The FEVER Issue: Indigo De Souza
by amany khreis
Photo by Amany Khreis
One of Indigo De Souza’s warmest memories is one she shares with her mother, Kimberly Oberhammer: De Souza is a toddler and her mother is helping her take a shower. Oberhammer is in the shower with her, holding her. They talk and laugh and water pools up in between them. They sit there in the water for what feels like hours sharing these moments together.
De Souza is close to her mother, both in a familial sense and a creative one. Her debut LP, which came out in 2018, is literally titled I Love My Mom. Oberhammer, an artist and painter, painted the album covers for both I Love My Mom and Any Shape You Take.
Like the relationship she shares with her mom, all relationships impact De Souza deeply. Besides Arthur Russell’s music, she describes the relationships in her life as being the biggest influence on her art. “It's just a full time job if you do it right — if you want to do it right. If you're really working on your relationships with other people, it shows you so much. It's the most important thing to me.” she explains.
This sentiment is echoed in every lyric of every song to the 25-year-old singer-songwriter’s name. When she isn’t navigating where relationships went wrong or why she had to step away from one, she’s embracing the people around her with her words.
In “Hold U,” a single off her latest album, she sings about wanting to hold and be held by others. The music video shows De Souza dancing with her friends in her living room. There’s warmth and closeness and safety to it. De Souza says her and her friends dance that way all the time. “Dancing is my therapy,” she says. “Whenever me and my roommates are in a good rhythm of being home, we dance almost every night together.”
In “Way Out,” the song from which Any Shape You Take gets its title, De Souza sings: “I’ll be here to hold you through the pain… I’ll be here to love you / No matter what shape you might take.”
Since De Souza has wrapped up touring, she can finally spend time with the people most important to her at home in Asheville, North Carolina. She spent a large portion of the year on the road, opening for My Morning Jacket and Mitski, playing at music festivals and performing at her own gigs.
Now, De Souza sits in her room on a video call with me, bathed in warm-toned lights and wearing an MF DOOM long-sleeved shirt. There’s a little stuffed animal in the background of the frame resting on a piano. I make a note of the sheer amounts of red and orange in her room. She tells me that the color scheme of her room is purposeful.
Indigo De Souza turns her camera around, giving me an impromptu room tour. She has red and orange cloth hanging in front of her windows, casting a warm glow onto her. Her pants are orange. Her comforter is a deep, almost-brown orange. She adds that even her living room shares the same color scheme, “Those colors are really comforting to me, really warm and cozy. I've always liked warm colors.”
She seems relieved as she tells me about her time at home. “When I'm gone for so much of the year, I never get to put my room together in a way that feels good, I don't really spend any time in my room,” she says. “It's nice to be here for long enough to have spent an idle night watching TV and drawing pictures or listening to a podcast in my room.”
There was a week in the summer where I had seen Indigo De Souza perform on three separate occasions: as an opener for My Morning Jacket, in the pouring rain at Pitchfork and headlining a college show on the Memorial Union Terrace as the sun was setting. I remind her about the Terrace show emphatically, explaining how much fun I had and how I hope she’d enjoyed it just as much.
When I provide a little more detail (I jog her memory describing the lake and the colorful chairs), she cheers up instantly, “Wow! By the lake! That show was awesome. I was nervous because a lot of college shows are really not like that — they're actually horrible. But that was really, really fun. It was just magical. Being by the water or by trees is always magical.”
Going on tour hasn’t been the easiest for the North Carolina artist. She’s made it clear time and time again that it takes a lot of energy from her. She's in a better place now mentally and performing old, angsty songs she wrote at a different point in her life can be draining. What makes this even harder is audiences of people completely wasted, talking over her set or ignoring her while waiting for the next band to come out.
De Souza describes this touring frenzy as having affected all artists: “We came out of the pandemic and everyone broke into a fever. Every artist I know has been torturing themselves to death because of the amount of opportunities that came through. At this point that we're talking now, a lot of people are really burnt out.”
Touring has not only put a halt on De Souza’s recreational activities, but also impacted her songwriting process. She hasn’t been able to write much while on the road. She says making music is something that needs to be done naturally — while she tours, she’s in survival mode.
“Anytime that there is a moment to rest, I am resting and I don't get to use my energy towards anything creative.”
She managed to fit the songwriting for her upcoming project in December of last year and wrapped up in March. The new songs she wrote came to her right after the release of Any Shape You Take, her sophomore album that’s been so dearly loved by fans and critics alike.
De Souza has been writing music for a long time, ever since she was a teenager. Like most people who do, she writes songs to process her emotions. Besides the two albums she’s released, she’s also put out work under Icky Bricketts, her side project with Ethan Baechtold.
At this point in her career, De Souza feels comfortable with where she’s at creatively and in her relationships. She describes her upcoming album (which she promises will be out sometime next year) as reflecting the current headspace she’s been in — stronger and settled. “I'm most excited to share the new album with the world because, out of anything I've ever made, it's most clearly what I want to say.” Each album is completely different to De Souza. As she describes it, she was at a completely different place in her life during the making of each one.
“The first album I made, I was really young and confused and sad,” De Souza says. “I just started playing with a band and we made that album on a whim. It was magical that it ended up the way it did. The next album, I was still pretty young, but a little stronger. I had been through a lot of shit, so much trauma and pain. That album came from this place that was a little more fiery and pointed. With this new album, I came into this really great space of having a great community.”
Earlier in conversation, De Souza and I spoke about her tattoos. She told me almost all of them are stick-and-pokes that she gave herself. The tattoos done by her, on her, are her favorite ones — she feels more connected to the art on her body when it’s her own. She doesn’t see each tattoo as having a deep, emotional, grand meaning — she views each one as being a timestamp in her life. Something permanent on something temporary.
“I feel connected to my body, but I'm very aware of how my body is not really myself. Tattoos helped me feel more at peace with that and closer to my body.”
De Souza views her albums in the same way: “I really love sequencing albums. It feels like a story. It's kind of similar to tattoos, right? It just feels like a timestamp. Each album is this moment in my life and my life is never the same in every moment. It's definitely going to sound like each song will have its own mind.”
On this new album, this holds true. She’s dabbling in new sounds and new genres. She had fun exploring where her music could go on her sophomore album with songs like “17” and “Die/Cry.” Making new sounds is fun for De Souza. It makes her feel like she’s on a playground.
I ask De Souza about how she came to be so sure of her relationships. She answers by saying the key is knowing when to leave and realizing that you are an individual first before you are a partner in a relationship.
“Okay, so I'm a person and you're a person,” she begins explaining. “And the way in which we're growing right now is not allowing us to be together as partners, but that doesn't mean that we can't remember the time we shared and continue to love each other in a different way. You still shared so much love with that person. If they're trying to grow and better themselves, and they have to be away from you to do that, then that's a great thing.”
De Souza learned that she had to be accountable for her own emotions. That, if someone hurts you, it’s your responsibility to work through your own emotions that boiled up in reaction to the pain. It’s your responsibility to separate yourself from certain relationships and it’s your responsibility to surround yourself with other relationships.
That’s where Indigo De Souza is at right now: confident, comfortable and resting. She dances with her roommates every night. She hangs out with her two baby nieces. She spends time alone, resting in her room, doing nothing at all. Now, she gets to unwind.