On the Rise
Pixie McCann

It shifts between a process of both involuntary and voluntary action. ”It's kind of like all the emotional waste coming out," she tells me, laughing. “When I go through periods of time without songwriting, I feel emotionally constipated and really gross. I’ll start thinking, ‘What's going on?’ And then I'm like, ‘Oh, I haven't written any songs’.”

It’s only reasonable that writing songs would become an innate thing for the 20-year-old McCann. Raised in London, she picked up a guitar for the first time at eleven years old, and almost immediately found herself absorbed by the desire to perform. At that age, the most accessible stage was curbside. She got her start by busking, which she describes as “a continuously humbling experience”, while also recognising its fun, unpredictable nature. “It's given me the thickest skin I could ever ask for. I also really enjoy instant gratification, and sharing music comes with that.” 

The gratification that McCann experienced early on, which gave her a regular push to continue working at her craft, can largely be credited to the impassioned and community-oriented nature of Galway’s music scene. While she was wary of stumbling into turf wars, she jokes, as a busker in England, she gleams over the more approachable nature of other musicians within the Irish city where she would visit family. 

“Galway’s got this incredible folk and standard Irish music scene that’s so inspiring,” McCann recalls. “There is a real Galway sound, and I think that I just got sucked into that. My favourite thing in the world is passion, and I find that a lot of people in Galway are really passionate. It was my first introduction to music.”

“The busking scene there is much more friendly than it is in England,” she adds. “It’s a real community. The first time I ever busked in Galway, I was on the street, and another busker came up to invite me to join a Facebook group chat. It really drew me. I think there’s something really human about the music in Galway.”

These were some of the earliest tenets of McCann’s developing musical language. She came away from her time busking with a devotional understanding of music and a desire to create art with the fundamental vulnerability and humanity of folk tradition, without committing too strictly to the genre’s sound. 

McCann had other influences that would compel her to consider her sonic palette and her presence as a performer more broadly. She recalls her dad having a deep love for guitar music and guitars in general, fondly describing him as “one of those guys who spent ten years learning ‘Starway To Heaven’.” Classic rock held a strong presence in her household, with McCann citing artists including Jimi Hendrix, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fleetwood Mac, and Kate Bush as formative figures. 

Fleetwood Mac and Kate Bush, in particular, proved to be inspirational to McCann as a young artist. One of her earliest concerts was Fleetwood Mac at Isle Of Wight Festival in 2015, which she describes as “one of the things that really changed me as a person.”

She saw Bush live at a similar age, and can paint an elaborate picture of the show as though it just happened last night. “She basically said that she was never going to do shows ever again, but she did one where it was this art piece — a dollhouse with separate compartments that would turn and spin, and it was incredible,” she recalls. “That was a mind-blowing experience for me.”

”I love when people think out of the box,” she adds. “I love it when someone puts a lot of effort into things, and you can see it. When you can see that someone clearly gives a lot of shits about what this is. I've always wanted my live stuff to reflect that. I really, really care, and I want everyone there to have a fantastic time. Nonchalance is out. I really care about music, I really care about my fans, and I'm not afraid of doing that.”

For a long time, McCann poured that care into her work alone. She wrote, produced, and managed herself. She would quickly release songs within two or three weeks of finishing them, before she could overthink them or feel inclined to change them. But through her self-sufficiency, she developed a solid grasp on her own vision. "Really early on, loads of people were going, ‘Okay, you need this, and you need to change this, and you need to do this’,” she reflects. "And I kind of just stuck it out for a long time, and it turns out I didn't need to change a lot of things. I've gone into meetings and said I want to do this, and they've been like, ‘I don't get it.’ And then I've done the songs, and they've gone, ‘Oh my god, I get it.’" Rather than finding that misunderstanding unnerving, McCann has learned to trust the gap.

This conviction has never been more tested than during the making of McCann's debut EP, Indigo, Vibrant and New. It’s her first collection of songs, following a string of singles released throughout 2024, and also her first project made alongside a producer. For the EP, McCann enlisted former Athlete vocalist Joel Pott, known for his work with London Grammar, Joy Crookes, George Ezra, and Shura. The collaboration was, by McCann's account, both insightful and terrifying. "I'm such a control freak with my music, and having to share that with someone was a lot," she admits. "But Joel is a literal wizard. He's a true, true artist, which I think is easy not to be at his level, and he's just a really kind man, and he really got it.” Ultimately, this required a growing level of trust on McCann’s part, but Pott was not shy about calling her out and encouraging her to loosen the reins where necessary.

