Q&A: Daya Is Redefining Her Path, Talks Returning to Music After A Lengthy Break With Her Most Honest Music Yet

Q&AMusic

Jul 11

☆ BY LANIE BRICE ☆

IF YOU TURNED ON POP RADIO IN 2016 — you’re likely already familiar with pop singer Daya. Over the course of that year, the 16-year-old from Pennsylvania skyrocketed to prominence with radio hits “Hide Away,” “Sit Still Look Pretty,” and “Don’t Let Me Down” with the Chainsmokers. Their collaboration scored Daya a Grammy Award for Best Dance Recording.

In the years that followed, though, Daya largely took a step back from music and used that space to live life like a regular young adult, fall in love, and publicly come out as bisexual, as well as re-evaluate the way she wanted to create music.

Making her full return to music with her 2021 EP, The Difference, Daya set a new precedent of sharing much more personal songs and started experimenting with her approach to music creation. Tracks like “Montana” are a foray into writing acoustically without the production leading the way, breaking the mold laid out at the start of her career.

These lessons carried over into her latest release, “Love When You’re Gone,” and the EP that will follow later this year. No longer the guarded 16-year-old who entered the music industry wide-eyed but unsure, Daya has grown into an artist open to experimenting with new sounds, stumbling into unfamiliar life experiences, and sharing what she’s learned with confidence.

Read below to learn more about her journey so far and what she’s been up to during her time away from music.

LUNA: Prior to going to the LA writers camp, where you wrote your first single, “Hide Away,” you’d learned quite a few instruments and studied songwriting. You were clearly on a musical path, but what made you take a substantial leap into the industry at such a young age?

DAYA: I was 16. I was a junior in high school, and I feel like that's the point where you're faced with the decision of figuring out what you're gonna do when you're older. You're thinking about college and stuff like that. I had been playing shows around my hometown — small gigs — and writing some stuff on my own. I went to some songwriting camps so music was obviously a big part of my life. It felt like a no-brainer to take it to the next level professionally. I didn't really know what was going to come of that first trip to LA, but there was no real plan B for me. It was that or nothing, so I just went for it.

LUNA: I didn’t become an international music artist, but I did graduate high school at 15, and I’ve ended up developing a much more complex relationship with that choice as I’ve grown up. How do you think entering the “real world” so young altered your perspective on life?

DAYA: Oh, wow, that's really cool. I don't meet that many people who left school at the age that I did. In retrospect, I think it was the best idea at the time. I do think as I've gotten older, too, that I've definitely missed out on certain things, like the more traditional stages of life like college and just being messy and finding out who I am in those formative years. That's what those years are for. And for me to be launched into the public eye at 16 was really strange. It was something that I definitely wanted at the time, and I told myself I wanted it because I was a workaholic and I love music. I just wanted to get out of high school so bad. I wanted to play adult, and I just wanted to be an adult. There were some steps that I missed out on looking back retrospectively. I think there were some steps that would have been important for me to be part of — just little things.

LUNA: That was how I ended up feeling about everything. I sometimes laugh about it now. I was so desperate to become an adult and then I became an adult and I was like, what was I doing?

DAYA: In the past two or three years I'm like, okay, wait, I'm entering my early 20s. I missed my entire late teen years, and I'm not gonna get those back ever, so might as well try to recreate them now. I feel like I'm trying to age backwards.

LUNA: Your early music was very girl power–oriented and talked about collective, shared experiences, whereas your 2021 EP, The Difference, and your new single, “Love When You’re Gone,” pull from much more personal, interior stories. Is it more nerve-wracking to put out the more revealing songs? What inspired the switch in focus?

DAYA: When I was younger, I was a really private person, and I was pretty shy. It was pretty daunting for me to say things about my private life in public, let alone broadcast them to millions of people via my music. It definitely helped to have this buffer between myself and my music at the time. Not that the music wasn't personal to me, but it felt a step removed from who I am and from actual feelings that I've had.

Now I connect most with artists who are really vulnerable and really raw and go to the most private spots of their brain. Art is where that stuff should live, if anywhere. That encouraged me to want to dig more into my private feelings and experiences and relationships and share that because I know that, hopefully, someone will connect with them in the same way that I connect with those types of artists.

