"I write from the very specific, and somehow that tends to reach the universal"
- Liya Shapiro
- Apr 13
- 6 min read
by Vents Magazine
This interview is also available on the Vents Magazine website, read here.
Hi Liya, welcome to VENTS! How have you been?
Really good, thank you! There’s a lot going on right now with the EP, rehearsals and writing new music, so it’s all very exciting.
Your music draws from art, fashion, and anthropology—how do those disciplines shape the way you create and present your songs?
They’ve become so tangled together in how I think that I don’t always notice them working separately. Art history gave me a way of reading images and constructing them – I think about each song almost like a canvas, something that needs its own visual logic. Fashion, for me, is less about trends and more about dress as a form of language; I see what you wear as a statement, a way to construct a tangible sense of self and even some sort of armour. I handle creative direction on my own, and both art and fashion are where a lot of that instinct comes from. And anthropology is perhaps the most quietly pervasive of the three. The concept of ritual is a big one in that discipline, and I keep returning to it in my work. “Another Woman”, for example, functions as a kind of ritual for me, a symbolic rite of letting go. When you study the human condition academically, you start applying that lens to everything, including your own emotional life. Which is either very useful or slightly exhausting, depending on the day.
You’ve mentioned how “Another Woman” explores the contradictions of unrequited love—was it difficult to revisit those emotions while writing the track?
Not exactly, and I think that in itself was quite revealing. The song came in about thirty minutes, completely without effort, which made me realise that something had been sitting just below the surface waiting for an outlet. I thought I was over it, but finding out that he was with someone else was apparently enough to prove me wrong. The writing wasn’t painful in the way some songs have been, I’d say it was more like drainage, in a sense. The difficulty wasn’t in the revisiting but rather in realising I hadn’t fully left in the first place.
There’s a line in the song about not loving someone anymore, yet still feeling the pain—how important was it for you to capture that emotional complexity honestly?
That contradiction is really the whole point of the song. “I don’t love you anymore, not at all, but why does it still hurt somewhere deep in my heart” – I needed that line to be exactly that blunt, because anything more poetic would have been a kind of dishonesty. It’s not romantic, what the song is describing. It’s irrational and slightly humiliating. Watching someone you once loved be with someone else when you never even got the chance, knowing it makes no logical sense to still feel it but feeling it anyway. If I’d dressed that up, the song would have been a lie.
Sonically, the track leans into a chamber rock sound with swelling dynamics—how did you approach building that emotional arc musically?
I was very inspired by Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence (the album) when writing it: that quality of soft, almost hazy verses that give way to something explosive, with a cinematic atmosphere threading through the whole thing. I’d always heard violins in the song but honestly didn’t think it was achievable without pushing everything back timeline-wise. Then the producer I worked on the EP tracks with, Iona Catherine, who is a violinist herself, found the time and the inspiration to record and layer them onto the existing mix, and that changed everything. The chamber rock element made it more visceral, more gut-wrenching. The outro is the moment the whole song has been building towards with literally everything going into full explosion mode – drums, electric guitar, violins – and then underneath it all there’s me screaming. We ran it through a guitar distortion filter in real time and layered more in post, so the result is deliberately ambiguous – you can’t quite tell what you’re hearing, and I think that ambiguity says something true about the song itself. The line between what’s controlled and what’s falling apart isn’t always clear.
Your work feels deeply cinematic and intentional—how involved are you in shaping the visual identity that accompanies your music?
Entirely. I handle all of my own creative direction: the photography concepts, the artwork, the overall aesthetic world each release inhabits. My background in art history and fashion media means I came into music already thinking visually, already thinking in terms of how images construct meaning. I’m obsessed with the idea that every song deserves its own visual representation, not just a cover but an atmosphere. The visual and the sonic are the same conversation for me.
The EP is described as both a reflection and a step forward—how does Another Woman represent your personal growth as an artist and individual?
It’s a strange thing to pin down, because the song itself is definitely not a triumphant piece of writing, it’s raw and unresolved. But the EP as a whole traces more of a complete arc, it finally closes the door on a chapter that had been open for years. I realised that only when I’d decided on the EP title, the duality of it hit me – this record is a rite of passage. I’m not the person I was when most of these songs were written, and “Another Woman” (the song) is the proof of that, even if the song itself is still standing in the wreckage of this whole unrequited love ordeal. Growth isn’t always a clean upward line, and sometimes it’s just finally being able to acknowledge what you’re leaving behind in a meaningful way.
What have been the biggest challenges and rewards of that journey so far?
Do you mean doing music as a whole? If so, then doing everything yourself is both the challenge and, in a strange way, the reward. There’s no one to hand things off to when you’re exhausted or when you simply don’t know what to do, but it also means the work is entirely mine, from the first line of a song to the last detail of the packaging. The Troubadour show last July was a real marker – I organised it without a promoter, played with a full band for the first time and it sold out somehow, which still feels surreal. That truly meant something. But honestly, the moments that land hardest are smaller than that, like messages from people saying a song made them feel less alone, for example, or that they can truly relate to some of the things I’m singing about. I think that’s why any of it is worth doing.
Your songs feel very vulnerable and unfiltered—how do you balance emotional honesty with protecting your own mental well-being?
I’m not sure I always do balance it, truthfully. I’m a deeply emotional person and quite guarded at the same time – I’ll hold things in until they boil over and then the music becomes something like a pressure valve. The writing itself is healing, I’ve found that consistently. But returning to songs in live performances or even interviews can be its own thing. You end up re-inhabiting emotions you’ve already metabolised, which is occasionally strange. I try to think of the songs as artefacts of a particular moment rather than a live wound I’m reopening every time. Most of the time that works.
Having headlined a sold-out show at The Troubadour, how has performing live influenced your connection to these deeply personal songs?
It changes the relationship to the material completely. In the studio or in the writing process, a song is quite private, almost sealed. The moment you perform it in a room full of people who are listening, like really listening, it becomes something shared. I have a ballroom dance and acting background, so my relationship to physicality on stage is quite specific – I use movement a lot, and that turns performance into something more visceral, more like inhabiting the song rather than just singing it. The Troubadour night specifically felt like a special moment because until then I’d been performing solo with backing tracks, and having the full band behind me for the first time meant the songs sounded the way they’d always lived in my head. However, it did bring some limitations too: with a full band there was very little space on the stage, so I had to give a more traditional performance without the dances and theatrical elements that were present in my shows before. I’m now adamant to solve this problem and combine both full band and choreographed elements.
For listeners stepping into your world for the first time, what do you hope they feel or discover through Another Woman?
That what they’re feeling is valid, whatever version of it they bring to the song. I write from the very specific, and somehow that tends to reach the universal. The particular shape of longing this song describes is mine, but the experience of loving someone who didn’t love you back, of feeling something you know you shouldn’t still feel, is not rare. If someone hears it and feels a little less like there’s something wrong with them because of whatever they’re going through, that’s everything I could want from it.
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