Q&A: googly eyes Lets Love Leave a Mark on “paint me like one of your fav american girls”
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY KIMBERLY KAPELA ☆
GOOGLY EYES IS STEPPING INTO HER MOST INTIMATE ERA YET — The songstress has announced her forthcoming EP, “paint me like one of your fav american girls,” set for release on March 13, a project that finds her leaning fully into vulnerability, unraveling love to its rawest form and uncovering the beauty of exposure. Created in collaboration with Tove Lo and Flume, the EP promises a technicolor exploration of love and the quiet bruises we collect along the way.
Leading the release is “Bruises on the Peach,” a hazy, emotionally charged single that drifts between warped electronic textures and intimate pop melodies. Co-written with Tove Lo and Flume and co-produced by Flume, the track feels both glossy and diaristic. It floats in that liminal space between bruised romance and euphoric release, where softness and damage coexist, and where vulnerability becomes both a risk and a reward.
“Bruises on the Peach” wrestles with the uneasy truth of intimacy. Love, as googly eyes says, requires handing someone the very tools that could undo you. To be deeply known is to be deeply exposed — to invite both care and potential harm. The song acknowledges that love isn’t perfect, but messy, marked and often in need of do-overs.
“Bruises on the Peach is about vulnerability,” googly eyes says. “To be known and loved deeply means sharing all your fears, insecurities and pain points with someone. It’s a fragile ecosystem. You’re giving someone the blueprint to either wound you beyond repair or soothe your deepest hurts. That takes immense trust.”
At the heart of “paint me like one of your fav american girls” is an intentional act of openness for googly eyes, both creatively and personally. Where her earlier work was made in near-total isolation, with her handling every aspect as producer and writer, this EP marks a turning point. For the first time, she invited other voices into her world, expanding the emotional scope of what her music could hold.
The EP’s backbone is rooted in her long-distance relationship with her husband, the title “paint me like one of your fav american girls becomes a love letter of sorts. With this EP, googly eyes doesn’t shy away from the bruises, instead, she lets them bloom, framing love as imperfect and deeply worth the risk.
Photo Credit: Sophia Shrank
LUNA: Thank you for talking to Luna. Our readers would love to get to know you and your music more. For any readers who aren’t familiar with you yet, what inspires your artistic style and sound?
GOOGLY EYES: I grew up on Imogen Heap, Jon Bellion and Bon Iver, all those weird left of center people that I love dearly. Then I grew up in the South, so I feel like country music had a big influence on the way I write my songs. But I love those left of center babies. They're by far my favorites.
LUNA: What kind of atmosphere or emotional space do you aim to create for your listeners?
GOOGLY EYES: I would love for my listeners to have a safe place to feel all of their emotions in every range of what colors their life. I'm such an emotional person, and a lot of times I equate my writing to making blueprints. I'm like a cartographer in a lot of ways of here's this emotion I have experienced and here's the map, and if that helps you get through a certain feeling or feel seen, that's the best outcome for me.
LUNA: Your newest single “Bruises on the Peach” is a sneak peek into your upcoming record. What is the inspiration behind the track or the feeling that pushed this story to the surface?
GOOGLY EYES: I am in a long distance marriage, and my husband was in town at the time when I was working with Tove Lo and Harley, and we had gotten into some argument over something silly. I wrote about this in my Substack. I talked about how I had walked in the door and was upset. I was stressed about having to perform for Tove Lo and Flume, trying to be the best cool artist and know what I wanted and have a vision. I came home depleted and looking for somewhere to disperse the energy, the anxious energy that I had.
Something that we do in our relationship is we call mulligans, and so we call do overs. I basically walked out of the apartment and then walked back in to restart the night fresh and “Bruises on the Peach” was written the next day about that feeling where love requires you to be vulnerable. It requires you to give the greatest weapons against you to the person that loves you. When someone knows you deeply, that means they can love you greatly, but it means they can hurt you just as bad. The sweetness of love is the trusting that they won't use that against you. “Bruises on the Peach” is diving into that thought about how love knows every part of you and how love isn't perfect, and it requires do overs and it requires bruises, and despite all of that, that's beautiful.
LUNA: “Bruises on the Peach” is accompanied by a music video which adds another layer of depth to the song’s themes. How was your experience filming it?
