{"id":348,"date":"2024-12-04T18:35:04","date_gmt":"2024-12-04T19:35:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierohair.com\/?p=348"},"modified":"2024-12-13T13:42:18","modified_gmt":"2024-12-13T13:42:18","slug":"working-out-the-knots-with-bishop-briggs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierohair.com\/index.php\/2024\/12\/04\/working-out-the-knots-with-bishop-briggs\/","title":{"rendered":"Working Out the Knots With Bishop Briggs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img src=\"https:\/\/assets.rebelmouse.io\/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy81NTEyODM5MC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTc0OTU2NzEzNX0.hfVwkrM0SK--rEn2FvyAQ553ExerS0v3F-OX0RjLV9E\/img.jpg?width=2000&amp;height=1334&amp;coordinates=0%2C0%2C0%2C0\" \/><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s early November in Los Angeles, and <em><em>PAPER <\/em><\/em>has plans to meet up with singer-songwriter <a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/bishopbriggs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bishop Briggs<\/a> at a local karaoke bar. The unconventional interview backdrop makes sense. The now LA-based vocalist got her start singing in karaoke bars in Japan as a kid, long before her massive hit \u201cRiver\u201d took over the airwaves, becoming a commercial success and taking the top 10 spot on multiple Billboard charts.<\/p>\n<p>But \u2014 much like our plans that day \u2014 after achieving industry fame, Briggs\u2019 trajectory shifted. Her first full-length album release in five years, <em><em>Tell My Therapist I\u2019m Fine,<\/em><\/em> details those staggering changes, from the birth of her son to the tragic death of her sister, who was also her manager and best friend. The raw journey doesn\u2019t wade in despair, however, but takes on the whole breadth of human emotion, from the glittery, pop song \u201cGood For Me,\u201d where she questions her longing for stardom, to \u201cMona Lisa On A Mattress\u201d where she details the lethal impact of a situationship. There&#8217;s also \u201cIsolated Love,\u201d a track that features Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker and slowly builds and crashes, an encapsulation of the music she shared with her sister as well as the heartbreak of losing her.<\/p>\n<p><span><\/span>After listening to the album and scoping out its themes, it didn&#8217;t come as a surprise that Briggs would want to spend our interview doing something a bit more \u201chealing\u201d than karaoke. We planned to get foot massages instead, but when we walked into the parlor for our chat and the kind lady at the front gave us an upsell, we nodded in agreement, noting that it felt like the perfect way to work out the album and maybe a few knots. <\/p>\n<p>So, ahead of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bishopbriggs.com\/tour\/#\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><u>her tour kicking off<\/u><\/a> in March and following her live rendition of The Rolling Stones\u2019 \u201cPaint It Black\u201d at this year\u2019s Macy\u2019s Thanksgiving Day Parade, <em><em>PAPER<\/em><\/em> got couples massages with Briggs at a tiny LA strip mall and talked about healing, battling depression and the cathartic process of creating <em><em>Tell My Therapist I\u2019m Fine. <\/em><\/em><\/p>\n<h3><\/h3>\n<p><span class=\"rm-shortcode\" data-rm-shortcode-id=\"313ae70cd66e305a674b6e5cc42c65fa\" style=\"padding-top:56.25%\"><br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Bishop Briggs - Mona Lisa On A Mattress (Official Video)\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/OvtD5JFuhMs?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><\/h3>\n<p><\/p>\n<p><strong>What headspace were you in going into the studio for <\/strong><em><strong><em>Tell My Therapist I\u2019m Fine? <\/em><\/strong><\/em><strong>Heading back in after five years would must&#8217;ve been a daunting task.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The first song was written before lockdown, and it was called \u201cIsolated Love.\u201d That\u2019s the one with Travis Barker, which is insane. I remember leaving that session because it was so much fun to sing in that way, with a different vocal style and totally different instrumentation. I was like, \u201cI&#8217;m so excited. This is gonna be for another artist!\u201d It was just unlike anything I&#8217;d ever done before. Right at that time, my sister had been diagnosed [with ovarian cancer], so I got to play it for her and see her reaction. Consciously or subconsciously, I was chasing that the rest of the time I was making the album. You know? Like, \u201cHow does this compare to the music she showed me?\u201d That was really the beginning. But also, the joy and beauty of creating is that you don\u2019t realize you\u2019re making a body of work until it starts coming.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Was there an \u201caha\u201d moment in the studio where you could feel that it was going to be a cohesive collection and a theme and not just one-off songs?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s a song on the album called \u201cI\u2019m Not A Machine.\u201d I wrote that after watching the <em><em>Barbie <\/em><\/em>movie. I know it\u2019s classified as a comedy but it felt very real and was more of a horror film in some ways for me. That was the main theme that I realized, \u201cOkay, I want to have an album, have a body of work that really talks about girlhood and all that comes with it.\u201d There can be a lightness to that, but there&#8217;s also so much heaviness. I feel like when I&#8217;m talking to women, we all carry these similar stories. Then it became this goal of making sure I write more about those themes. Like in the song, \u201cShut It Off,\u201d where I was talking about the men in the music industry and trying to just talk to my 22-year-old self. <\/p>\n<p><strong>Speaking of \u201cShut It Off,\u201d what was the experience you were sharing? What was it like for you as a young woman trying to navigate the music industry?