As she releases the third and final of her Summer singles, the Iranian Swedish-born musician talks finding her artistic identity, cinematic soul, and the three life-changing lessons she learned from her mentor, Prince.
“The word is “free”. That’s a good starting point for anyone.”
It’s also the word that keeps surfacing during my call with Snoh Aalegra, who has just released two out of three Summer singles to a loyal fanbase of over 4.9 million monthly listeners (on Spotify alone). It’s the first time we’ve heard Snoh’s soulful croon since she dropped her 2021 album Temporary Highs In The Violet Skies, and the singles feel like a refreshing relief from the two-year drought. Each of the songs are united by a vision of hazy summers that have long since faded into scraps of precious memory. On Be My Summer, the Iranian Swedish-born artist sings of a love that dares her to tread into the dangerous unknown, while Sweet Tea is a dreamy ode to a lover that sounds like the afterglow of a garden after a fresh Summer shower. The final single, Wait A Little Longer, which releases after our conversation, brings the trio full circle sonically and thematically, as Aalegra laments lost love over a gentle piano melody. “I’m not a very cryptic songwriter, I put it all in the songs, it’s very naked.” She says. “I get quite shy about breaking them down, but I can tell you that the reason why I wanted to release them right now is that ultimately they felt like long summer nights, the warm sun, the cool summer breeze something about the sounds of the songs made me want to put them out in the summer. I just wanted to share them, you know?” The singles have been accompanied by small visual snippets shot on grainy 8mm that hammers home the idea of Summer as a time capsule for wayfaring memories. “I’m drawn to anything that feels nostalgic—that’s the magic of music to me, and I listen to music with nostalgia in mind. I associate that emotion with warmth. I love Super 8 because it can bring any format to life. It’s so rich, it’s so lush. I’m a texture junkie for sure, when it comes to music, clothing, film.”
The news that there’s no album imminent might come as a disappointment to fans of Snoh (don’t worry too much, she assures me that she’s in the studio constantly), but her lack of regard for a typical rollout is more a sign of the singer-songwriter’s strong artistic integrity and sense of self than anything. It makes these three singles more resonant, to consider them the result of the artist’s need to share their work, as opposed to a contractual obligation. Although it exudes from her in abundance now, Snoh’s confidence in her own output isn’t something that always came naturally. Having signed to Sony Music Sweden at an early age and later Universal Music Sweden, Snoh spent many years in the music industry feeling short of her own potential. It wasn’t until she released her Don’t Explain EP in 2016, as part of legendary producer No I.D.’s ARTium Recordings, that she truly found artistic clarity. “I really dived in creatively to make that project. I met myself, I met my voice, I met my purpose. I feel like, anything before that, I was just a fetus in the womb. I was being created, I wasn’t really choosing to create. With that project I felt like I was using everything I got to create what I was meant to do and really be in control.”
Don’t Explain was my first entry-point to Snoh’s music, and many graveyard shifts spent with her discography in rotation have led me to believe in the project as an overlooked classic. Inspired by the Old-Hollywood melodramas, it feels like a concept album at heart; the soundtrack to a movie that doesn’t exist. “It was a passion project”, Snoh says. “But I didn’t have a movie to work off of, so I turned to my own life, and created from my own experiences. My life became a movie in my head, told like a dramatic 50s picture.” Snoh’s name for Don’t Explain’s hybrid of movie-magic and classic soul stylings is cinematic soul, and the album more than lives up to its ambitious premise, full of lush orchestral instrumentation and jazzy vocals that will make you wonder why Aalegra hasn’t been offered a Bond theme yet. As a child, Snoh was captivated by grand scores from great composers like John Williams, James Horner, Hanz Zimmer, and James Newton Howard, and it’s from those influences, coupled with a love for Jazz greats Billie Holiday, Nina Simone and Quincy Jones, that the album was conceived. “Those scores always unlocked something in me. They were always full of such rewarding melancholy. Mediums of storytelling are all very connected to me. I see and hear music and film as one thing. I loved tapping into that on Don’t Explain, but I feel like I haven’t tapped into my full potential in that area yet. I have passion projects on my list and things I wanna do in life before it’s all said and done. I would love to write music for film.”
As Snoh tells it, Prince gave her three life-changing gifts. The first, she says, was validation. “He verbalised to me what my instincts were already telling me. He recognised me as an artist before my art existed, at least in the form that I consider the most true to myself. He saw that potential in me. He heard my voice. He encouraged me to make music that I love and not to fall for the pressures of the industry.”
The second: discipline. “He showed me, in person, by example, what work ethic looks like. He was always working. When I met him, he had a whole female band called 3RDEYEGIRL, who were really cool, and they’d rehearse for 3-4 hours a day. He was always trying to get better…even though he was Prince. [laughs]”
Prince having an all female backing band isn’t shocking: the legendary artist was known in his later years to champion female artists and take them under his wing long before they were to find mainstream success. He mentored Chicago native Eryn Allen Kane, as well as Janelle Monae, whose artistry has the Prince stamp all over, and though Snoh only had the privilege of knowing the rockstar in the last three years of his life, she soaked up all the advice she could during their friendship together, even if they didn’t get off to the smoothest start. “It started when he first reached out to my label.” She tells me, recalling her first brush with the iconic musician. “They called me and were like “Prince is trying to get a hold of you, can we give him your number or email?” And I was like “Yo. You can give him my blood type, this is Prince. [laughs]. And he called me one day, and was just being Prince. Super mysterious. Super mystic. Super cool. And he tells me he loves my voice.”
