When Rina Sawayama returned to her birth country of Japan this August for her first visit in three years, she sought out gel pens and snack crackers. The pop star was there to mark a milestone with her inaugural performance in the island nation, but found herself thinking about all the summers and winters she spent in Japan as a child after her family moved to London when she was five. So, between stops playing the multi-city Summer Sonic Festival, she ransacked a stationery store to stock up on the little treats that used to delight her younger self.
“Now I can buy all the pens,” she recalls triumphantly a few weeks later on a call with me from the London office of her label Dirty Hit. Though it seems simple, reclaiming the happiness that comes from colorful writing instruments seems like one way Sawayama is getting back in touch with her “inner child,” a psychological concept that she explores on her new album, Hold the Girl, out September 16. The project, which veers from the bright 2000s acoustic pop (think Avril Lavigne and Kelly Clarkson) to feverish U.K. garage and club beats, required the now 32-year-old singer-songwriter to confront the self-denial that came from “growing up without boundaries” and thus “receiving a distorted view of reality.”
She clarifies that her experience of being gaslit into “not believing in [her] own truth” is tied to her identity as a Japanese British immigrant who is both femme and queer. “The idea of, where do I start and where [other people] begin is something that I’ve only really truly learned recently,” Sawayama reflects. “I think when you spend your whole life trying to make other people happy, whether it's your parents or school or this societal notion of what’s good [...] you genuinely forget what you want to do. What makes you happy? What are your values? I think this record overall is about finding out what those boundaries are.”
Sawayama’s ability to turn memoiristic insights such as these into catchy anthems is part of what has made her a modern pop icon. Her deft sociopolitical commentary only adds nuance to her already urgent work. Having studied political science and sociology at Cambridge, she broke out with her 2020 self-titled album, an adventurous project that tackled themes of capitalism, East Asian fetishism, queer identity, and familial lineage. Proving Sawayama as an astute experimentalist, the debut blended from Y2K pop to nu-metal and New Jack Swing. It immediately brought her the visibility and acclaim that she had been working toward since releasing her earliest singles in 2013. But just as her star was rising, the pandemic forced her to stay inside and delay the tour for Sawayama.
This period of isolation became one of self-reflection: Sawayama started a new type of therapy that introduced her to the concept of “reparenting” her inner child, and in between intense sessions, she quickly wrote the songs that would become Hold the Girl.
While the startlingly intimate album captures her internal confusion, Sawayama also searches for magic amid the turmoil, as on “Catch Me in the Air,” a glowing celebration of her bond with her mother in which she sings they “[saved] each other in every way.” She makes space for exuberant joy on “This Hell,” a country-pop track about dancing with all your queer friends who are “doomed for eternity.”
While crafting the album, Sawayama worried that a general audience wouldn’t understand the subjects she broaches in her songs. “So much with this record, I’m like, ‘Is anyone going to get what I’m talking about?’” she tells me. “But I’ve tried to do this thing where I try to make the hook as easy to understand as possible so that it's still a good pop song. The specificity [to my experience] is slightly lessened by the fact that the hooks are universal.”
Then she lays out her intention with Hold the Girl: “I’m trying to infiltrate therapy into pop music.”
In the two years since her 2020 debut, Sawayama has become besties with Elton John, collabed with Charli XCX, walked the Balmain runway at Paris Fashion Week, and been cast in the next John Wick film after director Chad Stahelski noticed that she liked to play characters in her music videos. Her impeccably curated video concepts have indeed shown off her shapeshifting abilities, finding her embodying everyone from a drunk businessman to a headbanging ghost to a cowgirl in a three-way pansexual marriage. Sawayama has emerged as a rare pop diva who can merge the personal, political, and fantastical all in one.
But what has become an artform for Sawayama began as an escape. Pop was a “way to fit in,” she tells me, back when she started attending Catholic school in London, at a time when she wasn’t yet fully fluent in English. “If you’re new to that school or whatever, it can really connect you to the rest of the students.” She recalls setting up Destiny’s Child-type girl bands with fellow classmates, and idolizing divas like Britney Spears, Gwen Stefani, and Lady Gaga, all of whom inform her work now. “I still feel that same excitement when I listen to songs from back then that inspired me.”
The first pop artist Sawayama recalls following on television was Hikaru Utada, the Japanese-American superstar who made genreless, boundary pushing music in both Japanese and English before the industry knew how to market multicultural artists. (Utada’s 1999 record First Love is still the best selling album in Japan to this day.) Their influence can be traced in the way Sawayama fearlessly synthesizes influences from both her homes of Britain and Japan, striving to embrace all of herself. “I’m not trying to be cool in a [writing] session. I’ll pull really, really cringe references that people would consider not cool,” she says. “But sometimes just trying ideas and mishmashing different genres can yield pretty cool results. That playfulness is something I try to really keep very pure with production.”
Crystalline, Sawayama’s creative director, calls the artist “the most intelligent, eclectic, and tenacious person I’ve ever witnessed.” A Korean-American creative and musician, Crystalline recalls being “floored” after first watching Sawyama’s futuristic “Cyber Stockholm Syndrome” video back in 2017. “Seeing an Asian girl do it, in a true pop sense, in the West was amazing to me,” they tell me. “She’s such a cross section of so many cultures and time periods and musical references and academic references. To work with her is to be constantly surprised by what she’s going to combine to create something new.”
After starting to work with Sawayama last year, Crystalline was quickly impressed by the attention and care the artist gives to her very diverse, largely queer team. “In this industry, there’s a lot of people who take every other role for granted, and she is a person who invests in every person that she works with, takes the time to know and care about them — because she’s done them too,” they say of Sawayama. “She came up from working as a nail tech, working at the Apple Store, to fund her music career.”
