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22-year-old rising songstress Wallice knows many of us Gen Z-ers are feeling stuck right now. It might seem ironic, especially given the fact that as kids, the desire to grow up was often very real. (But hey, it’s not our fault that being a teen or young adult looked easy in many of the shows and movies we watched as kids!)
It’s just not easy, but Wallice’s new single “23” is here to make us feel *seen*… if you know what I mean.
Wallice was a middle schooler when she started writing songs. She was a member of her school’s band too, and as any teen would, Wallice loved turning her iPod volume on full blast and jamming out to a diverse mix of artists. You could definitely say Wallice had a thing for music, and as time went on, it only grew and grew!
After a year of attending the New School’s Jazz Vocal Performance program in NYC, Wallice decided it was time to head back home to California and focus on her own music. The journey truly got started last year though, as Wallice let her debut single “Punching Bag” out into the world.
She spilled, “‘Punching Bag’ started with me seeing the address of an old friend pop up in my Google maps as a suggested destination, but we weren’t talking at the time so it just made me feel weird. I wanted to be able to just go to their house and hang out with them but that wasn’t an option anymore. Around the same time I had another friend get a girlfriend and completely stop talking to me. I realized that there is such a correlation between strained friendships and romantic relationships that most people have probably felt. There’s such a strange absence of someone who used to be such a big part of your life. I made it with the thought of the protagonist (me, cause I am the one singing) being so dramatic and manipulative to do anything to see this other person, but in a completely relatable and valid way. ‘Left my Hydroflask in the back of your car’ was a line that we thought was so silly and an obvious (perhaps pathetic) excuse to just see someone again.”
With “23,” Wallice is yet again channeling the shared experiences of so many young people into a song. It’s a song to blast when you feel like your day (or life in itself) is just dragging on. Society has inevitably made many of us feel as though we have to accomplish certain things by a certain age. Seeing friends succeed in their own endeavors can especially set off a mid-life crisis from time to time, but Wallice has a message she hopes will resonate with you!
“It’s hard not to compare your own professional success to that of your similarly aged peers. I dropped out of university in New York after studying Jazz Voice for a year, and my dad was VERY disappointed to say the least, so it was hard not to feel like a loser in that sense,” she admits. “When I was younger my best friend and I would always talk about the cute apartment we would get after high school, but I found myself at 22 still living with my mom and wanting to move out but not able to quite yet. The specific age 23 doesn’t have any milestones associated with it, but it’s more the idea of just looking forward to the future. Much like how people ‘reset’ every new year, it’s comparable to be ‘older and wiser’ with each birthday, but instead of constantly looking to the future, it is important to be happy with where you are. “
Enjoy “23” below, and say hi to Wallice on Instagram @wallice and Twitter @wallicew!
