Blogtober artist Michelle O Faith releases Hans Zimmer-inspired “Birthday Blues”

This year’s winner of the Women Make Music award, the classically trained singer deals in love, loss, and an echoing melancholy Lana Del Rey could only dream of.

“I wrote “Birthday Blues” about my birthday this year,” O Faith explains. “It's a song about time - and the overwhelming, all-consuming feeling that there is never enough of it! I recall, in the run-up to my birthday, growing increasingly ill-at-ease. I had reached this startling, quite sudden realisation that - of all things in my life - time was the one thing I couldn't control, and the foundation both terrified and debilitated me. "I'm friends with everyone," I thought. "I pride myself on being a good person. But if I have one enemy, it's Time." And, I had started to capitalise it in my head - "Time" with a capital "T". It just felt like the thing had a life of its own.

“My birthday itself was a funny one. For the first time, I didn't organise anything special. Merely went out the evening before, bought some Bailey's, and spent the entire night and following day finishing off the bottle, at home - a melancholic celebration of one. It occurred to me that's how I wanted the song to sound. Morose yet uplifting; hopeful yet hopeless... like a jubilant funeral-march! I set about composing this super-militaristic, almost tribal drumbeat. Then, once the backbone was in place, I started on a string arrangement. As always, I was heavily inspired by film composer Hans Zimmer. I just knew I wanted something really cinematic.”

If you like what you hear, you can catch Michelle O Faith at this month’s #BLOGTOBER festival, curated by The Line of Best Fit. “It will be my first ever time playing with a band, so I'm both nervous and excited,” she says of the slot. “Hopefully, I'll smash it, though! I'll be playing all the songs off the new EP, and a bunch from the first, too."