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I realized what I was experiencing wasn&#8217;t okay and it wasn&#8217;t normal, and so I shifted everyone I was working with that wasn&#8217;t a feminist. When you&#8217;re in that situation, when you are constantly told that you have no power, and then you realize that you have the ability to fire people \u2026 it&#8217;s important. What I inevitably realized was, \u201cYou&#8217;re just promoting those people to young artists that potentially like your music.\u201d It made a huge difference.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The process of making this album, did it feel cathartic? Did it feel challenging? What was the overall energy of pulling this together?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Cathartic is a good word to describe it. I was writing all these sad songs and I was like, \u201cWhere is my sister? These represent her and I don&#8217;t feel any closer to her.\u201d I felt farther away. So then once I found this sort of itch that I needed to scratch, I felt like I got to connect with her again. That felt really healing and it was in the way that she existed in the world. She was a huge music lover. We were kind of raised as twins hence the closeness.<\/p>\n<h3><\/h3>\n<p><img alt=\"\" class=\"rm-shortcode\" data-rm-shortcode-id=\"faa324203e142351234ceb57ff98f238\" data-rm-shortcode-name=\"rebelmouse-image\" id=\"d1045\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/pierohair.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/img-55.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<h3><\/h3>\n<p><\/p>\n<p><strong>If you\u2019re comfortable talking about her I\u2019d love to know more about those formative experiences.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>She set up my first YouTube account and was the first person to ever encourage me to pursue music. I would come to visit her in LA and we would drive through Mulholland Drive and she would play me Portugal The Man or Local Natives. She just was a connoisseur of all things music. When we were much younger, any sort of memory of those bands like Good Charlotte and Panic at the Disco were really encapsulated with all the posters on her walls and crazily, I\u2019ve been managed by Good Charlotte\u2019s same management company. And as you can imagine, we just freaked out. Something I&#8217;m noticing with artist friends of mine is that they\u2019re doing things for your younger self. In a lot of ways you&#8217;re trying to heal those parts of your younger self that maybe have not yet healed, and there could be so much joy in that, which is why I love being a mom too, because I feel like I get to redo things in a different way than what my parents did.<\/p>\n<p><strong>How has becoming a mom transformed your life and what you&#8217;re creating? Also, how you navigate and exist in the world?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s the biggest gift. I didn\u2019t really see a future for myself after my sister passed away. I had a lot of work to do on myself before entertaining the idea of having a baby. Not everything stuck. I did EDMR, equestrian therapy and art therapy, but the biggest thing that changed my life was self-care and [medication]. I wasn\u2019t on a high dose but even just the placebo effect \u2014 I was choosing to live. We don\u2019t get a choice in that ultimately, with health and everything, but I was actively trying to. Because I really had the dream of being a mom one day. I dreamt of that with my sister, that we would raise our kids together. It was hard to have that dream again, but that made the biggest shift.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve since come off the antidepressant. But someone once described it to me as a leg injury. You&#8217;re wearing a cast, and you can practice the movement of what it would be like to build up that muscle and sometimes you have the ability to take the cast off but that&#8217;s not the same for everyone. It&#8217;s literally a deficiency in your brain at that time. That&#8217;s what depression is. That&#8217;s what anxiety is. It shows up on a brain scan. That&#8217;s why these things exist.<\/p>\n<h3><\/h3>\n<p><\/p>\n<p><strong>You\u2019ve clearly made this album for yourself but also for your those close to you. For fans, though, what do you hope they hear when they listen to <\/strong><em><strong><em>Tell My Therapist I\u2019m Fine? <\/em><\/strong><\/em><strong>What message do you want to leave them with?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>For people to feel less alone by hearing the music. That&#8217;s what music has been for me. When I felt the most alone, I heard Adele singing about heartache and I\u2019m like, \u201cOh, she\u2019s going through this too. It\u2019s not just me.\u201d I think it&#8217;s really common when you are going through any sort of difficult time, whether big or small, it feels as though the world is collapsing in on you and you&#8217;re completely alone in it. So I think the biggest takeaway that I want people to have is to feel empowered to use their voice and to know that they&#8217;re not they&#8217;re not alone in it. <\/p>\n<h3><\/h3>\n<p><\/p>\n<p><em>Photography: Nick Walker<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It\u2019s early November in Los Angeles, and PAPER has plans to meet up with singer-songwriter Bishop Briggs at a local karaoke bar. The unconventional interview backdrop makes sense. The now LA-based vocalist got her start singing in karaoke bars in Japan as a kid, long before her massive hit \u201cRiver\u201d took over the airwaves, becoming&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":350,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierohair.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierohair.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierohair.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierohair.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierohair.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=348"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pierohair.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":353,"href":"https:\/\/pierohair.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348\/revisions\/353"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierohair.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierohair.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierohair.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierohair.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}