Alice Phoebe Lou: Our favorite songs from Orbit and Paper Castles
Written by Gabby C.
Alice Phoebe Lou, people. Remember the name, and get it right! Nope, not Phoebe Bridgers (who I love dearly, don't get me wrong), and not Phoebe Waller-Bridge either (so many famous Phoebes these days...). Alice Phoebe Lou. Alice Phoebe Lou. Alice Phoebe Lou.
Ironically, I discovered her on YouTube while listening to a Phoebe Bridgers' song. The video that got me hooked was her rendition of Lou Reed's "Take a Walk on the Wild Side" (see below... it's much better than the original, in my opinion).
After listening to both albums of Lou, what I found was a highly evolved musician. Alice Phoebe Lou's first album, Orbit, is primarily just her voice and her acoustic guitar. It sounds pretty, but none of the melodies really stood out to me. The album is good folky stuff to have in the background when you're drinking coffee. Her 2019 album, Paper Castles, on the other hand, is something that will get you out of your chair and moving.
Lou does a complete creative 180 here. Paper Castles is a one-of-a-kind jazzy, indie masterpiece. It's very funky and delicious to the ears. It's half lovey-dovey 50s slow ballad (e.g. Nostalgia, Skin Crawl) and half jazz, with Lou sometimes bopping along as if she were Esperanza Spalding (My Outside, Paper Castles).
Oh. And one more thing. Did I mention that Lou wasn't trained as a musician? Yeah, let me say that again: She wasn't trained as musician. When Lou was 19, she decided to leave her hometown of Cape Town and move to Berlin in search of adventure. She didn't have any plans in the "professional" and traditional sense. Originally, she took up fire-dancing to support herself, but gradually she found she could make more money busking. Through old fashioned trial-and-error and absorbing music tips from other performers in the community, she learned the guitar and grew in popularity.
Even with her growing success, Lou hasn't budged when it comes to doing her own thing. As Laura Steiner writes, "There's the Alice Phoebe Lou who has consistently gone against the mainstream music industry. The one who's never signed with a big label, the one who refuses to be boxed into one genre, the one who earned a loyal following by busking on the street, the one who still sometimes crashes with fans when she's on tour and money is tight."
Again, it's rare to find musicians who are so determined to do their own thing and not cave to commercial desire. I think we can expect lots of great songs from Lou in the future. Go find her on the streets of Berlin.
'A lot of people that have an alternative life like me romanticize different times. And say: I'm a hippie; I should have been born in the 60s. But if we look at where women's rights were at that time, where gay rights were, were the freedoms were, it's not the time that I would like to live in. There is an ideal romantic version of this which is nice to get inspiration from. But I think that I'm living in the most interesting time to be alive. Because there are these kinds of possibilities of especially being a woman - I mean we still got a long way to go, but I feel like I'm able to really express myself on topics about feminism and these kind of things which I wouldn't have been able to do 20,40 or 50 years ago. I really appreciate being alive right now.' -- Lou in MBHAP, 8/8/2018
Favorite Songs:
Nostalgia
Paper Castles
Something Holy
My Outside (my personal favorite)
Skin Crawl
Society
Orbit
'Alice doesn't want to be boxed into one career either. When I ask her whether she would ever consider doing anything other than making music, I expect to get a very resounding no. But instead she throws a curveball. "We're all multifaceted human beings and I don't think we're born to do one thing until we die," she says. "There is so much pressure around the capitalist idea of career-one thing and one thing only-that if we change our minds and we want to start something new from scratch it feels like a failure because we start from zero."' - Steiner, Document Journal, 8/7/2019