Two days later, Snoh found herself on a plane to Mineappolis, where she would meet Prince at his home-recording studio Paisley Park. “One person in his team picks me up—I get in the car, and he just looks very concerned. He’s like ‘hey….Prince kind of has this dress code at the studio. Do you have other pants?” The year is 2014, she tells me, and the fashion was…different back then. “It was like this Saint Laurent distressed jeans and leather jacket era. So I was wearing distressed jeans, black ones. His guy is like “yeah…he’s not gonna like that…”
Cherish Brooke Hill. Hair by Kameron Gordon. Exclusively for A Rabbit’s Foot.
Nevertheless, the car pulls up to the Paisley driveway, and the first thing Snoh says she glimpses as she approaches is a grand art-piece of Prince’s eyes overlooking the park, like T.J. Eckleburg gazing over the Valley of Ashes in Gatsby. “I’m shaking at this point. His people tell me he’s ready for me, and I start to walk up the stairs, and, as I’m walking, I see him at the top of the stairs. He’s standing there with a diamond covered sceptre, very majestic, and not blinking. I don’t know if these are stairs to heaven or to hell, but all I know is that Prince is standing at the top of them. The first thing I say to him is ‘hi’. And the first thing he says to me is not ‘hi.’ The first thing he says to me is: What happened to your jeans? You think that’s cool? I said “Yeah, I made these holes myself” and he looks me up and down and says “I can tell.”It’s a moment not many can say they’ve experienced; to find themselves at the receiving end of the famous Prince side-eye, and Snoh seems to wear the dressing down as a badge of honour. It’s Prince, after all, can you blame her? “He got over it, and we started talking about music, and we started this incredible friendship. I was his student and he was my teacher.But that was the third gift…he banned me from wearing distressed denim”, she laughs. “I don’t wear distressed jeans to this day, but I might bring it back one day.”
Fashion faux-pas aside, It’s a testament to Snoh’s talent and range that arguably some of the greatest musicians of all time have hailed her as one of the promising artists of the new age. Just last year Janet Jackson was spotted singing and dancing in the rafters of Aalegra’s show at London’s Brixton Academy, later appearing outside of her dressing room to give Snoh her flowers in person. “She stayed for the whole show, in the crowd, recording me with her phone. Then she was the first person I saw standing outside my dressing room when I was done. I don’t usually get starstruck, but she’s one of the legends I got nervous meeting. I just froze when I saw her. She was the sweetest soul, so kind and humble. We hung out that weekend and we went to a birthday party together. We still stay in touch every now and then.”
Snoh’s influences stretch far and wide, though it always feels natural to hear them in her music, even as she wears them on her sleeve. A hint of a MJ vocal inflection here, a smoky Sade hum there. A true student of the game, as a child she devoured everything from Èdith Piaf and Shirley Bassey—jazz greats her mother would play at every opportunity—, to Swedish pop producers Max Martin and Denniz Pop—picked up during her time growing up in Stockholm—and the MTV icons of her generation. Growing older, she started studying her idols’ idols. Her love for Whitney led her to Aretha Franklin, while her obsession with Michael and Prince triggered deep dives into James Brown and Sly and The Family Stone. Listen to any track from Don’t Explain to Ugh, Those Feels Again to Temporary Highs In The Violet Skies to these latest three singles, and you’ll be able to spot a clear musical heritage that stretches back decades, but never feels dated. “The beauty of being a student of music is that you always have the opportunity to keep digging, keep learning. For me, those artists made the ultimate pierce-through-your-soul music. And there’s a reason why there’s only a few greats. It’s a combination of incredible musicality meeting incredible vocals meeting incredible lyricism and that combo is a slap in the face. And that’s what I grew up on. When you consume something so much, inevitably it becomes a part of you.”
Cherish Brooke Hill. Hair by Kameron Gordon. Exclusively for A Rabbit’s Foot.
The music runs deeper than just standing on the shoulders of giants though—it’s in the blood. I mention a lyric I caught while listening to Be My Summer, in which Snoh compares the span and nature of her relationship with the often-overlooked intimacy of building a home: naked walls at my place when you met me / now they’re dressed up with my mama’s poetry. “My mum writes beautiful poetry in Farsi.” She explains. “She’s very gifted. And there’s an Iranian artist that’s based in the United States, who did an art piece of one of her poems, which I keep on my walls. When I met this person, I had just moved into my apartment, I didn’t have anything on my walls, but as time passed they were stained with memories, with life. When you walk into my hallway, the first thing you see is my mom’s poetry.”
Discussing the various DNA that make up her artistry, and diving into old projects like Don’t Explain and Feels, I find that Snoh has inherited the same perfectionism as the musical giants that came before her, and before I know it, I’m defending her own music to her, citing tracks like Under The Influence as timeless moments in her oeuvre. But Snoh is intent on looking forward. “I feel like I get better with each project. When I revisit my old work I’m just like…yo, why do I sound like this? I get embarrassed by those recordings, because I feel like I keep going beyond my own perception of what my potential is.”
I ask what the key was to the revitalisation she experienced between There Will Be Sunshine, the first project she dropped as Snoh Aalegra (and a sound almost unrecognisable to what we would hear only a few years later), and the Don’t Explain EP, and beyond.
“The word is ‘free”, she replies. “That’s a good starting point for anyone.”
