Published on August 19th, 2024 | by Just Jay

Fiji Blue Reveals Title for Debut Album, Announces Asia/NA Tour Dates  

Nettwerkis thrilled to announce the signing of “bittersweet optimist” indie pop singer-songwriter Fiji Blue. Today, the LA-via-Phoenix artist announces his debut album Glide, as well as new tour dates in Asia and North America.

Born Trevor Dering, Fiji Blue finds creative solitude in the mixture of guitar-heavy storytelling, drawing inspiration from artists like Stevie Ray Vaughan & John Mayer. After accumulating over 300 million streams across three EPs—Reasons You Should Care (2021), Goodbye (2021) and I Loved You, What Happened? (2022)—Glide will serve as Fiji Blue’s first proper album.

“This album was written during a period of personal transition,” he explains. “There’s a lot of adjustment that comes with dealing with the end of relationships, feeling stuck in the middle trying to process all these intense feelings at the same time…It was like starting from scratch, both emotionally and in terms of writing songs themselves.”

Each of the 10 songs on Glide are captivating snapshots of Dering’s songwriting prowess, ruminating on loss and love both platonic and romantic. They’re achingly personal yet universally relatable. To tell these stories, Dering decamped to Topanga for a weeklong writing retreat, penning a song a day and getting lost in rich production – an ascendant helium balloon of synths, skittering electronics, and widescreen harmonies cut with the warm humanity of more organic instrumentation like piano and acoustic guitar.

Today, Fiji Blue shares the album’s lead single “Peppermint,” dedicated to the “effortless love” he feels for his wife, a key creative inspiration for the album. The tune feels like a warm embrace, wrapping up nostalgic naïveté and puppy-dog romanticism into a three-minute running time.

“This song tells my story of effortless love, like riding a bike downhill, feet off the pedals type of love,” Fiji Blue shares. “I was beginning my process of writing with new producers (for the first time ever) & was lucky enough to cross paths with Matt Kahane. Typically, it takes a few sessions for me to open up and feel comfortable, but the day we made this song, it felt like I had found a new best friend. The creative process flowed effortlessly, just like the story we were trying to tell. We completed the song within a few hours, and I’ve been playing it every day since.”

As he begins to roll out Glide, Fiji Blue will return to the road, rounding out the summer with eight August shows in Asia (including Lalala Fest in Indonesia and Summer Sonic in Japan) and announcing an 11-date headline tour in North America for the fall, which includes stops at the Gramercy Theatre in NYC, El Rey in LA and Subterranean in Chicago. These new dates follow up a July festival run that included Milwaukee’s SummerFest in support of COIN, Seattle’s Capitol Hill Block Party and headline billing for Chicago’s Wicker Park Fest.

ABOUT FIJI BLUE

The story of Fiji Blue owes a debt to both coasts, but his genre-spanning sound is truly global. After graduating Berklee College of Music in 2019 with a major in songwriting, Phoenix-raised Trevor Dering relocated to Los Angele. There, the Southern California cool of Fiji Blue became fully realized, swirling bedroom pop, indie, house, easy listening and R&B into a sun-kissed daydream.

A stamp of approval from BTS’s Jungkook elevated the single “It Takes Two” to the global stage in 2022, while tours in Southeast Asia, an appearance on Spotify’s New Music Friday and features by Ones To Watch (who hailed the “incredibly orchestrated” songs) introduced Fiji Blue to millions of new listeners. Now, more than 300 million Spotify streams and 20 million YouTube views later, Fiji Blue’s long-awaited debut album Glide (Nettwerk) is Dering’s strongest artistic statement to date, mourning endings and practicing love and gratitude for what remains with potent lyricism and a reassuring voice listeners won’t soon forget.

“This album was written during a period of personal transition,” he explains. “There’s a lot of adjustment that comes with dealing with the end of relationships, feeling stuck in the middle trying to process all these intense feelings at the same time.”

There’s palatable emotion reverberating through every note, chord, and melody of Glide, balancing both the pain and affection that inspired them. At its most heartbreaking, it’s a rumination on those who never really leave us, the faint imprints that linger long after lives go their separate ways; at its most uplifting – the emotions Dering prefers to focus on – it’s rich with gratitude for his friends and family, a future full of hope and possibility.“I love sad music, and if I could only write sad music, I would,” he says with a laugh. “The thing I really love about Fiji Blue is having uplifting harmonic and production elements alongside lyrics that sit more in that melancholy world. Sometimes it’s nice to find that middle ground.”