Mexico City-born, Los Angeles-raised Andrea Bejar has just released her debut album In Bloom. The album is a dreamy, ethereal musical diary that tells the singer-songwriter’s coming-of-age story through layered vocals and tender lyrics. Ahead of the album’s release, Local Wolves had the opportunity to chat with Andrea about how she fell in love with music, her journey as an artist, and her upcoming tour with Juanes.

I wanted to start talking about your recent single, “Wild Woman.” It feels like such a beautiful love letter to femininity. Is there anything in particular that inspired that song for you? 

I’ve always wanted to write a song about women. I have a lot of women in my life that I’m really inspired by. I also feel like women have a really strong connection to the earth and nature around us; I just wanted to celebrate the best parts of being a woman and our deeper connection to [nature].

Do you have any specific women in your life that you feel really inspire you and embody the feeling of the song for you?

Yeah, my grandma. I’ve always had a really, really strong connection with her and a lot of the songs on the album are about her. [laughs] 

She’s always inspired me to be a better person. I always try to be a little bit more like her, which I think inherently makes me just a little bit better.

The “Wild Woman” music video is also so stunning. How involved are you in your music video process? And how do you tend to visualize your music?

Thanks! Yeah, I love that video. It’s one of my favorite videos for sure. [The shoot] was literally just five women, five of my really close friends. We went to Cumberland Island in Georgia. It’s this national park, a 17-mile island, so we were definitely in over our heads carrying all of our gear in a little wagon. But it was just such an awesome time.

I worked really closely with Summer [Schantz], the director of the video. We’ve worked together for a while now and I feel like she really understands my vision and makes it ten million times better.

The way that [we] work best is kind of just having a rough plan [with] a specific location in mind. That happened with “Delicately.” We just drove up four hours from LA into Kernville, this tiny, tiny town, and we stopped and were like, let’s get out here and let’s shoot. That freedom lets us express ourselves a little bit better. It feels more spontaneous, which I feel also translates into [our] videos. 

When I’m writing a song, I immediately have a vision for what I want it to look like. I’ve always said that there’s two parts to a song and two parts to an artist. One of them is the music and the lyrics and the other part is the visuals. I’m a very, very visual person and I’ve always been really drawn to music videos in general. So for me, it kind of completes the project.

I feel like your music has a similar vibe to your videos, very dreamy and floaty. I would really like to hear about how you found your own unique sound. Did it just come to you or is it something that you explored and defined intentionally?

At the beginning, it was a little more exploring and being intentional with what I wanted things to sound like. When I first started making music, Billie Eilish was my top artist, so I wanted to make music like her. It was like all pretty much just MIDI and stuff on the computer. 

Now, I want to sound as raw and natural as possible. Whatever we end up putting in the song needs to come from an instrument. “Despierto” was the first time that I wrote a song on the guitar. It felt way more authentic than the other music that I was making [at the time].

After I honed in on that type of music, I started taking from more of my inspirations, mostly Natalia Lafourcade. I love her, I’m inspired by her all of the time. Fleetwood Mac is another band that I’m super, super inspired by. At the end of the first year that I was really starting to write songs, I said that I wanted to bridge the gap between Latin folk boleros and 70s folk rock.

That’s been my goal for a while. Slowly, I just stopped thinking about it so much. I just let the songs be. I’m very clear about what I like and what I don’t like. Working with the people that I’ve been working with has been really, really helpful in just getting the sound that I’ve always dreamed of.

With “Wild Woman,” I was really hearing the folk rock, Fleetwood Mac type influences there—

Hey! [laughs]

—Again, I really love that song.

Thank you so much.

I’m wondering how you fell in love with music for the first time?

I’ve always been surrounded by music. My grandpa on my dad’s side had built this really awesome house in Mexico, more just a piece of land that he started building onto more and more and more. In one of the little houses on this piece of land, he had a music room. He had a lot of siblings, and they would all get together once a week and play their favorite pieces of classical music. I grew up [experiencing] that whenever I went to Mexico in the summer.

My parents also really love music. There was always music playing in the house and, when I was little, I was always telling my parents that I wanted to give them a performance. My sister would sometimes sing and I would dance, or we would sing together. Just the typical, “Mom, Dad, we have a show for you!” on a random Wednesday night. [laughs]

I had really, really bad ADHD when I was younger. When I was doing all the tests, they told my mom that piano lessons [would] help. So she put me in some piano lessons. I did it for a year, I hated it. And then I went to another teacher in that same music program, [where] I had my first singing lesson, when I was 12.

This music teacher, César, became a mentor of mine. It was a safe place for me to go weekly and talk about the things that were going on in my life and the music that I was listening to. 

My sister had a huge influence on the stuff I listened to, too. She’s my older sister, [so] anything that my sister loved, I loved. [laughs] I was listening to Daughter and the whole folk movement like Of Monsters and Men and The Lumineers. She also showed me the first Natalia Lafourcade song that I ever heard, which was “Para Qué Sufrir.” 

I’d like to hear about your songwriting process, how you take a song from concept to final track. I was wondering if you could use the song “Don’t Hurt Him” as an example, walking me through your process.

Yeah, so I wrote that song in Mexico. It was the first time that I was writing in Mexico with another Mexican artist. And it was the first time that me and Arath [Herce] met. We might have spent like the first 45 minutes just chatting. That’s usually how the songwriting process goes, the first hour is like a therapy session, and then you can get to writing. [laughs] 

I usually come in with songs that I’ve been listening to or songs that have been inspiring me. And then I have a notes tab on my phone that is just full of quotes from books or random thoughts. It’s a brain dump of inspiration. I remember I had “Only Over You” by Fleetwood Mac as inspiration for that songwriting day.

