Low Down

Album: Zero Experience (2022)
Charted: 59
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Songfacts®:

  • Erin Doyle is a singer-songwriter from Chatham, Kent, who records under the name of Venbee. She broke through with "Low Down" after it went viral on TikTok.
  • "Low Down" finds Venbee struggling with depression. Though her mother told her "life would be fun," she finds it dark and scary and struggles to cope. The singer holds out her hand, hoping to find someone there for her.
  • Manchester-based singer-songwriter Dan Fable contributes a guest verse. He too is feeling the weight of the world on his chest, and resorts to drugs to lighten the load. When he's high, Fable is unconcerned about the consequences, but once he withdraws he feels like a train wreck.
  • Venbee and Fable wrote "Low Down" with the track's producer Elias Abid. A Paris-born, Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist, Abid's music has featured on ABC's sitcom Grown-ish, the documentary America To Me, and the film When Jeff Tried to Save the World.
  • The song originated with some voice notes Venbee wrote when she was 16 or 17. The singer told BBC Music Introducing in Kent's Abbie McCarthy that back then she wasn't in a good place mentally and "literally got so comfortable with feeling like rubbish in my head."

    Venbee had set up a writing session with Dan Fable and he'd asked her to come in with something. Going through her old voice notes, Venbee found her teenage recordings where she's talking about her depression. "And I was like, right, okay, you were low down low key," she recalled. "Let's just try and figure out a way to word this that other people can take into their own perspective."

    Venbee wrote the hook at 3 o'clock in the morning, as well as a couple of lines from the first verse. She played them to Fable, who liked it and agreed to help her finish the song. They wrote the track over FaceTime just on guitar, then Venbee's producer friend Elias Abid brought the tune to life.

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