New York Newcomer Simone Releases Kiss-Off Pop Song "Kissing Strangers"
Born and raised in New York City, Simone first fell in love with Broadway as a youngster. By the age of ten, she had appeared in a slew of musicals, and by the time she hit middle school, she was writing her own songs and performing regularly at New York open mic nights. It was at one of those early performances that Simone had caught the attention of a New York-based producer, and she soon found herself recording in a proper studio and making waves across Spotify and social media.
Photo Credit: Camilla French
Needless to say that from an early age, Simone has set her vision on sharing her love for music. With a mix of mesmerizing performance clips and down-to-earth, straight-to-camera videos documenting daily life, she quickly went viral on TikTok (215k followers), racking up millions of likes from fans around the world who could relate to both her unabashed ambition and dry, self-deprecating sense of humor.
Now, at 16, she’s ready to release her pure pop Love Lessons EP this summer, kicking it off with the release of her first alt-pop track “Kissing Strangers”. The arrangements on “Kissing Strangers” are sonically rich to match, mixing radio-ready pop hooks with indie rock grit and singer/songwriter intimacy.
Simone shares that her new single is inspired by an on-again-off-again relationship featured on one of her all-time favorite shows, “New Girl”, and was written from the guy’s point of view, who initiated one of their splits.
“The song is about messing up something that you wanted so bad, regretting it every second, and doing anything to get this person back. So you go out and try to make them jealous by kissing random people at parties (because somehow that’s gonna make them fall in love with you again, right?).”
Simone writes with a cinematic eye here, capturing the rough edges of modern relationships in vivid detail. The track is a buoyant, brilliant ear worm exploring the rise and fall of young love in all its exhilarating, heartbreaking transience. Her musically diverse songwriting styles from acoustic teary to pop bops will be part of her upcoming EP. Besides writing, she hosts a weekly podcast Is This Thing On?