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Sienna Spiro was something of an established artist even before her debut full-length album, “Visitor,” came out on July 3. The 20-year-old Londoner with the big ’60s hair and an even bigger, more timeless voice is officially
a freshman — she will almost certainly be up for a best new artist Grammy in a few months — but she’s also already a role model.
Not that this has occurred to her yet. “Really?” she says when I point out this dichotomy over a Zoom call shortly after the record’s release, a little bit surprised that anyone could consider her an influential or entrenched figure in pop music just yet.
So here’s the case for her already being a star, and a true influencer: The new LP was preceded by a series of star-making singles, like the glorious ballad “Die on This Hill,” which went Top 20 in America and Top 10 in her native U.K. That led to a series of media-galvanizing shows, like a U.S. headlining debut in L.A. at the Troubadour in March that had me raving about her in Variety as “the world’s next great pop vocal superhero.” A tour of bigger North American theaters set for this October sold out immediately, with her album not yet released, as skyrocketing resale prices suggested that the amphitheater circuit would have been within reach for her.
But perhaps the most telling sign of her impact is how many of the young women participating in competitive TV singing shows have decided that covering her original songs is the best way to make an impression in an audition. On a spring episode of “American Idol,” for instance, a standout candidate tried out by covering Spiro’s “Maybe.” That was followed by Luke Bryan saying the judges had already heard other “Idol” contestants try out with Spiro’s song — and maybe were already weary of it — but at last they’d found an aspirant who could nail it.
Spiro brightens on the rainy stoop where she’s sitting, delighted to hear that in the world of “Idol,” her nascent singles are already considered standards. “Whenever I hear of someone doing that,” she says, “it’s so crazy to me because when I was younger, me and my little sister would do ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ in my mom’s bedroom, pretending to audition.” She has been able to pass go and skip having a reality-show step in her career, but she’s tickled to be covered by even more youthful singers who’ve come to consider her the gold standard. Spiro may only be 20, but she’s probably just a step or two away from acolytes calling her “Mother.”
Speaking of finding hills to die on, I’m ready to collapse on a mound proclaiming that Spiro’s is a voice for the ages, or at least one that I expect to be hearing for decades to come. It doesn’t hurt that she’s inculcated in the classics and is unafraid to follow in some very big footsteps. She’s most often compared to Adele, who laid the groundwork for husky belts like hers to succeed. But conversation about her favorite albums is bound to lead to Spiro sharing her adoration for Frank Sinatra’s lonesome 1955 classic “In the Wee Small Hours.” “You know, one of the reasons I signed to Capitol was because I wanted their logo on my vinyl to match Frank’s,” she confesses.
Chalk it up in part to a dad who grew up in the ’60s and implanted that era in her soul, although only fairly recently has she added a visual complement to her throwback musical loves by adopting a bouffant and a minidress, styling herself like she was straight out of Swinging London, if not singlehandedly reviving the Ronettes.
When Spiro recently did a how-to video for Vogue before a concert (yes, she does her own makeup), she cited Twiggy as an influence as she went through the steps to putting her cat-eye liner in place. “You’re drawn to what you’re drawn to, but I love the ’60s,” she says. “I just loved all her magazine covers, and the way her eyes look was so fascinating to me. When I was figuring out my identity growing up, I loved her, so I wanted to try it.”
If you’ve seen the video Spiro put up as a blond lass just starting out at 16, sending her cover of a Finneas number into the world like a message in a bottle, she’s unrecognizable. “I grew up really insecure, and much bigger in weight to all of my peers and family, so I’ve always had issues with the way I dress. But my dad always showed me the music and the films of women like Barbra Streisand and Ava Gardner. When I started releasing music, I still didn’t want anyone to see my body, so I would wear huge clothes so that no one would get to make any comments. Then you grow into yourself more. I tried the hair for the first time, and it made me feel like such an elevated version of myself.”
Her songs match the promise of her voice, but there’s very little that’s retro about them, at least lyrically; they’re mostly too stripped down and confessional to suggest any era but that of a contemporary young woman who’s writing very frankly. “I have no filter, which is a good thing and a bad thing. But I have no choice but to write honestly, and no choice other than to show up as myself,” she says. “I’m just a 20-year-old, and sometimes I wake up and I’m on my period and I have to go and perform onstage. And sometimes having hair that’s different from my everyday hair, or when I put my boots on, allows me to kind of step into something and have a level of confidence and separation from the way I felt writing those songs.” But she certainly doesn’t step into them every day: Without the big hair, she goes unrecognized on the stoop for the length of our video call. And, she points out, “I’d never wear heels in everyday life.”
Famously, at this point, she has vocal nodules that are responsible for the quality of her voice. “I was really husky growing up,” Spiro says. “I only officially found out [about the nodules] two years ago. But I’ve always had a super raspy voice. I do feel like I’ve probably always had them, or from a young age at least.” Half the world’s young female singers would probably pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for those nodules, I note, and she laughs. “You definitely wouldn’t. A nightmare! They’re such a blessing and a curse. I love the texture they give my voice, and sometimes they stop your voice from doing something, which I actually think sounds good. But I was nearly mute for a year — like, I barely spoke the year before last. It was really tricky. Very isolating.” And ultimately very empowering, when she came back out of it in full strength, sounding 20-going-on-40, a one-woman tonic for anyone who’s had their share of wispy voices in pop.
