Even if you find success on tour with the likes of Taylor Swift and My Chemical Romance and earn a Grammy nomination…you’ll never be able to avoid the annoying growing pains of being in your late teens and early 20s. This is exactly what GAYLE, aka 22-year-old Taylor Gayle Rutherfurd, explored in her official debut album Observing Chaos, out now via Atlantic Records.
She explains, “I put out ‘abcdefu‘ and my life got completely turned upside down in the best ways. And while I was dealing with extremely unique circumstances, I was also going through things every teenage/young adult has gone through.”
She adds, “When I came home from tour, I had so much unraveling and piecing together to do. When I looked at my life and picked through all the songs I wrote on and off of tour, I was writing from such an honest place. I realized that in all the best ways, my life was chaos. The album is me honoring and observing it while slowly making sense of it all. And let’s be honest… being a teenager and being in your early twenties is complete CHAOS.”
idobi Radio had the distinct pleasure of sitting down with GAYLE to dissect each and every track of her stunning debut LP. Heartbreak and healing aren’t easy to deal with, and Observing Chaos triumphantly navigates the peaks and valleys of young, messy love. While not an explicit concept album, it does primarily follow one long-term relationship and the turmoil that came from severing ties. And it’s alllll too relatable. Check out the full interview below and secure your pysical copy here.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Clementine
I was writing songs for basically four years of being on and off tour and putting out an EP, but always knowing long-term I was wanting to write for an album. When it came time to tell my story, “Clementine” just felt like the easiest way to start from being like, “This is the base level of my mentality of how I’m feeling through everything.” It starts with the fact that I was in a relationship with somebody that you can tell I cared about, but you can also tell I knew we weren’t perfect and didn’t necessarily think we were getting married tomorrow. Yet, the relationship and the way things ended really was affecting me.
“Clementine” also talks about the struggles of how I’m dealing with my own feelings because I’m angry. I’m angry that I was in this loving relationship, or what I thought was a loving relationship, and then they turn around and are with this other person. I’d never met that other person, but I was told that they knew about me. I don’t know what’s the truth or what’s not. So, then I’m having all of this anger toward him and toward the other person he got into a relationship with, while also dealing with my own insecurities.
Bite The Bullet
“Bite The Bullet” is actually [about] me trying to open myself up to having a crush and trying to just put myself out there again. It’s trying to just be really lighthearted. I know I’m going through all this turmoil, but I just need to let all of this go for a second and try and move on, have crushes, and just be happy.
Burn
There’s a lot of back-and-forths for this record. “Burn” kind of circles back to: “I went out and I had fun, had my little crushes, had my little experiences and my time, but then I also went home and was alone.” I was really sitting and thinking about how much I loved this person. Especially at the time when I was younger, I had the mentality of: “If you’re going to love me, then let’s go, let’s do this, let’s burn it to the ground!” Even when a relationship ended or when we first started dating, I was like, “Well, if we break up, I hope we hate each other because that means we really went for it. I don’t want to half-ass this, I really want to go for it.”
Clara
I kind of realized that I never really “came out” to my friends, I guess. I’m really lucky to be born in a generation where sexuality isn’t necessarily a thing that has to have labels or has to be decided. I think it’s so awesome that we’re in a place where things get to be more question marks than ever. I just realized that because I was in a relationship, I just never really talked about [my sexuality].
I am so lucky; I have such long-term female friendships—and I guess I did have a bit of a fear at times of talking about liking girls and them maybe thinking that I would like them, or that it would add a layer to our friendship. I guess deep down I had maybe some insecurities that it would make things weird, or make somebody’s boyfriend uncomfortable or something, when I just grew up with them as my friends and never saw them like that and never will.
I met this person, and I just had such a crush on them, and it was just such a wonderful opportunity in my life to get to open up to people about another part of me. It helped me be able to bring this girl around, bring her around my friends, meet my mom, and actually go on dates. As an adult, I was able to pick a girl up, clean my car…it was a really awesome opportunity in my life. That was also a really wonderful time when I realized that it was just something that I always was, and I realized I just hadn’t really talked about it in my music. I had a time in my life where I was like, “Wait, I really get to open up to my friends and my family, and have people get to know me more and be closer to me.” That’s what inspired me to write “Clara.”
I’ve always had crushes, and especially with girls…if I have a crush on a girl, I want to throw up and die. It is just miserable! It’s so much harder because you’re like, “Oh, you’re so pretty, and you’re so cool.” It was worth it to have such a beautiful relationship, to be able to open up that part of myself to my platonic friends and my family, and share this.
Arkansas
In my opinion, relationships end before you break up, and I think it’s a lot easier after a breakup to look back and say, “I know we broke up here, but I think this is really when we ended.” “Arkansas” is talking about that moment, pinpointing that moment.
