NAME:
Bow Anderson
ABOUT
Bow Anderson believes that everything happens for a reason. Ever since the 24-year-old Edinburgh-born singer-songwriter was a child, she has been on a path – albeit one that has been altogether unconventional, filled with fearless highs and life-altering pivots – to become one of UK pop’s most refreshing new voices. It’s an unorthodox journey, but one that has resulted in a bold and distinctive musical vision: an electric sonic amalgamation of old and new, reverential to both the legends of 60s soul and the titans of today’s modern pop landscape. Pulling all the strings and tying them together is Bow, who is overflowing with fortitude and go-getter attitude.
In an extreme time for new artists, Bow Anderson nonetheless firmly stands out - a point made in style on her breakout 2021. Her debut single, ‘Sweater’, went viral, with early support across Radio 1 and Apple Music 1 (and fans in the likes of Elton John). The fast-rising Scottish pop star has since been named one of Vevo's Ones to Watch, gone top 20 on Spotify's Viral Charts and made her first TV appearances on the likes of Children In Need and German prime time TV show, ‘Late Night Berlin’; all up-front of her debut EP, ‘New Wave’, which was released to further acclaim in early 2021 surrounding her collaboration with Felix Jaehn and Cheat Codes.
Beneath all that, you’ll find the first hints of Bow Anderson’s compellingly underdog back-story. Dancing was Bow’s initial way of expressing herself with music. While her dad was very into music, there wasn’t anyone in her family who was actually musical. Nevertheless, seeing an advert in a local newspaper for a performing arts school, her grandad signed her up. “I went along for the dancing. I remember one of the first classes: we had a singing lesson and I was really out of my comfort zone,” she recalls. “We all had to sing together in the room and the teacher walked past us to hear us sing individually. When he came passed me, I was miming. It was so uncomfortable for me. It's mad to think now, but back then it was a no go for me. It was like, 'Nope, not for me thank you very much.'”
Anyway, performing wasn’t really Bow’s focus at that stage. “When I was about 10, I started going trampolining for fun with my friends,” she says. “This woman called Lauren Jeffrey was coaching me and asked if I wanted to join Edinburgh Trampolining Club, which took it more seriously. You could train to compete and I loved competing. I still danced, but it wasn't the main focus at that point. I was still really young. It's funny, I always thought that I would go to London to pursue dance, but then trampolining came along and that got in the way. It's what I was going to do.”
Bow’s plans were scuppered, however. During some strengthening exercises, she landed incorrectly: “I was doing a seat drop, which is where you land on your bum and come up and do a straddle. But I was leaning too far forward. I straightened my legs to prevent myself from landing on my face, and when I did that my knee dislocated and then popped back into place all in this quick few seconds. As it popped back into place, it broke below my knee. It broken cleanly and then cut into my artery. You couldn't have written it. It was a freak accident.”
She was rushed to hospital, with doctors, at one point, requesting her father sign a consent form stating that, should it come to it, they had permission to amputate her leg. “I was looking at my dad asking, 'Am I going to be able to dance again? Am I even going to be able to walk again?'” she recalls. “It was so serious.” Thankfully, things didn’t escalate to a worst-case scenario and Bow recovered from her injury. “I've always been a strong, positive person, and I worked really hard at physio so I could get back to dancing,” she says of the period after her injury. “But ever since I was younger, I've always felt like things happen for a reason. I was obviously meant to be doing something else.”
That “something else” turned out to be music. While in recovery, Bow was still enrolled in the performing arts school and she was encouraged to pursue singing. “It fell into place and I fell in love with music. It made me feel better about everything,” she adds. “That was my way of coping with things. I accepted that trampolining maybe wasn't what I was meant to be doing and music was. It just felt right.”
Music provided the perfect escapism. Bow taught herself to play the piano, and would learn cover versions, copying riffs and replicating melodies to learn about vocal technique and to improve. Singing also provided respite from the linger effects of her injury. “I had a thing I called my tingly toe. Because my nerves were healing, I had these things like constant pins and needles, but worse. The only way to distract myself from it was to sing. My dad and I would sit and sing to try and distract me from it.” Together they would sing hits by Beyoncé or songs from the musical Dreamgirls, which had provided Bow with her first real introduction to the musical legacy of Motown.