She credits her primary producer, Omer Fedi, for helping teach her the vocal quality she cherishes most: “Intentionality.” Before Fedi put her back on the right track in the early making of “Visitor,” she went through a phase of trying too hard in the studio before comprehending that, while we love artists who overshare, we don’t necessarily love the ones who over-sing.
“I didn’t grow up thinking I was a singer, ever. My dad always was like, ‘Oh, you sound shit,’ and I was like, ‘OK, great — so I’ve got to be a really good songwriter if I wanna do this as a job.’ But then I started doing sessions, and people started being very complimentary of my voice, so then I fed off that validation, and so I would do the most. Every riff, every run, every moment to belt, I would take it. But the way Sinatra sings is like a painter.”
The lead vocal she most aspires to live up to, though, is Roberta Flack’s 1971 cover of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow.” “The way she approaches each line is with so much care. When I listen to it, I just feel like melting. You’d think a favorite vocal performance would be something like Whitney Houston, which obviously is up there for me. But that is a dream of mine, to be able to sing like [Flack]. Sometimes holding back and being quiet is the most powerful thing you can do.” As far as most fans are concerned, Spiro’s already mastered the art of creating meltdowns: Every time she sings, there are happy puddles where listeners once stood.
“Visitor” isn’t quite a concept album, but the title stems from her coming back around again and again to the theme of “impermanence,” and how disturbing that can be until you find a way to embrace it. It’s not unusual, among her peer group, to focus on relationships inevitably ending, but Spiro goes on from that to address the way all things — and mortality itself — must pass, which can be a little heady to be hearing from a 20-year-old.
“Sorry, it’s raining now,” she notes, explaining why she might be feeling “super existential,” though it’s clearly her natural way of being. “I’m neurodivergent, and I think that’s a really big part of the hyper-fixating and overanalyzing. If I feel something, I will sit there for hours, days, weeks and years trying to understand why it is I feel that way. It took nine tries for me to write [the song] ‘The Visitor,’ because it was years of ‘Why do I feel like this? What causes it?’
“My grandma feels these feelings, and you can feel it when you’re 10 years old in a playground, feeling like you’re not getting chosen. You feel it when you’re in your early 20s and going through your first heartbreak, or seeing how your old friends aren’t really your friends anymore. Or finding your identity while knowing how fragile your existence is. My grandpa died, and you have people leave your life in that way. We are all visitors in life in some way, shape or form. And this whole album is me grappling with coming to terms with that.”
Somehow out of these feelings about life being transitory, Spiro finds a momentary fix in focusing on physical media. For example, the song she recorded for the “Devil Wears Prada 2” soundtrack, “Material Lover,” specifically came out of reflecting on the film’s storyline and how it addresses the threat of print publications going away. “I really related to the idea of magazines ceasing getting printed as everything becomes digital with social media. I’m 20 years old, and that’s very much apparent in my generation, and I hate it. I especially hate how it translates across to music. I really believe in having tangible, real, physical things everywhere in life, but music is the thing I’m the closest to.” She did a photo shoot picturing herself amid the colored vinyl variants for the new album. “I love these old hi-fi and analog adverts, and I set up that whole shoot inspired by it. Holding your music in physical form is just a really crazy feeling. Music comes out of nowhere — it comes out of your head — and you’re like, ‘I don’t even know how this even came to be.’ But then when you get to hold it in a physical format, it makes it feel real.”
Spiro will be the guest performer at Variety‘s annual Power of Young Hollywood event, where she will join a lineup of honorees who are mostly also in their early 20s to sing “Pure,” a bubbling-under track from the new album. She will undoubtedly be able to compare notes with some of her contemporaries at that event. Spiro acknowledges it can be difficult navigating life as an old soul who not so long ago was being made to feel like a child prodigy; after teenaged years of being told she was great for her age, now she has to go for just being great. Which, as “Visitor” proves, is hardly a formidable task. But finding the sweet spot where she can embrace her youth while looking toward a kind of agelessness can be a challenge.
“Being 20 is just tricky, period,” she laughs. “Everyone struggles. But in the industry, for some reason, it’s really been great to be super young. But you’re put in these really trying situations where you have to be mature and make decisions about your life and do sessions with people that are twice your age. And so it’s a really weird balance of ‘Oh, I’m super young’ yet needing to be mature to make good decisions… while also making sure I’m still being youthful and having life experience so I can continue to write songs and grow as a human… while also making sure I’m not damaging anything for my life being in these situations. There’s a balance you have to figure out — which I’ve definitely not figured out! So that’s my experience with my age.”
Dichotomies suit Spiro. File her under “New Arrivals,” but know that, by any intuitive standard, she’s already a fixture.