For me, I was on a road trip, and I had just gotten into a fight that was really, really harsh, and things were said. There are times you just can’t un-say things to somebody.
Loving You Is
I wrote this song when I was 17, and I wrote it before almost all of the songs on the record. I’ve had the ability to put that song out forever—I mean, it could have been the second single after “abcdefu” when I was 17.
After I wrote “Loving You Is,” I made so many mistakes.17-year-old me writing that song, I was so hopeful. I was in a relationship that a bunch of bullshit was about to go down in, and I think I had a really hard time listening to that song without getting disappointed in myself, because I heard a 17-year-old who was really hopeful, really believed in myself, and really believed that I was going to have standards.
I was able to look at the song and find the innocence and find empathy, then also kind of find humor, being like, “You really thought you knew it all, huh?”
It took a couple years for me to emotionally work through this song. I see the album kind of split into two parts, and “Mother Trucker” is the flip.
Mother Trucker
“Mother Trucker is actually the last song I wrote for the record, and it was like a little accident. I did not mean to write that song for the record at all. It literally was just a song that started as a joke. I was working with my friend Willie Breeding…I think I called him a motherfucker, he called me a motherfucker—and then I went like, “Hey you, motherfucker!” We just started joking around, and I ended up writing the song.
The song is kind of me just giving in a little bit. It is just a little bit of like, “You know what, motherfucker? Like, fuck you, because I just fucking love you.”
Open Arms
It’s one of those [songs] where I’m mad at myself. I am just like, “God, like I am so over my bullshit. Just come back to me.” This was the most toxic, stupidest thing to think…but I was like, “I know he’s not treating me great, but it’s on me to care. He can just not treat me great, and I can just not care. It’s that simple, so I’m just not going to care, and just come back. It’s fine, I just don’t care.”
It’s kind of me just giving in, kind of getting sick of myself, and kind of me slowly starting to get worn down by just the back-and-forth of the relationship and kind of the breakup.
Just Like That
To me, “Just Like That” is a callback to “Clementine.” I take time to process my feelings. I don’t even know I’m mad about something until probably like a day or two later. So “Clementine” is kind of for me like the beginning of finding out this information, the beginning of getting sad, the beginning of all of this.
Then, “Just Like That” is after sitting with this information, stomach-ing it for a little bit, really looking back on how he handled telling me that he’s seeing another person…because the way he went about it was just not great. Not great.
Junebug!
“Junebug!” is one of my favorite songs! I love the lyricism, and I kind of feel nostalgic listening to it, which, for me, I just haven’t experimented too much with nostalgia in music.
“Junebug!” felt like something that was similar to music I’ve put out before, but still an evolution. I have a song called “Snow Angels,” and “Junebug!” felt like its older cousin.
It was a really happy, joyful song, and I thought that was really fun to come back after a couple years to come back after a bit of a darker era, and come back with this fun song.
Anybody Like You
“Anybody Like You”… I need to handwrite apology letters to everybody in my life during that week, because I did the thing that everybody has done at some point in their life. I may or may not have driven to my ex’s house in the middle of the night. It happens, it happens, you know, and things happened. Then I woke up the next morning at home, and he blocked me and all my friends on everything.
It had been years at this point of just the timeframe of the relationship to where it’s over, to seeing each other, to then getting blocked. I saw how intentionally cruel he was, and how he very easily just went out of his way to do things that I, even after how badly he hurt me, would never imagine doing.
I was 19 at the time—I will give myself that. I started getting to that point where I was just like, “I cannot ever do this again. If in another relationship I get treated like shit, whatever, but when it comes to you and me, this needs to be rock bottom. Like, I need to never love anybody like you, ever.”
Rot
“Rot” was the final conversation that he and I had together, and he said to me, he said: “I hope the memories of us rot in your brain with you until you die.”
And I remember being flabbergasted. Genuinely… my mouth dropped. It was very spiteful.
I was thinking about the fact that he went off and had this other relationship and fully fell in love with another person, and kept coming back to me, kept trying to text me, kept trying to reach out to me in the middle of the night…while I never fully fell in love with another person.
I knew that after he said that to me, I needed to write a song called “Rot.” I knew that I was going to think about him all the time, and I knew I was going to feel sad about it all the time, and then I knew one day I was going to wake up and I just wasn’t going to feel that way anymore. So, “Rot” to me is saying, “You know what? You’re not going to rot in my mind, because I am going to think about you, and I am going to mourn our relationship, and I’m going to make sure that I never love anybody like you again, and I will make sure I’ll never act like you again.”
This Is What You Asked For
“This Is What You Asked For” is basically saying…he did some things he shouldn’t have, and if he gets mad about me talking about it… Well, buddy, you knew what you were getting into. You knew!
