Diana Ebe – Capturing The Right Feelings In Songwriting

Lonesome with mixed feelings between dreams and reality,

Laying down, overthinking, writing, and now singing:

Self-expression and self-achievement provides such a relief for your mind and spirit.

It’s been Swedish artist Diana Ebe’s salvation since she’s settled in Los Angeles.

Constantly writing and willing to get her singer-songwriter career rolling.

Not only songwriter,  Ebe produces her own songs with the pop sensibility of artists like Lorde and Lykke Li.

Besides any interpretations, she describes her work as expressing the “lonely and longing feeling of love and life,” drawing inspiration from nature’s power, daydreams, lust, and love.

She’s been preparing these past months an EP with a really interesting concept:

‘Elusive Pleasure‘, 7 tracks EP, could be interpreted as the succession of 4 seasons,

Capturing the contradicting emotions of happiness (summer), sadness (winter), hopefulness (spring) and anger (autumn?).

The first single, ‘Elusive Pleasure’ gives a hint of the cold sadness Diana captured in her visual, with beautiful and snowy landscapes.

The song is a masterpiece of poetry, and Diana’s got Soul in her voice.

Plus the chorus sounds like a second wind for the singer running away, letting out a scream of freedom,

Stepping in dreamy places, maybe another illusion of hers, maybe another elusive pleasure.

In the following interview Diana Ebe accepted to reveal a lot of secrets behind the making of the EP, a great journey.

The most interesting here is to discover someone who’s really active when it comes to write poems/songs, and who’s sure of the concept of her EP.

INTERVIEW

Congratulations for your EP and your new adventure in LA.

Thank you for your time, let us now take profit of this interview to get to know you and your music a little bit more.

1) Which song means the most for you in your EP? Why?

Thank you! It is difficult to point out which song means the most, because to me, each song is unique and expresses different stages in my life.

I do feel like I have captured the sadness, the happiness, the angriness and the hopefulness of my life in the EP.

If I would really have to pick one, I choose “Elusive Pleasure”. It was the first song that I wrote for the EP, and the one song that kind of helped me in the process of writing the other songs.

2) How did you write “Elusive Pleasure”? Have you started by the lyrics or the melody?

It’s different from song to song. For example “Dreaming”, I already had the melody and the chord progression, and wrote the lyrics after.

For “Elusive Pleasure” (the song) I wrote the lyrics, like a poem at first, and then arranged it so it would fit to the melody that I wrote afterwards.

3) How did the vision of this EP come to you?

After I wrote “Elusive Pleasure” and “Chasing”, I knew I wanted to write an EP.

Later on I started writing on “Bold”, and that’s when it started to grow.

After releasing two singles (“Something About You” and “Trouble”) I knew the next step would be an EP.

By that time, I had so much unfinished material that I really wanted to show.

The EP expresses the time from when I came to LA till today.

4) Please share with us your journey of making this EP. How long did it take to make it? How your connections with musicians and producers worked? What has been the most challenging?

I made the decision of making the EP in late January, so the process has been very fast.It took us 4 months to complete it, including the single release in March.

One of the reasons why I had to work fast was because my producer was leaving back to Sweden in April, so that was our deadline.

I have to say, that everything has gone very smoothly. For the songs, I always start by doing a lot of production myself, when I pick and create sounds that I like. After that, my drummer and executive producer steps in to arrange the songs and edit the drums, and when he’s finished I hand it to my producer.

The most challenging part of the EP has been the deadline. We knew that we just had to be done before the end of April.

5) Travelling always helps to grow. How did Los Angeles make you grow and what in particular gave you the confidence to start your career?

Moving to Los Angeles helped me grow to the artist that I am.

After half a year of living here, I had already written over 30 songs.

It was a lonely time and I felt lost. I just had so much to say, I guess.

The more I wrote the sooner I realized the style of music I wanted to create. Now, I am confident in what I am writing and the sounds that I create is so Me.

6) Sometimes by travelling, what you see in a country you’d like to see it in your home country, or vice versa. What have you seen and loved in the LA music scene that you would have been missing in Sweden?

When I moved to LA, I realized that music is something I want to work with professionally.

I think the biggest step is to just leave your comfort zone, which is your home.

I still think about Sweden, and that it would be great if I could work for Sweden and LA back and forth.

Sweden has a great scene for music as well. Though, I have to say that the weather is probably my biggest issue about Sweden. It’s just too cold for me. Otherwise, I love spending time there.

7) Your EP  is coming out soon. How are things going for it? What are you preparing for this show?

The EP is set for release June 10th.

The release show that I am planning June 3rd, is a pre-view show for friends and fans to get an exclusive first listen.

The show will be held at The Record Parlour in Hollywood on 6408 Selma Ave Los Angeles, CA, 90028 at 7:30PM. It is a public event and you are welcome to come!

8) What’s the next step after that?

After the release show, I have shows already booked in the Los Angeles area.

There will be another music video coming out in the summer/fall.

I’m constantly writing, so maybe there will be more coming out. We’ll see!