Looking at the past and thinking about the future, Poppy Ajudha talks spirituality, catharsis and how making the record made her understand who she truly is.

On the cusp of releasing her new album, Poppy, Poppy Ajudha is treading the tightrope between vulnerability and connection, letting fans know that it’s okay to understand their emotions and release them. Looking at the past and thinking about the future, she talks spirituality, catharsis and how making the record made her understand who she truly is.

 

“Having an album out is quite an overwhelming feeling. Songwriting is so deeply intimate, and I think releasing songs always feels exposing and vulnerable.” Poppy Ajudha is comfortable with vulnerability. Exposing your feelings to the world is part of the process and the purpose of art, she says, and with her new album, Poppy, out soon, she’s ready for the next stage: connecting with people through her work. “The point of music for me is two things. There’s my own purpose on the planet, my own process of understanding my emotions and releasing them. And then there’s how you create community, how you feel less alone, and help other people feel less alone.” Together, it’s the meeting of the two – vulnerability and connection – which drives Poppy’s work. “Those two elements are so fulfilling, and they are what makes writing and releasing music feel so meaningful and important.”

 

Community has shaped Poppy’s art from the very beginning, when she was first performing as a 16-year-old in south London’s music scene. “I didn’t have any music training, so I learned everything from the people I was around. I don’t know if I would know anything that I know now, if I hadn’t been around those people who were just working it out for themselves.” She worries, however, that as venues shut and the focus shifts to online success, new musicians are missing out on that experience. “If venues are closed, if community centres are closed, if people don’t have a lot of money to learn instruments, I don’t know how new young artists will come up easily without that infrastructure and that help.”

She’s conscious, too, of the ways in which art is increasingly under-funded and taken less seriously in culture. “I think that honest music is really important. Honest art is really important. And I think we’re in an era where we don’t value that anymore. We don’t realise how valuable art is in changing culture, in helping us get through things. I think we really underestimate its impact.” But, she says, it’s in the moments when we do need help, when we realise that “we need art to reconceptualise our life and our perspective and to feel less alone.”

 

People are central to the way Poppy approaches music – and life. With a degree in anthropology, she’s always been interested in learning from every interaction: “I love to connect to people, I love to talk to people, I love to learn from them.” And this is the driving force behind her new album, Poppy: “It’s so much about my growth and my understanding of who I am and how I want to interact with people, and how powerful that can be in also changing the world. I just came to realise how important conversations and connection and perspective are for finding happiness.”

Finding happiness through vulnerability hasn’t always been an easy journey. “When I wrote my first album, I was dismissive of love. I didn’t want to be a woman just writing love songs; I wanted to talk about things that I felt mattered, and love felt secondary to that at the time.” This time around, though, she’s leaning into love – in all its complexity – with tracks like ‘Crossroads’, a love song about difficult choices: “That’s not the way that life goes / Only crossroads, no lifeboats will carry you home”. It’s her favourite song on the album, a reflection of the lessons she’s learned. As you grow older, she says, “your understanding of love changes so much, and you create your own path.” Sophomore albums are notoriously difficult beasts, but Poppyis an album about transformation. “That’s why I called the album Poppy, because it felt like finding the path to who I am and who I want to be, how I want to move in the world and what will actually make me happy. Sometimes the things that you think will make you happy won’t actually give you long-standing happiness.”

 

Looking back at the path behind her, what advice would she give her younger self? “Get out of your own way.” Poppy is a self-confessed perfectionist, but, she says, “You don’t have to be perfect at something to do it. Sometimes, when we’re waiting to be perfect, we stop ourselves from appreciating what we are.” It’s a fine line, she says, because her perfectionism doesn’t always stand in her way: “It’s important to care a lot, and the way I created this album was so specific, so intentional, so careful.” She reckons she reproduced the single ‘My Future’ ten times until it felt right. Poppy is someone who tries, hard. “There’s this idea that giving a shit isn’t that cool, you’re supposed to be nonchalant. Well, I fucking care a lot!” she laughs. “It’s cool to care a lot and to put a lot into what you do, and to make something of your life.”

You have to be able to count on yourself, she says, something which ‘My Future’ explores in depth with lyrics like “Baby, I’ve got self-control / And I’ve got the dedication / Am I selfish if I let you know / Love comes second to my future?” Too many people, she says, go through life believing they don’t deserve much. “When I was writing ‘My Future’, I was with someone who was holding me back. I wanted that song to feel triumphant – through the chaos, you find out what you need to do.”

 

All of this reflects back to her original purpose: expressing herself and connecting with other people. It’s something which manifests even in the songwriting process, whether she’s alone at her piano or in the studio with her trusted collaborators. “You can’t make great art with people you don’t connect with. Music is a business, but it’s still creating art – which is a spiritual, emotional experience.”

 

On the other side of the spectrum, Poppy finds that live performance is a different, but equally valuable way, to experience art. “When you release music, it’s kind of gone and you don’t hear the nuance or the intricacy of how it’s affecting people’s lives.” It’s on tour that she finally gets to see the fruits of her labour, whether it’s on stage or afterwards, when she’s often had people approach her with stories about how her music has sparked conversations or feelings in their own lives. “It’s so interesting to see how someone else has interpreted art. You don’t know who will connect with it at what time, but it will always be at the time that they need it.”

It’s for this reason that she’s so preoccupied with authenticity. “Everything’s been super-capitalised and super-commodified, and it feels like art has been sucked into that. But it will always have that spiritual, cathartic, conflicting element that will always be part of the human experience.” A lot of things change, she says, but “we’re all having the same universal, emotional experiences.”

 

On a personal level, Poppy has long been influenced by the works of James Baldwin – the only tattoo on her body which is not the name of one of her own projects is a quote from Baldwin. The line, from an untitled poem, reads: “Do not get carried away by the sound of falling water.” It’s a fitting reminder, and one which is echoed in her own words when I ask her what she’s most excited about in the future. “I’m excited to continue making work that I believe in and love. I think that it’s easy to lose sight of that, it’s easy to be torn in lots of different directions, but the most important thing is that you believe in what you do and you want to do it.”

 

Buy your copy of NOTION The Artists Vol. 1 featuring Poppy Ajudha here. 

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