Rivusa AUgust: Musa writes an album about Riven AU
“I’ve always been an escapist. I don’t always do well with intensity. This was the first time I embraced the overabundance,” Musa says about the album. At 18 years old, the Empath may be young but she has felt every single emotion under the sun. “It’s really strange how that overabundance became a comforting thing.”
OVERabundance is a statement before it is an album. It encourages the complexity of being Musa previously avoided. She is no longer running from her power. Rather, she’s leaning into it. “This album was something of a personal reckoning. I wrote it about the beauty of having this emotional capacity that I’ve been gifted with, but I don’t think I realised that I was writing an album about love until it was complete.”
“mid-October / Intro”
“I wrote this song as a last minute addition to the album. The recording is directly from my phone. It’s just me and my guitar and my boyfriend’s sleepy sighs in the background. To me, mid-October is about the indescribable feeling that accompanies being really glad someone exists and that they exist in your life. It’s a rare thing and it’s beautiful.”
“I Shouldn’t”
“I never know what to say about this song,” Musa laughed nervously, “which is ridiculous since I’ve been promoting it for months.” I Shouldn’t was released as the lead single from OVERabundance. “It’s sexy and flirtatious. It’s a song about hidden desire and the thrill of the chase. It has these really sensual, heavy drums that drive the beat. It’s an excellent dancing song without being a dance song, which is what I love about it. It has all these pop elements mixed with a sultry R&B vibe. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever created.”
“The Clearing”
“I wrote this song about being in the most dangerous place but still feeling safe somehow. I thought I was being literal but then Helia, who I wrote the song with - he’s a genius and his words are poetry, - pointed out that that’s what vulnerability is. It’s dangerous but you allow yourself to be vulnerable because you feel safe enough to be, whether that is with a lover or a friend, or even just by yourself. I was metaphorically in a clearing, no barriers to protect me, and it should’ve been terrifying but I knew I was safe with my person.”
“Overabundance”
“‘Overabundance’ was one of those songs that we wrote and knew right away that it would be the title track. It’s all about the rush of feeling absolutely everything. I felt it all in one person. The song has the big energy, lots of reverb and echo to create a large atmosphere for it too live in. I wanted it to feel larger than life. The lyric ‘I’m no longer afraid of the overabundance. Honey, it feels like you,’ summarises what the song and the album are about. When I wrote that, which was pretty late in the game, I knew the album just came together.”
“Wither Into the Truth”
“This is about the first encounter I had with my boyfriend. It’s so funny because it was brief and all I remember feeling was annoyance but I still managed to write the longest song on the album about it. It’s a personal one for sure. It’s basically about unpredictability and the way we take strangers and make homes out of them and in the moment you meet, you have no idea how much that one person will come to mean to you.”
“Green”
“‘Green’ is a song about feelings that are green; envy and jealousy; healing and approval; peace and safety. The green eyes I reference in the song can be taken to mean actual green eyes or eyes that emote or evoke all these green emotions. The song itself is super eccentric and the instrumentation is very experimental for this one. It builds to this crescendo that you don’t find release from. It just flows straight into the Interlude.”
“Chaos Interlude”
“The Interlude was the most fun I’ve ever had in the studio. I didn’t have to worry about my vocal delivery or if I was hitting the right notes. It was pure, unadulterated chaos. We were grabbing whatever inspired us, crashing around the room and into drum sets, creating all these mismatched melodies. The process of making the Interlude was so creative. It’s the most creative I’ve ever been. I got to replicate how someone sounds when they feel everything, all at once, all the time.”
“Smokeshow”
“This was the first song I wrote for the album. It was that very first instance of overabundance that comes from intense attraction. I think there's something very sexy about subtlety and this whole song is subtle; from the tempo to the baseline, and I got to really explore my lower register. It has a lot of smokey sounds and tension and word play. I think of this song as the foreplay to ‘I Shouldn’t’ but there’s no rush to it.”
“Fight Club”
“I go to Alfea, let’s just leave it at that.” the singer laughs. “No, I’m joking. ‘Fight Club’ is all rage and anger. We went from a generation that had never seen a single Burned One to the frontlines of war. It’s very do or die. There’s a lot of aggression and high energy in this song. I listen to this song while I do my fight training.”
“Unconscious Mind”
“Oh fuck. This song is hard to talk about,” Musa’s voice shakes as she makes the statement. “I wrote this song from the perspective of someone very close to me about a time when they had been mind controlled. It’s a very traumatic experience. I wrote, recorded, and produced this song by entirely myself. I was very protective of it and I wasn’t going to place it on the album, but the person I wrote it about encouraged me to do so.”
“The Summer After Eighteen”
“I think Helia and I wrote this in the August after I turned 18. It’s a beautiful ballad about being young and in love. Helia wrote this absolutely melting poem, it’s called ‘Floral Arrangement’, that really inspired me. It’s about all these pieces of your lover coming together to create something beautiful. ‘The Summer After Eighteen’ takes that idea and tells a story, my story, out of it. It celebrates the beauty of young love because who cares that we don’t know anything about what love really is, it’s still real to us. We realised later that while love is an overarching theme throughout the album, this is the only love song on [‘OVERabundance’].”
“Symphony / Outro”
“I have played the flute forever. I think my earliest memory has me playing a flute in it. So it was so much fun for me to play again with a full orchestra. ‘Symphony’ sort of picks up, sonically, from where ‘The Summer After Eighteen’ leaves us. It’s similar to the Interlude in the sense that there is a lot of chaotic energy to it but this time, it’s directed. It’s me untangling a web of emotion. The lyricism is very minimal on this one but I think that makes it more impactful. The song is about making a symphony out of someone’s chaos and disorder and making art of them when they only feel overwhelmed by all that they are feeling. It’s about a specific instance but it’s also about my whole life. I chose this as the last song on the album because I think it captures the way I’ve come to embrace the overabundance.”
