walking upstream…
beabadoobee
photo: david lee · cc by 2.0 ↗beabadoobee
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Bea Kristi was born in Iloilo City, Philippines, and moved to London at three, spending her teenage years as the only Filipino student at an all-girls Catholic school – "very uncomfortable with who I was," she has said. At seventeen, worried his daughter was depressed, her father bought her a secondhand guitar; the song she wrote on it days later, "Coffee," was only meant for friends before it drew hundreds of thousands of views. Raised on her mother's love of jangly 90s British alt-rock, mostly heard from the car stereo, she built a catalogue of hushed bedroom confessionals before Fake It Flowers and Beatopia widened the sound into full-band nostalgia. Her music keeps returning to one instinct: turn whatever she's obsessing over into a diary entry set to a melody.
the sound in question
2022
the perfect pairbeabadoobee
walk the tributaries ↓
Pavement1990s · slacker rock / indie rock / lo-fi
When Bea talks about her run of 90s guitar heroes, one name outranks the rest: "I wanna sing like Stephen Malkmus for fuck's sake! I literally want to be Kim Gordon!" she told NME, crediting the Pavement frontman with shaping "the way I dress, how I speak, act and just everything I am." The devotion became a single: a self-love anthem addressed to Malkmus by name, which led, eventually, to an actual meeting after a Portland show he described on social media as "good times with Bea and her band."
listen: upstream & here
1994
Gold SoundzPavement
2019
I Wish I Was Stephen Malkmusbeabadoobee
listen forBoth tracks lean on the loud-quiet trick Pavement helped define: a vocal that barely commits, half-sung and slightly detuned, riding over guitars that seem to shrug off their own hooks rather than resolve them. "Gold Soundz" hazes its melody behind tape-warm fuzz; the song Bea wrote for Malkmus does the same trick louder, naming him outright in its pre-chorus before the guitars snap back into a sneer. Neither singer sounds like they're trying very hard – that's the point.
Elliott Smith1990s–2000s · Indie folk / Lo-fi / Singer-songwriter
Smith has been a fixed point since her teens: "I even have an XO tattoo on me because it means so much to me," she told WFUV, naming his 1998 album as her favorite of his records and "another of my biggest influences on songwriting." What she keeps returning to is confession delivered plainly – she has described crying to his hushed, piano-and-voice records during high school, the same unguarded diary mode she reached for on her own earliest, most private recordings.
listen: upstream & here
2000
Everything Means Nothing to MeElliott Smith
2017
Coffeebeabadoobee
listen forOn "Everything Means Nothing to Me," Smith repeats the title "over and over and over again," in Bea's own description, over a bare piano line until the drums finally arrive – a wall built from repetition, not volume. "Coffee" works the same trick in miniature: one acoustic guitar, a vocal recorded close enough to catch her breath, and a tempo change partway through that never asks to be noticed. Neither song reaches for a hook; both wait for you to lean in.
Daniel Johnston1980s · outsider music / lo-fi / folk
Beabadoobee has said only two artists shaped her before she'd released anything: "I had two people I was completely obsessed with: Elliot Smith and Daniel Johnston... Everything I did was based on them," she told NME the day he died, then pointed straight at her earliest records' hiss and clatter: "Even down to the production, like all the broken keyboard sounds, and the simplicity of the music and the shitty recordings." She has a tattoo of the bat from his song "Continued Story," the tag he scrawled in school notebooks long before anyone called it art.
listen: upstream & here
1983
Speeding MotorcycleDaniel Johnston
2018
Bobbybeabadoobee
listen forNeither recording is polished, and that's the point: Johnston's chord organ wavers out of tune while his voice cracks on the high notes, cut straight to a boombox with whatever hiss came free. "Bobby," from Bea's first EP, keeps that same undressed rawness – a plain acoustic guitar, a vocal take left in rather than redone, nothing sanded down for radio. It's a kinship in method more than in melody: two records that refuse to hide how they were made.