These sessions with her father planted the seeds for the music that Bow would ultimately want to create herself. After finishing school, she relocated from Edinburgh to London to study music at BIMM Institute, although she viewed higher education as more of a means to an end than an educational opportunity. “I was never there for that, really. I just wanted the student loan,” she laughs. “I was never really academic at school; I had to work hard to get reasonable grades. I'm also dyslexic and I didn't find out until I was 14, which is quite old. In school teachers just used to imply that I was lazy. Thinking back, that gave me quite a lot of anxiety. It wasn't fun for me.”
Coming from a dance and sporting background, Bow knew that to succeed she would have to put in the graft. She also knew that, musically, she wanted to pay homage to soul legends like Aretha Franklin, and Etta James, “but I wanted it to be modern,” she says. “It took a long time to figure out how to do that. Amy Winehouse is a huge inspiration but I didn’t want to replicate her style.” She struck upon gold when she met songwriters and producers Jamie Scott and Jonny Coffer. “They were the first people who were able to create what I wanted. I'd been into sessions previously where I'd given references, but people either wouldn’t get it or things would go off on a Swedish pop tangent. Jamie was one of the first people to completely get what I was trying to create without me having to even really explain it.”
Along with Jonny, they wrote Bow’s viral debut single ‘Sweater’, which was released the week the world went into lockdown but made an immediate impression ("Tear-stained soul...a chorus that lifts you up by your ears" – Guardian Guide). “That was the first song where it made sense,” Bow says of the track. “From there we had something to reference and from then on could experiment, but refer back to that and ask, 'Does this fit?'”
Going forward, Bow and her collaborators developed an almost scientific technique to ensure that the sound represented who she was as an artist. “For a lot of the songs, we've taken samples from old soul records and then we write to them,” she explains of the writing process. “We have to balance of pop melodies and soul melodies. We ask, 'Does this have enough soul? Does this have enough contemporary pop?' It's a really hard thing to do. I've just never wanted to just write pop records that anyone can sing. I want to try and do something that's a bit different.”
Along with this molecular approach to pop songwriting, themes began emerge lyrically, most notably heartache. “Oh yes. I've not had much luck with relationships,” Bow laughs. “Going through heartbreak can feel really lonely, but I hope that by writing about it that it helps people feel less alone when they listen to my songs. Also, I find it hard to write really lovey dovey songs. When I'm writing an upbeat song, quite often it's 'I'm good on my own.'”
This empowering mentality is all over Bow Anderson’s debut EP, ‘New Wave’. The title track mixes uplifting, gospel-tinged pop - and a ‘La La Land’-inspired dance video - about starting afresh, and letting go of the negative people in your life. Second single 'Heavy' captured the attempt to get over him, but by accidentally getting drunk in the park (with a creative video shot with a drone under lockdown). Elsewhere, early favourite ‘Island’, meanwhile, takes neo-soul and injects it with a sense of fiery sense of independence as she sings, “I am an island, baby/ Do you think that I need you?” (complete with its playful, synchronised-swimming video). Even the torment of heartache is given a shot of adrenaline: on ‘Sweater’ Bow obfuscates romantic ruin with pronounced pianos and huge sucker punch of a chorus, while the retro stylings of the Dusty Springfield-esque ‘Black Heart’ brings a sense of faded Hollywood glamour to matters of the heart, Bow’s stunning vocal delivering a story of love forever lost.
These songs further preview the stunning music Bow Anderson has coming in 2021. The haunting ‘I Hate That I Fell In Love With You’ is the sort of ballad that could rival Adele, the vivid and photographic lyrical imagery providing a devastating and raw portrait of what it’s like to fall out of love with someone. “A pretty shit situation, isn’t it,” Bow says with a wry smile. She’s hoping that in the future she can tour with it, although the restrictions of the pandemic are making that hard to plan at this moment. Still, as with her mentality after her accident, she’s looking forward with a healthy amount of self-belief.
