Interview: Evelyn Feroza on her first single, “Close Your Eyes”

Five years since Evelyn Feroza first started serenading the crowd at TAPS Beer Bar, the 26-year-old has now opened a new chapter in her singing career with the release of her first ever single, “Close Your Eyes”.

Though this is the petite crooner’s first single, she does have a few other songs under her belt, which she collaborated on with – aside from one of her frequent collaborators, Q Sound himself – the likes of Jumero, Dean Sim, Clinton Liew and more.

Hoping that she would be able to work on more original tracks, Evie expressed her wish to complete and release an album by next year.

Don’t close your eyes just yet! Read on to find out what else Evie had to tell us when we met her during her music video launch. Then you can click the play button on the music video way below and enjoy “Close Your Eyes”.  

Evelyn: Thank you! Well, this is my first single ever. It's a collaboration with Michael (Q Sound). We wrote this song last year, we sort of delayed and procrastinated and finally this year, I said to myself, “We're gonna make this happen”.

I wrote the lyrics. Marcus did the music. He let me listen to it and I had this melody in my head. At first it was sort of like jazzy, which does not fit it. I love jazz but it doesn’t fit with this song. So we came up with this, we came up with the hook first, “Breathe and I'll let you touch me”.

We were already planning to do a song together but that was a song called "Soul Gazer". We were actually working on that song and I was about to leave when he said, “Hey, can you listen to this track?” and I did and yeah.

Yes, my uncle Brad Hogarth was the director of the music video. We went to Bangkok and we shot the music video in a studio in Bangkok. We did it there because my uncle was doing his work there and he thought he'd just take me there as well.

When you listen to this song, to me it's about your conscience, it's basically about people's personalities, how many personalities you have inside of you. Some people have more than five, mine is just five very different characters. One particular one that stands out is the darkness, I’m gonna call her The Darkness, and I think she's my favourite character to play in the music video.

Maybe not easy but both was in my element. It was really a passionate thing for me to do but the fun one, like really fun to do, was the music video because I get to play five different characters. 

I’ve always loved to look in the mirror and whatever movies that I've watched, since I was young, I'd see if I could copy whatever they were saying and then as I was doing it, I’d be like ‘this is nice, this is cool’ and you don’t really think about it, before you know it, you're already portraying different characters in your life. It was not hard to get into the characters for me, I don’t know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. [Laughs].

When, where, who, what? [Laughs]. That's a lot of questions but I wouldn’t say no, honestly. I would love to try new things.

I can see myself doing that. I'll definitely focus more on music but then again, you never know where this creativity would take you in life and I'm not one to just say no to opportunities. So to me if it comes, if it's meant to be then it's meant to be.

When I first started this, I basically only know karaoke songs because I was a school singer, no vocal lessons. Then when I started singing back in 2013, because I was doing just an acoustic guitar and myself, they were throwing me classic songs like Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Etta James, Nina Simmons. That year, I was focusing mostly on that, classic songs.  The next year, that's when I started venturing into pop songs. Then the year after that it was R&B, then it was soul, then it was a mixture of everything.

I don’t think I can ever really pick just one genre. It just depends on what I feel at the moment but I really do like this song, “Close Your Eyes”. Not being biased!