Following on from her album From Girl To Men in 2021, Bee Asha’s soul-tinged new song ‘Faking It’, which features Nathaniel Cartier, continues her exploration of the thornier side of relationships, eloquently capturing the inner battle between our need for companionship and the desire for freedom, 

As part of our exclusive premiere of Bee Asha’s video for ‘Faking It’, we asked her about the song, her second album and her plans for 2023. 

What’s the premise behind the video?

It’s based on Ernest Christophe’s statue Le Masque, which shows a distraught-looking woman holding a mask in front of herself. The mask is really beautiful, and that beauty’s what you see when you first look at the statue. But when you look at it from the side, you see that she's pulling away from that experience of beauty. 

So often we keep ourselves in relationships solely for companionship, and the relationship just feels unreal. There's a part of you that's like, this isn't my true self, this person doesn't really know me. I did that for a long time, and I'm hoping that the video and the song will help a lot of people realise that maybe they're in relationships that are just for companionship, and that it's not actually positive for your mental health to be pretending all the time.

A lot of your first album felt like an act of therapy. Is the same true of ‘Faking It’?

For sure, my music is always very cathartic. It’s also a way to open up and connect, let other people feel or recognise things within themselves. It's kind of like a social activism. At the same time, it's just a way for me to express things. I don't need to go to therapy because I have my music.

^{Behind the scenes of 'Faking It'} 

Is this single building towards a new album?

Yes, I've started my second album. I'm in the studio every week recording little bits of it whenever I can get in there. The new album is going to be called Gitika, which means 'small song' in Punjabi. So it's kind of like a siren song. We're going to be doing a whole project around it with the album, three music videos and a live gig night of BPoC folk and local creatives called The Gitika Project.

Every song on the album is a reflection on the mixed experience. Not just the mixed-race experience, but also growing up in the city and in the country, and growing up with and without money. And it’s about the connection to community that you find within those different places. So the connection to my female community, or my queer community, or my POC community. All these things can come together and create a really positive part of your life, but they also bring their own challenges.

Listen to ‘Faking It’ on all major streaming platforms now.