Feature Photo credit Lukas Palatinus
V Torres is Learning to Let Go, Let Love In, and Become “WOMAN”
There are moments when you don’t know what is happening yet. You’re standing next to someone you’ve known for a while, except suddenly you notice the way they look at you. Or maybe you notice the way you’re looking at them. The room hasn’t changed. The music hasn’t changed. Nothing has technically happened. And yet, somehow, everything has. You could call it uncertainty. You could call it a possibility. V Torres calls it exciting. “I get excited in the moments that possibilities are open and available,” she says. “It’s exciting to think about what you want and to daydream about it.”
That’s the emotional territory that inspired “That Night”, the latest single off Torres’s new seven-songstress record WOMAN. It’s a song about that strange little period that occurs between when two people stop being just friends and when they become something else entirely before anyone has had the chance to say the defining words of a relationship, when nothing is set in stone, when hope and dread are tangled up in one another so tightly that neither can move without the other. “I wanted to write about that feeling when there isn’t an answer yet, but there is this excitement/nervousness in the imagining,” she says.
Torres wrote the song while living through that very uncertainty, walking the line between friendship and something more. She didn’t have any answers when she wrote it, no resolution at the end of the song to signify a new beginning. It makes the tune feel all the more immediate, all the more alive. “Take my hand tonight, slowly dancing to a fast song, out of our element, acting like we belong,” she sings in the second verse.
Torres loves the feeling so much because it personifies two people creating their little world, locked away from the rest of reality. “I think it really paints the picture of being in your own little world with someone and the beauty in that feeling and connection,” she says. There is something so wonderfully thrilling about the idea that you can imagine the future, because it isn’t set in stone. You can put whatever you want in that blank space, in the moment before it happens. “There is magic in the moments that are undefined,” Torres says. “You can imagine and think about what you want and where you want to be.”
That word “magic” keeps coming up when you ask Torres what WOMAN means to her. It appears in the way that she talks about the possibility of love and her belief that grief will turn into something else. It appears in the strange alchemy of the record itself, the way that it seems to transform as she goes from song to song. “When writing this record, I did not know it was gonna be a record,” Torres says. “I let the songs really speak to me and this specific group of seven songs wanted to belong together.”
They were written all over the place, as well. Torres was writing them over the course of three years, and changed drastically from the person who wrote the earliest tracks to the one who put down the final set of notes. “There are so many things that happened in my life that I didn’t expect that really opened my eyes and heart to letting go,” Torres says. “I gave into divine timing and really let things come and go.” It’s one thing to say that everything changes, but it’s an entirely different matter to admit that we’re not so different from the things that change. We like to think of transformation as an event, something that has a beginning and an end, but Torres has a different idea. “I believe it’s more about uncovering who you are rather than becoming someone new,” she says. The healing process has taught her that, the long road through grief and loss and rediscovery that has defined the past few years for her. “It’s been a long process, as it took a lot of time and layers for me to get to this place,” she says. “The healing journey really takes you back to yourself.”
It’s why WOMAN makes so much sense as a record. Not because it’s a record about becoming someone new, but because it’s about becoming honest enough to realize who you’ve always been. That may be the most important statement about WOMAN that Torres makes. It’s not a record about womanhood, about discovering yourself or putting yourself together for the first time. It’s about remembering who you are when it’s all said and done. The title came to her later on in the writing process, after she’d realized what the record was really about. Torres says that the WOMAN track, as she put it, is “at the apex of all of these songs.” She felt as if the record chose the title for itself in many ways. “The song ‘WOMAN’ really encapsulates the entire message of this record,” she says, “and ultimately as the songs started to tell me that they were a record, I felt that the title WOMAN was the appropriate move.”
The music itself seems to change as well, ebbing and flowing between different styles and genres. It’s indie rock at points, Americana at others, and a cinematic blend of the two at many. Torres describes the songs as feeling like “blending the desert and the sea”, and the sound of a “rambling, balladic cowgirl”. Think Bob Dylan meets Neil Young, but with some synths and drums thrown in for good measure. All of that leads into “That Night”, the single that sees Torres stretching out her sound to envelop listeners in a mix of musical styles. “I wanted this song to be a little more spacious musically than some of the other songs on the record,” she says. Her vocals are spectacular, as always, but they feel a little frayed at the edges. The guitar riffs are long and wandering, but synths and drums give the song a real dance-rock edge. “It has a little bit of a dance rock element,” she says.
It’s the kind of tune that exists to soundtrack the very real moments before “something happens”, and that makes it the perfect single for the record. It’s the most interesting part of any relationship, really, to be completely honest. Torres has spent much of WOMAN learning to exist in that space, not insisting that everything must be resolved immediately. She didn’t know when she was writing the record that she would be writing about grief and moving on. She only knew that she was writing about really difficult things. “I’ve always been someone who tries to see the light at the end of the tunnel or the lesson in the journey, even when it sucks,” she says. Then she says something that sounds suspiciously like a mission statement for the entire record. “I think if we don’t believe in the magic that life has to offer, then what are we doing?”
She believed in the magic. She believed in love, music, healing, and the idea that losing things doesn’t mean losing yourself entirely. “In that, there is always a hopefulness and an openness to love again, live again, see again, heal again.” And now the record is leaving her hands, and she is preparing for its release into the world. It’s one of the most difficult parts of being an independent artist, having to relinquish control of your music to others. She describes the process as giving “a deep sense of creative ownership and freedom”, but creative ownership is a strange thing, because ultimately you have to walk away from something in order for it to belong to you. The music will no longer be just hers, and that’s a strange thing to accept. A song is only ever in the hands of one person at a time.
Somebody else will put on WOMAN later on and listen to it in their car. Some random person will hear the lyrics to “That Night” and think about someone they lost. About someone they wish they could see again. About someone they want to stand beside at that strange moment before something happens. And eventually, the song will take on a second life. Torres seems prepared for that moment. “I genuinely hope they can relate to the lyrics and know that they aren’t alone,” she says. “I hope they can walk away from listening to the record with some openness in their heart and the sentiment that it will all be okay.”
There is still apprehension, of course, but it is small and easily dismissed. “I am so excited for people to hear the record from start to finish and truly hope that people give it a listen and let the record play,” she says. In particular, she is excited for people to experience the record as a physical object, to press play on a tangible copy of WOMAN and hear all of these songs come to life. “Nervousness and excitement often present the same,” she says. “It’s an exciting time to let this record go and be in the ears and hearts of others now.”
Maybe that’s what WOMAN ultimately understands about transformation: the opposite of holding on isn’t indifference. Sometimes it’s trust. You grieve, then you remember. You write, then you make something out of what happened to you. You fall in love again even though you know what love can cost. You stand in the undefined moment and let yourself imagine. You take someone’s hand. You slow dance to a fast song. You act as you belong. And then, eventually, you let go. When asked what she would tell the version of herself who was writing these songs, Torres doesn’t offer a grand speech. She keeps it simple. “Just keep going.”
Photo credit Lukas Palatinus
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Photographer and Editor/Founder of AllMusicMagazine.com. My love of live music has taken me to incredible experiences with the top bands of all time in stadium shows to the smallest venues with equally inspiring musicians. Using the medium of photography and my publication, these memories will last forever.