Willow wanted her song “Run!” to evoke the feeling of a panic attack — like the one she nearly had when she was stressing out over a confrontation during a relationship. On her past two albums, Lately I Feel Everything (2021) and Coping Mechanism (2022), she wielded this type of angst through brash rock and pop punk. Now, on her upcoming album Empathogen, Willow is pairing funk influences with distorted instruments to create a sense of paranoia. On “Run!,” she pushes this sound to an extreme, as she asks herself a question: Will you stay and fight, or run and hide?
“There’s a relief, but you feel the sadness. You feel me going, ‘I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I’m not brave enough to face this head-on,’” she says. “The vocals are giving this ethereal beauty that would feel like a relief if it wasn’t this deep sadness of me being like, ‘I’m not strong enough to meet this uncomfortability head-on. I’m not strong enough to see this through and really do the self-work that I need to do in order to see this person as a human being and not just the metaphor of a threat to all of my insecurities.’”
On the latest episode of Rolling Stone‘s The Breakdown, the singer and songwriter explains how the funk-inspired record emerged in a similar way, pouring out of her after a moment of self-reflection. Willow wields her voice as a percussive tool across the weighted song, crafting a sonic atmosphere that reflects her own indecision when faced with the question: will you stay and fight, or run and hide?
Letting It Out
Lyrically, “Run!” captures Willow in a conflicted emotional state. She remembers the song pouring out of her in one day as she processed the tension between staying or leaving someone. “I’m trying so hard to be in the moment and see their sincerity and not let my toxic mental pattern paint them as this person who’s trying to attack me or judge me,” she recalls. In the end, she chooses to leave, a feeling she calls “beautiful,” but admits, “There’s almost a sadness to it because it’s like I wasn’t strong enough to stay in the moment and see this person for who they really were, and I just ran from the situation.”
Cutting the Vocals
“Run!” is one of the standout performances on Empathogen. “I hadn’t really sang like this,” Willow says of her gritty vocals. “I kind of wanted to stay away from that more rock-leaning sound because I really wanted to strip everything back and just bare my voice in its raw form.” The less-polished vocal texture communicates where the singer stood emotionally: “I really wanted it to feel anxious.”
Guitar Hero
St. Vincent was one particularly strong influence here — Willow credits the musician as “an inspiration for everything that I do.” She was drawn to the ways St. Vincent uses guitar “not tonally but as a feeling.” Willow was initially reluctant to use electric guitars on the record, but ultimately, she decided it would be incomplete without them. “It just needs to sound messed up,” she recalls telling her guitarist Chris Greatti. “It needs to be like you’re wrenching your heartstrings. That anxiety needs to be there.”
Putting It Together
Willow built the foundation of “Run!” with drums and bass. It was a departure from her usual process, which often starts with vocals or guitar. “I needed to start with those two things first because they needed to interplay with each other and have that conversation,” she explains. From there, the sonic and thematic narrative unfolded. “With all the vocals coming in and out — even the texture of the drums changes a little bit — it gets more like, ‘Now, I’m not angry anymore. I’m just scared and needing to get away from this,’” she says.
Visual Thinking
Willow has already been contemplating video ideas. “I think that the real feeling behind the title is an emotional and a mental escape,” she says. “If I ever make a video for it, I’m definitely going to be running in some regard physically, but [with] that being a metaphor for the escaping that I’m trying to do inside.” She wants listeners to connect with the song’s message: “I hope people feel there’s beauty in our human desire to want to escape our vulnerability and escape our fears.”
A New Era
“Run!” is just one song on Empathogen that helped Willow break away from past habits. “With this album, I feel like I took a bat and just was like, ‘No, no, no!’ to all of these old ways of conducting myself as an artist and as a musician,” she says. “Coping Mechanism was definitely a step towards that. But this was really like, ‘OK, now the foot is all the way in this new place.’ That makes me really excited.”
