Future Star is a singer-songwriter whose bittersweet melodies, tongue-in-cheek sense of humor,  and stripped-back theatricality make for a listening experience equal parts poignant and optimistic. In this interview, she discusses the influence of musicals on her work, the decision to perform solo, and sentimentality.

How/when did you first get into making music?

I first started getting into the DIY scene in about 2006. I was sixteen, and me and Alie Lynch started a band called Kidnap Kids!. We were probably around for about four years. That was my first band, and it was really exciting—we did a little tour down the West Coast with a band called Unreliable Narrator, who invited us. I wasn’t as active in the songwriting piece of it, and then in like 2010-2011, I volunteered at Girls Rock Camp Vancouver, and I struck up a friendship with Marita of Bill Can, and we started a band called True Crush. Then I was in Only a Visitor after that, and then I started writing songs for Future Star in 2013-2014. But I never performed them, just recorded them.

Right around that time, I kind of dipped out of the scene for a couple years. I had some really bad mental health stuff going on. But then, I remember my first show—I have the poster still—I played as my original name, “Where You’ve Been That’s Where You’re Coming From”, which is now the name of one of my songs. Christopher Ellis was there, and he was like, “I really want to record you,” and he was hounding me about it, and I was like, “I don’t know if I want to do this,” and then I was like, “Fine, okay, let’s do it, whatever,” and he started playing drums with me [for] the first couple years.

I started playing solo around 2018 because I was like, “It’s too hard to do this,” basically—I was going to school and lived in Coquitlam, and he lived in Marpole. I’ve always found the hardest part of being in a band is coordinating with people, and also, it’s an interesting parameter to play within: like, “What can I do by myself? What can I actually do in my entire life with all the things that you do and needing time for everything?” So, I guess Future Star, the way I exist now, started around 2018.

Your songs contain an almost showtunes-like quality—are musicals an influence in your music?

I love musicals. I love Andrew Lloyd Webber, I love frickin’ Stephen Sondheim, and I love Into the Woods—it’s my favorite musical of all time. One of my most precious objects is the Into the Woods original London cast recording. You can’t find it anywhere, but I have it on CD and it’s just…the singing in that version is so well done.

I did a lot of musical theatre-y stuff as a kid. I also went to jazz school and a lot of their standards—I don’t want to admit it, but it influences me, jazz influences me. I just love the way musicals sound. I think about music a lot as manipulation, because I’m tricking you into having a feeling about something. That’s what musicals do.

I was filling out some application for a festival and they were like, “Describe your genre,” and I was like, “Where theatricality meets intimacy,” and was pretty happy with it. Because, yes, sometimes it can be theatrical, but at the same, when I’m performing, I’m pretty naked on stage. It’s me and my voice, or backing tracks, and I do it all myself. I don’t have a big stage around me, I’m not a dancer, I want to create an intimate space where people are feeling things. People are always like, “You should get a band!” but I really don’t want to. I don’t think I’d be getting what I wanted from it. I know bands can lift things up, but I don’t want to hide behind anything.

The more I listen to it, the more I feel like there are multitudes to It’s About Time! as a title, so I was wondering, what does the title It’s About Time! refer to?

Honestly, I made up the title because one of the songs on the album—“This Is the Part That’s Too Hard to Explain”, that I put out, originally it was much different. I just put a demo of it out on an album called I Went Home and All I Got, so that’s from 2017 or 2018, something like that. They’re all from a long time ago [and] I just never released them.

I never gave myself the time to do them nicely. The most obvious play on words is like, it’s about time, in that thematically all the songs are about time, but it’s also like, “It’s about time! I haven’t released an album in four years.” I love self-reference when I listen to music, like, I love when Avril Lavigne refers to herself in a song; country music as well is constantly being self-referential as a genre in the lyrics, and I find that really fun.

To me, your songwriting conjures up a lot of nostalgia. But it also seems like there’s a tension there, between being able to appreciate things now, to not just long for the past, but also to remember the past fondly. Would you consider yourself a sentimental person?

That’s hard to answer. I’m sentimental but I’m also a lot of other things that I guess kind of negate my sentimentality. I’m very pragmatic, but I have a hard time letting go of things sometimes. It’s funny, because my immediate kneejerk reaction was, “I’m not sentimental,” but maybe I am.

I feel like a lot of what I try to say in my music, and a lot of what I try to make people think about when they listen to my music, is to let go of attachments that they have. I think sometimes people can enjoy a wound, does that make sense? People are like, “Ah yes, my wound, look at it,” and I want to try and inspire people to let go of showing off all their nasty wounds. Like, “No, you need to go to the doctor. If it’s really that bad, do something about it.”

And, yes, I’ve been hurt by things in the past and I’ve fucked things up and things have not always been good and people have hurt me and I’ve hurt people, et cetera, et cetera. I’ve gone through hard times. I’ve also had incredible luck. At the end of the day, let go of what isn’t serving you. This stuff that you hear, these sort of platitudes, very frequently, [are] important to actually look at and be like, “Maybe they say them for a reason.”

I’ve been seeing a lot of stuff around that’s sort of like, “You shouldn’t have to learn from every bad experience that you have, maybe it just has to be.” And part of me is like, okay, that might work for you, but are you not learning letting go? Has that experience taught you nothing? I don’t know, this is a conversation I’m having with myself. You don’t need to learn from every experience or terrible trauma that’s happened to you, but that’s very important to me, to create something positive out of something negative. That’s something that’s very important to my growth as a person, to have that acceptance and borderline gratitude for the things that I’ve experienced, even if they’re not positive. But it’s tricky because you can’t tell anyone else that.

So many love songs are centered around feelings of loss, longing, or even betrayal, but a big theme I found in your music was gratitude for the people you love. Is that an intentional choice or are you just naturally more inspired by optimism and abundance?

I think it’s not wrong to be angry but it’s wrong to stay angry. It’s important to me to set boundaries with myself about how much I’m going to be angry about something, or how much I’m going to worry about something, how much I’m going to let someone else’s shit affect me. I think there’s a way you can forgive other people without betraying yourself.

I think that it’s scary. [But] I see people and I’m like, “What are you scared of? You scared of getting hurt? You’re gonna get hurt anyway! Buck up!”

Future Star’s most recent release, It’s About Time!, is available on all streaming platforms, and news/updates can be found on her Instagram @foreverfuturestar. She performs at Lucky’s Comics on October 18^th.