WOMb - EP

WOMb - EP

Madeline Bradley, aka deryk, took her first tentative steps towards songwriting at the age of 12. “I started writing short fiction stories when I was at school,” she tells Apple Music. “And I met a young girl who also did that, and we used to share stories and have these wild imaginations about meeting our first loves and all that. From that point I just started putting them to music.” Another key partnership would be with producer Justyn Pilbrow, with whom Bradley wrote the song “Call You Out” in their first meeting, and who recorded her debut EP, WOMb. Despite the fact that Bradley–whose stage name is a tribute to her grandfather, Derrick Baddeley—had been working on her songwriting for years prior to writing and recording the EP, she says the title isn’t a metaphor for finally birthing her debut release as deryk. “One of my best friends said to me, ‘I feel like these songs have been brewing for such a long time that it’s as if they’re in a womb.’ I hadn’t even thought about that until I’d called it that, but it was more just the fact that when I think of the word ‘womb’ I think of growth and feminine and fleshy and pink, and that’s what the music feels and looks like to me, it just suited it.” Here, Bradley talks us through WOMb, track by track. Call You Out “It’s about prejudice. It can be specific to so many situations where you just want to call someone out for saying something that’s just not right. It doesn’t even matter what it is. It’s just nice sometimes to feel that you can call someone out if you want to.” One Star “‘One Star’ is about when you’ve been in a relationship with somebody and things have ended, and they’ve moved on but they still won’t leave you alone. And so it’s about, wow, you should literally have a one-star rating, this is horrible.” MEN “It’s ironically not about men. It’s just about taking time for yourself. Everyone forgets to do that. I was going through a lot in terms of not letting myself have a break. I was breaking my neck trying to fit everything in, get enough hours at work on top of full-time uni, and I was really overdoing it. And I’d read a book called Deep Work by Cal Newport around the time I wrote ‘MEN,’ and it really inspired the song.” Heard It All “It’s about how horrible it is and how soul-destroying it is when someone feels like they can comment on your appearance. Because it’s so unnecessary. I deeply believe there’s never a good time, or ever a reason to comment on what someone looks like. I feel like a lot of people have to deal with it all the time, whether it be about their skin or their weight or their body parts. No one else should ever care about what other people look like.” goodtimes “It’s about when you have some good times with somebody, and then something poisons the well and things aren’t so great anymore. There’s such a bitterness. They take away your ability to reminisce, because you can’t reminisce with them anymore because you don’t want to talk to them. And then you can’t reminisce the memories to yourself because it’s yuck to remember what was actually going on when you thought things were great.”

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