I had the opportunity to have a wonderful conversation with rising singer/songwriter, Izzy Pingrey, and our chat was so incredible.
Pingrey is a 17-year-old singer/songwriter from New York City with a desperate passion for all things music.
In some way or form, Pingrey has always had a life full of music. “I’ve been doing various forms of music since I was really young. I got into musical theater when I was 3 or 4. I have an older cousin who has been doing musical theater all their life, so I was really interested in that. I did that for most of my early to late childhood,” she reveals.
“When COVID hit, I kind of stopped that and lost interest in that. I started listening to more pop artists, and indie artists, and I started really taking inspiration from Olivia Rodrigo, who’s only a couple years older than me. She was writing a song a day, and that kind of inspired me to start writing my own stuff when I was about 13. Looking back all of it was bad,” she laughs.
Her father is a music producer in New York City, and at 15, Pingrey began learning how to produce her songs with the help of her father by her side. Pingrey’s first song she released is called “Sick of It,” and was a workshop-type of song she wrote on her couch in late-2021/early-2022, and she released that song at 16.
Her father is her music producer, but making music was never pushed on her. “It was kind of like an interest that I developed on my own, it was skills that I was working on, on my own, it was never like I have to do music. It was never that. It was never how things were in my house. I’m actually really thankful for that because music is a passion that has kind of grown to be something that I love for myself, and I think if it were pushed on by a parent, I wouldn’t like it,” she explains.
She’s known that she wanted to do music her entire life but didn’t get into writing and recording singer/songwriter material until she reached the age of 13 or 14.
“Some songs that I write, I’ll write about things that happened a long time ago, so that’s what it was like with “Sick of It,” I was already over what was going on,” She explains. But with her last song she released, “Narcissus,” she says, “I was in the deep end of struggling with friendships and they were specifically friendships that I had for a while. Being friends with someone through early adolescence to later in your adolescence is really rough because everyone is going through all these, not to be super cliché in that way, but everyone is changing a lot. It’s hard to keep those friendships and, a lot of my best friends are friends I had when I was a baby, but you can’t keep all of those people. I was struggling with some friends of mine that weren’t necessarily changing for the worst, but I was kind of growing in a way that I was just not compatible with them anymore. I was losing my people-pleasing tendencies a little bit, and I was kind of just realizing the way I was being treated in my friendships wasn’t a normal way to be treated in a friendship, and it was something that was really weighing on me emotionally, but I was kind of ranting about it. I said ‘Narcissus,’ and it kind of sounded like a narcissist, but not a lot of people that I talk to, know the meaning of narcissist, but it’s basically this guy who sees himself in like a reflecting pool and falls in love with himself.”
When Pingrey sat down and wrote “Narcissus,” she explained, “I write top lines, so I’ll always start with the melody, or I’ll find something, and it’s nice when I’m writing,” she continues. “I co-wrote. It’s nice when I’m writing songs in that way because some of them are like that. He’ll start playing guitar, and I’ll start singing along to it, and I just kind of, the first verse kind of flowed out of me.”
Pingrey just released a brand new song titled “Flatline” that was just released on July 21 (stream below)
When I asked Izzy about “Flatline,” her latest single, she exclaimed, “I’m really, really excited about that one! “Flatline” is the first positive song that I’m releasing, which is new. I remember I played the demo of “Sick of It,” for all of my close friends and one of my friends asked, “Are you ever going to write a positive song?”
She reveals, “A lot of the strong emotions I was feeling were negative,” then she continues on and said, “‘Sick of It,’” started in October and like that when I started working on that, even though it came out in April, as I was doing that, I started falling in love. I started falling for a friend that I had. For me, I’ve always had crushes on people that I have been friends with, but this felt different.”
She said she had struggled with love in the past, and that experience influenced her songwriting. “I had this good friend of mine and we had a lot of mutual friends, and I was just like there was so much anxiety surrounding it for me, and it always was with love. It got to a point where I just liked him so much that I had to kind of give out and let go of all the anxiety that I had. And he’s my boyfriend now.” she adds, “He’s had a really positive impact on my life, I felt much more open and much calmer, I think a lot of my anxiety is going away because it was coped with in a way. It makes me feel better.”
Currently, Izzy is living in New York City with her music producer father, and the city impacts her songwriting greatly she says. “Living in NYC you’re definitely exposed to more stuff than you would be if you’d be living in a more enclosed environment,” she begins. “It definitely gives me a lot of independence that I wouldn’t have because I don’t have my driver’s license. I think that is due in large part that I can already get around by myself. It’s just like the kids who live in New York, because of the way that it’s accessible, it’s really easy for us to be independent sooner, and to think on our own faster than it would be if we lived somewhere like where I would need a parent to drive me around.”
She claims she writes her music with teenagers in mind, but it really is for anyone. “I think it can be enjoyed by everyone, but if you look at my Spotify statistics, my biggest demographic is people in their 20s and 30s,” she reveals.
She’s inspired by artists like Beabadoobee, Alanis Morissette, Gracie Abrams, and Taylor Swift; all strong female artists. “For ‘Sick of It’ and ‘Flatline,’ we actually looked a lot at 90s rock, specifically how you can translate that into modern music, and I took a lot from Beabadoobee. She takes those older influences and modernizes them,” she explains.
For the rest of the year, Izzy says, the songs she’s released so far, are songs from an upcoming EP she’s releasing. She’s busy at work, but because she’s so busy with school, she said she can’t promise she will have it all finished by the end of the year.
Connect with Izzy Pingrey
