One to watch, Raven Numan is making waves with her self-penned new single, “Overwhelming”, a soul-baring Gothic crossover track where she shares her experience of borderline personality disorder (BPD).
The talented 20-year-old daughter of electronic music legend Gary Numan is brutally honest as to the inspiration and core theme of her pulsating new track…
” ‘Overwhelming’ is somewhat self-explanatory, it’s about being overwhelmed with everyone and everything, it’s also about growing up with a famous parent and how it’s affected me personally. My parents are incredible, they’ve done absolutely everything and more for me and I love them endlessly, but a big part of their job is going on tour for long periods of time and that has quite obviously affected me negatively.
“The song is partially about that; how my parents going on tour as a child caused me to develop quite a lot of issues. It caused me to develop borderline personality disorder which involves the constant fear of being abandoned, severe mood swings, anxiety and it has also caused extreme social anxiety.
“The loudness of this lifestyle, the shows, my dad’s fame, the unpredictability, the fans, the unnecessary hate all because I was born caused so much stress and it was a lot for me to handle. It’s about totally shutting down and disassociating because everything was very overwhelming.”
As a child, Raven grew up surrounded by her pioneering father Gary’s music and wasn’t particularly interested. Instead her first passion was the mainstream pop of Ariana Grande.
But it wasn’t long before his music inspired her – [she recently joined Gary on stage at his sold out Roundhouse shows in London] – as did the work of electric friends such as Nine Inch Nails and Ministry, not to mention influences such as Deftones, Lana Del Rey and Siouxsie & The Banshees.
Writing her own music provided a release from her emotional and psychological battles: a way to find peace rather than to lash-out at loved ones. By her mid-teens she was writing seriously, all the while talking candidly about the issues in life that she struggles with.
The pulsating paranoia and anxieties of the song are heightened by the accompanying video , which was directed by Jackson Ducasse (Dua Lipa, Imagine Dragons).
