one to watch
Berney has found success as a songwriter to stars including Mabel and Diana Ross – now, after several years and a sequence of EPs as Violet Skies, she’s released her debut album If I Saw You Again. Emma Way caught up with her.
How different is your finished debut album to how you first imagined it when you were younger? I’ve been writing since I was like 14, so I really thought it would be sooner. I definitely put out lots of music, but it never felt like a complete body of work. I thought the first thing I ever put out would be an album – but you have these strange delusions of grandeur when you’re a kid. But honestly, soni- cally and what it’s talking about is probably what I could have imagined.
It’s quite a bold choice to have such a stripped- back album as your first, I think. Lots of the people I love, Joni Mitchell, Adele, Amy Wine- house, all their first albums were very much like that. A song- writer is what I am more than anything, whether you’ve got a voice or not, my songs are the thing that I do first and fore- most – so it makes sense to me.
You were learning guitar in lockdown, right? Did you find that learning a new instrument helped write the album?
Some of the songs are quite old – Jupiter was written in 2017 – but just didn’t have a place on an EP. I had lots of the songs in demo form in 2020 and wrote a couple more that summer. My guitar scales were limited to five or six lessons I took when I was 18, so when I actually sat down to learn some proper chords, I found production was easier – I was able to take songs from demo form into finished version, because I could play an instrument suddenly. I couldn’t have done this album in the time I did it, six months probably, if I hadn’t learned guitar.
Did you record the album when you were in LA? No, I recorded some in Chepstow at my parents’ house – in lockdown I went back to Wales for a bit. But I was in LA when I was, like, stuck at the beginning of the pandemic, and made a lot of it with Micah Jasper, who’s based in LA. The production was done in Sweden, Finland and Germany, because I have a lot of international collaborators I’ve met through songwriting. We couldn’t be in the studio together, so we had to send notes back and forth over the internet.
What’s that like, writing a song online? Two songs on the album were written on Zoom – that feels weird to me. But they’re with collaborators I’ve worked with for a long time. Never Be Cool was with Charlie McClean, who I’ve known for six or seven years. She and I have written together for Léon and Diana Ross.
The other friend, Nick Kahn, I met on Zoom and have written with a lot online as well. When we wrote Love You Better, I was sitting in the living room with my guitar and it just felt like he was in the room.
Do you feel like writing for other people influences your own music?
It lets me know what I do and don’t want to do for myself. The Mabel song [God Is A Dancer, with Tiësto] – I love that, I was so pleased to watch her in the music video and singing in stadiums, but it’s not something I could sing and perform like she does. The kind of music I do best is my own.
The two things are very separate, even though I’m incredibly proud of the music I’ve made for other people. Writing my own music, for my own artistry, scratches an itch in my brain I can’t scratch when I’m writing for other people.
If I Saw You Again is out now. Info:
violetskies.komi.io
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Violet Skies Chepstow alt-pop musician Hannah
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