St. Lucia

I'm very interested in how visual artists think because I think the way that I think about music is similar. I'm very inspired by aesthetics and space.

St. Lucia in South Africa is this exotic place where you might go on vacation, and it evokes this nostalgic, hazy vibe.

My lyrics are quite train of thought, and they are all over the place, but they evoke something.

The reason I decided to become a solo artist in the first place was because I always felt that the results that I got from working as a team where everyone had equal say... ended up with compromised, watered-down results.

The name came about from me just closing my eyes and sticking a pen on a map of South Africa. St. Lucia was the fifth place that the pen landed on.

Everyone knows Earth, Wind & Fire. We know 'September,' all the big sort of hits from going out and dancing and stuff. When I was developing St. Lucia, I really started listening a little bit deeper, listening back to their stuff from the '70s and '80s, and really dug into it.

I went through all these different phases. But it always felt like I was impersonating something, so I went back to some of the music I grew up with, like music from South Africa and the '80s stuff. I stopped suppressing it, and I stopped trying to be cool.

You can only absorb when you look back at photos: like when we played Coachella, and there are thousands of people in the audience, and you just walk on stage.

When I was a kid, pre-1994 was still apartheid, so we didn't get a lot the subversive music from the States or from the U.K. A lot of the music we would get was the poppiest pop music, so I've never really had a bad association it.

We don't put limits on ourselves.

I'm always very cautious, because I don't want St. Lucia to turn out like everything else. I want to have a personality and be unique in some way that maybe limits our appeal to everyone in the world but makes us more special in some way.

It took a while of performing and pushing the boundaries and starting to involve the audience to feel comfortable.