Alice Phoebe Lou
Photo by: Caroline Bertolini
Alice Phoebe Lou
August 2nd | Field Stage
August 2nd | Field Stage
Alice Phoebe Lou started playing music as a busker after moving from South Africa to Berlin and falling in love with a lifestyle that was so self-determined. At first, it was just a way to earn enough money to pay rent but it quickly evolved into something more. Busking, she explains, “is hard and fucking humiliating. People will shout at you, men will harass you, competition for a spot to perform can be vicious... But then you have those shining moments where you genuinely move somebody. I knew that if I worked on my music, it could be something beautiful.”
Debut album ‘Orbit’ (2016) saw Alice piece together the possibility of music turning into a proper career while ‘Paper Castles’ (2019) cemented her as a talented, exciting musician. With a busker’s mentality about needing to win people over immediately, Alice only gave herself permission to write without the fear of judgement on ‘Glow’ (2021). By contrast, ‘Shelter’ (2023) is a celebration that sees her going through a second coming of age. After living in Berlin for the past ten years, she unexpectedly found herself without a place to call home and had begun writing and trying to make peace with the traumas instead of simply eviscerating them. “It was very isolating, lonely and weird,” she explains but ultimately ‘Shelter’ is about “coming to that place within yourself and intentionally deciding that wherever you are, that is home and that is enough.”
