FEATURE: Spotlight: Allison Ponthier

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Lissyelle Laricchia for Vogue

Allison Ponthier

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FOR this Pride Month…

I will use a couple or few of the Spotlight features to shine a light on inspiring and phenomneal L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ artists. Allison Ponthier is a queer Country artist whose E.P., Faking My Own Death, was one of the best of last year. She has put out music this year, but the interviews I am quoting are from last year – and they were released around the time of E.P. coming out. Released back in August, I think Ponthier is a sensational artist who is going to be an icon. This is well-timed, as she is going to release her new E.P. on 10th June. She is releasing a track, Hollywood Forever Cemetery, but I am not sure whether the E.P. shares that title or exactly what form it will take. Lots of eyes will be on her social media channels next week. Anyway. There is no particular order for these interviews. Each teach us something about Ponthier and her wonderful E.P. NME chatted with Ponthier last August. It is interesting how her move from Texas to Brooklyn impacted her songwriting:

“You moved from Texas to Brooklyn, New York when you were 20. What was that like?

“I grew up in a town called Allen, it’s not a small town but it is a conservative town in the Bible Belt. I had grown up wanting to live in a big city, and especially in New York, because I watched all the movies and was a kid that was obsessed with showbiz and entertainment. When I finally moved here I made the decision very quickly – from the time that I decided to move and to when I actually moved was around two and a half weeks, which sounds very Manic Pixie Dream Girl of me, but I really wanted to be somewhere where I could be myself.

“I was in the closet for years by the time I had moved to New York, and I wasn’t intending to move and just live freely, but that there was a part of me that was really hopeful that I could.”

Did the move impact the music you were making?

“Definitely. When I was in Texas, I was making R&B-inspired pop music. It was me making songs over vocal loops, which was very fun and I loved making music like that, but I was really afraid to make music that was genuinely vulnerable, that was me telling my story or expressing feelings that I wasn’t familiar with.

“I hadn’t even begun to entertain the complicated feelings of coming out, or the complicated feelings of me never truly feeling like I belonged when I was growing up, and so a lot of the music I made was ‘cool music’. I made what I thought people would like to listen to at a concert and I tried to be someone I wasn’t.

“And then when it came to moving to New York, I was so alone that I didn’t have to perform for people personally, and I was really, really heartbroken over the fact that I was scared to come out. The first song I wrote about it was ‘Cowboy’, and ‘Cowboy’ was a country pop song, that kind of came out of nowhere. I grew up with country music but I really rejected it because I wanted to be a rebel, and I wanted to be different. And because of that, it was really surprising that the song that came from my heart was the song that kind of reminded me of where I grew up.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Julian Buchan

Do you still get nervous putting songs out?

“I’m nervous when I do everything, I mean, I’m a healthy level of nervous right now; but ‘Cowboy’ was especially nerve-wracking. It came out a few years after I came out, but I had never told the story of me coming out through music before. And ‘Cowboy’ is quite an alternative song so I was like: ‘Maybe not everyone will love it. Maybe not everyone can dance to it, but even if everyone can’t dance to it, I hope that a few people can cry to it and feel validated by it’.

“Some artists are artists that everyone can party to or celebrate with, and while I would love to be that, I really want to be the kind of artist that could be someone’s favourite because they relate in a unique way to my story.

“I’ve had quite a few people reach out to me and say that ‘Cowboy’ spoke to them, especially people who are also from the South like I am. I think there’s a lot of people that felt like they were the only person on Earth as a queer person. And I always say that I feel like I invented being gay and that’s why it was so lonely. I didn’t know about other gay people until I was 12 or 13-years-old. And whenever I say that other queer people laugh and be like, ‘Yeah I’ve totally felt that before’. And, in a weird way, releasing ‘Cowboy’ has kind of made me realise how silly it was that I ever thought I was alone in the first place”.

