Banks: "I Gave Out My Telephone Number To Fans"
She’s been compared to Banks.
MTV UK spoke exclusively to the California girl about music, songwriting and connecting with fans.
“I’ve always been into music, but when I first got into writing music it was around 10 years ago and I was just in a really dark time,” Banks recalls.
She started writing, she says, because she felt “really helpless and alone.”
“I didn’t know how to talk about anything that I was feeling or who to talk to or anything,” she explains. “Somebody gave me a keyboard as a gift, just a really small one that the keys were lighter than a feather – it was like a toy.”
“And then I just started fiddling around with it and it just let out this beast in my mind that nothing else could quench – so I became addicted.”
Writing songs is a “very fluid process,” she reveals. “Sometimes writing the song helps me discover what I’m actually feeling.”
Despite the intimate nature of her tunes, she has no problem singing them in front of an audience. “There’s nothing like singing a song that means a lot to you and seeing it connect to someone right in front of your face,” says Banks passionately. “And you can feel them and taste them.”
As well as “tasting” her fans, the This Is What It Feels Like singer likes to talk to them too. But not for her the faceless anonymity of social media. “I’ve never had a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or anything and I just felt a little bit ingeniune to jump into tweeting and doing the whole social media thing,” explains Banks.
But she still wanted to connect with her audience so she did something totally unheard of for a budding superstar and gave out her telephone number.
“It seems pretty naïve saying out loud but I was like let’s put my phone number and if people connect to it they can text and call.”
Does she get any weird messages? “I don’t get any, like, really creepy, ‘you should stop this now’ ones.”
“My favourite ones are the ones where people say they felt so lonely and then they heard a song that I wrote and they realised other people have these feelings and they didn’t feel so lonely,” she smiles.
“Those are the best.”
Reporting by Karen Yossman
This article ©2014 MTV Networks Europe. All rights reserved. Any reporting on this interview (including quoting therefrom) must credit MTV News UK as the source.”
