“This song is kind of looking inwards from a different perspective than I typically have,” says genre-jumping Julia Bhatt about her synth-driven indie-folk single “Confetti” out today. “Confetti” is the newest single from the Miami-based indie singer/songwriter’s debut album, it is what it is (independently releasing on July 20, 2022) and the single shifts perspective from the internal to the external. “I tend to be quite negative especially when I get emotional,” she says. “This song was kind of me viewing myself from the outside. I can get completely consumed by little things, things that might not matter to anyone else, and I lose sight of the bigger picture. There’s always a rational voice in the back of my head telling me to chill out and slow down, but it gets buried very easily. I wrote this as that voice.”
A song about gratiude and the power of positive thinking, “Confetti” follows the fresh and carefree indie-pop single “Karma” which she wrote it when she was sixteen, and though it’s one of the oldest, it’s also one of the songs she’s the proudest of on this collection. Meanwhile, the previous album singles, the jangly indie pop “Cotton Candy” is about feeling “safe being on the edge and comfortable in foreign places… kind of like a rollercoaster” and the airy folk-pop single “On My Shoulder” depicts the shoulder angel/devil trope, the constant battle of conscience vs. temptation.
Akin to her hometown amalgamation of communities within Miami, her music is a huge melting pot of people and cultures. “I’m not really even sure what to call my sound, but each song [on the album] has its own set of influences. Some you’ll be able to hear clearly and some you won’t. It ranges from the Magnetic Fields to Marina and the Diamonds to Washed Out. Lots of stuff for lots of people” she told PhotoBook Magazine. Adding that some influences come from her parents, but some came from “friends growing up, local radio stations, etc.”
An ear-opening concoction that defies categorization, Julia’s music is such a fresh showcase of her gen-Z genre-fluid talent (she just turned 20 in January). From September 2019 to early March 2020, Julia was in a whirlwind of life-changes: she released her first three singles (“Tall,” “Marco” and “I’m Cool“), turned eighteen and graduated high school. Just as she was really getting started with the announcement of her first ever tour however, the pandemic brought everything to a standstill. While the world was in quarantine, not only did she release the singles “Miami” and “Bird Girl” as well as her debut EP 2 steps back, but she also, in a creative burst of energy, being states away from her mentor and producer Elliot Jacobson (Ingrid Michaelson, Elle King, Vérité) in New York City, she started to compose songs on music creation software, Ableton Live, rather than on the guitar. The first music to come from this new approach to making music were her 2021 singles “1:30” and “Hair Salon Vibes” both of which will be included on the debut album alongside an earlier recording of “Miami.”
