On October 18, Isabel Dumaa will triumphantly release her debut EP Just My Nature. The title, borrowed from a yet to be released track, isn’t a resignation, but rather a declaration of acceptance.
Dumaa has wanted to be a singer since she could talk. As a child, she would subject her family to living room concerts, and as she entered her teens, she became a regular in the San Francisco circuit. Determined to pursue music as a career, Dumaa, armed with a journal full of vulnerable confessions, promptly took off for LA after graduation. However, despite this lifelong dream, and success, the rising artist couldn’t escape imposter syndrome, as detailed in her 2021 debut “Call My Bluff.”
The heartfelt track was the beginning of a two year journey to reconcile those feelings and uncover the confidence to embrace herself.
We spoke with Dumaa ahead of the release to chat about the album, which features previous releases “Quarter Life Crisis,” “C’est La Vie,” and “Enough for You,” self-acceptance, and more.
Excerpt from the podcast:
What inspired your new single “Enough for You”?
Just a relationship that I was going through at the time. Honestly, the lyrics are quite literally pretty literal. Like he had told me that he liked my friend’s perfume, so I was like, ‘Oh, okay. He likes that perfume.’ So I bought it and didn’t get a text on my birthday. And so honestly it was just a very like, let’s write exactly what I’m feeling and what I’m thinking. And that’s kind of how the song came to be.
Especially since this is the one that you’ve written fully yourself, it must’ve been really interesting to put pretty much all of yourself into it.
Seriously. I mean, and I think that’s what makes it at least personally feel a little bit more special, just getting to throw my whole heart and soul into the lyrics and into the song, and then having that be the song.
How did the title of your upcoming EP “Just My Nature” come about?
One of the songs, which will be on the EP has the line, “just my nature.” It’s another one that’s just very personal. It was one that I’d been wanting to write for a while, and the line just my nature was something that I’d been playing with for a while and wanting to kind of work into a song. And then this song – we put it in the chorus and it just, I was perfect. This is exactly where this line was supposed to lie.
Yeah, so it was kind of this line that I’d been sitting on for a while. And then when we were playing with title ideas for the EP and the first one that came to mind was, ‘What about just my nature?’ And I kind of sat on that for a while and I didn’t really tell my team about it for a while ‘cause I was like, I want to make sure that I know that this is it. But looking back now, I knew the second that I wrote that line, I knew that that had to be the title of the EP. I feel like it relates to C’est La Vie in the same way, just like these are the qualities of myself and it’s just my nature. It’s who I am. It’s how I act. It’s who I will be.
For more from our interview with Isabel Dumaa, listen to ECHO – The Podcast.
Featured Photo Credit: Alissa Wyle