On a sharply sunny February morning in Manhattan, Liv.e lights a joint and sings about finding herself. But she’s not reciting lyrics from her introspective new album, Girl in the Half Pearl. She’s offering the words of another contemporary philosopher of feeling: Drake. “Finding a way to stay outta the way,” she lilts. “Holding me back, supposed to come right back.”
Liv.e is a huge Drake fan. She has sent him a DM to thank him for writing “Falling Back,” the song she’s quoting as she walks through New York, though she didn’t anticipate or receive a response. And she suspects he wouldn’t make a great friend anyway: “He’s probably not good at constructive criticism.” Nonetheless, he’s the one pop star that she really loves, largely for his bravado and frankness about his own fallible emotions. When I suggest that he is a little corny, she responds without hesitation. “That’s. Why. It’s. Good. That is the exact reason.” Later, as “Best I Ever Had” plays in the Malaysian restaurant where we’ve just arrived for lunch, she starts dancing and adds, “He just makes you feel so seen. He just gets it too much. Honestly, shut up, bro—you’re not supposed to know that we all think the same thing. That’s so scary.”
Sonically, Girl in the Half Pearl doesn’t have much in common with a radio-ready Drake record. On her twisting, avant-garde R&B tracks, Liv.e’s vocals somersault over cobwebs of glitchy beats, jazz-inflected keys, and cool synths. These songs alternatively feel like the jittery inside of a robot’s brain, a sunny Sunday afternoon spent listening to crackling ’80s vinyl, and a buzzed summertime walk home through the park.
But thematically, it makes sense that she relates to Drake’s self-conscious charisma. On “Falling Back,” Drake insists that he is trying to find himself but does very little to actually do so. That sort of interplay between self-delusion and self-awareness also lends Liv.e’s music its power. As she sings on “Clowns,” she knows that “this shit doesn’t feel good and I won’t admit to it,” so not much changes for her. She submerges us into the deep end of her pain with no plan and no catharsis, just an acute understanding that she shouldn’t be feeling this way.
In person, Liv.e is initially reserved but quickly becomes goofy and vibrant. She is in town to attend fashion week events, and her outfit reflects it: bleached eyebrows, a knit brown beanie, a pair of pearl earrings and a pair of gold hoops, a fluffy tiger-print jacket, and a floor-length striped red skirt. As we talk, she fills in any lulls in conversation with singing. Though much of her album comes from a place of emotional distress, she speaks joyfully about her work. She says one of the best things men offer us in life on a small scale is “a good laugh.” When I ask her who her musical peers are, she tells me that she is peerless.
Liv.e, whose real name is Olivia Williams, grew up in Dallas, then studied architecture and object design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After college, she bounced between cities for a while before settling in Los Angeles, where she has lived for the last five years. She comes from a musical family: Her dad played blues and gospel music, and her brother is a drummer. After some initial hesitation to follow in their footsteps, she released her first EP, F.R.A.N.K., in 2017. The following year, her breakout project, Hoopdreams, caught the attention of fellow Dallas native Erykah Badu, who later described her work as “an extension of what I am creating,” and Earl Sweatshirt, who featured her on the song “MTOMB.”
Girl in the Half Pearl, her second full-length album after 2020’s Couldn’t Wait to Tell You, came about as a way to cope with an all-consuming relationship that left her in a “state of cognitive dissonance and big delusion”—or “big delush,” as she frequently puts it. She was “avoiding friends, avoiding myself, avoiding spending time alone,” and struggling to alleviate the pain. In her diary, she begged herself to get out of the relationship, but she adds that she was also “making my own story to believe in order to not see how fucked up whatever was going on was.” She decided, over the course of a year, to write the 17 songs that make up Girl in the Half Pearl as a way to “exorcize that shit out of my ass.” The album really does sound like an exorcism: chaotic and stormy, throwing sparks of ecstasy (“I love you,” she repeats, frantically, on “Six Weeks”) next to whirls of despair (“When I looked inside myself/I found there was no one to help,” she sings on the album’s opening lines).
