Daya shares exclusive live session and discusses the joy of creative freedom

Live from her home studio singer/songwriter Daya aka Grace Tandon shares an exclusive stripped-back session as part of our Off The Road series. Started back in the spring as a response to the global pandemic, you can watch previous sessions and interviews back on our Instagram profile.

This year Tandon began a new chapter in her creative journey, releasing her first single with Sandlot Records having parted ways with Interscope. A breezy pop song, "First Time" sees Daya team up with Swedish writer SHY Martin and production duo Jack & Coke as she hits restart.

Her only solo release of the year, we hopped on Zoom to find out what's been going on behind the scenes and what to expect from the new music she hopes to share soon.

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BEST FIT: How's December treating you? What are you up to?

DAYA: At the moment, well for the past two weeks or so I've been doing Zoom sessions every day. I signed a deal in August with JKash and Sandlot Records, and I'm really happy to be working with them and basically since then we've just hit the ground running. It's a cool and freeing feeling to have after not being able to control the output and my work for so long. We're both in agreement and we both wanna put stuff out all the time, but also make sure it's good.

How are you finding working over Zoom?

I do miss the original energy and vibe that you get when you walk into a studio and you stumble across something. Everyone's like 'oh my god, that's it' and everyone freaks out. I miss that reaction, the give and take, push and pull feel because now we all mute each other and we're individually working on stuff. Someone will then send an updated version, then you're talking over each other and it's really hard to navigate sometimes. It's made me be more independently creative, here on my own. I've set up my mic and I've been recording myself and trying things out on the production side.

Is the stuff you're working on now sounding like you want it, do you feel like you're getting the same quality from the online interactions?

Yeah I think it is. I'm not really working with new people, so I've been working with people I feel comfortable with and people that I know and I can rely on. That definitely helps things because we already have a mutual understanding of things and it's easier to communicate if I don't like something or I want to go in a different direction.

"First Time" dropped in October, was this an older song or something you've made recently?

I wrote that about a year and a half ago in the summer of last year in Sweden. It was always a song I'd been sitting on and had been thinking [about] what I wanted to say with it creatively and visually. I kept coming back to it and hitting up Jack & Coke with ideas for the production, it was this constant back and forth. I don't even think of it as a single, it's just this song that's in a cool sonic world which I hadn't really experimented before, so I thought it could be something new to give fans. I'm really happy with it and think it opens the door to all the new stuff we're creating now.

Will it be part of the next project, or is it a standalone single?

Yeah it will be part of the bigger project. I think visually it's more in the world of where I want to be. My girlfriend, Clyde Munroe, directed the music video, photo shoot and lyric video for it, so it has this very consistent visual world. It was about breaking out of myself and experiencing freedom with my music and work for the first time.

How was filming everything with lockdown restrictions?

One of the good things about having a small team is that there's not a million random people on set trying to direct things or step in and give their opinion, so it was really nice. We did complete backbone crew, had tests and there were less than ten of us. It felt really safe and we also filmed up at Big Bear, which is this lake around an hour east of us. It's a popular ski destinantion, but not that many people go there in the summer, so it was really easy to find open roads and spaces where we didn't have to interact with other people.

Are you enjoying the freedom?

I love it. I get so excited by that and by people who have the same energy and same excitment. For a long time I was grasping for this sense of self and trying to figure out my identity and cut through like who am I and what do I want to say? It was hard with a lot of people telling you what to do and that's pretty common in this industry. I took a step back and quarantine helped me do that a lot.

Will the new music delve deeper into themes around identity now that you've figured some of more that out?

Definitely with my writing I've not been avoiding things that I think I've avoided before. All those songs were representative of me at the time but I never went the extra mile digging into myself and I think these songs are things I'm realising as I'm writing about them in sessions. It's a lot more candid and vulnerable.

[It's going to] continue in the same wave as "Insomnia" and "First Time", that's the precedent for the new stuff going forwards, staying in that '80s and '90s dance world. It's weird that I'm sitting hear writing about being in the club and dancing, when I'm really in my room with nowhere to go. That's what I'm drawn to most, ironically, and I think a lot of it falls into that world. There's also more vulnerable, stripped-back, acoustic, minimal production vibes too.

Do you feel more at home in the dance world or this more raw, stripped-back world?

Naturally, I feel more comfortable in the dance world because there's stuff to hide behind and it's more simplified lyrically too. There are layers to it, but sometimes it is pretty straightforward. The songs that I get a reaction from, the ones I end up crying to, are the stripped-back ones, I feel less comfortable sharing them, but ultimately they feel more rewarding.