This story originally appeared in i-D’s The Royalty Issue, no. 370, Winter 2022. Order your copy here.
When Raph was ten she wrote a song about her friend getting kidnapped. It was dark – the intensity concerned her parents – but it was perhaps the most important moment in her childhood, and it had come to her entirely unprompted. One day, in the process of packing up her world for a big move across the Atlantic – from Houston, Texas, where she had grown up, back to her birthplace of Paris, France – she had dropped the box she was carrying, suddenly overcome with the need to create. “The melody and lyrics came to me and I rushed to my bedroom and wrote the entire song in 45 minutes,” Raph, now 27 and having just released debut single “Goodbye At The Door”, tells me on a call from her current home in LA. “And that was the start of it all.”
Raised in suburbia by her American father and French mother, Raph adapted to her new life fast, soon becoming a hybrid of the cultures: a musical theatre kid who played sports, rode skateboards, and smoked weed. “I grew up in a suburb, but it was in the city that I found myself,” she says. “It forced me to be independent at a young age. I was competitive and super intense, but when I made music, it was a space where I could be soft with myself – an escape.” After going through a tough time in her late teens, once again Raph sought comfort in music. “The very first time I heard Bon Iver, it was like my heart lit up,” she beams. “I found it so powerful.” Wanting to know more, she dug deep into Justin Vernon’s influences and uncovered the likes of Radiohead, Kate Bush, Portishead, and Phillip Glass. “To me, Phillip Glass is just…” she takes a breath and shakes her head. “I can listen to his orchestral piano all day long and just melt. That’s kind of my world.” But it was writing her own music that proved to be especially healing. “Something clicked and I was like, wait… this is what makes me feel good, so why can’t I do this all the time?”
On graduating high school, Raph moved to New York to pursue her plan. Five years of soul-searching and sessions with some pretty major producers taught her what she didn’t want to do. “I just wasn’t writing the songs that I wanted to; nothing really resonated until I finally hit a moment – and I might have been quite extreme about it – where I just shut everyone off and started making music alone and not showing it to anyone.” She then really started to nurture her talent. A few years on and those early days of self-doubt and finding her place in the industry are long gone. “I had to learn to trust myself basically, and it’s been challenging,” she admits. “But once I was able to, the songs started coming.”
Raph is now living in Los Angeles and has become a more than competent producer, having grown frustrated and taught herself the skills to better articulate herself sonically. “I spent, like, thousands of hours making really weird shit,” she says smiling, “but also really beautiful shit, and slowly but surely I got to where I am today.” Describing herself as “a singer-songwriter through and through”, Raph’s writing process always starts with her sitting at the piano. “But I also love to move and dance and I need energy in my work, so it has a very youthful, coming-of-age feeling too. I’ve learned who I am through experience and I finally have music that I’m ready to share; music that I stand by a million percent.”
“Goodbye At The Door” has serious layers to it. Raph wrote the power ballad’s hopeful melody a year ago, playing with the song for a while before putting it on ice. “Six months went by and I’d experienced death for the first time, so I came back to it with that as a theme.” Penning lyrics moved the mood accordingly: “Goodbye at the door/Your absence hard to ignore/Honey, can’t we just talk?” “It was this feeling of wanting to have one last conversation with someone,” she explains. But then Raph’s world imploded and the lens shifted again. “I came out of a very emotionally codependent relationship,” she tells me, her voice softening. “I didn’t think I could stand on my own two feet and I was scared, so that was the last piece of the song. Even though I’d gone through this death and loss, it’s like I needed to go through it to find my own personal freedom.” The result is understandably packed with emotion. So is Raph’s voice: yearning, mournful, raspy, the song builds and builds into something epic and hopeful and motivational.
In the accompanying video, directed by her friend Dan Pappas, we find her running through the streets of LA into her freedom; dancing in a leather two-piece; losing her shit on a downtown rooftop with Fourth of July fireworks taking over the skyline behind her. “You know, when you go through anything dark in life, there’s always another side. That, to me, is what this song is all about.” Those who have seen Joachim Trier’s Oscar-nominated The Worst Person In The World might understand the affinity Raph felt with the existential Norwegian film while working on this project. “As I was watching it, I felt all the emotions that I did writing this song, and others, inside the movie,” she says. “Sometimes I would even mute it and play my music over it.”
While Raph is hesitant to go into detail about her forthcoming project – whether it will reach us in the form of an album, an EP, or even just a bunch of songs – what is clear is just how important its creation has been to her growth. “This point in my life is about me having my own power. And even though each song is a totally different story, the overarching message is: I can do this, I got this. It’s about surrendering and letting go, because that’s how you’re able to make it through.”
Raph recently learned the extent of the impact her music can have on others. Ushered drunk towards the piano at a house party, she decided to test out a work in progress: a song about being scared to show someone who you are but ultimately surrendering to it. “I’m telling them: I’m not gonna leave you, you can tell me the most fucked up thing because I’m fucked up too! We can do this together!” she says of the lyrics. A friend at the party was struggling with discovering his sexual identity – everybody seemed to have figured it out but him. After Raph played the song, he came up to her and thanked her. “Five minutes later he was making out with some guy in the bathroom, and it was the first time he had ever done that. It really hit me that wow, these songs could make people ask questions and make them feel seen: that’s the power and responsibility you have as an artist.”
Ever the polyglot, Raph is currently translating “Goodbye At The Door” into French, bringing yet another take to the song. “When I sing in French, a different emotion comes out of me,” she explains. “I’ve written in both languages since I was a child.” This brings us back to that first, very raw outpouring of creative expression Raph had at ten years old. “That feeling I had when I was a kid is what I’m constantly chasing,” she says. “As we grow older, things happen and we get a bit jaded or more fearful of everyday emotions. When you’re a kid, you don’t have that, so you’re able to freely express yourself without this voice coming down on you. For me, songwriting is definitely an escape and a source of recharging, but it’s also really emotionally tasking. It’s something that takes everything out of me and I almost have to fight, tooth and nail, to finish my music. It’s like a battle with myself and I’m still learning how to let go… because when I really let go, it comes.”
Clearly determined to win the battle, Raph has ambitious plans to sweep the Grammys, reach number one in the charts, win an Oscar, score a film, and perform on Broadway. “There are so many things that I want to do,” she says, with a mischievous look on her face but in full sincerity. “But I think what I really want is to continue to get braver and braver and braver as I get older. That’s really the key for me: how brave can I get? How much further can I let go in this lifetime? That’s it. That’s the goal.”
Credits
Photographer Jeff Henrikson
Fashion Caroline Newell
Hair Lauren Palmer-Smith using Oribe.
Makeup John McKay at Frank Reps using Charlotte Tilbury.
Set design Spencer Vrooman.
Casting director Samuel Ellis Scheinman for DMCASTING.