Stella Talpo caught up with Have You Heard ahead of the release of her brilliant new single 'Shark'. 

"I can’t believe that I finally get to say this: shark is my first production baby. I’m still really early days in learning music production but I took a month off work earlier in the year (pre corona) to get some practice and writing done and found myself layering these violin sounds that I loved. I had this cool beat idea behind it and a verse I’d written back in November that was longing to find a song to belong to and it fit so perfectly it felt like it had been planned.

Songwriting is almost like fitting random pieces into a puzzle. I had thought nothing of the demo to be perfectly honest, I’m quite harsh with myself in the early part of the process but I showed Jonny, my long time producer, collaborator and brain sharer, and he loved it and in no time at all had brought it to life. He has an incredible ear for percussion and syncopation and funnily enough, that’s my favourite part of any song or arrangement so when I heard what he did with the demo I was totally floored, we were bopping and excited as hell and the rest of the song wrote itself. 

Shark is about my fear, about how it’s paralysing and keeps us from growing or making choices that could change our lives. I’ve been afraid of sharks since before I could speak and have been waiting to write a song with the title for years, I knew the time would come when I was ready and here we are. The song is an invitation to lean into our fears instead of resist them, resistance makes it all spiral out of control…something I experienced so often I suffered from a panic disorder for a few years… my therapist changed my life the day he said to me, “if you get bitten by a shark, you must get back into the water”. Now I use fear as a gauge for what I should do next… when in doubt, do the thing that scares you the most."... Read More