In Conversation with Felicity: Her Debut EP, Songwriting, Nashville and More

Felicity reflects on the inspirations for her emotionally charged EP, “You Take Me To Dinner But You’ll Never Feed My Soul”

Nashville-based singer-songwriter Felicity is out with her debut EP, You Take Me To Dinner But You’ll Never Feed My Soul. Full to the brim with rich, aching and all-too-relatable songs, it has everything needed to feed our souls. 

Felicity’s deep and emotional vocals turn stories of burnout, fatigue, and heartbreak into warm, dreamy, and ultimately hopeful songs, shedding light on some of the darker parts of life. Pleaser Magazine had the chance to chat with Felicity about her EP ahead of its release.

PHOTO COURTESY OF TAYLOR BALLANTYNE

Pleaser: Let’s jump right into it! My first question is about your EP, and all of your feelings surrounding its release.

 Felicity: It’s definitely very full circle, I feel like I'm experiencing a spectrum of emotions. This is the first large body of work I've ever put out, and I also just started releasing music again after a few years. I've written all these songs with people that I really love so it just feels extremely authentic. I'm very proud of the fact that this is the first thing that's coming out because it's me, it's all it is, and just what I've gone through.

What inspired you to return to making music?

 F: My move to Nashville! I had been living just outside of New York for a while; I moved there when I was 19 to do music, and it was amazing when I first moved there, but the pandemic really changed it. I lost a lot of inspiration, and I came to Nashville for about six weeks just to see if it would spark my fire again, and it instantly did! It just had a real sense of community, which is super inspiring in itself.

You moved around quite a bit growing up as well, I’m curious how, if at all, that inspired your music.

 F: So basically, I was born in Perth, Western Australia. That's where my soul feels the most at home even though I feel like an alien everywhere I go. I also lived in Indonesia, my whole family was [there], so we did about five years in Jakarta, a year in Bali, and then moved back to Perth. My dad’s American, so we went to Colorado for a couple months, and I also lived in South Africa intermittently when I was around 12. I moved back to America when I was 17, and visited New York City every six weeks to make music, because at that time I had been offered a deal … Once the pandemic hit, I moved here to Nashville – that’s the condensed version, it’s a bit mad.

What was the draw about Nashville in the first place?

F: I came here about once a year to write when I was in New York because it just bleeds music, and it felt more like a town. It's so amazing, the caliber of talent and musicianship here is unmatched, you know. And I think moving here, I found people who stuck with me. Like in creating this EP – it probably took no more than 10 people, from visualizers to mixers to producers and writers. Just my little group that I met here, that formed here.

That’s wonderful! My next question is about the title of your EP: You Take Me To Dinner But You’ll Never Feed My Soul. That is a very specific title, and I'm wondering where that came from?

F: It's the first line of the bridge, in the first single, “I Prefer You In My Head,” which is just a really sad song about a pretty abusive romance that one of my best friends went through. I wrote it with her, and he was just like, super hot-and-cold, so the line was initially written for her to be like, “Yeah, he'll do all these elaborate things for me. But at the end of the day, he's not willing to change.” 

That’s how the line came about, and the more I thought about it, and the more the EP started to take shape, I was like, “Oh, this kind of represents what I've been through in my career, too.” Like, I cut off a couple of deals early on in my career and had to rid myself of a few people that I thought I'd want to work with and create with forever. And, you know, as a young artist, you're taken out and wined and dined and shown what you think is going to be the norm, but then when it comes down to it, nothing actually happens. 

It was also a reflection of all the smoke and mirrors that I was shown. It’s also a bit about past relationships, I've been in things that feel like you’re sitting at the table, but it’s never really satiating you.

What does your creative process look like?  

F: I mean, physically, there's not much of a process that repeats itself over and over again. I like to start acoustically – I don't play guitar, I play keys – but if someone's got an acoustic guitar, or just any sort of lick, I like to go from there. I'll go through some ideas I have and see if any of them match, but sometimes I’ll write to whatever, in my car, on my phone, it’s not really much of a process.

The only consistent thing I would say is the people I work with, like I wrote with pretty much the same group of people for this whole project. And it has to be worth writing about, I can’t pretend to write about something. All of the songs on the EP wrote themselves because they all represented something in my life.

Do you have a favorite song from the EP?

F: I don't know, it's different for an EP, because there are only five of them, and they’re all there for a reason, but probably “There’s Been A Lot Going On.” I wrote that when I wasn’t doing well. I was working in a restaurant job where I wouldn't get home until like, three, four o'clock in the morning sometimes, and it was one of those days where it was not a vibe at all. I was so burnt out, and I didn’t have a lot of the people I’m working with now. I was just in Tennessee alone, flat broke and not sure what the future held for me.

I had a session with Austin, my producer, the next day and we wrote it instantly, like it just wrote itself. My mom's always said, “There's been a lot going on,” that's one of her phrases when there's too much happening and you start faltering as a result, but it's not your fault, you can't be expected to hold everything on your shoulders. I wrote it as a reminder that things are going to be fine. Like, there's a lot happening, but there's still a lot of beauty in the world, which is why the whole song is kind of a fake tongue-in-cheek apology. 

But at the very end, the last line is “I know, it's been a rough night, but after darkness comes a light,” because I didn't want it to be just four minutes of depression. So yeah, probably that one. But “I Prefer You In My Head” needed to be written as well. It’s one of those songs that I will always keep really close to me.