‘Soft Power’, the opening title track of Fazerdaze‘s first album in seven years, begins with a crisis of faith: “Where’s the magic/ The light inside me fades/ I used to hold tight/ Now I let it float away.” Still, the New Zealand singer-songwriter and producer, otherwise known as Amelia Murray, holds out hope for the idea that grounds and gives the record its name, which feels tangible, even something she can embody. Following her breakout 2017 debut Morningside, Fazerdaze returned in 2022 with the Break! EP, which Murray wrote while living alone for the first time following the dissolution of an unhealthy long-term relationship with someone 20 years older than her. Though she was still reeling from a period of physical burnout, mental exhaustion, and imposter syndrome, Break! EP was a liberating effort that allowed her to stretch her sound beyond the hazy, inviting warmth of her debut into grittier, more dynamic territory. If Break! was Fazerdaze drawing a hard line in the sand, Soft Power attempts to reconcile the tenderness and vulnerability of writing through the most tumultuous time her life with the confidence and ambition of wanting it to sound as big as possible. You can hear the unrest between the luscious synths and heavier rock instrumentation, the push-and-pull between pop songs and dreamier, introspective vignettes. But you can also see the glitter in the dark, a person crafting it all on their own, just making it through.
We caught up with Fazerdaze to talk about how faith, Hilma af Klint, leaving Auckland, Jane Eyre, and more inspired Soft Power, which is out today.
Faith and spirituality
When I was younger, I didn’t have any form of spirituality or faith. I’m not religious, so the idea of getting older, the idea of death, the idea of change – I felt like I didn’t have any anchor to ground me. Everything just felt so on edge, and I was just anxious the whole time. Spirituality and faith have helped me deal with that. I think this whole record, to me, is almost like me becoming more faithful and spiritual, because I went through such a dark period while I was making it. There were times when I just didn’t have anything to look forward to or anything to hold on to, but spirituality gave me a sense of purpose and hope. I didn’t have anything in the external world going well for me, so I had to look deep into my internal world to find some light. With the album artwork, I kind of wanted it to show this spiritual, otherworldly realm.
To what extent did you realize that was something you were grasping for in the day-to-day of making the record?
I feel like I wasn’t very cognizant of that. The hardest moments were the moments when I was just fighting things and forcing things and trying to change my external world without having changed myself. It wasn’t until maybe the last fifth of making the record that I found this flow and peace and deep acceptance of what I’d been through. Even the way I was making the record, I was like, “I’m just gonna deeply accept this and embrace this and trust that this journey I’ve been on was for something, and it was always meant to be.” I think the record was so hard because I just didn’t trust things, and for me, spirituality is just really trusting that things are going to work out – to be able to imagine and trust in a better future.
Redefining power
You present the idea of redefining power for yourself as sort of antithetical to that of self-sacrifice. Did sacrificing less of yourself for others allow you to redirect some of that energy back to yourself?
Absolutely, because when you’re no longer absorbing other people’s energy so much and sacrificing yourself for them, you do have more energy to focus on yourself and charge up. For so long I didn’t have anything left in my tank, because I was just giving and giving and giving from a place that I didn’t have; I just didn’t have anything left in me, and I kept giving. There was just nothing really left for me to finish this record, and I totally lost my sense of self. I had people around me that fed off that constant giving because maybe it served them in some way, but in that process, I was enabling really poor behavior. To circle back to spirituality, there isn’t an equilibrium in that. That dynamic is out of balance.
Growing up, as a girl into a woman, I just felt like self-sacrifice was almost an expectation of me. If I’m not self-sacrificing, I’m being selfish – and I’ve been called selfish a few times. And it’s because, you know, I do my art, and it takes a lot of time, and it looks invisible a lot of the time. I feel like self-sacrifice has been packaged up into this noble thing that is really good, but I actually think the world loses out when you sacrifice yourself.
In ‘A Thousand Years’, you sing about this feeling of playing to the crowd till you disappear. Is there a blurry dynamic there, for you, between giving yourself to an audience and losing yourself in the process? Do you feel like you have to create a separation between Fazerdaze and your own personal identity?
Yeah, I love that. You’re so good at weaving it back into the songs. I feel like there’s just a constant balance I’m trying to find between Amelia Murray and Fazerdaze, and it’s really hard for me not to give everything to Fazerdaze all the time. It’s really easy to lose my sense of self as Amelia Murray because I work on Fazerdaze so much, and I care about it so much. Because I would do anything for this project, it’s put me in really vulnerable situations sometimes. The fact that I’d do anything for my music – I’d be taken advantage of because I’m like that. I’m just doing my best now to hold a little bit back from Fazerdaze to keep for myself as a human.
