Bryce Drew is still finding herself caught up in timelines. The Los Angeles-based pop singer and songwriter has never been in love and always thought her time would come, at 21. She explores her search for love and finding contentment with what she has now on her upcoming EP and new single “21.”
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Now 24, Drew says 21 was a pivotal year. Her parents fell in love when they were 21, and she believed love just found people by this point in their lives. The song came to her one night when she was trying to go out with her friends, and everyone was out on dates. “I had a timeline in my head, and I got there, and it was nothing like I thought it would be,” Drew tells American Songwriter. “And a lot of the songs [on the EP] are about that kind of self-made timeline.”
Written mostly while she was in college, the EP, motions through love and the momentum of life. “It’s still very honest to me,” she says. “I think love is something everybody wants in their life, and it’s something that’s important to me, but I’m also very career-driven person. I’m happy with my life and have amazing friends and family. I try not to put so much pressure that it [love] has to happen right now, because I think that whenever the time is right for that, it’ll happen.”
Delicately flowed, the slower pop of “21” flushes through Drew’s deeper want in lyrics When I was younger it all seemed so simple … I’m not talking diamond rings, just looking for someone who gets me / Here I am 21 never been in love / Nothing to cry about, I know it will come /But it’s all that’s on my mind in the middle of the night.
Produced by Greg Wells (Dua Lipa, Adele, Katy Perry, One Republic), Drew says working together led to a natural unraveling of her music. It wasn’t about making an overproduced, pop album.
“He totally changed my life,” she says. “He’s the reason why I moved to LA.”
When Drew was still living in Nashville, she was on a writing trip to Los Angeles in 2018, and ended up having coffee at Wells’ studio. When he asked her “Why are you actually here?” she started playing “21.”
Two months later, Drew moved to Los Angeles and started recording. The whole process was enlightening, says the singer. “He’s just so multitalented, it hurts,” says Drew. “He has so much experience working with other artists, and you can tell he’s just a very sensitive human and is respectful of the art.”
For “21,” Drew already had the guitar part, and the melody just followed, which is usually how songs piece together for the artist. “Most times, I’ll sit there and come up with the guitar first,” she says. “If the guitar part is sticking and speaking to me, I try to figure out what it’s telling me, because I know that it’s something special when the music alone feels a certain way.”
She says she also edits a lot while working out songs—something that stuck from her songwriting studies at Belmont University in Nashville. “There was a lot of throwing lyrics up in front of a whole room of people, then asking how you can make your song better,” says Drew. “You start realizing that one line can actually make a huge difference.”
The track’s second verse, Drew says she ended up rewriting a month later, and it’s now one of her favorite parts of the song. “It feels like the most honest and conversational,” says Drew of the song. “It took me a second to really realize how to simplify what I was saying.”
Ready to ride the waves of her EP, Drew is about to put her music out to the world and see how it connects.
“I want to watch it come to life and move forward,” says Drew. “It’s been a really exciting process, seeing things visually come together and it becoming more than just the song. It makes me excited to think of how much farther it can go.”