“There's just something inside me that has always known what I want” she explains. “It's not an ego thing at all. I could have come to London and it all go tits up. But if I had the mentality that I was ready for it to fail then it was never going to work in the first place. You go through rollercoasters and bad times, but those times make you who you are and can be turned into positives. If I hadn't had that injury, I don't know that I would be doing music. But everything that happens in your life makes you who you are. For me, there was no other option but to succeed.”
ExpandIn an extreme time for new artists, Bow Anderson nonetheless firmly stands out - a point made in style on her breakout 2021. Her debut single, ‘Sweater’, went viral, with early support across Radio 1 and Apple Music 1 (and fans in the likes of Elton John). The fast-rising Scottish pop star has since been named one of Vevo's Ones to Watch, gone top 20 on Spotify's Viral Charts and made her first TV appearances on the likes of Children In Need and German prime time TV show, ‘Late Night Berlin’; all up-front of her debut EP, ‘New Wave’, which was released to further acclaim in early 2021 surrounding her collaboration with Felix Jaehn and Cheat Codes.
Beneath all that, you’ll find the first hints of Bow Anderson’s compellingly underdog back-story. Dancing was Bow’s initial way of expressing herself with music. While her dad was very into music, there wasn’t anyone in her family who was actually musical. Nevertheless, seeing an advert in a local newspaper for a performing arts school, her grandad signed her up. “I went along for the dancing. I remember one of the first classes: we had a singing lesson and I was really out of my comfort zone,” she recalls. “We all had to sing together in the room and the teacher walked past us to hear us sing individually. When he came passed me, I was miming. It was so uncomfortable for me. It's mad to think now, but back then it was a no go for me. It was like, 'Nope, not for me thank you very much.'”
Anyway, performing wasn’t really Bow’s focus at that stage. “When I was about 10, I started going trampolining for fun with my friends,” she says. “This woman called Lauren Jeffrey was coaching me and asked if I wanted to join Edinburgh Trampolining Club, which took it more seriously. You could train to compete and I loved competing. I still danced, but it wasn't the main focus at that point. I was still really young. It's funny, I always thought that I would go to London to pursue dance, but then trampolining came along and that got in the way. It's what I was going to do.”
Bow’s plans were scuppered, however. During some strengthening exercises, she landed incorrectly: “I was doing a seat drop, which is where you land on your bum and come up and do a straddle. But I was leaning too far forward. I straightened my legs to prevent myself from landing on my face, and when I did that my knee dislocated and then popped back into place all in this quick few seconds. As it popped back into place, it broke below my knee. It broken cleanly and then cut into my artery. You couldn't have written it. It was a freak accident.”
She was rushed to hospital, with doctors, at one point, requesting her father sign a consent form stating that, should it come to it, they had permission to amputate her leg. “I was looking at my dad asking, 'Am I going to be able to dance again? Am I even going to be able to walk again?'” she recalls. “It was so serious.” Thankfully, things didn’t escalate to a worst-case scenario and Bow recovered from her injury. “I've always been a strong, positive person, and I worked really hard at physio so I could get back to dancing,” she says of the period after her injury. “But ever since I was younger, I've always felt like things happen for a reason. I was obviously meant to be doing something else.”
That “something else” turned out to be music. While in recovery, Bow was still enrolled in the performing arts school and she was encouraged to pursue singing. “It fell into place and I fell in love with music. It made me feel better about everything,” she adds. “That was my way of coping with things. I accepted that trampolining maybe wasn't what I was meant to be doing and music was. It just felt right.”
Music provided the perfect escapism. Bow taught herself to play the piano, and would learn cover versions, copying riffs and replicating melodies to learn about vocal technique and to improve. Singing also provided respite from the linger effects of her injury. “I had a thing I called my tingly toe. Because my nerves were healing, I had these things like constant pins and needles, but worse. The only way to distract myself from it was to sing. My dad and I would sit and sing to try and distract me from it.” Together they would sing hits by Beyoncé or songs from the musical Dreamgirls, which had provided Bow with her first real introduction to the musical legacy of Motown.