The EP itself was written throughout a short period from April to June of last year. McCann describes the experience of writing them as being possessed, the words simply fell out. "I feel like, with almost all of these songs, I just woke up one day and they were just in my head," she says. "Sometimes I feel like songs just come from the sky and they just appear to you, and you almost just wake up, and they're inside you, which is a gift. I do look back on them, and I'm like, ‘How the hell did I do that?’" She likens the sudden emergence of songs to her experiences of lucid dreaming, and is invested in the idea of tapping into a source of creativity and emotion that exists on a different plane.

But for Indigo, Vibrant and New, McCann was drawing on a deeply personal context that permeated her reality. Her mother was diagnosed with brain cancer, she reveals, and it threw her world into a completely different register. "I was immediately confronted with the concept of mortality in every sense," she explains. "It absolutely threw my entire world for a spin. I was not an atheist but agnostic, kind of leaning toward not believing in anything. It’s so easy to be agnostic when you're not aware of mortality. I developed a lot more empathy for people who are more religious, and I was quite jealous of people who grew up in that kind of space." Organised religion didn't feel like her thing, but she was desperate for some version of the same comfort.

She found it, unexpectedly, on a 5 AM walk home while recording a voice note of birdsong and passing cars, a very specific snippet of early-morning clamour. She later turned it into what would become “Déjà Vu”, the EP's opening track. Listening back to the demo, she had what she can only describe as a spiritual experience. "I had this spiritual experience, and I was like, oh my god, this feels divine, this feels like not human," she says. "And I listened to ‘Everything Is Not on Fire’ by The Howl and the Hum, which is an incredible song, and I thought, ‘This is just proof of there being more’, because this feels so spiritual. It was like humans had created a bit of heaven on earth." 

“I just felt like things were connected," she continues. “And that gave me a lot of comfort to feel like if we're all connected, nothing truly dies.”

As a result, McCann’s experience of meaning-making, looking for signs, and refusing to believe that everything can simply be chalked up to coincidence, runs vividly through Indigo, Vibrant and New. The title itself comes from a lyric in “Déjà Vu”: "you indigo, vibrant and new." She references an Adrienne Lenker line, "I was scared indigo”, explaining, "For me, indigo is kind of that unsure colour. This EP is something that's so vibrant, new, and exciting, but also terrifying. It reflects a period of my life where things were really vibrant and lovely, and also ugly and horrible.”

The songs follow this period carefully, capturing snapshots of uninhibited feeling, fog, and imbalance for McCann. “Rotting” gathers up the intrusive thoughts that follow a night out, a low-grade dread that everybody hates you and the looming sense that you're getting life fundamentally wrong. “Don't Let Anything Go” channels a refusal to move on, while the closing track “The Pit” is suspended in the tense in-between of caring intensely about someone and desperately needing to hold back, as McCann levels, "I used to care" and “are you still there?”

Meanwhile, “Living In Memory” reflects a sense of physical deterioration that McCann could not completely understand at the time. "I had, still have, but had at the time, a crazy iron deficiency, which I didn't really know about," she explains. “It meant that I had the most wicked brain fog ever. I literally felt like I was under a cloud while I was just living. I wrote that song trying to convey that I was literally feeling like I was in a cloud — and that's why I think the demo, and definitely some parts of this track, feel like you're underwater, because I felt like I was underwater. It just had to come out, because it was so debilitating.”

Sitting in that emotional material extensively was one of the hardest parts of the process, McCann reveals. "Before this, I've always produced and written everything solo myself and pretty much put it out there within like a two or three week period," she explains. "I've never had to emotionally sit in something for a while. I’d do this song, and then a month later me and Joel would work on it. And then when you're doing the vocal takes, you want to be back in that headspace. I felt like I was a method actor. So it was really challenging. But also maybe quite healthy. Like, you can't just forget about this, you have to actually live through it again.”