“My friend Alexander 23 is a very talented musical artist. It’s such a love language in general between me and all my community where you share songs with each other, it’s truly the joy of my fucking life. We were driving around in my car and I was playing him what I listen to and he went, ‘I really think you would like this song.’

“It always sends a chill up my spine when someone does that, because everybody’s always wrong, right? And they always send me something that I have absolutely no interest in and I have to be like ‘Ah yeah, that’s fine…’ but when he played me this, my jaw was on the floor. The top was down, the sun was shining, and I was ready to pull over. I was like, ‘Wow, we have to run away and get married.’

“This was so accurate, and I’ve never loved a song more immediately than “Hello Hello Hello”, it’s crazy. Remi Wolf is one of my favourite artists at the moment. I honestly can’t overstate this song, the sound of this song sonically, I don’t know how they do it. I’m so obsessed. It’s going to be the song I’m buried to, that I’m married to, it’s everything, this song is everything.”

“I listen to a lot of rock music. Everyone always tells me that the music I’ve released is so different, everybody says ‘I love that you don’t have a sound’. I think that’s a compliment (laughs), but it’s because what I listen to is so varied. I would never want to tie myself to a specific sound. I listen to everything. That’s my number one thing. I become a DJ on set, I bring my speakers with me everywhere I go and if I don’t have them everybody’s like ‘Hey, where’s the music?’ I’m always bumping tunes. I’m a psycho, it’s a problem almost, one of those weird things. Do I even have an identity outside of music?!

“I found this song on a road trip I went on in January with my best friend. Her name is Veronica, and we went to Seattle and listened to all the classics. We were listening to Led Zeppelin and she asked me, ‘Hey, do you know Greta Van Fleet?’, and I say this with so much love and respect, but I thought, ‘Here is basically Led Zeppelin!’ And when she turned it on, I swear to God, I always know I’m going to like a song when my body turns into atoms and it liquidates, and I sink into a pile of nothing.

“There’s nothing that can make me feel like this except “Renegade” by Styx and “Highway Tune”. It’s the same thing. I have a little convertible that I got in LA when I was really wanting to feel like myself again in the breakup. And I know it's so crazy, but when I’m in LA and I put the top down and I’m blasting this so loud, its physically painful. It can get me out of any mood. This is the cure.”

“Cailin is actually a friend of mine that I’ve known for a long time. There’s always a bit of a stretch to that term when you’re in the public eye. ‘Friend’ could mean a million things; it could mean you’ve known them for a decade or you’ve met them once. Cailin is somebody who I do know. I remember when she was first starting out and first playing me her stuff. She’s always been so incredible, but this one really resonates with me. This one and “Pink Sand”, those are my two favourites of hers.

“All the songs on this list have one thing in common, which is that they are so self-aware. They are all very tongue in cheek and almost all of them are told through a lens of a sense of humour. There’s a lightness and a cheekiness and a fizzle pop to every single one of these songs, even though they are all so different. That’s who I am as well and that’s why I resonate with them, so this one is no exception.

“I mean, the lyrics ‘Baby take me, don’t hesitate / With a girl like me you’ve got to activate / I’m a tidal wave coming through your grave / I wanna do bad things with you.’ Come on! That is the sexiest collection of lyrics. I’m in such a transitional time right now. I’m dating and that’s exactly what this song is. “I want to be your best friend, I want to go on adventures, I want to do bad things with you, I want to be your partner in crime…”

“It’s that feeling, like ‘We’re going on this grand adventure and it doesn’t have to be serious’. It’s so light-hearted and maybe you’re falling in love a little bit when you’re listening to it. I love the idea that love is not what we’ve been told it is, it’s not saccharine, where you have to hit everybody over the head with it. Maybe it’s ‘With a girl like me you’ve gotta activate / I wanna do bad things with you.’ Maybe it’s that, you know? I think she does such a good job of having these conversational, commonplace lyrics but making them so grand and sexy and real and lived in.”

“This is another Alexander 23 pick, I have to give him his credit! I’m a huge fan of SOFI TUKKER. You know when you’re getting to know somebody and you’re playing them all the things that made you who you are? I was playing him their Treehouse album. I think I was playing “Best Friend” or “Batshit”, which are two of my favourite songs - also “Fuck They” is a really good one - and he said, ‘Have you heard “Purple Hat?” I feel like it’s going to be your new favourite song.’

