“The world expects musicians — especially female musicians —to be everything to everyone,” Jen Deale told American Songwriter. “We have to be beautiful, creative geniuses, but also troubled and edgy all at the same time.”
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This phenomenon — almost akin to a musician’s equivalent of the manic pixie dream girl trope — has been deeply instilled in our collective consciousness. Just think about the fascination in pop culture over things like the 27 club. As fun as these projections onto artists can be for music fans, artists themselves are usually the ones who end up hurt. In an effort to combat this assumption, Deale and Chris Spicer — who make up the new wave duo, Camp Crush — deal with it directly on their new single “Fangirl,” which dropped on October 16.
“In the line ‘I’ll keep chasing you like I am your own shooting star/ until we both fall,’ we’re recognizing that the path laid out for creatives is to relentlessly chase our creative dreams, knowing someday it may burn us out,” Deale continued. “But with ‘Fangirl,’ we chose to turn that on its head and do it our own way by ignoring the game, having a blast and making the fun, upbeat music that’s interesting to us and brings us creative fulfillment.”
Musically, “Fangirl” effortlessly fits into the wave of ‘80s-inspired pop tunes that we’ve seen rise up throughout 2020. Maybe part of that has to do with the fact that the track was produced by Rian Lewis of Doja Cat fame. “It was a collaboration with Rian from the beginning,” Spicer said. “We would record parts and send them over, then he would mix and send them back with some recording homework. We did this kind of back and forth for a while, which removed the time restraints of the studio and allowed us to just focus on getting it right.”
For her part, Deale hopes that the song’s joy can bring listeners a little bit of light in the darkness of this pandemic. “It was so important to me to release this song now because I wrote it to bring people a moment of fun in the middle of one of the craziest years our society has ever seen,” she said. “I hope that people feel joy when they hear this song, that it picks up their day, that they stand up and dance a little. It’s something that you can pick up your hairbrush and sing in the mirror to!”
Watch the music video for “Fangirl” by Camp Crush below:
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