Indie pop singer-songwriter and “bittersweet optimist” Fiji Blue (aka Trevor Dering) shares his long-awaited debut album Glide. The 11-track project is rich with achingly personal yet universally relatable anecdotes on love and loss, both platonic and romantic.
“This album was written during a period of personal transition,” he explains. “There’s a lot of adjustment that comes with dealing with the end of relationships, feeling stuck in the middle trying to process all these intense feelings at the same time…It was like starting from scratch, both emotionally and in terms of writing songs themselves.”
Born Trevor Dering, Fiji Blue finds creative solitude in the mixture of guitar-heavy storytelling, drawing inspiration from artists like Stevie Ray Vaughan & John Mayer. After accumulating over 300 million streams across three EPs, Glide is Fiji Blue’s first proper album.
To tell the stories on Glide, Dering decamped to Topanga for a weeklong writing retreat, penning a song a day and getting lost in lush production – an ascendant helium balloon of synths, skittering electronics, and widescreen harmonies cut with the warm humanity of more organic instrumentation like piano and acoustic guitar. Notable features on the album include Conrad of Public Library Commute & Colin of Surfaces, who helped write & produce “One Last Time.”
After postponing his North American tour to be with his wife Natasha while she recovered from brain surgery, Fiji Blue will bring Glide across the US and Canada this coming February and March.
Giving this one a spin?