Drop Dead | Sam Fender

Chapter One Hundred and Four

Glamour Magazine

Rory Nightingale: 'I know how much one sentence can change the whole course of your life'

Aurora Nightingale, more affectionately known as Rory has shot to fame over the past year and a half. It was only in February of last year had Rory debuted her first single, Starving, which raced to number one on the charts where it stayed for six weeks straight.

The titular track of her debut album, Drop Dead was released in March and surpassed many of the young singer's own expectations, following the success of Starving and Love Ain't Meant to Hurt, which was released in November, and stole the No. 1 spot on the Billboard charts for nine weeks. The song detailing a toxic past relationship has been hailed as that of a success with Nightingale following up with the full album after a long six months of teasing. The self-written album has dominated the charts with critics praising the 21-year-old's songwriting abilities.

The Tyneside native actually got her start on YouTube. "It's a funny story now looking back," she laughs. "I was painfully in love with my best friend when I was fifteen and I caught him snogging a girl in his year, so I had a tantrum and wrote a song. I ended up recording it and posting it to my YouTube account, not realising I had made it public. The video blew up overnight. I was so embarrassed. Everyone I knew had seen it, including my best friend and the lass he kissed."

"We actually ended up dating for five years," she says when asked if the song made things awkward between them. "The lass was so sweet about it all too."

"YouTube was actually how I was noticed by my label. My manager, Helen had found my channel and reached out to me, asking if I would be interested in working with them. They offered me a record deal pretty much there and then, it was definitely one of the most surreal moments of my life," she tells us.

"If you probably couldn't already tell, Drop Dead is mostly about a breakup I went through. I spent the majority of my teens in quite a toxic relationship that I kept getting sucked back into and it definitely took its toll on me. It wasn't until something big happened in both our lives, which affected us both quite a lot did I realise that it wasn't healthy," Rory recounts. "There's a lot that's glossed over in the album, you can't really fit almost six years of memories into eleven songs."

"I struggled a lot with my mental health over the last year," she says, "It's been tough and I've gone through a lot of change, which I haven't been coping well with. I broke up with my long-term boyfriend just over a year ago now and I moved to London to focus on my music and it was scary at first, still is now. Moving somewhere new is always going to be but I did it whilst in such a dark place. I didn't know anyone outside of my label and my support system was three hundred miles away. I'm awful at remembering to take care of myself. My best friend despises it but I'm conscious about making that change."

"My anxiety got really bad, especially just before something was being released," she admits. "This industry is a tough one, it's so harsh sometimes. I didn't want to put out something I wasn't happy with or that I wasn't proud of, but I was scared that what I wanted to put out wasn't what people wanted. I think the anxiety lessened once Drop Dead was put out and was well received as it was a sort of teaser of what was to come. I was more optimistic that people would like the rest of the album like."

"I always loved music, even as a little kid. My mam would sing to me, had done since I was a baby, apparently it was the only way I would ever go to sleep," she laughs. "She's actually the one who taught me how to play the piano. She passed away from cancer when I was twelve and ever since then I couldn't bring myself to touch the keyboard that I had gotten for Christmas when I was nine. Writing Heather was the first time I used it since the day she died. There was a lot of dust, that's for sure."

"I think there's a lot of pressure on me to be a good role model for my fans. The majority of them are at such an impressionable age that I forget that I'm still so young myself. I'm only twenty-one. Like I was still in school three years ago!" she says on having such a big platform. "I'm so scared of saying the wrong thing, because of the impact it can have. I've been there. I know how much one sentence can change the whole course of your life, especially when you're young."

"I really don't know what's next for me. In all honesty, I've been winging it up until now," she tells us. "I'm just trying to go with the flow at the moment. I've been constantly writing songs since I was 15, so maybe I've got my sights set on the next album. But for now, I'm just taking the time to enjoy now. I don't want to look back on my life in 20 years' time and say that I've not been able to actually take it all in, that everything happened so quickly."

We asked Rory if she could go back in time what advice would she give her younger self. "I would probably just hold her hand and tell her that everything will be okay. That even though there have been times when it's felt like the entire world has ended, everything will work out. It all happens for a reason and sometimes you need the rain if you want the rainbow."