“You’re on your own this time again”: How Molly Payton found inspiration in her independence
“You’re on your own this time again,” Molly Payton’s debut album, YOYOTTA, is an acronym for that—the lyric that both started and summed it all up.
When an album is born out of hardship, it’s typically referred to as brave. It’s easy to gloss over the context. It’s to roll out a shiny, neat story where the struggle that inspired the songs becomes nothing more than artistic fuel. It is as if struggle suddenly becomes a good thing for which an artist should be thankful. Hindsight certainly helps with that; by the time the music is written, recorded and released, the artist usually has a bit of distance from it and perspective on whatever emotions powered the work. For Molly Payton, as we chatted, she’d had even longer; YOYOTTA was released in August 2024, and we caught up in February 2025. But still, the circumstances that birthed the album have a kick.
“At the time, I would describe it as very scary,” Payton said of the moment she started on her project. “I’d been dropped, and I thought that my career was over, and it was the most scary, scary time of my life,” she explained, having the experience that so many young and talented artists face: being dropped by the label they believed would set their career up for life. There was more to this time. “I was also going through a lot of personal upheaval. I’d just moved back to New Zealand for a year and felt like the world was burning down a little bit,” she explained.
It’s important not to lean into the tortured artist myth. Pain is not a necessary part of creativity, and suffering is not an essential ingredient of art. However, there is undeniably a side to which struggle can be a vital redirection, as humans so often emerge from a period of intense personal hardship and realise, actually, they kind of needed that.
In the wake of Payton’s own, as her life went up in flames, she retreated to comfort and found herself exactly where she needed to be: home. “It’s very music for music’s sake is how I would describe it,” she said of the scene. Having just left the world of intense industry and being booted by the suits, the casual passion of her hometown scene was reigniting as the exact opposite of what she’d just fled.
“All the bands kind of just make what they love with no intention of getting big or getting famous or like making it their career, which is kind of how it seems here sometimes. I think what comes out of that is just really incredible and interesting new music.” And so, surrounded by that, Payton started making her own.
But the story of YOYOTTA intersects with another person’s life somewhat collapsing, too. “My friend, Oscar Lang, who’s an incredible musician in his own right, was going through a breakup at the time, and he decided he wanted to get out of the UK. So he came to visit me for a month while I was going through all of that,” she explained. Once again, pain is not a requirement for great art, but here they were—two collaborators, two friends, both reeling, both keen for escape, both harnessing the natural inspiration that comes with intense emotions, and both needing to find some kind of new focus.
Both of them needed to hear it, but it was Lang that said it. “He was the one that was kind of like, ‘We should just make something just because it’s fun to do, and you should be reminded of that.’” For Payton, like so many others who are dropped, the experience made her feel closer to a failure. But as a sidebar to that, it was a deeply stifling experience. Having previously been within the system of writing with a purpose and an end, suddenly being out of that can make a person feel like they don’t know how to do it anymore or as if they don’t have permission to.
What Lang vocalised was that Payton needed to kick that door down. Not only was she allowed to make music purely because it’s fun, and she’s good at it, but she was now free to write absolutely whatever she wanted. “I ended up making this really fun record just for me, and I think it showed me how I wanted to make music going forward, and it’s really set me up in a good way,” she said as she followed Lang’s suggestion and YOYOTTA came together.
“You’re on your own this time again.” That’s when this lyric came back. First written years back about a different moment of personal upheaval, Payton refound an old unfinished track and saw that it perfectly summarised this new moment as both a sentiment of her fear and also an emboldening statement on her new artistic independence. It was also a song that came back as a result of this new freedom she’d been granted.
“My favourite thing that I learned from making the album, actually, was that you should revisit ideas and keep working on things and keep trying them again and again because that song I kind of had abandoned and thought was shit,” she explained. Now, with no external voices to pass judgment on what they thought had value or what didn’t, what might “perform“ or “sell“ or what wouldn’t, Payton was free to figure that out for herself. “I’ve picked them up, with a couple more years behind me and a bit more experience, I’ve turned them into my favourite songs ever,” she said, adding, “it was a good lesson for me.”
That titular lyric is now not even just the start and summary of it all; it’s also the thing she celebrates most. Now, since a fair bit of time has passed since its release, Payton reflects on her ability to do it alone as her main pride in the record. When I asked her what about the album makes her happiest, she simply said, “Just that I enjoyed it and did it for myself.”
Though initially born from a moment of terror when she thought her career was over, YOYOTTA now stands as proof that her career will endure as she added, “I think the fact that I made it happen and did the album alone makes me so happy and makes me feel so confident that I can keep making music now for the rest of my life, even if I’m not signed and even if I’m not in a good place in my life.” It was a truly invaluable lesson as she concurred, “That’s the best thing any musician or artist can have.”
