Rina Sawayama has shared the title track from her impending second collection, ‘Hold The Young lady’.
The English Japanese pop star has shared the profoundly private tune wrote after she was decreased to tears following a treatment meeting in 2020.
Sawayama wrote “This Hell” with Paul Epworth and Lauren Aquilina; the single is co-produced by Epworth and Clarence Clarity. Sawayama will perform the song on the May 19 episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. In a press release, Sawayama said:
I had so much fun writing “This Hell.” The past couple of years I’ve been listening to lots of female country singers and wanted to write a euphoric and tongue-in-cheek country-pop song. Country music at its core to me represents comfort, brilliant storytelling and authentic expression of the writer’s reality. I’ve been dreaming of working with Paul Epworth my entire career so I knew it was meant to be when we finished this song in a day. I put in as many iconic pop culture moments as I can, but the song is more than that.
It’s an important song for me given the human rights that are being taken away from minorities at a rapid rate in the name of traditional religious beliefs, more specifically I was thinking about the rights being taken away from the LGBTQ community when I wrote this song. When the world tells us we don’t deserve love and protection, we have no choice but to give love and protection to each other. This Hell is better with you.
Return to Pitchfork’s 2020 Rising meeting “Rina Sawayama on Her Ridiculously Varied and Disarmingly Individual Presentation Collection.”
