New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Ashlynn Malia felt emotionally starved by her environment and personal fears when she started writing rather be alone. The EP depicts Malia letting relationships last past their initial burst of passion and energy, acting on impulse to be closer to someone and welcoming their need for intimacy, all while accepting some relationships' inevitable abandonment and failure.
If making those connections means enduring all the overthinking, insecurity, growing pains, abandonment, rejection, questioning of my own self-worth and blurring of my mental vision - then I'd rather be alone, where I'm safe from that type of pain. - Ashlynn Malia
rather be alone shows a girl torn apart, winding her way through her circular deliberations, and ultimately growing to live with the forlorn conclusion that she can live with the empty spaces that relationships would fill. Life is much less complicated in solitude.
Rather be alone was created by Ashlynn Malia over the span of two years with producers Andrew Weitz and Koby Berman.
On the creation process of rather be alone, Malia says: We played around, experimented a lot, and didn't take ourselves too seriously during the process. A ton of the sounds you hear in this EP are original. The first snare in "desperate" is a heavily processed recording of me biting a carrot. The pulse in "alone" is the ticking of a giant clock that we found in Koby's studio. I think we all genuinely enjoyed working together and finding our collective sound. Looking back at the start of this project, we've all evolved so much since. We poured our time, energy, hearts, and souls into this body of work and it's extremely personal and special.
Today we get another great taste of the new record in the form of her single "temporary," a song that incorporates and captures many of the brooding pop sound of those like Billie Eilish, equally sensual and haunting.
Asylynn talks about the new single "I got the inspiration for "temporary" from a dream. I woke up with feelings for someone who I knew I didn't actually like, hence the "i hope [the feelings] will be gone by tomorrow" line. "Temporary" kind of blends the themes from my other songs "open" and "emergency" since it focuses both on apprehension towards getting close to someone ("open") and resorting to detachment in relationships ("emergency"). The production is dark and intense and reflects the panic going on in my head while my two conflicting realities were at war.
In regards to the video she adds When I write songs I place a lot of emphasis on my lyrics. The picture my words paint directly effects the choices we make during production. To me, they're the center of everything. This video exists so everyone listening experiences the song that way too.
