It’s quiet inside the lobby of the Ludlow Hotel on Manhattan’s Lower East Side — a welcome respite for Fletcher, who touched down in New York for one night between Brazil and London.
It’s somewhat of a surprise she isn’t shouting, given only a few days before she was at the center of thousands of screaming Brazilian fans, who sang her songs back to her at a reported 116 decibels, “which is equivalent to the decibel volume of a plane taking off,” she says.
“Like, I am obsessed with that,” she adds.
Despite having been on the music scene for a few years, it’s the first time Fletcher has been able to do a proper world tour — a pandemic will do that to you — and she’s still processing the fact that people all across the world are screaming her lyrics back at her.
“That is the exact sentiment that I think about all the time. The fact that I make up things from my brain, whether that be just in my bedroom or in the shower, and then that thing, that idea takes me around the globe to places I have never been to, where English is not the first language, and they’re yelling these songs word for word,” she says. “And sometimes I forget my f–king lyrics, and they’re like, ‘We got you.’”
Fletcher was originally supposed to release her debut album in early 2020, but it was put on hold once the pandemic hit. Instead, she found herself quarantining with her ex-girlfriend, and the two ended up making an EP called “The S(ex) Tapes.” (The ex in question is a photographer, who shot and directed all the music videos for the EP.) Her debut LP, “Girl of My Dreams,” was released in 2022 and garnered her a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Music Artist and nominations from the MTV Video and Music Awards and MTV Europe Music Awards.
Her new album, “In Search of the Antidote,” out now, is the music she is most proud of to date, she says. She began working on it at the start of 2023, and it’s heavily inspired by the health journey she went on with her Lyme disease diagnosis.
“I was supposed to go on tour last year and I had to cancel it. I disappeared off of social media. I was just in and out of doctors and trying to get answers. I was in search of the antidote,” she says. “The antidote has been many things for me over the course of my life. It’s been fans and women and the road and tequila, it’s been many different things. And last year it was my healing, my physical body and my emotional space and mental space and spiritual space. I really had to look in the mirror.”
She wrote most of the album from her childhood home in New Jersey, set against a soundtrack of early 2000s female pop rock artists like Michelle Branch, Avril Lavigne and Kelly Clarkson.
“[Being at home] brings up a lot of childhood anxieties or fears or things I’ve processed. But at the same time, it brings me closer to the core of who I am and also why I started making music to begin with,” she says.
It also is a full-circle experience to where she is now, having just turned 30 while in Brazil releasing the album.
“My birthday was March 19, and then the album came out three days later, so it was this kind of big celebration of renewal and a new trip around the sun, a new decade that I just feel super ready for,” she says. “I’m leaving all my bulls–t in my 20s, it’s a new page, a new chapter. I feel like I’m finally starting to get settled in my skin and who I am.”
