MUMBAI: Out now, indie pop singer-songwriter 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.”
After postponing his North American tour to support his wife Natasha during her recovery from brain surgery, Fiji Blue is set to bring ‘Glide’ across the US and Canada this February and March. Last August, he performed at some of his biggest festivals yet, including Summer Sonic in Tokyo and Lalala Festival in Jakarta. Most recently, in November, Fiji Blue returned to our shores in Asia, with stops in Singapore, Taipei, Manila, and Hong Kong.
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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—’Reasons You Should Care’ (2021), ‘Goodbye’ (2021) and ‘I Loved You, What Happened?’ (2022)—’Glide’ is Fiji Blue’s first proper album.
To tell the stories on the forthcoming album, Fiji Blue 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.
There’s palatable emotion reverberating through every note, chord, and melody of ‘Glide’, balancing both the pain and affection that inspired them. At its most heartbreaking, it’s a rumination on those who never really leave us, the faint imprints that linger long after lives go their separate ways; at its most uplifting – the emotions Dering prefers to focus on – it’s rich with gratitude for his friends and family, a future full of hope and possibility.
“I love sad music, and if I could only write sad music, I would,” he says with a laugh. “The thing I really love about Fiji Blue is having uplifting harmonic and production elements alongside lyrics that sit more in that melancholy world. Sometimes it’s nice to find that middle ground.”
‘Glide’ Tracklisting
1. Angel
2. Adjust
3. Start Over
4. June
5. Peppermint
6. Where Do I Begin?
7. Shadow of You
8. One Last Time
9. Never Get Old
10. Pink
11. Beautiful
About Fiji Blue
The story of Fiji Blue owes a debt to both coasts, but his genre-spanning sound is truly global. After graduating Berklee College of Music in 2019 with a major in songwriting, Phoenix-raised Trevor Dering relocated to Los Angeles. There, Fiji Blue became fully realized, swirling bedroom pop, indie, house, easy listening and R&B into a sun-kissed daydream.
A stamp of approval from BTS’s Jungkook elevated the single “It Takes Two” to the global stage in 2022, while tours in Southeast Asia, and appearances on Spotify’s New Music Friday introduced Fiji Blue to millions of new listeners. Now, more than 300 million Spotify streams and 20 million YouTube views later, Fiji Blue’s long-awaited debut album ‘Glide’ (Nettwerk) is Dering’s strongest artistic statement to date, mourning endings and practicing love and gratitude for what remains with potent lyricism and a reassuring voice listeners won’t soon forget.
Though based halfway across the globe, the majority of Asian cities dominate Fiji Blue’s Top 10 worldwide including Bangkok, Jakarta, Singapore, Taipei, Quezon City, and Kuala Lumpur.