That work ethic never left Sawayama, now a bona fide pop star. In the thick of a promotion cycle, she might have to do up to 20 interviews a day, which includes up to five photo shoots, she says. When she’s on tour, she writes down a goal for herself every show, next to her setlist in big letters — usually technical notes, like “push abs on high notes.” When her vocal coach, Maria Rivington, suggests knocking down her melodies a couple of keys to make it more manageable for live, she refuses.
Then there’s the public eye. “The pressure with the pop girls is that even if you’re not having such a good day, even if you’re really jet-lagged or your IBS is going crazy or whatever, you have to look really hot. Consistently hot,” she says. “And also everything you say is going to get printed and put on Twitter.”
But Sawayama has also been enjoying the fact that in this social media age, pop stars are able to communicate more directly with their audience and break the “fantasy” of individualized perfection. “I think people are really comfortable and cognizant of the fact that every pop star runs their own business,” she reflects. “Even though I know Britney was very much involved in her songwriting and stuff, it was all quite smoke and mirrors back then. I think what people value now is the idea that [the fans] are part of the music process. And definitely seeing artists like Charli [XCX], for example, who just do whatever the hell they want and are so good at it. I think that’s a much more accepted narrative.”
Sawayama also uses her platform to advocate for the marginalized. After Sawayama was deemed ineligible for the BRITs and Mercury Prize due to her permanent residency visa and not having full British citizenship, she spoke out about how the decision was “heartbreaking” and “othering,” given that she had lived in the U.K. for over 25 years. After fans and luminaries like Elton John echoed and amplified this criticism, the institutions changed their policies.
Even as she calls on her personal experiences to push change forward, Sawayama keeps firm boundaries around what she shares from her life. “I’m not pursuing fame,” she says. “I don’t want to do anything that is going to invite any unnecessary attention. I want to promote my music, do my interviews, see my fans, but I don’t want to expose anything else, if that makes sense.”
In 2019, Sawayama was able to meet her hero Utada, who came to one of her London shows opening for Charli XCX. “I try not to fangirl too much, but I was quite like, ‘Yeah, you are the reason I did music,’” she gushes. But the full-circle moment was also accompanied by some weirdness: Utada, who has been releasing music since 1996, was mistaken for Sawayama outside the venue. “I know it’s so cringe. It's so cringe,” Sawayama says now. “Yeah, we were both lol-ing about that. We were just like, ‘Oh, for God’s sake. That's just so embarrassing.’”
These sort of ordinary yet dehumanizing events are what fueled the writing of Hold the Girl’s opening track, “Minor Feelings,” based on the 2020 Cathy Park Hong essay collection of the same name. On the synth-pop song, Sawayama sings about spending a lifetime pretending that she doesn’t feel “out of place” before finally reaching a breaking point. “[That book] is about the minimizing that a lot of Asian femmes do to their feelings, being treated a certain way in the Western world,” she explains. “Minor feelings are not major events. It’s often the daily microaggressions that can be so exhausting and make you internalize a lot.”
In just the first few lines of Hold the Girl, Sawayama collapses the borders between her individual experience and the emotions brought on by the escalating attacks against Asians in both the U.S. and U.K. The song opens with feelings of dissociation (“How am I supposed to feel / When you tell me that nothing in my life is real”) before mentioning detractors who “hide behind a plastic shield.” The latter line stemmed from a news story of a COVID-19 patient refusing treatment from a health care provider because they were Asian. “During COVID, it did turn into major incidents,” she recalls. “People are behind these plastic shields but still yelling hate.”
But true to Sawayama’s therapeutic mission, it feels necessary for her to explore this pain to find healing on the other side. After all, acknowledging that you lost a part of yourself, that you were once denied certain kinds of love and belonging, is the first step in finally getting those feelings back.
On “Phantom,” a rock-pop ballad wafting memories of scented gel pens and stickers, she promises to embrace the wounded kid she once was. “Inner child, come back to me / I want to tell you that I’m sorry,” she sings, strings swelling around her voice, as she approaches something akin to completeness.
While most of the album finds her writing directly to herself, Sawayama takes on the perspective of an apologetic parent on the powerful “Send My Love to John,” based on the story of a queer friend who had struggled to gain acceptance from their homophobic family. One day, this friend’s mom finally acknowledged their partner while hanging up a phone call: “Well, send my love to John.”
Inspired by that story, Sawayama wanted to “provide a bit of a more empathetic view” on parents, especially immigrants who “tried to assimilate and buy into this American dream and wish so many things for their child that never worked out.” On the country-inflected song, she sings, “I’m sorry for the things I’ve done / A misguided love to my only son / We both had to leave our mothers, to get the things we want.”
“I hope that song can set a lot of people free, in terms of the people who have never said sorry to them or who will never see them for the beautiful human being that they are,” she says. “I think there’s a lot of people who carry that with them, [feeling like] they represent embarrassment or shame to others. I think those people deserve a sorry.”
Listening to her say those words, I choke up for a second, thinking of listeners who might get some closure from this little bit of role play, made possible by the fantastical realms of pop music. “I’m getting emo,” I tell her, before trying to pivot to another topic.
“Let it out,” Sawayama urges, not a hint of hesitation in her voice.
Photographer: James Bee
Photo Assistant: Di-Chen Chen
Digital Tech: Stewart Volland
Stylist: Katie Qian
Stylist Assistant: Kiona Vickroy
Hair Stylist: Preston Wada
Makeup Artist: Tami El Sombati
Manicurist: SreyNin Peng
Prop Stylist: Andre Shahjanian
Props Assistant: Luke Stiles
Production: Hyperion LA
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