Aislin Evans

“If only I had an enemy bigger than my apathy, I could’ve won” - Mumford & Sons

Sometimes you meet someone that’s so right for you that your mind can’t process it, and the warnings flash because It Can’t Be Possible and you don’t know what you’re feeling so you label it as repulsion and brand them an enemy and try to move on. But you can’t.

In music, Aislin found her greatest enemy.

It stalked her from childhood, arriving in 1999 when the tiny child first took up piano lessons. It didn't last long. It reappeared in 2005 when her mother and father brought down a dusty flute and an old clarinet from the loft and offered them ceremoniously to Aislin and her sister as they stood wide-eyed in the front room. She took the flute.

It followed her when she hid away studying in a Suffolk boarding school, and when she tried to push it away it wouldn't loosen its grip. Her apathy was strong but the music was stronger. They tumbled and battled and fell in and out of love, and pulled each other's hair and kicked and screamed but in the end, she always came crawling back. It's the vitriolic lovers that create the brightest sparks.

"I hated it, but it wouldn't go away", says Ais. "Nothing in my life was constant except music, and when everything else was gone it was still there, waiting. So I took a deep breath and I gave it a chance. But I don't think I'll ever fully trust it."

"At the start, when I was a teenager, I was a flautist and a pianist and a singer and people who didn't know my name knew I was that girl who played music, and I was so bitter that this abstract concept was consuming my identity and I felt strangled beneath the weight of it all and I tried to rebel against it but once people have an image of you in their heads, it's almost impossible to change. I guess when I started writing my own music, it was almost an act of defiance, like a reclamation of my identity, because if I was going to be the girl who played music, I wanted it to be on my own terms."

That result of this reclamation has been described as strong and delicate, flawless and emotional, and Aislin herself has been labeled angelic, an "unstoppable, special little thing". She sees the music as a natural extension of her own tangled mind.

"When I first started writing songs, I knew I had a lot of feelings but I didn't know how to express them and I was teaching myself guitar as I went along, so I was exploring these simple accompaniments and pouring out fountains of metaphor and even I didn't know what I was trying to say - I just knew that in some small way it helped me figure things out, and that people were responding to it. If I can write strange emotion-infused poetry and someone else can find their own spark of meaning in that, then that's what I want to do always."

In the small space she has carved out in her life away from music, Ais is an introverted, idealistic, deeply sensitive creature, prone to standing on the edge and observing everything from a distance, and profoundly affected by the wrongdoings of the world. She is a vegan feminist romantic, unfalteringly nurturing and enchanted by stories and dreams and what-ifs and maybes.

"I like to imagine that I'm like Hermione Granger, except with fewer house-elves and more cats, and less magic and more singing. I've always identified with Hermione as a strong, smart female and I find so much inspiration in women fulfilling their potential and shining. Musically, I look to the likes of Marina Diamandis, Florence Welch, Laura Marling, Lorde, Beyonce, Nicki Minaj and Taylor Swift and see these uninhibited empowering forces and I want to do what they're doing."

Kate Bush, The Cranberries, Paolo Nutini, Mumford & Sons, Fleetwood Mac, Lana Del Ray, Bastille, Daughter, Sia, The Staves, Gabrielle Aplin and Paramore have all also influenced her musical tastes.

"But really I just want to be an ethereal musical fairy, in whichever way that manifests."