Asheville artist Indigo De Souza’s music exists outside of structure: powerful and confident, yet at times subdued; candid, yet potent. Bouncing between North America and Europe to tour for her 2021 album, “Any Shape You Take,” the 25-year-old singer opens up about her past, present, and future.
Words by Laura Relyea | Photos by Charlie Boss
Indigo De Souza’s ineffable casualness is striking. When we hop onto Zoom for our interview, she’s preparing to leave for her first European tour. Somehow she seems relatively unfazed. She’s in West Philadelphia at that moment, sitting cross-legged on a bed wearing an oversize T-shirt that says “Reebok Is for Lovers.” Her long, curly tresses are loose and expressive, and her bare face is pacific — if slightly amused. I’m in my home office outside Asheville, North Carolina, the city De Souza also calls home. We chat about errands and the folly and logistics of travel in 2022, and though she expresses that there’s a lot to do and things have been a little loony, she seems as steady and unwavering as the clouds coasting by above the Blue Ridge Mountains outside my window.
Despite her calm demeanor, De Souza is moving by leaps and bounds. At 25, she’s pursuing her music full time. This tour marks her first time out of the country for, in her words, her “first time as a conscious adult.” When she gets back, she’ll be spending the summer traveling across North America before departing for another stint in Europe in August. 2022 also brought performances in festivals and tour circuits alongside heralded indie acts such as My Morning Jacket, Courtney Barnett, Sylvan Esso, and Lucy Dacus. When she finally does come back home to Asheville in mid-November, she’ll be headlining The Orange Peel for the first time, a historic, landmark venue with a standing capacity of 1,100. De Souza has never headlined The Orange Peel before, and talking about this big moment gets her a little bashful. It’s no wonder. Over the years, The Orange Peel has hosted the likes of the Commodores, Ms. Lauryn Hill, The Flaming Lips, Sonic Youth, and Ice Cube.
Indigo De Souza spent much of her childhood in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, and then moved in with her older sister in South Asheville when she was 16.
It would be easy to lose track of herself amidst a season with such a dizzying itinerary, but De Souza, who has already been touring for her sophomore album, “Any Shape You Take,” for a year now, remains centered. “What I miss most is my friends, my dog, and my family. Those things are what make my personality shine through. They’re what’s most important to me. And when I don’t get to interact with them and am just surrounded by all of the boys in my band, I start to lose sight of myself,” she says. “I’m still learning, honestly, what helps.”
As an artist who is very open about her own struggles with mental illness, De Souza persists in anchoring herself to her life in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Whether it’s videos of her dog, dancing by herself with her AirPods in, or the tattoo of “HOME” across the knuckles of her hand, De Souza recognizes her need for stability amidst the calamity. And she pursues it with wholehearted grace.
This has been a breakout year for De Souza; she’s performed alongside heralded indie acts such as My Morning Jacket, Courtney Barnett, Sylvan Esso, and Lucy Dacus, and is set to embark on her first European tour.
De Souza’s wellspring of expression has been fostered since her childhood. The singer spent much of her childhood in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, about an hour north of Asheville and with a population of just over 2,000. Her father, a Brazilian bossa nova guitarist, was largely out of the picture.
“I didn’t see myself in anyone else there,” she tells me. Not only was she one of very few people of color in Spruce Pine, but she was raised by a single mother in a nonreligious household. “That set me apart from a lot of people. There were a lot of bullies in Spruce Pine.”
“My mom is very colorful. She has naked Barbie dolls glued to her truck,” she says with a subdued laugh. “It was very obvious that we were very different. No one else was that flamboyant.” Her mom, Kimberly Oberhammer, is the artist behind the album artwork for De Souza’s first two albums, “I Love My Mom” and “Any Shape You Take,'' and she set the stage for her daughter to find a means of self-expression by living by example. When De Souza started to show a love of playing guitar, Oberhammer bought a 4-track and enrolled her in music lessons. By the time she was 9 years old, De Souza was writing songs and performing them locally.
De Souza’s mother, Kimberly Oberhammer, created the art for her first two albums and has always been a champion of her daughter’s musical talent. When De Souza was young and began showing an interest in playing guitar, Oberhammer bought a four-track and enrolled her in music lessons.
In 2013, when she was 16, De Souza left Spruce Pine to move in with her older sister in South Asheville. Almost immediately, she got plugged into the city’s music scene and began working and recording with the folks at Echo Mountain. Back then, her music wasn’t fully realized — she was mostly performing as a singer-songwriter with a ukelele. But then a friend exposed her to heralded underground acts like Bill Callahan, Sparklehorse, Arthur Russell, and Happyness. The notion of transcending genre and typical musical structure opened her mind to possibilities outside the constructs she had been operating within. “I realized I wasn’t being true to myself,” she says. “That I was just creating music in a way to please the people I was working with.”
