At the start of the year, Nilüfer Yanya announced her new album Miss Universe, and she did so with the single “In Your Head.” The album is so diverse that it’s impossible to represent entirely with just one song, but it’s definitely a strong showcase of Yanya’s broad skillset. It’s also the track she performed during her television debut on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert last night.
The song is largely about anxiety, evidenced by lyrics like, “I cannot tell if I’m paranoid / Or it’s all in my head, it’s all in my head.” Yanya spoke about that theme previously and its relevance to her life, saying, “I never knew what anxiety was until I felt it. Then you realize it’s always there, always part of your mind, it can get really big and take over and it’s hard to decipher anxious thoughts from reality.”
She also said of the song upon its single release in January, “Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me and I get trapped. There’s the things I need disguised as things I think I only want, things I think I’m choosing out of choice not necessity. […] I think that’s what I wrote the song about, but what’s interesting to me, and what I think I was trying to get at, is the illusion of freedom.”
Watch Yanya perform “In Your Head” on The Late Show above, and read our interview with Yanya here.
