On February 10, 2023, one of November Ultra’s dreams came true. Everything she had worked on, in the years prior, reached its apex when her name was called as Best New Female Award at Les Victoires De La Musique. Winning the French equivalent of a Grammy was something the singer and songwriter, who also goes by Nova, said came just at the right moment.
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Several years earlier, Nova, raised in France to a Spanish mother and a Portuguese father, was writing songs in her bedroom, reminiscing on her life, loves, and everything flooding. Eventually, she had the 11 tracks of her self-produced debut, aptly named bedroom walls.
Her musical vignettes are unabashed in the loveliness, and ugliness, of life. Each captures some of the most moving and momentous stages, from fleeting time on opening “over & over & over”—The tale’s getting older / Blood’s growing colder / The ticking sound of youth — to more cradling stories of heartbreak on “soft & tender” and the rhythm-dusted “miel” with croons of Been lost for days inside my mind / Can’t find a way to work it out/ ‘Cause I don’t really want us to / But I don’t really want us to break.
The lower lushness and loftier registers of Nova’s vocals meet the occasion of each story, all absorbed by the folk and R&B, along with 1960s musicals and the Spanish narratives of traditional coplas introduced to her by her grandfather. Her love of Frank Ocean also inspired her nom de plume of November Ultra with his 2011 mixtape, Nostalgia, Ultra.
Nova’s story is to be continued on bedroom walls: le salon, a deluxe edition featuring seven additional tracks, including the gentle acoustic open of “le salon: introduction” and piano-threaded “come into my arms,” which initially gained more attention after Camila Cabello used the song in a TikTok video. The album also offers one Spanish-sung ballad, “corazón caramelo,” and more songs of continuity through the heartrending finality of “the end.”
Also moonlighting as a songwriter for other artists Jaden Smith, Claire Laffut, Kungs, and Jasmiin since parting ways with her previous surf-pop band Agua Roja in 2018, Nova has already started chronicling one of the most intimate storylines of her life, even as she’s moved on from the bedroom.
Nova recently spoke to American Songwriter about her continuing journey through songs, why she prefers to write and sing in English (and Spanish) and not French, and how she’s transitioned from writing living room songs now.
American Songwriter: Congratulations on your Les Victoires win. Was that the fitting full-circle moment for bedroom walls?
November Ultra: It does feel like the right pace because it feels like it’s going little by little. It’s crazier than I ever thought possible for me. I’m a girl from France. I sing in English. One of my dreams was to have a Grammy one day, and people in France were like, “No, you’re French. It’s never going to happen, and in the U.S., you can forget about it. You have to first focus on France.”
It was all these doors and people being scared of those things. I was like “No. I’m going to do my music. The windows are going to open and stars are going to align.” I was quite chill about it because it was one of my dreams. It can be in 50 years, 60 years, or 100 years, if I’m still alive, to get that Grammy, but I also want to go through that journey. I want to sing in English. I want to sing in Spanish. I want to be able to travel with my music and meet people, and I feel like I have already spoken all that into existence, in a way. But it feels like the right pace because I can wrap my head around what’s going on.
AS: That’s a wonderful attitude to have at this stage. Winning a Grammy is nice, but it’s not just about that. It’s the bigger picture.
NU: It’s the journey. It’s the people that you meet, everywhere that you go. It’s the crazy curious, magical, and unexplainable. It’s failure. It’s the things you didn’t think would happen. It’s all about that. I always put a little bit of an addendum to it. I don’t want a Grammy at all costs. I don’t want to win it with a song that I’m not proud of, or surrounded by people I don’t like, or if I feel too anxious or sad — then it will mean nothing to me.
It’s truly about the journey of making the music that I like. It’s crazy because I’m a shy person. I made that album in my bedroom, in France, and here it has connected me to people around the world.
AS: Aside from singing in English, why do you think you have connected so deeply to U.S. audiences?
NU: I was born and raised in a multicultural family. My mom is Spanish and my father’s Portuguese. I was born and raised in France, but I learned English because I was like “This is going to be my space, my room, my language because it doesn’t have any memories attached to it. But the memories I’m going to put into it, the words are going to be my own, because they’re not used by anyone in my family or anyone around me.” So it’s really a space of my own. My first bedroom really became the language itself.
At the same time, I grew up with a grandfather, who’s [now] 90 years old and uses Instagram and TikTok, and is a fan of musicals from the ’60s. I felt like that way of singing, that way of emoting music, and writing songs … there’s a like-mindedness with people from the U.S. I love The Sound of Music and Funny Girl with Barbra Streisand, so I think we have the same kind of loves. I also think that they connect directly to the lyrics. In France, it’s more about melody first. We’re not from the same country, but my emotions are universal, and that’s where we connect, and it’s just incredible.
AS: You predominantly write songs in English, but do songs ever come out in Spanish, or French?
NU: Yes, in Spanish, but not in French. And people in France are like “When are you going to do a French song?” Probably never. I’ve tried, and I really don’t like it. I think there are two sentences, two lyrics in French, on the whole album. I don’t know the space I’ll be in seven albums from now. Maybe I’m going to do one all in French, but that’s not the space I’m in. And I don’t want to do stuff that I don’t want to do.
I’m not writing songs for the people. I’m writing songs for what I’m feeling, what I’m going through, and when I sing it, it appeases me. It calms me. It’s like meditation. If it works on me, then it’s going to work on people. It’s about the specificity of what you’re going through and then just how magical it is when it gets to people.
AS: Whatever language you choose, you’ll always have options.
NU: Yes! Life is long. I want to make 1,000 albums. Well, maybe not 1,000 (laughs), because I always take three or four years to make them.
AS: It sounds like you’re constantly writing. Do you have buckets of songs in waiting?
