Rina Sawayama on Her Upcoming Album and Queer Representation in the Music Industry for ELLE Magazine

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For ELLE’s June/July 2022 Women in Music issue, ELLE profiled singer/songwriter Rina Sawayama about her life as a gamer turned pop star. Rina discussed navigating her newfound fame through the pandemic, collaborating with artists like Lady Gaga, queer representation in the music industry, and her upcoming album, Hold the Girl, out September 2^nd.

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Before Rina Sawayama was a pop star, she was a gamer. With her hands on a controller, clambering around a virtual world, she could get out of her head and “be that character for the 50 hours or whatever the game’s going to take.” Video games were also a huge influence on her songwriting (and not just because she samples the Final Fantasy theme song on “Snakeskin,” the final track on her debut studio album, 2020’s Sawayama): “For me, everything’s about stories. A good video game is a great story,” she says, adding that whenever she puts pen to paper, she asks herself: “Who’s the main character, who’s the side character, what’s going on around them? Who’s going to listen to this, and what are they going to feel?”

On how her statement and fans fighting for her following not being considered for the prestigious Mercury Prize, awarded to the best UK album released by a British or Irish artist, because applicants are required to have a UK or Irish passport, helped change the rules for fellow immigrant artists: “My team reached out and was like, ‘Hey, can you just change this, because Rina’s lived here for 25 years?’” she recalls. The request was denied. Sawayama was disappointed, but didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. “I’m not really a callout culture kind of person,” she says. But then the nominations came out, “and there were articles about the fact that I wasn’t nominated, and people didn’t know why. I was like, ‘Okay, maybe I’ll do something.’” Addressing the situation on Twitter and in interviews “kind of made me cringe a little bit because I was like, ‘Is anyone going to care?’”… As a result of her statement and her fans agitating for her to be included, the rules were changed last year, and a fellow immigrant artist, the Trinidad-born rapper Berwyn, has since been nominated. “If I could just help in this tiny way to break down some barrier, then it was definitely worth fighting for,” she says now.

On queer representation in the music industry: “I grew up with songs about heterosexual love, and I don’t negate them. I think there’s a place for them. Most of the world is heterosexual; it’s not a big deal. But my best friends and my chosen family and I are queer, and they are not hearing the songs that best represent them.”  

On her quest to produce meaningful, unifying work ahead of her next studio album: “That’s something that I’ve really amped up for this [next] record and I will continue to do. If I can heal someone around me or someone that I don’t know with the songs I write, and I’ve been given the opportunity to do so, why wouldn’t I take it? There are so many songs out there in the world, it kind of turns into noise, and I just want to do meaningful work,” she says. After all, “as we saw from the last two years, we might die at any moment.”

On the rise of transphobia in the UK and her commitment to spreading joy: “There’s been a big shift towards transphobia. And it’s just like, I cannot believe that trans people are the scapegoat now. It feels like at one point, it was immigrants, now its trans people… It has real life consequences,” she adds, pointing to the higher suicide rates among the trans population. “I don’t have confidence that I can change legislation, but if I provide music that makes people feel happier, that’s what I want to do.”  

On working on her second album, still in isolation, and worrying that she wasn’t getting enough lived experience to draw from: “What was I doing? I’m not meeting new people. I felt like I couldn’t offer the best record or songs, but luckily, I always believe in collaboration, and I’m very open about the fact that I collaborate with various people. Without them, I don’t think I could produce records, because I’m not the sort of person that can sit there and write a song on the guitar.”

Photographed by: Nathaniel Goldberg
Styled by: Alex White
Written by: Véronique Hyland

[Photo Credit: Nathaniel Goldberg/Courtesy of ELLE Magazine]

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