With a handful of assertive hits already under her belt, PARIS PALOMA is all about women coming together. Catch up ahead of her appearance at Live at Leeds: In The City this weekend (14th October).

Words: Martyn Young.

If you've been online at all this year, particularly on TikTok, you've no doubt come across Paris Paloma's stirring anthem of feminist rage, 'Labour', whether it's the song itself or as a soundtrack to videos in which other women offer their own experiences of misogyny and how the patriarchy has impacted them. It's became an incredibly powerful song, so powerful that it propelled Paris all the way into the Top 30 of the UK singles chart. "It's a song that's a lot bigger than me now," Paris tells us. There's a lot more to Paris, though, than virality. The singer from Derbyshire is a special talent, and 'Labour' is just one small part of the tapestry of storytelling that she is putting together, making music that is sweeping and dramatic but also intensely vivid and resonant. She's only been making music properly for a few years, but already Paris Paloma's connection with her audience is deep and true. 

"It's been pretty insane," she smiles as she describes her 2023 so far. "I couldn't envision anything both on this scale and in this short time frame would happen. The degree of the change in volume of my listenership and how much music I'm currently able to make as a result of the response to my music. It's a really great feeling. It's moving really fast, but that's how I want it to be." 

Music is all about moments. Moments when you know you're in the middle of something special. For Paris, she can remember the exact moment this year when she knew that something was truly happening. "It was hearing people scream the bridge to 'Labour' along with me when I performed it for the first time since its release," she says. "That was what you hope for as a writer. You want to make people feel a specific feeling which is a feeling that you're feeling. Part of it is cathartic so you can share in this feeling with other people, but part of it is also helping and giving other people something to feel heard, and just hearing that emotion being articulated by so many people in a crowd back at you is a really transcendent moment."

"There were definitely a couple of weeks where it was just like a runaway train," she continues as she talks about the song's snowball-like momentum. "It was growing and growing and growing. I'm quite an anxious person, and that is really overwhelming and can make you feel very out of control, but what kept me grounded was being there with it and noticing that this is a song that I wrote partially from experiences and partially from observation, but I'm coming to it, not as someone who has any authority to talk about solving it." 

Part of Paris's reaction to dealing with a song that explores such a powerful theme was in allowing herself to take a step back from it and give the song life and allow people to apply their own perspectives to it. "I was watching it become bigger than me and allowing that to inform how the song grew and not restricting it to being what it was when I wrote it," she explains. "There are women with far different experiences to mine who were bringing insight and nuance to this song that I wrote in my room with my small window of what being a woman is through my perspective. That was something that I wanted to give space for that to happen and not reduce the song to this faceted experience of just one person. It was an incredibly moving and overwhelming time for me, but so worth it to see women and people coming together to discuss something that's based on the song." 

Paris always knew she wanted to tell stories with her music. Big, meaningful and powerful stories. "The music I started listening to in my teens was very lyrics focused. When I was little, my dream was to be a creative writer," she says. "I'd write stories all the time, and at some point, those stories started becoming poems, and those poems became songs. That transition happened out of influences in literature as opposed to influences in music." 

The formative music of her childhood was the soul and jazz her mum would play, but for Paris, she naturally gravitated to people who liked to play with words and language, whether florid and wordy or incredibly pure and simple. "When I was 12, I started looking up to songwriters like Ed Sheeran and people I thought were really using words and telling stories," she remembers. "Following on from that, people like Florence + The Machine and Hozier, people who I really look up to and who use their words in such a considered way. That massively influences me." 

As she started making more and more songs, Paris's songwriting began to evolve. "I've become a lot more considered," she reflects. "I've got to a point where I understand that it's ok not to say everything. The main driver for my music when I started was catharsis and feeling heard. It was an emotional outlet to use whatever it was that was incredibly difficult to go through, pain and grief and struggles with power in my own life and the strife of growing up as a girl. It's made me feel that I can be considered in what I want to share and how I want to share it. You just have to be giving something genuine. I think I've decentred myself a lot more than when I was writing bedroom songs about my feelings on things I'm going through. I'm still staying true to that but not beating myself up when I want to keep some things." 

She now sees her songwriting as a true body of work which allows her to focus on each song as a part of a world she's creating. "I think of my songs informing each other now rather than being specific," she says. "It's now this considered thing which all have relationships to each other and inform each other. My next songs stand on the shoulders of my previous songs." 

Indeed, her next single, 'As Good A Reason', carries on some of the big themes of 'Labour' but from a slightly different perspective. More triumphant and defiant and with a rollicking groove to it. "I wanted to write a song about the power of women learning from each other," she explains. "There were lots of things I was thinking about in terms of misogyny being eradicated through the generations, and that's happening because of work that women are doing. It's happening because of women of older generations giving space to women of younger generations to see how peaceful their life can be when decentering patriarchy." 

It's clear that Paris is an incredibly passionate and thoughtful songwriter who thinks carefully about what she wants to say and recognises the impact and engaging quality of her words. "I was thinking a lot about ageism and misogyny and this fear of being an older woman or any type of woman that doesn't correlate with patriarchy's idea of what women should be," she continues. "Also, the manufacturing of insecurity in women and the trends in body types and all of this exhausting stuff which women are really only realising is obsolete through talking to each other and seeing other women who are living as outside of it as they possibly can and seeing how peaceful that is." 

'As Good A Reason' is a song with a different kind of energy to 'Labour' but no less inspiring. "I wanted to write a joyful song," she smiles. "It was written prior to 'Labour'. Female rage is an incredible thing, but it can also feel like it's not for everyone, and I don't want to reduce the meaning of being a woman to our capacity for pain and anger. 'As Good A Reason' speaks to your reasons for doing things and your reasons for self love. The idea that if self-love is too difficult for the sake of oneself if you are a woman living under this patriarchy that is manufacturing insecurities and telling you that you have to do things to be loved. Loving yourself out of spite for those who would profit out of you doing the opposite is as good a reason in the interim while you're learning to do it just for yourself." 

For the rest of the year, Paris is getting on with the important business of being a pop star. "I've got my first European tour in September," she beams. "I've never played outside the UK before. It's going to be incredible to get over to see a whole new space of people who've been listening to my music." And is there anything else planned for the rest of the year? Well, we'll just have to wait and see. There's definitely a whole lot more music coming," she teases. Engaging with meaningful conversations and making music that resonates across generations, Paris Paloma is full of ambition and confidence, ready to tell her stories to a mass audience. 

Taken from the October 2023 edition of Dork. Live At Leeds In The City takes place on 14th October, visit liveatleeds.com for more information.