As she was driving around the city, Daigle started to listen to old voice memos to prepare for the retreat. “I have thousands and thousands of voice memos on my phone, thousands, from like back in 2010,” she said. “I don’t know, like years and years and years of voice memos, and I haven’t done anything with the majority of them.” She decided to start at the very first one and see what she had recorded.
Daigle noted that she started recording these voice memos prior to releasing “Look Up Child” in September 2018. That album, which contains the six-time platinum single “You Say,” marked a turning point in Daigle’s mainstream success. It is Daigle’s most successful to date and was certified two-times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
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“For the sake of the story, I’m telling you this: That record was my most successful record, right?” said Daigle. “That’s when ‘You Say’ came out. That’s when everything changed for me.”
“This was the season right before that, that I was listening” to the voice memos, Daigle explained. “So it was an unfiltered voice. It was an untouched voice. It was a voice that hadn’t seen, hadn’t known what was coming.”
“And then I listened to voice memos that are now, and there’s a different sort of structure,” she said. “The freedom of my melodies are completely different. I could hear so much more freedom in my voice previous to the ‘Look Up Child’ era, if you will.” It was then that she pulled the car over and began to ask God what had happened.
“I feel like this is what that labeling does,” said Daigle. “The labeling, the pigeonhole aspect of labeling eventually can take your voice.”
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“My prayer is, ‘God, in the midst of it happening, help me stay true to who you have made me to be,’” Daigle told Cavins. “‘Help me not to allow anything exterior to inhibit the creativity that you’re pouring in me, that you want to pour through me because there’s other lives at hand.’”
“And so,” she said, “I think labeling, it can be pretty debilitating, especially when it comes to creativity.”
