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Mango sticky rice might be someone’s first choice for a dessert after eating a fulfilling Thai meal. It covers all the bases: the sweet, chewy mixture of coconut milk and rice perfectly balances the tartness and dense bite of a mango. Some might say that blending the sweet and sour taste could be a metaphor for life. For UMI, it served as the ultimate foundation for her album people stories.
After one of her tour stops for her last album, Forest in the Wind, in Amsterdam, a couple approached the singer and confessed that they fell in love while talking about her music over a meal of mango sticky rice. They invited the 26-year-old to dine at the restaurant where their romance had begun and to discuss the different paths of life. “That’s when it all clicked,” the musician tells me over a Zoom call in her car. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I want to make an album about the stories of my fans and other people’s stories.’”
From then on, it became UMI’s mission to become a collector of all these precious memories. “Every time I go to the studio, I will send a message to my fans on Discord and write, ‘Send me a story the last time you cried,’ or ‘send me a story of your happiest memory.’ Then I’ll take all those stories and turn them into songs,” she explains.
The first song she wrote was named after the delicious dessert, and provides several vignettes of gradually falling in love, such as getting high while watching Wong Kar Wai movies. The lighthearted and bouncy guitar strums of the track are later embellished with UMI’s fluid Japanese rap interlude. Though the songs in her album are mostly about other people’s encounters, she makes sure to include her own meaningful experiences, too.
“Sometimes,” the first song of the album, sways with pensiveness as she asks the question that lays the groundwork for the project: “What is happiness?” UMI introduces recorded conversations with her therapist and connects the personal introspection to the collective. She asks the mental health professional, “Why is it okay for me to be happy if the world itself isn’t happy?”
It’s a heavy question we all have lingering from time to time. With the imminent political chaos that’s happening in the world, there’s only so much that we, as individuals, can do. Several sessions with the therapist allowed UMI to realize that, to enact the change you want to see in the world, you need to find the perfect voice within yourself and move from there. “I would love for people to see that caring for themselves is just as important as caring for the world, because they go hand in hand,” she says.
It’s why UMI is incredibly devoted to connecting with her fans on a deep and spiritual basis. In major cities, she hosts meditations and soundbaths, and even spends time on breathwork with her audience at the beginning of her performances. There were times when she wanted to quit the music industry completely in the process of making the project, but her number ones convinced her to keep going and pursue her dream. Lately, she’s developed quite an intricate relationship with her fans, describing herself as a big sister figure. “They’ll ask me, ‘I have a school test tomorrow. How can I study for it?’ or ‘I don’t know what to wear tomorrow, what should I wear?’ And we’ll just talk like we’re family. It always feels like FaceTiming with them.”
Among those hardcore fans are famous K-pop stars like V from BTS, whom she collaborated with on the hit song “Wherever U R,” and EXO’s BAEKHYUN, whom she worked with on “Do What You Do” with producer EL CAPITXN. She even asked the latter idol if he could film a video in tandem with the theme of people stories. “What does love mean to you?” she asks. “I believe that love should include the feeling of wanting the person you love to sleep well,” Baekhyun says casually atop a stairwell. “Wake up well, be able to start a happy day, and wishing that to happen.”
Like how she stays genuine and true with her fans, she wants to go beyond surface-level interactions with these huge artists. Rather than just saying hi at concerts or participating in a song together and never talking again, she wants to nurture these significant relationships. “Anyone who makes music with me—I don’t know why— we happen to become family afterwards. I hope that’s how the rest of my career goes. I can help rebuild a sense of community within the artist world.”
According to the musician, to truly understand yourself includes reawakening childhood nostalgia. Along with her longtime collaborator and producer V-Ron, she tapped into folk, R&B, and pop sounds and early 2000s MTV memories that shaped her musically. The music video for “Right / Wrong” is reminiscent of raw and sultry R&B videos that use rainfall as an emotional backdrop, while she paints a picture of going back and forth about whether she regrets decisions in the lyrics. She also admits that nostalgia goes hand in hand with childhood traumas. “Part of my creative process was reclaiming my own childhood and turning it into this whole new thing.”
“Familiar Friend” is dedicated to her sister and was inspired by her sibling’s experiences with depression and anxiety. UMI recounts that sometimes we often cling to those for a sense of familiarity. But there are days when they’re too much and we want those negative feelings to completely melt away. She describes the song as looking at mental health from a new and refreshing perspective. “We need a lot more compassion towards it,” she says. “I don’t think you can avoid depression as a human being. I think you can just understand it better.”
Balancing those feelings can sometimes get in the way of daily tasks, but it shouldn’t stop you from living life freely. The album sends out a comforting message that you’re always on the path you’re meant to be on. The past two years culminated in the artist finally embracing her rockstar side. “I’ve always been such a rebel,” the singer exclaims. She cites her inner free-spiritedness and desire to break the mold as motivations, as she wants to show her edgier and more mature side. The path to self-discovery is never-ending, and she confidently sings an everlasting affirmation in the chorus of “The Universe”: “The universe is always workin’ / Sometimes it hurts, but it’s always worth it / We fall apart, we’re bodies learnin.’”
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Lea Veloso
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