[Arath] sat down, started playing some things [on the piano]. In my notes tab [was] this random thought that I had. I think it just said “don’t hurt him, don’t let a good man down.” I was thinking about the concept of being with someone but feeling like it’s not right. Questioning yourself and being like, why don’t I like this person as much as I should? Just being with someone that maybe doesn’t feel right, but you just don’t want to hurt this person because you also love them.

I was also inspired by some of the stories that my mom had told me about her life before she met my dad. My mom’s stories, my grandma’s stories. It was an easy song to write. Sometimes it takes really long to start something, sometimes it just clicks. And this was one of the times where it just clicked. It was a really good day. 

Did any of your songs on In Bloom give you a harder time to put together?

Yeah. “Tell Me I’m Beautiful” was a really hard song to write.

I had a quote from [Betty by Tiffany McDaniel] that I really liked, and I wanted to dig deeper into what it meant. It’s something along the lines of the daughter talking about her mom as a face that mirrors miss when she’s not in the presence of them. And also, “She was my mother and I was her daughter. I realized that we did not look so different after all. I suppose for too long that relationship had raged like a war.” I was really inspired by that, but didn’t know where to go from there.

And then we started talking about the expectations of being a woman and how perfect you have to be all the time, while also being afraid. I think there’s a lot of pressure for women to stay young and beautiful forever. The older that you get as a woman in this society, the less desirable you get, or the more invisible you get, too. 

But I don’t see my mom, grandma, or sister that way. Whenever I see a new wrinkle or sunspot, I just see it as a part of them, the years that they’ve lived, how many times they’ve laughed, and how wonderful their life has been. I just wanted to write about that, and how it’s so easy to see that for someone else but [not] in yourself.

I was talking about my mom in particular, she points out her [eye] bags a lot. I was like, I’ve never looked at [her] and said, oh my god, her bags look crazy right now. I just look at my mom and I’m like, you are so beautiful. And then Jake [Fine]—he’s my producer, but also writes with me—was just like, why don’t we just start with that? Finding bags around my eyes. And then the rest of the song came a bit easier. 

I really appreciate you sharing that, it’s nice to hear that this is the kind of sentiment that this song was born from. Other than books, where else do you find your inspiration? 

I take a lot of quotes from my grandma, just random things that she says. [laughs]

I have a dog, so I go on a lot of walks, and sometimes street signs are an inspiration. Sometimes I’ll be on social media and a poem will come up and I’ll take that. I’ve been more gravitated towards art recently. I went to a couple museums by myself [in Barcelona] and was really inspired by a lot of the things that I saw. It was the first time that I [left] a museum and was like, holy shit, I have so much to write and think about. So that was really awesome. And I’m sad that it took this long, but I’m grateful that I got there.

What museum was it?

It was the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, the national museum in Barcelona.

There was this painting, a woman that initially looked kind of provocative. Her hand was somewhere [near] her chest and she was wearing a corset. But then she had one hand on a book and she was writing something. When the painting was painted, it wasn’t usual for women to read or be literate. So it was cool because initially, you kind of gravitate towards her chest but then it’s actually just a “fuck you” to the expectations that men put on women. And I was really, really inspired by that one.

So you were recently announced to be opening for Juanes, an artist that you’ve been listening to pretty much your entire life. What are you most looking forward to with this tour?

I am so excited to play the songs that I’ve been working on for a really long time. A tour is a really special place to connect with the audience that you’ve already built. Whenever I can, I want to be at the merch booth and just get to know the people that connect to my music.

And honestly, I’m so excited to see his shows. Juanes has been someone that I’ve listened to, like you said, for my entire life, and I have never seen him live.

Wow.

I’m just gonna be in the crowd with everyone else, singing all of the songs. I am so, so, so excited.

I’m so excited for you. Do you have any particularly memorable experiences with fans or people who have listened to your music?

Yeah, a couple. There was this one day in New York, maybe like last month. And a girl told me that her mom passed away a couple of years ago and that she listened to “Marigolds” and felt really connected to that song. She had been listening to me a lot since then. I started tearing up. I feel like those moments are always really, really special.

There was [also] a girl that [made] these felt flowers and bracelets for me and my band and my photographer. And it was just like the sweetest thing. That’s why I love meeting people. It’s a really special bond that you get to make with the people that listen to your music.

My last question for you is about the title of your debut album, In Bloom. Could you speak a little bit about how you came to that title and what it means to you?

I always said that this was a coming of age album.

There are so many things that I was scared about writing and are now some of my favorite songs on the album, “Tell Me I’m Beautiful” being one of them. I feel like I wrote music that finally felt like me, which is what I always wanted out of my debut album. It felt like I was coming into my own person. I wanted people to listen to it and be like, oh, okay, I feel like I know her, this is Andrea. 

I’ve always been really inspired by flowers. I have at least two [song titles] that are flowers. When I was talking to my team about the album, they [thought] it would be cool to kind of associate flowers with every song. I [didn’t] know how I [felt] about it. Then my manager was like, you’re wearing flowers on your shirt, and there is a flower in this presentation. And I realized so many flowers have just been coincidentally in so much of my cover art and weaved in with my songs. So it kind of just made a lot of sense.

I feel like In Bloom really encompasses the coming of age side of things. And also just—I look around my house now and see so many flowers around me that I never really noticed. And it was just kind of perfect. 

Words: Uma Snow

Photography: Liana Glennon

BTS Photo & Video: Amy MyAn

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