Indigo De Souza is not afraid of the end. She doesn’t find despair in the certainty of death or endings but rather a stoic sense of responsibility and love for the world around her. Following her 2021 groundbreaking album Any Shape You Take, her third LP, All Of This Will End, takes on the void with earnestness and honesty, blending musical stylings from track to track. The beating heart of the record, though, is the notion of truly living in each moment — past, present and future — as ephemeral as they may be. The centeredness from which she imparts her truth speaks for itself.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
The Michigan Daily: Where did your journey start with music and from where do you draw your inspiration?
Indigo De Souza: I think as soon as I was able to play an instrument, it was very clear to me that I wanted to write songs. And I started playing guitar around age nine, so since then, it’s just been kind of my safe space to express myself and say the things that are hard to say.
Music has kind of given me a way to express things that are hard to express with only words. If you are adding melody and emotion to it, it is easier to get across and easier to relate with other people. So, in a way, I guess it always has been an innate need within my body to write songs.
TMD: How would you describe your sound?
IDS: The genre thing is always tough to answer because I don’t really think about it. I just write songs, and people will kind of put them in whatever genre makes sense for them from what they’re hearing. But for me, it’s just an expression of an emotion. So like, if I’m very happy, I’ll tend to write more pop-sounding songs. And if I’m dealing with something more devastating, I’ll end up writing something that sounds more grungy or painful.
It’s changing all the time and shifting with my life and emotional state at the given time.
Actually, one of my all-time favorites is Arthur Russell. The reason I love him is that he doesn’t really fit into a specific genre, either. You can just tell that he kind of just made all of his songs from a place of truth. Sometimes he can be very avant-garde and random-sounding. And then in other times, he sounds really collected. Arthur Russell goes between country, disco and pop, and he has so much humor in his writing. And I feel drawn to that sort of expression of truth.
TMD: That idea of the expression of truth really comes through you as an artist as well. Your music is so deeply personal and confessional. How do you manage that type of soul-bearing honesty? And is that act of opening yourself up to perception ever a difficult task?
IDS: No, it’s not ever difficult.
For it to be difficult, I would have to feel precious about my life, or I would have to feel like my life is more special than other people’s lives. And so, therefore, it’s my own thing to keep and I should be very precious about it. But I have never felt like my existence is any more special than any other existence. It gives me the freedom to share very openly because it just doesn’t really matter. It’s like, I don’t care if people know things about my inner world because I will just be dead one day. There’s no sense in being guarded.
But like all other artists, when you are speaking from a place of truth in the age of the internet, it can be hurtful to have someone respond in a negative way to your truth. I try not to let that get to me ever, and it won’t stop me from continuing to share myself. Like I said: It’s innate.
TMD: What came to mind when you were talking about “everything ending so nothing truly matters” is the title of your most recent album, All Of This Will End. Is that where the title comes from?
IDS: In a way, yes, it comes from the duality of that statement. Like, you could think: “Oh, I’m going to be dead someday. So I’m just going to destroy everything in my path.” Or you could think: “I’m going to be dead someday. So I’m going to make the absolute best of this experience and really try my best to connect with people and create community and shine a light on all the corners that I can reach.”
The world is full of people who hold death in different ways — they tend to either feel really sad about it, or really grateful for the fact that they get to be alive for a little while. I used to feel really heavy about being alive and honestly just didn’t want to be most of the time and felt really conflicted. Now in my life, I’ve come to a place of complete gratitude. I just love my life and my community and my path. And I’ve found a purpose that feels beyond me and feels very involved in the betterment of the world in my own small way.
TMD: Can you speak on the music video for the first single of the album, “Younger & Dumber?”
IDS: The music video is an honoring of the past self and honoring the child’s self. It’s about me recognizing that the child self is still with me all the time. And that I am now holding all the weight for her.
Growing up I had a hard time — which most people do because the world is just kind of horrible. But it’s really beautiful at the same time and you can find a lot of purpose and beauty if you want to. But it’s hard to do that because you have to survive in a space that doesn’t feel intuitive to survive in. Society has been built in a way that isn’t based on things that feel natural to us as humans — like nature and community. It’s actually the most unnatural things that society builds itself upon — capitalism, consumerism, greed, money and violence.
When I was younger I was so messed up by that, and I couldn’t figure out how to function. And then I kind of came out of that and found a lot of power in holding space for people who feel the same need for nature and community. I just have so much energy now because I have found my purpose and found what feels good for me to pour myself into.
I took four grams of mushrooms for the video. I find that being in that state feels kind of like looking back at your whole life and feeling your whole existence in a single moment. That type of reflection has always been very tied to psychedelics for me. I owe a lot of my growth to my mushroom experiences.
I have a very particular way of dancing when I’m on mushrooms and I’ve always wanted to capture it in a way that honors the experience. In the “Younger & Dumber” music video, I wanted to capture this feeling of being a creature of nature.
TMD: Can you speak specifically to the making of the new record? It’s a bit intense in some moments.
IDS: Yeah, I mean, nothing’s ever really intentional. My music can sometimes sound more intense than I am in real life because it is used as my own personal avenue for expressing the biggest emotions that I have. So the songs can sometimes be really big and intense because I need to put that emotion somewhere, and it ended up being in a song instead of towards the people around me or holding it within my body.
I think it just ebbs and flows. Like sometimes I make music from an intense space and sometimes I make music from a calm space, and that’s felt track to track.
I don’t really feel like I am thinking a lot when I’m songwriting. It’s more like fully embodying the sound. If I do that, then the words just come because the sounds are just waiting to be connected to them.
I write songs in the most truthful way possible rather than writing with a goal or for some other purpose. It’s not about other people. When I’m writing a song, I’m writing it because I want to write it for me.
And I just know intuitively that it usually will mean something to other people naturally because it came from a place of truth. Anything that comes from a place of truth will reach people.
Be sure to catch Indigo De Souza at El Club on May 19.
Daily Arts Writer Claire Sudol can be reached at cjsudol@umich.edu.