When did the idea of soft power become important to you in this process?
I feel like the album title came maybe halfway through making the record. I came across the phrase when I was reading Michelle Obama’s autobiography, Becoming. Actually, I just very briefly passed over the phrase, and I just saw it for the first time. And I was like, “Wow, I’ve never heard those two words together.” I just think it’s really beautiful, and I couldn’t really escape it. It just stuck in my head for days. I was really scared to use the word power; I just didn’t really identify or I thought the word was kind of icky. And then I heard the phrase soft power, and I was like, “Oh, that’s something I’m looking for.” There’s so many dimensions to the phrase for me, but on a really personal level, it’s like: how can I maintain my gentleness and my softness and my sensitivity, but also be assertive and firm and strong? Realizing that these things don’t have to be mutually exclusive the way I thought they had to be. For me, there’s this groundedness, this fierceness to it. There’s a gentleness to it, and you can have all of these things at once.
I also thought of soft power sonically: What would soft power sound like? When I heard that phrase, I was like, “That’s the record I’m trying to make.” I wanted to have this oomph and punchiness, but also have this dreaminess and this more femme energy. The phrase seemed to encapsulate the sonics I was aiming for.
Was that part of the reason you decided to end the record with two of the quietest tracks, to emphasize that point?
Yeah. There’s so many more hard-hitting tracks at the beginning of the record, and I did want the end of the record to ease into this quiet darkness; almost let you just sit with yourself for a bit. The tracklisting was a real struggle, and I got so many different friends to tell me what they thought, but that was where I arrived at.
Womanhood
You already alluded to it, but could you speak more about how figuring out womanhood on your terms related to the idea of soft power?
I guess I had been living this false or predicted version of womanhood. I felt like I was just trying to be the woman everyone around me wanted. Again, that was very self-sacrificing, very gentle and giving and overly nice. I think Soft Power is me finding and defining womanhood from something deep within myself, and building my own version of who I want to be away from what had been conditioned onto me. I had so much conditioning through my twenties, and Soft Power is about me shedding all of that conditioning. It’s like, “I’m getting my boundaries in place now. I’m getting my fierceness back.” That was totally chipped away and eroded over the years of conditioning with the people I was in relationships withSoft Power is me just walking that journey alone and actually having to leave people behind me that didn’t want me to become independent of their projections.
Leaving Auckland
Moving out of Auckland is obviously a very real manifestation of this. Was there also something about the anonymity it afforded you that was useful in exploring yourself more from the ground up?
Yeah, exactly. It took me a really long time to realize I wasn’t able to change and grow in the relationships that I was in and the places I was living in. I was trying – I was trying so hard, but my environment wasn’t supportive of the person I was wanting and needing to become. So, I did have to embark on this journey of total solitude and darkness. I had to venture out of what I thought was my safe space – looking back, it definitely wasn’t – and go into that darkness and that loneliness to be able to rebuild my sense of self.
With some of the music videos, like ‘Cherry Pie’, I really wanted to show this woman on a journey alone. She’s all dressed up because she’s left something behind – you don’t know if it’s like an awards night or a date, but she’s in this state of in-between. I wanted to show that part of the journey where she hasn’t arrived at a destination yet, but she also has left something behind her, and whether it’s the picture of the perfect life or a relationship or something, you don’t know. But I wanted to show the scariest bit so many of us are afraid to walk into – I wanted to show her in that space and completely alone.
You reference moving more explicitly on the song ‘City Glitter’, which also sonically reflects that space. What was it like write about it more directly?
That one was a really emotional one for me. I have a lot of rage and anger about what I went through, and I’m trying to save up for therapy so I can deal with it. But then ‘City Glitter’ came out, it came through me, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, this song is actually really tender and really loving.” And that was quite emotional for me, because I was like, “I just want to be angry. I’m annoyed about all of this stuff.” But ‘City Glitter’ showed me that there is this love still there, and there’s still the softness and tenderness towards what I went through with someone. I played the song live a few times, and most of the times it’s fine, but there was one time where I completely choked up, the song is really hitting me, and that’s a mark that I can’t always control. That’s probably the closest to my heart, that song.
