YouTube phenomenon Marié Digby (pronounced Ma-ree-AY Dig-Bee) was in town last weekend to promote her new album, Unfold.

UrbanWire caught up with her in her hotel suite at the Grand Copthorne to find out more about this unique rising star.

UW: Sunday was Mother’s Day and you won’t be celebrating it with your Mom, so is there anything you’d like to say to her?

Marié: I need to send her flowers and I still haven’t done it! I’m losing time! I would just tell her that there are not enough words in my vocabulary to describe how much she means to me, how much she’s done for my sisters and I. She is the best Mom in the world, I’m very very lucky and … I’m gonna cry! (weak laugh)

UW: So how did your family react when you decided to drop out of college to do music.

Marié: They took it as if i had gotten pregnant and thrown away my baby! They were not happy; my Dad especially.

He was like, “That’s not the way you do things in life, that’s not safe. Everybody has to finish college and that’s just the way it goes.”

I totally get it! If i were a parent, I’d probably say the same thing to my kid too. But i think they also recognised that nothing was gonna stop me. So eventually they thought that, “We’d might as well support her and see how far she can take it.”

UW: So right now do they come to your events and stuff?

Marié: Yeah, they’re great. Even when i was just starting out, my mom used to accompany me to every open mic i ever did and wait with me for hours and hours just to play 1 song. My parents come to everyone of my shows. We’re a very, very close family.

My dad even came to Singapore with me. He came before me and went, “I’ll meet you in Singapore!”

UW: Could you tell us more about your school life? Why’d you feel like a loser and left out?

Marié: Well it was because of the way others treated me. When I was in elementary school, I didn’t have those problems. I was friends with everybody and we were all equals. But something changes when you hit 12 or 13. I think it’s hormones.

The guys were actually not mean to me at all, just the girls. I think it was because they were starting to be aware of their femininity and attracting guys and it becomes more competitive with jealousy involved and they’re going through hardships themselves so they start projecting themselves on other people.

I wasn’t attractive, I wasn’t cute and I didn’t wear cool clothes and people have no problem making fun of me because of that. And I never knew what that felt like and it’s so painful to be criticised for something you don’t have control over. It really hurt me deeply.

UW: So did you blame anyone for the plight you were in?

Marié: I’ve spoken to some people who were the cruelest to me in high school and they are not aware of it. They forget. They probably had problems of their own. To tell you the truth, if I hadn’t gone through that, I’d probably not have the same drive as i do now to make something of myself and to show people that i can turn situations around and to not judge people for the way they look.”

UW: On the topic of your song, in “Miss Invisible”, you mentioned the boy who joined the girl under the bleachers. So how are the boy and the girl doing right now?

Marié: Well, unfortunately, there was no boy under the bleachers. But i injected him into the very end of the song because i wanted there to be some hope. The message i was trying to get across was that half the problem was my own fault for not realising that there were probably 10 or 20 other kids in the exact same situation as me.

But i was too busy [going],” Oh, woe is me! I’m a loser and no one likes me,” to go seek out the other people who were feeling just like me.

I was trying to say, “I should’ve just looked around.”

UW: You have a lot of fans online especially through YouTube. Do you check back on the comments they leave on your videos? Not all of them are the nicest people in the world. Do you take time to read through them?

Marié: With YouTube, i don’t take it personally at all. The negative comments don’t bother me. Maybe I’ve created some sort of a shield.

I take it more personally when its on my MySpace because it’s not anonymous. You can see who is that person writing you, what they look like and where they’re from and the fact that they don’t care that you can find out all this about them and they’ll still write you a rude email is sort of hard to take.
But with YouTube, people can say whatever they want and no one really knows where they’re from and you could just create a screen page and just shut it down when you finish writing your comment. There’re all kinds of wacky people so I’m just used to it.

But once you start getting those is when you start doing something right, so it’s a good sign actually.”

UW: Do you have anything to say to the nasty people?

Marié: Get help? (laughs) I don’t know? A lot of them, i think, have too much free time so i hope you find a hobby that is more productive than writing wacky comments on YouTube!

UW: Looking at the design of the album cover, it’s very pretty (Marie: Thank you!), so is there any inspiration behind the whole design?

Marié: Yeah. The cover is the exact sketch I did while I was making the album. I had a lot of down time during the recording so I would doodle. I thought the producer was just throwing my doodles away, but he was actually collecting all of them.

At the end, he presented it to me, all the drawings that I’d done over the year and one that I’d been drawing over and over again was the cover; it was me, sitting down on a dark, hard wood floor in a dress with curtains and flowers on the side, so the album cover is exactly what I’d drawn through the making of the album.

UW: So everything inside is inspired by your doodles during downtime?

Marié: Pretty much. (Points to a page where she is draped seductively on a sofa) Although I never drew myself with my legs all splayed like that on a couch, I can’t say I doodled that.

UW: Is there any particular person who is the greatest inspiration to you in your life?

Marié: No, I wouldn’t say that it’s just one. I think it’d be all the musicians that I listened to, starting in my teens.

Fiona Apple came out when I was 14, so that was a pretty big inspiration to see someone who was pretty young too, like 17 or 18, when she came out with her first record.

I was blown away with her maturity of music and her lyrics and I guess that was pretty inspiring to me too. She was one of the people I was listening to at that time.

UW: Is there any advice you’d like to give to any aspiring musicians?

Marié: It’s simpler than you think. People always ask, “What’s the key? How do I break?” If you’ve got most importantly, good songs, a unique voice, you dont have to be the best singer in the world, so long as it’s something different.

And you have passion. You’ve got the ingredients. If you’ve got those 3 (good songs, unique voice and passion), then the only thing left is determination. So nothing will stop you, i think that if you’ve all those 3, there’s no way it can’t work.