Rotterdam has been waiting for Mysie for a long time: the glamorous singer was booked for MOMO Festival 2020, when she was picked by The Daily Indie among their favourite acts, and she finally performed at MOMO 2022 and we had the occasion to catch up with her.

Mysie is an artist able to transpose the Personal and the Authentic into intimate indie soul songs, dividing the line between pop and experiment, using a whole range of influences. She spoke to us about composing, healing through music and her collaboration with Grammy-winning producer Fraser T. Smith.

Even if she’s very young, Mysie already has many years of experience in the music industry and talked to us about the many ways she keeps reinventing herself. In reaction to her years in drama school, she realised how important individuality and originality are, contributing to who she is today as Mysie. “I’ve got my foundation, I know who I am as an individual. If you strip that away, it is not really productive. It’s good to be vulnerable because people relate to you when you’re being yourself”. Mysie has a joyful and energetic energy, but it’s especially through dancing that she channels her serious, fierce energy into her work: this helped building a character based on her strong and mysterious nature, in the likes of Beyoncé’s alter ego.

Not only this creative force shows in her music, but Mysie is a visual learner who possesses visionary skills that inspire the music videos as well: whilst working on a song, she often imagines how the music video is going to look like. And thanks to the team she is working with, the final content is enhanced and enriched, in a smooth and clear process. It’s definitely the case for the videoclip of her single, joyride.

The song draws on her personal experiences with love and turning it into a healing, cathartic experience. “You learn a lot about yourself when you fall in love, or fall out of love. Love plays a huge part of my life, to the point where it sometimes distracts me”. But it also helps her understand other people more, and you can definitely place joyride in a moment in which she eventually lets go and heals. This is why it’s very easy for Mysie to get attached to the music she’s writing, especially the early versions of it – but she’s gotten better at detaching herself from early versions of a song as she advanced in her career.

For joyride the guitar came first, then a drum beat, and “very out-of-tune vocals” were added to a demo that Mysie listened to over and over: “the first ever thing you make is so important, because that’s coming from the gut, it’s the artist’s natural instinct.”

Interview: Bianca Raicu, Luca Dattisi
Photos: Luca Strano