GOOGLY EYES: That music video was so crazy to shoot. It was 55 degrees in Los Angeles, which is rare, and then an atmospheric river was depositing itself across the Los Angeles area. There was a ton of rain, so it was freezing, and it was wet, and we couldn't move the shoot because I had a flight out of town that I couldn't miss, and so we shot it in the pouring rain. It was freezing. I was lucky enough to work with Maya Sassoon, who is an incredible creative director. Maya's idea was to bring ropes in for the metaphor of the tension. It was a really physical shoot, on top of the rain and on top of the weather, I was being yanked in four different directions by people off camera. I walked away with quite a few bruises, ironically, from the shoot. I'm so proud of what we were able to accomplish, and feel so lucky to work with so many incredible creatives.
LUNA: As you prepare to release your new EP, what initially inspired “paint me like one of your fav american girls,” and what emotional or thematic ground did you feel compelled to explore this time around?
GOOGLY EYES: The overarching concept of this project was to let people in. I think prior to this EP, I had done all of my music 100% myself. I was the producer, I was the writer, I did everything. This is the first project where I brought in other voices. I was opening up the scope of what kind of music I can make. A lot of it circled around my my husband and my long distance relationship, which is why I think it's cute to say paint me like one of your favorite American girls, because he's Norwegian, and we've been in a long distance relationship for six years, and so a lot of the thematics revolve around that, as a lot of my life revolves around it. It was about opening it up and letting people in, I think was a big thing.
LUNA: I would love to touch more on the creative process behind the EP. You worked with Tove Lo and Flume. What was it like bringing them into your creative process, and how did they influence the sound of the EP?
GOOGLY EYES: I feel like this project is a three way compromise. Basically, I think you can hear all of us really distinctly in it, and what a gift. I mean, insane to have my first collaborators be legends that I grew up loving, right? I feel so incredibly lucky, and I learned a lot from them during our time together. The fun thing about this EP is it was all made over the span of two weeks. We got together one weekend and wrote a majority of the songs. Getting to be in the room with two musicians that I really look up to and could learn from in the moment was an incredible gift.
LUNA: Do you have a personal favorite song on “paint me like one of your fav american girls” — one that feels closest to your heart or most revealing of who googly eyes is right now?
GOOGLY EYES: There's a fifth track on the EP that I did by myself called “Everywhere,” and it is a love song in the truest sense of the word. I'm a big lover girl. It's my favorite kind of music to write, and I think that one is nearest and dearest to my heart, so I'm really excited for everybody to hear that.
LUNA: What do you hope listeners take away from “Bruises on the Peach” and the upcoming EP? Are there particular emotions or experiences you want to evoke?
GOOGLY EYES: I really just love the idea of setting these nuanced emotions in a Flume style production in a danceable, fun landscape. I think so many of the songs have his signature energy and joy. The writing side is really deep and meaningful to me personally, and so I hope people can experience the depth of their emotions in the joy of the landscape of the production too.
LUNA: When you feel a creative spark coming on, what do you need in your space to nurture it? Are there any rituals, objects or energies you always return to?
GOOGLY EYES: What's funny is, the more that my life gets unstable, the more that I'm trying to allow the creative process to exist in many formats and without much hurrah. I think trying to find and streamline a way to just access it, whenever, wherever, however, is actually the ritual itself for me. Now, of course, when I get to have full control over my environment, I love a private environment. I love candles. I love sage. I love protecting the space, but I think even more so now it's about where is the ritual within myself that I can connect to at any point, so that I can continually make it despite the instability of life itself.
LUNA: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the rest of the year look like that you would like to share with Luna?
GOOGLY EYES: I'm feeling really excited. I'm still wrapping my head around the idea of putting out music with Tove Lo and Flume. I don't think it's fully set in yet. I'm not sure it ever will, maybe years down the line, so I'm still trying to digest how incredible this is and how much fun this is, and I don't know what the rest of the year looks like. I'm making a lot of music always, but I'm really eager for people to hear this project in particular, and hopefully we'll get some shows on the books and go around and see all the people who've been so nice to engage with the music and the project so far, I would love to go around the globe and meet all of them, so ideally, something of that sort. I'm really excited for people to hear this project first. I have a show in LA on March 13, which is so exciting.
Photo Credit: Sophia Shrank