“Again, I was ‘OK, play it for me, but I’m not going to like it, you’re going to be wrong.’ I’ve learned to think that he’s never going to be wrong again, because he is such a talented musician. His ear is crazy and his ability to hear what other people like and then deliver it, I’m so impressed.

“When I first heard this song I melted into a pile of nothing onto the floor of my car. And another thing I’ll never get sick of is the pitched down - and this is not a technical term, but I will never stop calling it this - “monster voice”. I hear it in so many songs! When you pitch a voice down so low that it becomes creature-esque. Oh my God, there’s nothing better.

“When I’m at the studio, there’s somthing that I always want that my producers always roll their eyes at like, ‘We can’t put this in every fucking song’ but I’m like ‘Can we?!’ I always want a vocoder. I always want to hear my voice layered in 10 different ways, because I think it’s so sonically overwhelming. That Imogen Heap remix, “Whatcha Say” by Jason Derulo, changed the game for me in terms of the music I wanted to create - and that’s a vocoder for anybody who’s reading this that doesn’t know what that means. Ever since I heard that I’ve been wanting to put a vocoder in fucking everything, but I’ve come to accept that I can’t do that (laughs).

“When this track comes in ‘I’ve got purple hat / Cheetah print / Dancing on the people,’ Oh my God. And when the beat comes in? Forget it, I’m dead! Even that lyric ‘Everybody in the booth / Can’t tell myself apart from you / Now that we’re dancing people’, that’s such a good lyric. It fucking blows my mind, because it describes that feeling when you’re in a crowd and searching for that feeling, that high. It’s like ‘Woah where do I end and where do you begin?’ That’s so sexy, you know? It's such a good song.”

“I hope that this song helps people colour the narratives of their breakup in a more broad strokes way. I used this song like a medicine to help me transition from one part of the breakup to the next, when I felt like I didn’t know how to. I was banging my head against the wall; I was calling everybody, I couldn’t leave Canada, no one could come and see me and I was fully isolated.

“The break-up (with fellow Disney alumni, Thomas Doherty) was such a fucking surprise. It hit me like a bus and I was reeling, trying to process something that I thought was never ever going to happen. I was on track to marry this person and then it came out of absolutely nowhere and my brain just couldn’t deal with it, it just wasn’t computing. I was going over everything in my head and I felt crazy, I felt brainless. I was speaking to my best friend, saying the same 20 things over and over again, looking for a soft place to land and not finding anything.

“Finally, I thought ‘You know what? I need to put this away. I may not get any answers. I may not get the closure that I want. I need to define this for myself, because if I just sit around with a big question mark over this, I am going to lose my mind. I will never move on, I will never heal.’ So I decided to write a song that put that chapter behind me.

“Breakups are so complex. I keep saying, ‘Love is simple, relationships are complex and songs are three minutes long.’ Of course, I’m not gonna fit my entire experience of what happened into “LazyBaby”, but I also needed to feel comfortable with people releasing it. I needed to be able to say my peace and walk away from this, put a big stamp on it, blow a kiss and walk away.

“LazyBaby” was my statement to myself, my way of saying that I’m going to survive this, “Promised you would fuck up my life / Why my kitty still got nine? / You said you'd have me seeing stars / Boy, you got me sleepy eyed.” It was a goodbye. I had to do that, and I feel good about it. I really feel it helped me and I hope it helps my fans to do the same thing. Sometimes we have to define things for ourselves and put up a boundary and walk away. It was my little form of therapy.

“I’ve never said this before, but it’s like when you write in your diary and sometimes the diary entry is ‘What happened? Where did it all go wrong? Why am I broken?’ And then the next one’s like, ‘You know what? Fuck this shit, I am that bitch! I’m gonna go drink my fucking coffee, I’m gonna get right and tight. Here’s the plan, I am sent down from the heavens and I am my own life partner and I walk away!’ That’s “LazyBaby.” It’s that conversation you have in the mirror like, ‘You know what bitch? You’ve got this, game over. Try and remember who you are and walk away.’ And that’s what it is.”

"LazyBaby" is out now