The bridge between what you delude yourself into believing and what you know to be true is a painful one to cross, and one that most women have avoided at some point in their lives. It’s easier, in the short run, to indulge in fantasy—he didn’t mean it, everyone there respects you, no one could ever intentionally harm you—than to work toward accepting the reality of an unfair and violent world, one in which systems will fail you, recognition will be an uphill battle, men you love will exalt your spirit one minute and then try to squash it the next. It’s harder still, once you’ve observed these truths, to continue the work of building yourself up, to hold the reality of external factors you can’t control and the truth about your own worth together at once. Girl in the Half Pearl is less a roadmap to a place of healing than a document of the confusion you feel while coping with these dueling impulses.
Liv.e is able to clearly relay such conflicting emotions because she is keenly observant about herself and about the world around her; she experiences her life and also witnesses herself in the third person throughout the process. When we look for a table at the restaurant, she asks that we sit facing the street so we can people-watch, one of her favorite activities. She goes on to point out a man with a great Nautica jacket and an impressive walk, a woman’s enviable white bob, a Kangol hat on someone who would “be a really good trumpet player,” and a man’s pose in the doorway across the street. Finally, towards the end of the conversation, she turns to me and says, “I’m curious as to what they’re looking at when they see us as they walk by. We must have nice shit on right now.”
Liv.e: Everybody’s games are really fucked up. I feel like we focus too much on trying to catch something and keep it locked up, you feel me? Once you have something in your grasp like that, it’s gonna leave because you’re holding that shit too tight. Or it’s going to die.
Sometimes you just gotta let it do what it do. I feel like I have always been in relationships because I needed to prove to myself that I can be desirable. But now I don’t need to prove that to myself. In retrospect, I like being alone, I love being able to be a little fucking fairy bouncing around everywhere like, “Hey! She wants me… he wants me… they want me… and I don’t want anything.” That’s a good feeling, I can’t lie.
I was talking about getting back to feeling myself. I wanted to feel that again, but we all know the goal is never to go back, it’s to go forward. Home is wherever you feel most comfortable within yourself.
I didn’t have anybody to talk talk to, so I wrote this album. I had to get this shit out of me. That’s why I’m so glad the album is out, because I feel like an open wound that’s hitting the wind. It feels nasty, but it feels kinda like, “Ahhhh.”
Every version of myself. I just be like, “This is what I want to hear right now, nobody is doing this the way I need it to be done, let me do this shit.” It just so happens that many people end up relating, so I’m grateful for that.
It means being more accepting of my reality. Being more accepting of my power. I want to feel more comfortable being who I am and being outward about that and not feeling like I have to dim myself around people. Ignoring that part of myself took a lot out of me. I’m about to be loud now.
I’m not where anybody else is at right now. I’m the kid at high school sitting at the lunch table by themselves, and you really want to fuck with this person, but you’re too scared to go over there. Anything that helps you peer into their personhood, you’re on it. That’s where I am. I love that bitch at the table being all quiet and spooky.
I was more naive while working on Couldn’t Wait to Tell You. I was very pure, ain’t been fucked up too bad yet, on some young shit. Now I feel like, “Let me be the vessel of experience for those of you who don’t need to experience this shit. I got it out the way for us. Don’t repeat the same thing that I did. And if you do, at least you can listen to this album and relate.”
Don’t let people suck the life force out of you. Take care of yourself. Don’t let people take advantage of you. But some people need to experience things to know. I’m one of those people. Anybody could tell me 90 million times not to do some shit but I’m like, “I gotta fuck around and find out.” It’s one of those things where, just because you read a book doesn’t mean you learn the information.
I’m glad I got that out the way early, because I feel like these are about to be my good years. That might also be delusional. But what is manifestation without delusion? I ain’t been able to do shit without delusion. I love delusion.
