Our passenger of the month for May 2023: VILLFORTH
Pop between deep sea divers and blue skies on Venice Beach
Behind our Passenger of the Month VILLFORTH is a German singer who makes pop like the greats. Villforth could have recorded her pop music in a wacky recording studio in LA. Also because, for example, one of her songs, the track “Cabriolet”, released in 2022, feels as light-footed, as pop, as the constant blue sky on Venice Beach.
“When I’m with you, I’m home” Villforth sings in this song and is not afraid to show a lot of emotion. The singer wants to offer her listeners a shoulder to lean on with her songs and at the same time encourage them to make room for their own emotions. A dreamy, nostalgic sound that flatters her clear voice, paired with self-reflective and insightful lyrics: that’s exactly what makes her music! She loves to blur the boundaries between pop and indie. Her songs move between these two genres.
Strangely Attracted is her current single and you can’t help but feel that the depth of her songs, however created, is so picked up by Venice Beach flair that it becomes a frame for the essence of pop music. But has Villforth always sounded like the essence of pop?
I can’t pinpoint exactly when and why I suddenly had this great need to make music. As a teenager I simply discovered singing for myself and sometimes sang for hours at home. Looking back, music was and still is simply an outlet for my feelings, which I couldn’t express well otherwise.
Then, at 17, VILLFORTH decided to really get into music and started putting up post-its in music colleges and band centres looking for musicians:inside for a band. At some point she met a producer from Kreuzberg. Armed with a few song ideas of her own and a guitar, everything went pretty quickly.
The process from a melody mumbled into a mobile phone with fantasy lyrics before going to bed to a fully formulated song – that’s what still fascinates VILLFORTH the most. Sometimes she doesn’t even know yet what she actually wants to write about, but in the process of songwriting it suddenly bubbles out of her. The only thing VILLFORTH doesn’t like about making music is the sometimes rigid structures of the music industry, which don’t make it easy for indie artists like her to be heard and taken seriously.
Find out more about VILLFORTH on Instagram, YouTube and Spotify.
Each month, recordJet presents the Passenger of the Month. Chosen by the recordJet crew, a recordJet artist is awarded that we particularly like. Apply here…