RØRY: Family, Flaws and Fixing Futures
If you’ve not heard of RØRY, where have you been? With a huge following on her TikTok @adhd_love, where RØRY – real name Roxanne Emery – and her husband Richard Pink advocate for better understanding of ADHD, it’s clear that RØRY is an incredibly open and empathetic. Outside of her work online, her music has exploded onto the scene over the last couple of years. Her first EP Good Die Young was a powerful discussion of loss and addictions, and was a huge success. Now, with her second EP Family Drama, RØRY has continued to channel her journey through trauma into new a set of personal, cathartic songs.
“In all honesty, it was quite a quite a horrible process in moments,” RØRY explains about the writing process. “One particular one is last song, on the apology I’ll never receive. I was really, really going through something in real time, which is going no contact with my dad after just years of a lot of difficult stuff. Songs like ALTERNATIVE, I wrote the chorus just on my own at home, I do that a lot. I tend to start songs alone and then take in a demo to finish it with people. I feel like you can get a really, really sad and get the full emotion out sometimes when you’re on your own better than with people.”
Her music is very true and honest, with a nostalgic alt-pop feel the likes of early AVRIL LAVIGNE, NOAHFINNCE and YOU ME AT SIX, she’s bridged beautiful vocals with crunchy guitars and glossy production. The messages are all very personal, but big enough to be completely open to interpretation to the listener too, which of course is scary, giving personal pain out in the hope it helps someone else who connects with it. The raw, physical pain of it can often be the sign that she’s hit the crux of the song’s heart. “Every time I cry, as it comes out, it does something in that energy that people feel and you can never quite explain it,” RØRY agrees. “Is it the lyrics, is it the music? I don’t know. But that experience you’ve had like it’s really common, that’s probably the thing I get told the most like, ‘oh, this made me cry’.”
A successful songwriter for other artists for many years, when pursuing her own music RØRY has learnt what works, but more importantly, what she actually wants to be for her audience, and that is authentic. “I think that in a strange way, my years doing pop writing kind of taught me what I didn’t want to do. It really showed me there’s a business way to do it, there’s a smart way to write a song, write a hit. And it makes me feel dead on the inside. I don’t like it. I always try to just step back from it if I can, because it’s just it’s not as fulfilling as what just heaviness or truth is, it’s just not. It’s been a really interesting journey. And I’m very glad to be on the like highly truthful, authentic, possibly sometimes slightly embarrassing vulnerability side of the fence now.”
Having had traumatic experiences growing up, through processing them as an adult and coming out the other side, RØRY has undoubtedly become the most authentic version of herself, and that absolutely shines in her music and her approach to well-being. “Music has been the only place where I can express emotionally. Now I’m in therapy, I can actually do it in real life, but it’s always been a release.” A performer who embraces herself and all she is, one of the most refreshing things about RØRY is her attitude to accepting yourself. There’s something to be said about being where she is now, that has allowed RØRY to write this record. “I’m older now. I’ve been five years sober have been in really good therapy for quite a few years. I would not have been able to make this EP if I wrote music like I did in my twenties. Without age, experience; therapy; having fucked up a load of things. So really, like, I’m very passionate about talking about that, because I felt for so long the shame [of being older] in the music industry, even when I release God Die Young.”
“[I thought] ‘I’m so old, I’m so embarrassing, no one’s gonna like it; Nobody cares at all [but] people just want truth. And I feel like, I know so many songwriters who have like left artistic careers or think it’s too late for them, who have got unreal stories to tell. And they don’t do it out of like, fear and shame. So I’m so grateful to have feedback, like what you said, that it’s maybe quite an unusual record, or it’s like very true. Because that’s purely because it’s an it’s an old person that’s done some therapy. So it’s a different perspective, it’s coming from the mess and the depth. Rather my twenties was, which was you know, the breakups and the parties and the slightly lighter stuff, that we need to write about too, of course.”
With hard hitting songs that really punctuate that bad things happening to you, or making bad decisions doesn’t make you a bad person, that you can move forward. Realising flaws allows for growth, and the natural steps towards accepting yourself is a wonderful thing that RØRY brings to the world in her songs. It’s that fans really connect to that, from the huge reception she’s had with sold-out shows and massive online response to each single release.
“It makes the pain have a purpose, to be able to connect with people,” she notes, thinking back to the taking her music out into the world, live. “I remember at my first ever show. August last year, at the Camden Assembly. I’d never met my audience, it was really odd experience. And there’s this room full of eighteen to forty year-olds, all with these threads of dyed hair and piercings. I guess we all have traumatic experiences, but it’s so mind blowing to be able to connect with someone who’s nineteen as well as someone who’s forty-four with the same story!”
Showing love and being the change she wants to see in the world, RØRY’s message through her music has breached the chasm of ages, with her fanbase being a place of pure acceptance of each other, and the collective journey people have to feeling better. “A lot of the kind of older listeners of my music, they say ‘oh this this is the music my teenage self needed’. Perhaps that’s why I’m writing it perhaps that’s what my teenage self needed, actually,” RØRY muses. “But then I’ve got teenagers listening and you just think ‘oh, yeah, you get this early, I’m telling you about sobriety in therapy. You don’t have to go and fuck up. You live for fifteen years to have a redemption story, [but these kids can] just walk away from things that might affect them negatively, so I hope I’ve helped now.”
Family Drama is out now via self-release.
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