One week ahead of playing her first major festival – Electronicon – DATAGIRL released her single, “I Choose You,” a pivot point in her songwriting career. The song has strong electropop and indie vibes, a departure from previous offerings by the artist, such as the relaxing vapor trip on Destination Spa and energetic, heart-throbbing vaporwave grooves on Alchemy. Listen to “I Choose You” on your preferred platform.
DATAGIRL told me, “I’ve wanted to be a singer-songwriter since I was a little kid.” After honing her music production and sound design skills, she is ready to release original material again, this time with vocals.
“I Choose You” is simultaneously nostalgic and futuristic. It has a noticeably lush, slushy atmosphere, with vocals mysteriously interwoven into the dreamy, warm fabric of the soundscape where the lead melody spirals and echoes through time.
I asked DATAGIRL about how she approached writing the song. She said, “I wrote ‘I Choose You’ fairly quickly. It was one of those songs where I already knew the vibe I was going for and what the first lyric should be. One day, I was mulling over that lyric (“when I was young”) and the melody just popped into my mind. The rest of the song sort of just spilled out after that.”
When writing “I Choose You,” DATAGIRL drew on recent transformative experiences with love. She told me, “I was reconciling with a false notion of love that I had come to adopt throughout the unhealthy and failed relationships of my past. Recent experiences have thrown that misunderstanding to the wind, which has been incredibly freeing. I really needed to express that transition and I think ‘I Choose You’ gets the point across well.”
The chorus embodies a sense of old and new understandings of love, as the lyrics are sung with a sense of definitiveness, A piece of me has died. Looking in your eyes, now I see, why I struggled to breathe. In the silence together, now I understand, love is a choice, and I choose you.
DATAGIRL fans can anticipate exciting new sounds in the future. She told me, “You’re going to hear a lot of pop-influenced electronic dance music, ranging from trance to breakbeat to house, and everything in between. It will be a culmination of all my musical influences, vaporwave included.”
DATAGIRL went on to say she won’t box herself into a specific sound or genre. Instead, she plans to explore a wide range of genres and inspirations. The lyricism “will be simultaneously reflective of my past and hopeful for my future.” She added, “Some of it will just be fun, because I think music should just be fun sometimes.”
“I Choose You” was released days before DATAGIRL plays her first major festival, Electronicon. She told me she’s excited be on the big stage. It’s a huge step for her. She’s been DJing and has tested a couple of songs, but she told me “this performance is unprecedented because I’ll be singing only the new stuff, and at an incredibly iconic festival for our scene.” She said she’s most excited to “finally being able to give people a taste of what I’ve been working on and hinting at for so long.”