PASTE also spoke with Ponthier in August. I want to stay on the subject of the songwriter moving from Texas to New York. Even though she has adopted a new city and area of the U.S., there is still that identity and connection with Texas in her music:

“As the kid discovered her artistic voice, fun fashion sense, and—having come out—the support of a whole thriving gay community she hadn’t had back home, she remembers taking any gig she could to put her food, such as it humbly was, on the table. A talented visual artist, she drew commissioned portraits of people’s pets. She made her own jewelry. She even tried modeling for a bit, until her agent split town with all the money he owed her. “I even worked for the American Museum of Natural History for a little while, doing their Snapchat stories,” she says. “I’ve always been a creative person. That’s why a lot of the odd jobs I was doing were creative.” Once she finally got financially ahead, she began attending concerts, trying to meet as many musicians as she could. “I so desperately wanted to be a part of something, I really put myself out there, even though I was very socially anxious,” she adds.

Every performer who has starved for their craft loves to romanticize the early hardscrabble days, when there was nothing in the pantry but Top Ramen and/or peanut butter. And Ponthier is no different. Growing up in Texas, though? Not so colorful, she’s sad to report. She was extremely introverted, and expressed herself through a cavalcade of passing phases, like horse nerd, an indie-rock phase, a Zooey Deschanel 1950s-dress period, and one where she would dress up like characters from her favorite movies; she preferred the old Sunset Boulevard-era classics flickering on the TCM network, until she stumbled upon her first horror film on Halloween at 15—the Paris Hilton-starring remake of Vincent Price’s House of Wax. “It was kind of brutal, and I remember watching it and thinking, ‘I can’t believe I’ve never seen a horror movie before! This is the greatest thing on Earth!’” she says. “And now House On Haunted Hill is probably my most-watched movie of all time.” It’s the newer Dark Castle version, she clarifies; she’s preparing to delve into the original William Castle celluloid crypt.

Naturally, her surroundings could only stifle Ponthier for so long. She knew she was different, understood that she had to leave home to find her muse, and was tired of feeling like an alien, an oddball outsider. “And it wasn’t just because I was in the closet,” she says. “It was mostly because I had such a hard time making friends. I think the best thing that could have happened to me when I was younger was having proper representation for queer people—I didn’t even know what being gay was until I was 12 or 13 years old. I was really, really sheltered growing up, so moving to New York was like a culture shock.” Fortunately, a YouTube video she’d posted of her teenage self singing Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” had gotten a favorable response from some New York-based managers; she’d declined their offer then, but tracked them down in their then-mutual hometown. And as they all shared a love of vintage horror and sci-fi, it proved a perfect team-up.

Ponthier’s new handlers, now based in L.A., encouraged her to let her freak flag fly. So while she sings Texas tales of twisters, like her ballad “Tornado Country,” or her dabbling in convoluted personas while residing there in the Faking My Own Death title track, the EP proved to be a total catharsis, which ultimately led to its definitive “Cowboy” proclamation. As much as she was fitting into her new city’s scene, she still felt like a Southerner, even though she spoke with no discernible drawl. “So I was some kind of hybrid of the two,” she now understands. “And I also had never said I was Texan more in my life than when I had moved to New York—it was like the third thing out of my mouth every time that I spoke”.

Even though New York was quite liberating for Ponthier and one feels, as a queer artist, it is a more open and accepting city perhaps (compared with Allen, Texas), it must also have been nerve-racking. Faking My Own Death is an interesting title. Maybe saying goodbye to the old self and reinventing herself, one can take it a few different ways. Cosmopolitan’s interview with Allison Ponthier is particularly interesting. I have selected a few sections:

“Cosmopolitan: It’s been an incredible year for you, especially these past few months as you’ve released your EP, Faking My Own Death, and started to perform. Does it all feel surreal?

Allison Ponthier: I never thought that I would be able to do music full-time. I’ve loved music since I was a kid and I always wanted to be an artist, but I never thought that I could be. I really struggled with giving myself permission to dream big. It was so weird. I was a super-shy kid and had trouble relating to other kids and making friends. Even though I really struggled with putting myself out there, there was still a part of me that always was trying to move in the direction of being an artist.