She changed everything about her approach and started to go her own way, opting to leave the studio and record her first EP, “Boys,” in the garage of a friend’s house. “That was the first time making collected works was really special,” she says.
Amid a busy tour schedule, De Souza finds peace and stability in anchoring herself to her life in the Blue Ridge Mountains, one of the reasons she has the word “HOME” tattooed across her knuckles.
In “Boys,” listeners can hear the powerful and confident, yet sometimes subdued, vocal performance she’s become known for. “People go crazy for the hell of it / Just little babies they’re delicate / I will scream and cry to the moon / Lord knows I’ll be losing it soon.”
Shortly after the EP’s 2016 release, De Souza realized she wanted to start a band to form her music in a way that was true to her expression. Free to spend more time exploring Asheville and focusing on her craft, she connected with her first bandmates. Her first album, “I Love My Mom,” came to fruition in 2018. “[The songs] had been in development for three years already, and then [the album] happened really fast,” she says. By the time that album was recorded, she was already writing songs that would be on “Any Shape You Take.”
“I write a lot of songs,” she tells me. “Especially in that period of my life. It was a really intense time.”
She started gaining momentum in her performances, too, with opening acts and eventually her own shows at Asheville’s The Mothlight (since closed). The city had a lot of opportunities to offer the burgeoning artist, and soon she was playing at Static Age, a record store and venue, and The Grey Eagle, Asheville’s longest-running all-ages venue. Record labels started to take notice, and De Souza chose Omaha, Nebraska-established label Saddle Creek. “I moved forward with Saddle Creek because my relationship with them felt the most human and the most real,” she says. “I felt that Saddle Creek's intentions were rooted in a love of music rather than a greed for power or money. I felt seen by them, and hadn't felt as seen by other labels that were interested,” she says. “It was a no-brainer.”
De Souza’s team got her in touch with Durham, North Carolina, producer and songwriter Brad Cook and electric pop duo Sylvan Esso. At the time, Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn had recently finished their recording space, Betty’s, outside Chapel Hill, and De Souza was one of the first sessions there. “Any Shape You Take” was recorded predominantly there and at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville. “My writing is always changing because I’m always growing up,” she says. “My brain is always shifting. My style of writing and the words I choose and the dynamic choices are always changing.”
What makes De Souza’s music so impactful is her unceremonious delivery of lyrics so candid they’re potent. In her review of “Any Shape You Take,” Danielle Chelosky described De Souza’s performance on the album as “freeing and admirable.” The lead single off the album, “Kill Me,” opens with:
Kill me, slowly, take me, with you
Down to, the garden, where magnolias bloom
Baby, darling, devil, I love you
And she delivers these lines as if they’d just occurred to her, whispering them into a lover’s ear before drifting off to sleep.
But by the chorus, the guitars and drums behind her are splenetically crashing on the track. The momentum builds, and she’s delivering her lines with increasing volatility. When she does let it all out, she’s distantly howling into the microphone, a coyote on the hillside.
She’s an expert at building tension across her music. Often her voice is unworried but dominant — stable and confident over the acerbic instrumentation, the choruses of screams, the melancholy melodies. And at times she lets go. She howls, she cries out, she summons a crowd to capture pain with cathartic abandon.
“I always put everything into each performance, and I plan to keep doing that until this [tour] cycle is over,” De Souza says.
Whether performing for thousands of fans in one night or over the course of several weeks, she’s committed to giving everything she has to her audience. “I put so much energy into making each song as emotional as it needs to be, which is really exhausting to perform.”
Yet even after a year on the road, De Souza is looking forward to heading back to her home base in Asheville. From there, she hopes to get a clearer picture of what’s to come. “When we make an album, I look at all of my songs and what should be put together. This next album in development now is all newer songs,” she says. “It feels like it took a while to get caught up.”
With the summer and most of the fall booked for touring, she’s excited to share her art with her audiences and make connections. “I always put everything into each performance,” she says, “and I plan to keep doing that until this cycle is over.”
Laura Relyea is a writer living in North Carolina whose work has appeared in Oxford American, Hyperallergic, The Bitter Southerner, and elsewhere. She was formerly a regular correspondent on WABE 90.1’s “City Lights,” and has been a featured guest on NPR’s “On Second Thought” and “The Bitter Southerner Podcast.” For The Bitter Southerner, Relyea has retraced the steps of outsider-art chroniclers Roger Manley, Guy Mendes, and Jonathan Williams; taken readers inside Atlanta’s Center for Puppetry Arts; and written about musicians in recovery.
Charlie Boss is a self-taught photographer who values personal connections above all else. Based out of Asheville, North Carolina, their work focuses on faces and seeks to tell stories of those connections. As a musician, they are also deeply intertwined with the musical world and work with musicians locally and nationally.