Hilma af Klint
About halfway through making this record, one of her exhibitions came to New Zealand, and I went to it with my dad. It absolutely floored me. I was totally breathtaken by the scope of her work, the size of her work, some of the spiritual meanings in her work and the spiritual inspirations behind the work. Just the idea that she was painting in a time that you know people didn’t respect woman artists as much as male artists, and she was very overlooked in the art world. Yet she made this incredible body of work over her lifetime, and seeing the exhibition while I was making my record just gave me so much encouragement to keep going. Just the fact that she made it with nobody validating her or giving her that reassurance in the art world – she still had the confidence to make art anyway. That was the strength I needed to tap into because I was really losing faith in my own career and my own confidence in my art.
And the idea that she was like, “Lock this up for 50 years after my death” – so cool, so boss. Having that confidence of, “This is really good. The world needs to catch up to what I’m doing.” I don’t know if that’s what she was going through in her mind, but it was what I need to constantly remind myself of: just keep making art, regardless of how it’s being received. She’s my beacon whenever I start feeling ignored, overlooked, or not understood. And she was my beacon of light when I was at the darkest part of the journey. I just felt so lucky that that exhibition came onto my path. I didn’t know much about her before then, and then so many of my friends were talking about her.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, The Awakening by Kate Chopin
I read them quite early on in the album process, and it’s only now I’ve thought about them again. I hadn’t really been exposed through education to feminism. I was in a relationship that wasn’t balanced, and these books showed me women that were fighting for that balance and fighting to be equal. I read them, and they stuck with me. And then I went on with my life. Looking back on those books, what they were about, why they made me feel certain things – it’s so much of the character traits that I really was too afraid to embody myself. When I came to the end of the record and I had finally learned to embody these characteristics, like dignity, independence, sticking to your moral compass despite what society wants, equality in a relationship. Especially with Jane Eyre, she wanted to be seen as an equal and didn’t want to sacrifice her own values. All of these qualities were things I had to learn in the making of this record. And now that I’m finally getting there with those qualities, these books have popped up again in my head.
Feeling small/Making big sounds
Do you see the expansive approach you took on this album as a reaction to feeling more, is it more ambiguous than that?
If I hear the record now and I look back on that time when I was making it – the bulk of this record, I just felt so invisible and tiny and completely overlooked in my domestic space and environment. This record is definitely a reaction to that feeling of insignificance in my relationship. I sort of feel like the record was, at times, a cry for help, because I was just trying to make some music that maybe – if I had enough money and resources – could free me from my living situation. I feel like I went quite pop on a lot of the songs because I really was like, “Well, maybe if I could write a big song, I could get out of here.” I definitely feel like the wide, hard-hitting, more maximalist sounds are a reaction to that feeling of invisibility.
Did you record them after or during the relationship?
I did so much of it during that relationship, and then I did some coming out. But I feel like I did so much of the groundwork when I was in that relationship and in Auckland. It was just a really, really hard time in my life.
Joseph Campbell’s te Hero’s Journey
I was watching that little show about it, Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth. This is another thing I watched during the making of the record but didn’t see how it applied to me. Now I look back on it and I feel like I embarked on such a hero’s journey – every artist does. You set out to make a record, and then you go through this transformation process, and it changes you, I think. You come out the other side, and you return to the public with this thing you’ve brought back and the change you’ve gone through. It sounds cheesy, but I jfeel like that gives me so much comfort with what I’ve been through. The lessons I’ve learned, I can bring back to the world and hopefully contribute in that way.
I think it just ties back to the ‘Cherry Pie’ music video, when I really wanted to show her at the bottom part of the hero’s journey. She has to let go of the past and baggage, things fall out of her suitcase, and by the end of the music video, she’s gone from being a passenger in her life to being at the driver’s wheel and in control.
It’s always hard to place yourself on this journey, as it was when you were making the record. With that in mind, do you feel like putting the album out is part of the reward? oOr is it hard to tell where you’re at?
That’s such a good question. I don’t know if I can tell right now. I don’t feel like when I wake up, I’ve got the reward of, like, “I’ve done it. It’s coming out.” I don’t think it’s healthy for me to expect anything now. Whenever I put out a song or an EP or an album, in the past, I’ve expected some sort of like, “I’ve done this, now I must get some reward.” And now I’m really like, “No, I’ve done this, and the reward is the fact that I completed it, and I got through it.” I learned so much, and I don’t expect any external thing back now. I think it ties back into spirituality and faith. I just trust that the reward is more something I get to feel over the long run. If I don’t see the results that maybe I dreamed of, I’m kind of like, “I just gotta hang in there and it’ll make sense over a long period of time.” I feel like that’s something I’ve been able to arrive at now that I’m older.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Fazerdaze’s Soft Power is out now via section1/Buttrfly Records.