These sessions with her father planted the seeds for the music that Bow would ultimately want to create herself. After finishing school, she relocated from Edinburgh to London to study music at BIMM Institute, although she viewed higher education as more of a means to an end than an educational opportunity. “I was never there for that, really. I just wanted the student loan,” she laughs. “I was never really academic at school; I had to work hard to get reasonable grades. I'm also dyslexic and I didn't find out until I was 14, which is quite old. In school teachers just used to imply that I was lazy. Thinking back, that gave me quite a lot of anxiety. It wasn't fun for me.”
Coming from a dance and sporting background, Bow knew that to succeed she would have to put in the graft. She also knew that, musically, she wanted to pay homage to soul legends like Aretha Franklin, and Etta James, “but I wanted it to be modern,” she says. “It took a long time to figure out how to do that. Amy Winehouse is a huge inspiration but I didn’t want to replicate her style.” She struck upon gold when she met songwriters and producers Jamie Scott and Jonny Coffer. “They were the first people who were able to create what I wanted. I'd been into sessions previously where I'd given references, but people either wouldn’t get it or things would go off on a Swedish pop tangent. Jamie was one of the first people to completely get what I was trying to create without me having to even really explain it.”
Along with Jonny, they wrote Bow’s viral debut single ‘Sweater’, which was released the week the world went into lockdown but made an immediate impression ("Tear-stained soul...a chorus that lifts you up by your ears" – Guardian Guide). “That was the first song where it made sense,” Bow says of the track. “From there we had something to reference and from then on could experiment, but refer back to that and ask, 'Does this fit?'”
Going forward, Bow and her collaborators developed an almost scientific technique to ensure that the sound represented who she was as an artist. “For a lot of the songs, we've taken samples from old soul records and then we write to them,” she explains of the writing process. “We have to balance of pop melodies and soul melodies. We ask, 'Does this have enough soul? Does this have enough contemporary pop?' It's a really hard thing to do. I've just never wanted to just write pop records that anyone can sing. I want to try and do something that's a bit different.”
Along with this molecular approach to pop songwriting, themes began emerge lyrically, most notably heartache. “Oh yes. I've not had much luck with relationships,” Bow laughs. “Going through heartbreak can feel really lonely, but I hope that by writing about it that it helps people feel less alone when they listen to my songs. Also, I find it hard to write really lovey dovey songs. When I'm writing an upbeat song, quite often it's 'I'm good on my own.'”
This empowering mentality is all over Bow Anderson’s debut EP, ‘New Wave’. The title track mixes uplifting, gospel-tinged pop - and a ‘La La Land’-inspired dance video - about starting afresh, and letting go of the negative people in your life. Second single 'Heavy' captured the attempt to get over him, but by accidentally getting drunk in the park (with a creative video shot with a drone under lockdown). Elsewhere, early favourite ‘Island’, meanwhile, takes neo-soul and injects it with a sense of fiery sense of independence as she sings, “I am an island, baby/ Do you think that I need you?” (complete with its playful, synchronised-swimming video). Even the torment of heartache is given a shot of adrenaline: on ‘Sweater’ Bow obfuscates romantic ruin with pronounced pianos and huge sucker punch of a chorus, while the retro stylings of the Dusty Springfield-esque ‘Black Heart’ brings a sense of faded Hollywood glamour to matters of the heart, Bow’s stunning vocal delivering a story of love forever lost.
These songs further preview the stunning music Bow Anderson has coming in 2021. The haunting ‘I Hate That I Fell In Love With You’ is the sort of ballad that could rival Adele, the vivid and photographic lyrical imagery providing a devastating and raw portrait of what it’s like to fall out of love with someone. “A pretty shit situation, isn’t it,” Bow says with a wry smile. She’s hoping that in the future she can tour with it, although the restrictions of the pandemic are making that hard to plan at this moment. Still, as with her mentality after her accident, she’s looking forward with a healthy amount of self-belief.
“There's just something inside me that has always known what I want” she explains. “It's not an ego thing at all. I could have come to London and it all go tits up. But if I had the mentality that I was ready for it to fail then it was never going to work in the first place. You go through rollercoasters and bad times, but those times make you who you are and can be turned into positives. If I hadn't had that injury, I don't know that I would be doing music. But everything that happens in your life makes you who you are. For me, there was no other option but to succeed.”
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