“Empowered” is the word that comes to mind, repeatedly, when Bea Miller discusses the process behind chapter 2: red, the second installment in the color-coded releasestracing the 18-year-old singer/songwriter’s growth as an artist and a young woman.
Red follows chapter 1: blue, unveiled in February, which evoked “the sadness you feel when there’s somebody in your life who you have to let go of,” says Miller, who plans to compile all three chapters plus three additional songs to form her sophomore album due in the fall after the release of chapter 3: yellowthis summer. Red represents “the very important next step.I wrote the songs on red in that period of time where I was ready to pick myself up, brush myself off and start again.”
The first single, the chiming, propulsive “Buy Me Diamonds,” “is very sarcastic,” notes Miller. “I was thinking of this previous relationship, and at that point it was, ‘How dare you try to come back into my life after how you made me feel about myself? After we already decided not to be around each other anymore, because we bring each other down?’ So the sarcasm stemmed from anger. But anger can be very empowering – I think it can be used to create something amazing.”
Miller co-wrote “Buy Me Diamonds” with frequent collaborators and close friends IdoZmishlany and Steph Jones. “I had written with Steph in Los Angeles and Ido in New York, so to bring them together and all work in the same room was magical.” The song’s title popped up by surprise late one afternoon, in a minimart across the street from Zmishlany’s home studio: “We were hungry after working all day, and we went to get snacks. Steph went to pay for mine, and I was like, ‘No, you don’t have to do that, Steph.’ And she said, ‘Save your money – buy me diamonds!’ And I thought, ooh, that’s a cool idea for a lyric. So we went back upstairs and told Ido, who thought it could be a title. It took us about 30 minutes to write the song after that.”
The spacious and sultry but haunted “Like That” was also “empowered by anger,” Miller says, as reflected in the song’s defiant refrain: “When ya treat me like that / It’s pushin’ me harder / When you’re breaking my back / I only get stronger.”
“I was feeling abandoned the day I wrote it,” Miller says of “Like That” -- and not just by the person who inspired “Diamonds.” As most of her fans know, “I had kind of a falling out with one of my family members. And on that day, while I was trying to get over this other previous relationship and move on, I received an email from the personthat I don’t speak to anymore, ripping me apart…Two people in my life who were supposed to be lifting me up were tearing me down, and I was experiencing that on one day.”
Miller’s mood was more buoyant when she crafted Red’s third song, the ambient, aptly titled “Warmer.” “I wrote it as I was learning to accept that I needed to move on,” she says. “And as I was realizing that I’d be better off by myself, finding my own happiness,” a strange and lovely thing happened: “I started to notice this other person – someone who had been in my life for a long time, as a friend; and I thought, ‘Oh, maybe there’s something here.’ We were spending a lot of time together, and I think we had similar feelings, but we never really talked about it.”
Miller doesn’t say more about this ongoing evolution – yet – but stresses, “I don’t think it’s that this new person helped me to move on. I think I figured out that I can get by on my own, and that’s when I noticed. This person added to that, that sense of feeling better, you know? I’m still figuring out where we’re at, but I know that my life is better.”
Her journey of self-discovery will continue on chapter 3: yellow, due in August. “I’m still experiencing what I felt when I wrote ‘Warmer,’” Miller says. One of the dozens of songs she’s written thus far has been confirmed for yellow,“but at this point the other slots are still open. Because I’m not there yet. I want to make sure these songs are all really, truthfully about things that are happening in that moment.”Stay tuned.
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042017