Exclusive: Nicola Hoie on her new single Skydiving and her musical influences

Nicola Hoie has just released her latest single Skydiving, we caught up with her over Zoom to have a chat about it. Nicola is one of those people that within 30 seconds of chatting to her you just know she’s a lovely person.

” Skydiving is actually a cover version by an artist called Lights who’s a Canadian artist. And I didn’t know of her until not too long ago, but she’s really cool. She has a very cool sound and with a good voice, and she’s someone who’s kind of gotten my interest, to be honest. And I first heard that song in Stockholm, Sweden, and it was introduced by one of my sound engineers. I automatically loved it the first time I listened to it, but then we decided to try mixing and making a little bit more of a different production and see if it works. And I just thought it was a very fun song. So I quickly said yes to it, which is fun, because I’m not someone who does that as it always takes me time to develop those feelings towards a song and that emotion but that [Skydiving] was a song that gravitated towards me pretty quickly”

As an artist and songwriter, Nicola admits she’s drawn to more emotion-led songs which is why her feelings towards Skydiving were pretty special to her.

“I tend to gravitate towards more emotional songs so I quickly get pulled towards them. Then we have the upbeat ones, but now I kind of want to do a little bit of both because it’s good to have like a little bit of a mixture of some so it’s not always so depressing in your feelings and you can have someone some things which you know, people want to dance to. Or cry and dance too..”

She knew from the age of eight that she loved to sing and was encouraged by her family to pursue her passion. At 13 she decided that she wanted to do it as a career. But while determined to do it, Nicola suffered from stage fright.

” I had such bad stage fright to the point where I was like vomiting before being put on the stage just in front of 50 people but I still love to do and I still knew that I wanted to do it because of something which meant the absolute world but the more I remember the beginning process of my journey with the people I’m working with.

It was to the point you know, it asked me to shut off the lights when I was recording and not look at me the way the attention on me and I just want to be like a black hole. But then that couldn’t really go on forever. And the more people got involved and began to work with me. I kind of had to force myself to you know, be looked at and put on the lights and all that and I got quickly used to it surprisingly and I got quickly comfortable with that. And that was just because I had to remind myself this is something you know, you’ve dreamed up since you were a little girl. Don’t take it for granted. Do your best and that’s awesome. That you know, it’s easier said than done. I mean, I have nerves here and there but a lot less!”

Growing up she had some hard times in her teens and it was her connection to music and songs that helped her through it, and is why she feels very passionate about connecting emotionally with songs. One of the artists whose songs helped her was Adele.

“I had troubled teenage years actually, it was really bad. And it’s more on the darker side that I kind of want to express it through music because it makes it a little bit I feel like a lot of people can relate to those things and I feel like a lot of people deal with difficult and strong emotions to themselves.

And you see that because they don’t feel like they have anyone to talk to, to talk to about it and you know people won’t really understand so sometimes nice to that’s why like Adele. She’s someone who really really attracted me instantly to her songs because there was stuff I can relate to since I was 10, which is really young.

But yeah, she wrote these things which were so like impactful and like what’s so cool is that all these different generations could like relate to what she was writing about and, and if it wasn’t exactly like it would be like similar experiences and hopefully just to you know, have people feeling like yes, there’s someone out there who actually gets me like, who has the same kind of thought pattern?“

The future is bright for Nicola in 2023 she will release more songs that are as catchy, fun and meaningful as the current single Skydiving, she has an album pretty much ready to go and hopes to do more live shows.

“20203 is gonna be a really, really good year. It will be very exciting. A lot of things are planned. A lot of new material is going to come out. Very, very, very excited.”

Skydiving is available to stream now!

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