Cosmopolitan: Many people would categorize your EP as country. What would you say your genre is?

AP: I never really think about the genre before I make something, but if I had to describe it, I would say it’s like alternative pop music that is based off of ’70s country and folk music. I grew up listening to country music because I’m from Texas and my mom also loved it. Especially that ’90s country-pop music like The Chicks or Shania Twain. And because I was a rebel, after living in Texas for so long and since there was some political connotation to country music for a long time, especially in the early 2000s, I was like, I’m better than this. I’m going to get out of this town and move to New York City. I never want to like your country music again. When I actually did move, the music that I gravitated toward, and what ultimately helped me come out when I wrote “Cowboy,” was a kind of pseudo-country song.

PHOTO CREDIT: Sarai Mari

Cosmopolitan: How does it feel going into that genre especially in a time when there’s a lot of debate about what is “real” country music, like we’ve seen with Taylor Swift, Kacey Musgraves, and Lil Nas X?

AP: This is a really, really exciting time for country music. Country originally was a really progressive genre and way more inclusive. In the early 2000s, there was this huge shift where country music became quite exclusive. But people are now viewing it as a great vehicle to tell stories. That’s what I love about it more than anything. I am really inspired by queer country artists like Brandi Carlile. I would even consider Lil Nas X a queer country artist. “Old Town Road” is a country song, so he is someone who is a country artist. Any genre should move with the times. I wouldn’t be making country music if I didn’t feel inspired by other country artists who are like me, and that’s thanks to the power of representation. It’s kind of a domino effect.

Cosmopolitan: Growing up as a shy kid, do you feel like the big reason you’re able to perform in front of so many people is because of your journey in figuring out and accepting who you are?

AP: Most of my life, I felt like I needed to make myself smaller or more digestible for a lot of people and to blend in a lot more. But I always had this hunger to stand out and be different. I really do feel like I know myself so much more now. Growing up, I wasn’t always hanging out at other people’s houses or going out. I spent a lot of time fostering my interests and hobbies, which were music and art. As an adult, now doing this EP, I take that thing that was mine, which was the way that I coped with a lot of things, and married it with this fear and dream that I’ve had, which is performing for other people”.

There is so much to unpick and dive into when it comes to Allison Ponthier. She is going to be a huge artist very soon! I am an admirer or her music and, following Faking My Own Death, I am looking ahead. Such a remarkable songwriter and performer, I will try and come and see Ponthier play if she performs in the U.K. Women in Pop interviewed Ponthier about an E.P. that, as it seemed, made her feel better and more comfortable about herself:

“I am a huge fan as well of 'Tornado Country' which ends the EP. It really is like a love letter to the past, which I think is so beautiful. There's something so incredibly warming with it that just reminds all the listeners, ‘hey, you know what, you can go through stages, but you're still going to be yourself at the end of it’. If you could describe this collection as a whole would it be like ‘this is me up to this point’?

Oh yeah. I didn't have a theme for the EP, I just was like, here are the songs I love. And then when I took a step back, especially when we wrote 'Faking My Own Death', I was like, 'Oh, I get it now'. Because they were all songs about what kind of person I wanted to be, or things that I had gone through. It's all really about identity at the end of the day. At first I was like, maybe I can just only write songs about identity, but really, that's just what was taking up space in my mind at the time. When I moved to New York, I came out and that was very difficult for me, and then when you move to a totally new place and you start over you can kind of be whoever. For me, not being around everyone that I had ever grown up around made me feel a little bit more empowered to figure out who I actually was underneath everything. 'Hell Is a Crowded Room' is about me having anxiety attacks, 'Harshest Critic' is about me being super hard on myself, 'Cowboy' is about how hard it was to come out. So they're all kind of connected in that way.

PHOTO CREDIT: Weslee Kate

As a listener, we take on your beautiful songs and that people come of age constantly. It's not just like, ‘bam, it happens when you stop being a teenager’. This thing keep happening all the time. And if you've got some music to see you through it, what better way?

