putting your pride forward and saying ‘I'm too this for that’. It's like ‘No, I love you, bring the love back to me, please don't ever take that away because the best that I'm feeling is with you’. It's a beautiful song and there's not that many of those anymore.
“The reason why I feel like Amy was from a different time was because she did the same thing where this is an actual love song. It says in the title ‘Love of My Life’, but it's a lullaby to the love of your life. I couldn't leave it out.
Artists can choose the obvious songs, like “Under Pressure”, so it’s good to see a deep cut from Queen.
“I love that you say that, because it’s like this even with Britney's songs; if you notice the songs of hers that are ballads, that are the ones that she writes, and I always love them. So you have to appreciate the full record. I don't feel like we do that anymore. I feel like we're so stuck to EPs and singles. It's always the B-sides that are going to speak to the true fans, because you know that they had some involvement in the writing process for them.
“Creep” by Radiohead
BEST FIT: So I’m going to say this one speaks to your teenage angst
ADORE DELANO: “Oh, totally dude. I came out of the closet when I was 12, and I started wearing makeup to school and living my life as a girl when I was like, 14. So when I started my ninth-grade year - the beginning of my whole high school years - I was looked at as the weirdo. I even have ‘weirdo’ tattooed on my thigh, because of this song. At that time, I wasn't even a fish out of water, it was like I was a sardine dried up. There was nothing about the people around me that spoke in any way to my relative energy - they were just like, ‘What the hell are you?’
“This song specifically, I used to listen to it in my teen years, just being like ‘Hello, it me’. Every lick of this song was me in high school, whether that was being the love interest of a bi guy that just wanted to try it out and see what I was, or me growing up into my 17/18 years, auditioning for Disney, looking at pretty carbon copies of myself and thinking ‘Oh, wow, this is not what it's gonna be. I'm not the prettiest one in the room.’ That just started a whole other insecurity. So this was a soundtrack to a lot of a lot of my life, and it still continues to be there.”
Did anything else from Radiohead ever stick out to you? This was their first release in 1992 wasn’t it?
“This was in 92? Oh man. This is the one that stuck out to me, but damn, I would’ve said 94 or 95!”
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana
BEST FIT: When I knew I was doing this interview with you, this was probably the one song I knew would be in this list.
ADORE DELANO: “This song doesn’t need any introduction. It influenced the music industry, let alone a whole new cult and a whole new way of music in general in what we thought rock music was. To say it was ahead of its time is an understatement. It singlehandedly changed rock music and brought a sound from a specific region to another part of the world. I feel like a lot of the bands in Seattle were getting recognised by LA, and I don't feel like they were wildly successful at first, with Bleach but they still kept trying and trying.
“Kurt was a smart egg, in the sense of that he saw what was missing in rock at the time and even influenced the bands that he loved growing up, with things like having a catchy hook and making it almost a pop twist, but he didn't lose the grit of that grunge sound. He introduced it like how Hole did with Celebrity Skin into the masses of Hollywood and the mainstream and made it work in pop culture. Was it Marc Jacobs that did a grunge line? All these people were fashioning themselves after this stuff. This record was a fucking phenomenon."
So when did when did this influence you in your life? When did it make you grunge?
“Ha! I listened to this when I was maybe 13 or 14, because again, I'd never put the Britney down, but she only raised me until I was about 11 or 12. When I started becoming more like, ‘…on the dark side’ in eighth grade, this was definitely one of the records that I visited a lot. Nevermind was that bitch, but also, again, I had The Distillers, and I was more of a street punk vibe, like GBH and stuff like that, but Nirvana was always the cool uncle to all these bands."
Have any of your songs released so far been specifically influenced by Nirvana?
“Well, my whole record Whatever was actually written and inspired by that entire record of Nevermind. If you listen to the lyrics of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, he says ‘Whatever, never mind’, so Nevermind was the record that they went with, and I went with Whatever. A lot of my songs like ‘Princess Cut too, I actually kind of flipped them and I wanted to be the Mexican Nirvana.
“I even moved to Seattle for a year when I wrote that. And I stayed right by where Sub Pop Records used to be, that was my apartment was. I was really living my career fantasy too hard.”
“Don't Let Me Be the Last to Know” by Britney Spears
BEST FIT: I can finally link all these songs together and it's the meaning behind it, the attitude, the vibe, that feeling?
ADORE DELANO: “Can you tell the running theme is how I’m just a hopeless romantic? You're probably going to laugh when you hear this, but I always say in interviews that Britney and Whitney taught me how to sing - no joke - and this song raised my vocal cords.
“I remember having a little karaoke machine at my neighbour's house that we would share. I would sit in his garage and I would sing this song. I remember one of his uncle's listened and was like, ‘What the hell?’, and he called my mom and said, ‘Your son can actually sing like her’. However no, it's just because she taught me how to think with this song, I'm not kidding. A lot of people would make fun of her vocals, but I would even copy her style and how she would hold the microphone on stage.
“This is a hard copy of how I could manipulate my vocals into sounding a certain way. I remember on American Idol they were like, ‘You have a built-in auto-tune box within your in your runs’. And I'd say, ‘I got that from Britney!’. I knew how to control my jaw as opposed to my throat and stomach, so I kind of have a cruise control of my voice.”
Can you believe that one of the writers is Shania Twain?
“Oh my god, I actually can. From this moment.”
Okay so they are your Nine Songs! I've noticed that it tends to be around the time you were 13 or 14 that they really started to influence you. What was it about that that age that really pushed you into your love of music, and how has it grown and developed since?
“That's a really good observation, because I came out when I was 12 and I started doing singing competitions when I was 13 here in Hollywood – my mom would drive me out here. I wanted to separate myself. I wore makeup and crop tops when I was 13, so my mom would say ‘You have to own that, and if you're gonna be who you are at a young age, then you have to recognise what's special about you, and not hide it. That’s going to separate you from other people’. So I always try to have my own sense of musical influence and use that as an advantage.
“I love every type of music, even if I can't understand it in another language. You have to just go in there balls to the wall. My mom would say ‘It’s okay if you like Mariah Carey and it's okay if you like Brody Dalle, that's fine. That’s what makes you, you’. That's why I would say Britney and Whitney taught me how to sing, but Courtney Love gave me my style.”
I think it's important to get stuff from all over the place, so you're being more than just a carbon copy of someone else in your music.
“That’s why it’s there! Grab it while it’s there.”
After ten years of listening to these songs, did they influence you consistently or was there a period when your taste changed?
“No. It’s forever evolving with the music industry now. I love the Billie Eilish’s and the Doja Cats of the world of course, but these songs are always going to be in my veins. My life is just so heavily influenced by music.
“I literally started crying the other day, because I live by Sunset and the last Tower Records here was still there when they filmed Pam and Tommy, and after they filmed that show they bulldozed it. Just the other day, I was going to the store to get like some juice or whatever, and it's right across the street on Sunset. I literally started crying because I remember going there with my dad when I was a baby and I'm like, ‘Dude, there's no more Tower Records like that. It's stuff like that.
“It was always an escape for me when I was bullied, or when I was going through stuff. I’d turn to writing or I’d turn to listening to the heartbreaks of other people, and I'd be like, ‘You too? Wow!’
Adore Delano's Party Your World tour starts in the UK on August 30
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