NU: I learned to understand myself. Sometimes I can write so many songs in the span of weeks. Then, I will have no creativity, nothing, like my cup isn’t full enough with experience in life. I can’t force it, because it’s not going to be a song that I’ll want to keep, or want to sing until my dying days.
I’ve learned to never stop myself. If I’m writing, I write as many songs as I feel, then take those songs to the second part of the work, which is looking at the lyrics, working on the arrangements, and the production. With “novembre,” I wrote it in one hour, at the end of the day. It just flew out of me, because that’s what I was feeling. I was on tour, and I missed my family, and the song came out.
AS: Some songs need more time before they’re ready.
NU: Yes! For “le manège,” I wrote the first part quickly, in two hours, but I was not in that space for the second verse, because of that feeling of never wanting it to end and always wanting to see that person, so that song took me a year and a half. It took having a new crush, and then I had the second verse, and the chorus, and it was finished. I also give myself that time. That’s a luxury that I give myself. Sometimes you’re surrounded by people that say “You have to release a song now, and you have to release an album now,” and I’m like “No, I haven’t lived enough. I haven’t experienced enough, and this is not going to be the album that I want to make.”
AS: Let’s go back to the timeline of bedroom walls. Were these songs initially written after you left your band in 2018?
NU: In 2018, it was about experimenting a little bit. I was just figuring it out because I really wanted to find a producer. I needed someone to compose and write with and someone who had the technical abilities I didn’t have. My publisher said the best thing he could have ever told me. He said, “You’re that person. No one’s waiting for you. You have that time in front of you. You can learn.”
I started experimenting with the sounds and suddenly, I made “soft & tender” in April 2019 in one weekend, and that’s when the little voices came into play. At the end of two days, I composed, recorded, arranged, and produced the whole thing by myself. That was the focal point. I had understood who I was as an artist, as a songwriter, and as a producer. It was a door opening to a new way of me making my music.
AS: How did songwriting shift over this period of time?
NU: It’s been hard lately because I think my life has been about touring about singing that album. It’s been a weird, incredible moment, but I feel like it’s not about writing songs as much as it’s about experiences in life.
Also, my bedroom doesn’t exist anymore. I repainted a wall, and it’s not even my bedroom anymore. That space is in the album, so psychologically, symbolically, I needed to move on. I made this album, and now it exists, and my bedroom is immortalized in a way. Now, I have to move on, because I’m not that person anymore. I can see that I changed a bit in the way that I write songs now. And at the same time, I think my main focus is always about a very simple guitar or piano and a big strong vocal with strong lyrics. The core hasn’t changed, but I don’t know what the future is going to bring. I need time to explore sound. I need time to explore everything.
It’s not even about writing. It’s where I’m at as a person.
AS: There’s also a lot of nostalgia in your songs.
NU: I have a very good memory, which is a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that I remember everything. And the curse is that I remember everything, so I can’t let go of anything, and that makes me very nostalgic. That makes for a lot of melancholy. That makes for a lot of “monomania,” which is about being obsessed. I’m very obsessive, which is amazing. I think those are qualities that you need when you’re making an album. If you’re not obsessed with what you’re making, then don’t go through with it, because it’s three or four years of your life every time. You have to be obsessed.
It transpires on that album. I think even my voice has a lot of longing in it. My lyrics have a lot of longing in it. But also the instruments and the way that we use them. When I wrote “nostalgia/ultra,” Nicolas [Mantoux], who I composed that with, started playing the synth, and I remember saying, “If memories were a sound, I think that would be that sound.” And it’s always been about memories, about people. The only vocals outside of me singing on that album [bedroom walls] are my grandparents, so it’s a time capsule of a moment in my life, and there’s a lot of nostalgia in it for sure.
AS: What else was added since the bedroom walls era on the deluxe edition?
NU: I’ve done the bedroom, but I realized that I spend more time in my living room, which is where I like playing piano and making music. I had songs I’ve written in between that I knew weren’t going to be on the next album and recorded them in my living room, which is why it’s called le salon (living room in French). I can see that it’s going to shift, and that’s why I needed to keep those songs close to the album [bedroom walls] and in the same moment.
AS: Do similar sentiments revolve around the “living room” songs?
NU: I think so. It’s funny because you can feel how obsessed with the different ways of being in love I was. It’s a lot of love songs — the first time that you say “I love you” to a person, for example, or that person that you haven’t seen in 16 years that you were in love with when you were younger and you see for the first time and you have a date. Your mind goes into a daydream because you can’t believe that you get to see that person again. Then, there’s another song in Spanish [“corazón caramelo”], which is more about “What do I deserve and what love do I want now they my 30s?” I thought I wanted the same kind of love that I wanted when I was a teenager, but now I’m in my 30s I know that’s not a healthy way of loving.
I think bedroom walls was me becoming an adult, and living room [le salon] is me as a woman, facing all those different emotions.
AS: Although bedroom walls was written in a specific space within your life, have any of the songs transformed in meaning for you over time?
NU: The album came out in 2022, and “over & over & over” was written in 2018. That was one of those songs that I just really didn’t want to sing anymore. That’s how I knew that the album was finished because I was not that person anymore. It was weird for me to sing that because it takes me back to a moment that was really hard in my life and I’m not that person anymore. I came back to the beginning of the story and was not that person anymore. It’s about a moment in my life, and then you release it, and it becomes something else that speaks to people.
Sometimes people see stuff in it that you would not see. I’ve seen that with my song “come into my arms.” I wrote it really fast. I put it on TikTok, and overnight it got like a million views. Suddenly, it’s not your song anymore. That was something that I needed to write because it helped me going through what I was going through, and now it’s helping other people. You’re just passing it on.
Photo by Pauline Darley / Gold Atlas PR