Yeah, truly it feels both selfish and natural to say this, but every song that I wrote, whether or not I was doing it as a job, I would have written already. Every song I've written I've written for myself. And in a weird way, it's kind of the least selfish thing you can do, because a lot of people write songs to impress other people, or to seem cool or to prove something to people. For me, I was just like, ‘I need to write the songs that I would like to hear that would comfort me’. It's really helped my self confidence a lot. Making this project has made me feel a lot better about being myself in general.

And you've made a hell of a lot of us feel better about many situations. It's gorgeous. Not to mention, your ridiculously cinematic music videos that accompany everything you do. They are next level cool. Obviously music does more for you than just sonically, do you always see your songs when you're creating them?

Most of the time yeah. Songs that are my favourites, I always see a music video with them. It's like a vehicle for me to write good songs, picturing it like a movie. I love making the videos. I'm a huge movie fan, and I fell in love with music by watching movie musicals. It makes so much sense to me to pair music and visuals. Plus, it's so much fun. There's nothing like stepping on set and seeing a universe that you've created yourself, I'm very, very, very lucky that I am able to do that. whenever it's time to shoot music video.

You are a bit of an old soul with regards to your songwriting, but at the same time, it's so very now. And I think that comes a lot from this new generation of country music. It used to be a dirty word, and now everyone's like, actually, it's kind of cool. Everyone's admitting it now. Can you talk me through music as an influence in your childhood? And when was it that you started to create your own and put it out there?

Yeah, I love talking about this because there's a misconception that you have to be able to write songs from birth to be a good songwriter. I grew up listening to country music, my mum loves country music, and I actually didn't even know pop music existed. It was just country music and church music because I grew up singing in church. I loved country music, especially pop country like Shania Twain and Faith Hill. When I got a little bit older, I was like, ‘well, I'm a preteen, I'm a rebel, I no longer like country music, and I only like indie and alternative music’. Discovering that Pandora existed changed my life, Regina Spektor 'On The Radio' 24/7. I loved Paramore, I loved Imogen Heap, I love Fleet Foxes. It was me trying to find music that made me feel like I could be bigger and better than what my life was in that moment. But I didn't write songs, real songs, until I was 19 or 20. I was so embarrassed to write songs, I wrote one song when I was in high school, it was for a project about the Salem witch trials! My first real artist song happened when I was 19 - and it wasn't good! And it's because I was just learning. It takes time to develop your artistic voice and I didn't really know how to do that. I didn't know how to be vulnerable, I was just trying to sound cool instead of trying to really express myself and tell my story. It's really important that people know that you don't have to write songs forever to be good. It's a skill like anything else and I've been very lucky, I do a lot of co-writes with people I really love and care about and I've learned so much from them. Also on top of that, if you tell unique stories, if your voice is unique, that's the way you're supposed to tell the story, the way that's natural to you”.

I am going to wrap it up now. The stunning and mesmerically talented Allison Ponthier is an artist I am highlighting now because I feel she had a remarkable year last year. There is going to be a lot of new music for sure. Keep your eyes peeled for 10th June and the E.P. she is putting into the world! After the exceptional Faking My Own Death E.P. and the positive reviews it accrued, that will provide the confidence needed for Ponthier to take her music to the next level. I am excited about next week and what we will get. Seemingly finding new inspiration and purpose in New York, I feel the Country artist might move once more in the future. A curious and hungry young artist, few have her remarkable voice and undeniable talent. Recent singles Autopilot and Hardcore make me think Ponthier is brewing and might give us an album soon enough. Although she has collaborated with others through her career, I know there are many artists who would line up to work with her. In return, Ponthier must have a list of artists that she wants to work with! One of my favourite new artists, the future is very bright for Ponthier. If you are new to her or have only heard the odd song, then rectify that! I would urge everyone out there to follow Allison Ponthier and check out what she has released so far. It will soon become obvious why she is going to be making music…