The singer-songwriter tells BUST how an indulgent three months gave her the creative spark she needed to write her debut album and find autonomy and freedom along the way.
Annie DiRusso’s debut EP, God I Hate This Place, wasn’t written about a physical location but a mental one: the territory between your late teens and the precipice of adulthood—a time when you’re forced to get accustomed to yourself, your body, and the world. Released in 2023, the four-track collection expanded on the Nashville-based, New York-born singer-songwriter’s penchant for vivid storytelling and the same vulnerable lyricism that made her slow-strumming love song “Nine Months” hit viral status on TikTok in 2021. Before she even released a full-length collection her success pushed her on tour, opening for indie rock mainstays like Haim and beabadoobee, playing The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and, most importantly, sharing tracks like the biting and anthemic “Infinite Jest” that audiences couldn’t help but echo back.
But once the touring stopped she hit a wall. DiRusso realized that so much of what she’d been singing about may have resonated with fans, but at this point in her life—with so much mental distance from the young girl who wrote those songs—she didn’t feel like they still resonated with her. She needed fresh inspiration, a new chapter to write about, and luckily she found that during a period of time she lovingly refers to as “party July.”
“It was a something’s gotta give moment,” DiRusso tells BUST during our video call. “I’d been touring pretty heavily for two years. I’d really lost myself in it and that can be such a beautiful thing because you’re so present, but you’re present in an alternative reality when you’re on the road. You’re not attached to a specific place or routines, just the people you’re traveling with.”
There was also little time to let loose since DiRusso, who was focused on staying healthy, made the choice to not drink or smoke or stay up late like her traveling counterparts. She also had a debut album to write, a deadline that was looming in the distance. “I was scared I was going to get back from tour…and I knew I had to write an album…but I was scared that what would happen is what happens most times I get back from a long tour. I hole up in my room and I have to make something but I have nothing to write about,” she says. Though she still recalls her tour as “electric,” and “exciting,” she admits that time wasn’t very fruitful when it came to creating the life she wanted or the music she wanted to write. “I felt like I’d lost a lot of my taste and a lot of my relationships were suffering,” she says. It was a turning point for DiRusso.
Then toward the end of her tour dates she got sick, canceled a week of shows, and then had to reschedule those same dates, making the tour even longer. By the time she finally got back to Nashville, she was officially ready to “live a little” and embrace the lifestyle her friends at home were living, hence, “party July” was born. The counterintuitive plan to let go instead of bucking down and writing was “life-changing” for DiRusso. “I felt present and engaged with life instead of feeling constantly pulled away,” she says. “Balance is so important and I didn’t have an understanding of that because when I started touring, I didn’t know I needed that. But you can’t experience that fully if you aren’t able to look after yourself and be present within that.” When she got back to Tennessee she “was living for the purpose of what mattered” to herself, she says. “It was a huge perspective and priority shift.”
It turned out that after months of stress around writing new material, the ultimate hack ended up being as simple as enjoying life with friends. “I had such a hard time writing my EP because I was reflecting on things that happened when I was 16, 17, 20,” she says. “It was like pulling teeth. But then that July I wrote three songs effortlessly. I wrote ‘Legs’ with two of my friends. We were drinking wine and we even stopped and got dinner in the middle of it.” In the song, which opens with distorted chords before the instrumentation falls back, revealing DiRusso’s delicate vocals, she embraces her desire completely, singing, “I think you want me,” and declaring, “I don’t give a shit if we fuck or we date.” When I point out that this confident protagonist sounds vastly different from the DiRusso we hear on her EP, she agrees. “It is a different vibe from the EP,” she says, noting a song called “Body,” that delves into a relationship where DiRusso was made to feel physically less than. In it, she shares plainly: “He loves my face but not my body.” “Having a song like ‘Body,’ then getting to have the first single from this album be ‘Legs,’ was so important for me,” she says. “I feel like a huge thing I discovered in party July…and then party August…and then party September was regaining a sense of autonomy, whether that was with writing or making music or sexually. ‘Legs,’ has those themes. In my previous work, when I talked about sex, it was much more uncomfortable or dark or confused. It felt good to write from a healed perspective.”
The night after writing “Legs” she met with another friend, songwriter Ruston Kelly. They day-drank tequila and wrote “Wearing Pants Again,” a track about pulling yourself out of a dark spot. They both refer to it as the easiest co-write of their lives. She also wrote “I Am the Deer” during that stint, a grungy ditty with gritty guitar riffs where she sings, “I am the driver/I am the deer” in a round and admits, “You still love her, I know, that’s okay/My legs still hurt from you putting them up by your face.”
In her track “Wet” she homes in on a theme that’s present throughout the album. “It’s the push and pull of me wanting to be present and wanting to experience things fully but having this fear of surrendering to those feelings,” she says. “‘Wet’ is about when someone is everywhere to you and you’re trying to do everything to avoid jumping in, but it’s unavoidable at some point. At the end I’m like, ‘I just gotta give into this.’”
All parties have a designated closing time, and DiRusso’s ended with a new phase she’s referred to as “Angry October.” “I was angry because things I’d written about in the past about being in an abusive relationship had come back into the forefront,” she says, pointing to the subject matter of her track “Hungry” and her previous release “Hybrid.” In both songs, she writes about harrowing events that take place in a Prius, but her newest relaying of what happens shines a light on new revelations of those events as she sings: “I watched you flash your teeth/When a bear gets hungry/Doesn’t care who it eats.” “For the first time I didn’t feel scared or sad at all,” she says. “I felt so fucking angry and it was such a relief. I didn’t feel any yearning or nostalgia. I just felt so angry. That’s where the song came from—not from attachment but a much more healed perspective and a much more clear perspective. I always love in other people’s music when you can tell something is about the same subject and they’re writing about it years later and it’s such a different take on it at that point. I do think it fits into the theme of the album because it’s coming at it from this new sense of self and understanding of what had taken place.”
The word pedestrian has multiple meanings: a rambling person who travels by foot or something unremarkable, commonplace, or dull. On Super Pedestrian, DiRusso takes those meanings to their highest degree, making the minutiae of coming of age, wine with friends, a sweltering hedonistic summer, and a gradually building revelation into a human triumph. Sure, life can feel pedestrian at times, but DiRusso’s debut album is about experiencing it at its blissful extreme. “I wasn’t waking up in the morning saying I had to make something,” she says about writing her debut. “I would just go about my day and something would happen. It was such a lesson and I’m still carrying that with me now.”
If she could distill those impactful months into a message, it would be the title of the album’s last song: “It’s Good to Be Hot in the Summer.” “That’s that phrase to me,” she says. “Let yourself be where you are in the present. It’s about standing in the fire and not numbing the things around you. It’s good to be hot in the summer…let me be where I am right now, not just turn on the air-conditioning in my head. Not trying to feel something else.’”
Top Photo Courtesy Of Danica Robinson
