“Moonlight” by Jen Awad

Jen Awad has been described as Los Angeles’ best-kept secret, and yet she’s best known for her raucously high-energy live shows that practically demand to be noticed. If you’re wondering whether that’s a contradiction, you’re asking the right questions – that bold clash of energies is where her music comes from.

Her music is crafted out of the rawest and most vulnerable emotions available to her, filtered through a nostalgic lens of 70s and 80s style pop-rock, like ELO, The Queen and The Smiths, with Awad aspiring to that same unapologetic boldness of approach. It’s set to be unveiled on her debut album coming this summer, ‘Existential Daydream’.

For now, listeners can enjoy a taste in the form of Awad’s new single, “Moonlight”. The track bursts out of the gates with a glammy guitar riff, before adopting a rise and fall rhythm that mimics Awad’s shifting emotions – calmer, more contemplative verses building into a huge and cathartic outburst in the chorus. The confidence bursting through the music is unmistakeable: in Awad’s own words, she’s “a motherfucking champion”.

On the song, Awad says, “Moonlight was never supposed to come out. It was a secret song I wrote as a bitter reaction to the one who broke my heart constantly bragging of his travels after we had called it quits.  I was mad that he could move on without me so easily while I was still living in the prison of “what went wrong?”. The song asks “was I so hard to love?’ he always made it seem that way but looking back he had put me through the ringer as well.This song was my response to all of that. It’s about two imperfect people who gave up on loving each other and both came out victoriously alone for it.”