First things first: No Peteys were harmed during the making of lemin.’s debut full-length album—the death referenced in the title of petey passed away is more of the dying-on-the-inside variety. As the Toronto-based singer/producer born Victoria Sheahan explains to Apple Music, Petey is less an alter ego than a revelation of her true identity. “Petey is who I've been since I was a kid,” Sheahan says. “My parents call me Petey, my friends call me Petey. It's not necessarily that Petey has died and now I've become lemin. It's more like Petey died and is born again over and over behind the scenes, while I'm still lemin. I wanted to get even more personal with this record—I am already really personal with my music, but I wanted to tell the story of the person behind lemin.” On petey passed away, the cause of death is a familiar culprit: a broken heart. Over the course of 10 narratively linked tracks, lemin. charts a relationship’s course from first dates to last rites, and the healing process that comes after. But if the subject matter is familiar, petey passed away is a breakup album unlike any you’ve ever heard before. By chiseling away at the smooth surfaces she laid down on her 2018 EP series Hold A, Sheahan reconstructs her sound into a bold bricolage of raw acoustic confessionals, trap jams, orchestral piano ballads, and ethereal a cappella tracks as delightfully disorienting as the lovestruck emotions chronicled within. Taking sonic cues from Imogen Heap, lyrical notes from Kurt Cobain, and cover-song inspiration from Billie Holiday, petey passed away confirms lemin.’s promotion from indie-R&B phenom to art-pop auteur. Here, she gives a track-by-track guide to Petey’s demise and her own musical rebirth.
good looks kill
“I'm a words-first writer. So that opening line ['Put your fucking cigarette out/I want you to live as long as me'] was inspired by a night where I was out with my boyfriend and two of our other friends, and they were all smoking and I was just, like, yelling 'put your cigarette out' the whole night. And the next day, they were making fun of me and imitating me, and I was like, 'That's kind of a powerful line, though.' So I just took that and turned it into a song. No judgment for anyone that smokes, but I want people around me to live as long as me at least!”
when i met you (feat. Sean Leon)
“Sean and I have known of each other for a while—we've both been musicians in Toronto for a while—but we hadn't met up until this point. My producer Jack [Rochon] also produced for him, so we made the beat, we made the song, and it was actually Jack's idea: 'Why don't we put Sean on this?' We sent it over to him and he was down to be on it right away, which is dope. I had written the first part—which is all the harmonies and stuff—as kind of an interlude. But when we were listening to it, Jack was like, 'Oh, it might be cool to flip it at the end into that 808 beat.’ And then it just felt naturally like a kind of he-said-she-said thing.”
foolish paradise
“I was listening to a lot of Nirvana when I wrote the lyrics for this, but this came out sounding like the opposite of a Nirvana song! I've known artists who’ve done this kind of a cappella arrangement before and I've always thought it was amazing—like Imogen Heap's 'Hide and Seek.' I was always so inspired by that song—I thought it was incredible, even though it's not technically a cappella because she uses a vocoder kind of thing. But it's the same kind of vibe, and Moses Sumney also does a couple of songs that are just harmony-forward songs. My producer Jack had always wanted to vocal-produce a track like that. It was perfect timing, because we were both in the same headspace.”
inch
“The songs on this album were really not preconceived—more or less, how they are on the album is how they were when we first made them. I sat down one night on the piano and basically wrote this whole song in, like, an hour. Jack recorded the piano professionally on a grand piano at the studio, and then my guy Aaron did all the strings, and that's basically it. The song is speaking to the truth of what was happening [in the relationship] at the time—there was this vibe of like, 'You're so great. I like you so much...you know, as friends.' And it's like, well, what's the difference? What do I got to do to not be seen as one of the guys?'”
zombie (feat. iaamSaam)
“This one is not thematically talking about a breakup in a way the other ones are, but it's more a look behind the scenes of what goes on when I'm making the album: I'm up and I'm working on music at all hours of the night. And my verse is also like a 'fuck you' to people that haven't believed in me. That's how I feel putting out this album: I'm really proud of it.”
decide
“I was totally sick of myself when I wrote this song, because I am probably the most indecisive person that you'll ever meet in your life! I was fed up with myself and I just wanted to make a decision.”
tv
“This is about one of those nights where you're waiting to hear from someone or waiting for somebody to come over. I got all ready and then I got a text after hours of waiting: 'Oh, I'm not gonna make it.' And I literally walked directly over to the piano after getting that text and wrote this song! That's why I feel like this project is so important to me and so powerful for me—it's those true, really authentic, raw moments just captured in a song, basically.”
one brain
“I don't know if I've ever written from a happy place. For me, that kind of longing, aching feeling is what really inspires me to write. The closest I'll get to a happy song is that emotion when you're so happy that you're crying, and it's like a sad-happy feeling. It's a happiness that makes you ache, and that's where I was at with this song: this moment of realization with this person where we knew it's not meant to be, the timing is wrong, but we still have love for each other and we still want to be in each other's lives, so let's just do it.”
anymore
“‘one brain’ is that exact moment of realizing, ‘Okay, maybe it's just not in the cards for us.’ And then 'anymore' is kind of after the fact, when I'm like, 'I'm not your girl. It's over.' And it's like the moving-on kind of anthem. I think sonically, the song kind of sounds like a rebirth, with all the strings—it's about brightening up and accepting what you lost and just moving forward.”
you go to my head
“We did this song around the same time we did 'foolish paradise,' so it kind of has a similar a cappella/Imogen Heap vibe. I love the Billie Holiday version of this song and always have, and it seemed to fit with the theme of the album: when you fall in love with somebody and you're obsessed with them to the point where they're all you can think about. It just felt like a good ending. It's kind of awesome this song that's so old fits kind of perfectly into this.”