“I've got no roots,” Alice Merton famously declared on her 2016 debut song. Born in Germany and raised in Canada and England, the singer-songwriter calls London home these days, but found that moving so often left her with a residual feeling of restlessness, leading to her asking herself some big questions...
Merton’s new EP, Heron, is made up of five songs examining the kind of thoughts that keep an overthinker up at night. Merton reveals how the EP’s lead single, run away girl sees her take an introspective look at herself:
“Especially feeling lost on the inside,” she says from her London home – her Canadian accent a reminder of her vagabond past. “Where do I fit in, in all this craziness? Who do I actually want to be in life? We are constantly surrounded by the opinions of others who show us what their version of happiness is, so we automatically assume ours must be the same. It often isn’t.”
Since the success of No Roots, Merton has played Coachella, gone 8x Platinum, her two studio albums, MINT and S.I.D.E.S. have racked up over one billion streams and three million sales, and she’s performed on NBC’s Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, The Late Late Show with James Corden and ABC’s Late Night Show Jimmy Kimmel Live! – and all under her own steam. She explains the reasoning for creating her own label, Paper Plane Records International:
“It happened early, just because we didn't get any other deals,” she admits candidly, bursting into laughter. “There were one or two labels that were interested at the time, but they kept cancelling meetings. Then they sent over a contract where I was basically signing 80% of all my rights to them for the next three albums.
"I thought to myself, ‘That's just unfair.’ So it was an emergency solution of, ‘How are we going to get this out there? Let's just start our own record label and put the music out.’ We didn't like the other options that were around.”