LUNA: Prior to returning to music last year, you took an extended break from the industry towards the end of your teen years and start of your twenties. Did having that time and space change your perspective on the music you release?

DAYA: It made all the difference. Honestly, if I didn't take that time off, I don't know where I would be mentally. It was a really smart move to take a step back. A lot of things were happening for me at once, and I felt very out of control of my own career. A part of me felt disconnected from a lot of the work that I put out, and I felt like I needed to take time and space as a human too and go through those developmental years. Just form experiences and go in and out of relationships and everything. I was in this really strange position, all of a sudden, that really disconnected from the real human experience.

Now, I am definitely approaching it with a lot more assurance of who I am and what I want to say and who I want to be as an artist. That was key. It would have taken me I don't even know how long to figure that out if I stayed on the same trajectory of where my career was headed before.

LUNA: On your latest single, you worked with The Gifted and you’ve also collaborated with Andrew Goldstein and Oscar Scheller for the upcoming EP. You’ve mentioned in past interviews that you often write with producers in the room, and they get involved very early on. What does a session look like for you, and how does working with producers early on influence how songs take shape?

DAYA: That was the world that I was introduced to when I was younger. When I first got into things, it was like, there's two topliners in the room, there's a producer. There's this whole team built around making the song together, and I thought it was cool. I didn't ever get to experience the other way of doing it.

Recently, I've been trying to strip things back, and especially with this song [“Love You When You’re Gone”] — it was just me and [Louis] Castle, from The Gifted, and James [Bairian] wasn't even there. It was just the two of us, and we were in his garage studio. We wrote the entire thing on acoustic guitar, and that was cool to not have the track and form the song but, rather, have the song and form the track. They finished up the track after the day we wrote it. It's just two different styles of writing, and both are good in their own ways. Lately, I have been wanting to be more classic with it and not so heavily rely on having the track day of.

LUNA: You’ve mentioned that Love When You’re Gone and the wider EP grapples with romanticizing a past relationship against the reality of what it is. I think so many of us struggle with seeing what’s clearly in front of us when we’re in love. What have you learned about reconciling romantic notions and reality through mining your experiences for the EP?

DAYA: I'm still unraveling, and it's always an ongoing process of figuring these things out. “Love You When You're Gone” was more of an exploration rather than a statement. I’m coming to terms with my attachment tendencies. It’s a very big wake up call when you get out of that and you're like, wait, how much of the relationship was me needing a safety net of another person. Also it’s exploring what it means to be separate from that person. It's not to say that that person was not a good fit because there can be really compatible relationships where there is too much dependency. It was more me being like, I need to step out and have space.

LUNA: Since you came up in the industry so young, is there a piece of advice you’d share with someone who’s 16 and going into music today?

DAYA: Honestly, every circumstance is different. When I came into it, there was no precedent to look after for the trajectory of my career because it was radio-based. And a lot of it was me as an artist trying to catch up to my song. I didn't necessarily have the following. It's hard to navigate, and it's hard when people are trying to tell you this is the only way. That's what I was told, and you just have to trust them. That's a really hard thing. I would encourage young people to listen to their gut and have someone that they trust on their team, whether it's a relative or someone who's known them for a while. That's definitely key. My parents were super on board, and I don't know how I would have survived any of that if they weren't. Have someone to really look out for your best interests and don’t just sign your life away to someone you don't really know.

LUNA: Much of your work in recent years has involved finding your own voice in the LGBTQIA community by performing US World Pride and working with the Trevor Project and GLAAD. Who are some of your favorite LGBTQIA artists?

DAYA: I really love Arlo Parks. I love her stuff so much. Her songs are super fresh, and her lyrics are so poetic and real.

LUNA: Can you tell me what exciting new things are on the horizon for you with the upcoming EP and new chapter of music?

DAYA: I'm super excited for everyone to hear the EP. It's a continuation of “Love You When You're Gone.” They are all based in the same period of time this past year. It's the most honest body of work that I've put out yet. Hopefully, tour after that, and I can't wait to be back on the road and see everyone again. It’s been almost five years since my last headlining tour, so I'm super excited for that.

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