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my interview for the october issue of @Fusion is out right now ! so thankful for elvera and all the beautiful people i got to work with 🤍

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article!

━ Adira Flynn has struggled to face the daunting challenge of transitioning from a teen pop star to an independent adult in the spotlight.

At the age of 16, Adira broke out into the pop scene with the release of her debut album, blue ship, in 2012, which debuted at number 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. The album's lead single, you and i, reached a peak of No. 5 on the Billbord Hot 100, while the last three singles all peaked in the top 20—golden at No. 9; love, jack at No 14; and run at No 17. The album went on to sell more copies in its second week than in its first week, becoming the first album since Justin Bieber's My World 2.0 in 2010 to debut at No. 1 and sell more the following week.

Adira's second album, to my one, was released in 2014. The lead single, again, debuted at No. 2 on the Hot 100, becoming the pop star's highest charting single in the United States. The album's last three singles—right now, summer, and always forever—peaked at No. 4, 5, and 7, respectively. The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart and became the first album in history to have the amount of copies sold increase each week for its first four weeks.

Since the release of to my one, the superstar has faced a myriad of bumps: multiple run-ins with the law; the loss of her younger brother and her close friend to suicide; the loss of her mother to lung cancer; and attempts by her abusive father, who has been in and out of her life since she was a baby, to rekindle their relationship following the deaths of her mother and brother. Still, Adira's legion of fans remained loyal, with her EP thoughts debuting atop the Billboard 200 chart in 2016. The EP, which took on topics including sex and drugs, saw a more mature and bold Adira for the first time, with songs like dress allowing the singer to embrace her sensuality and reveal her intense sexual desire for her partner.

Following the ending of her tumultuous relationship earlier this year, Adira took an unannounced break, during which she allowed a sole reporter from Fusion! to get an unfiltered look into her life as she fought to make sense of her battles and safeguard her mental health.

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It has been six years since Adira last appeared on the cover of Fusion! as a fresh-faced 16-year-old. She was an unblemished up-and-coming singer-songwriter—so, naturally, Fusion! photographed her with tears of blood streaming down her face.

Now, six years later, Adira is back.

The 22-year-old has been working with an array of producers on her first studio album in nearly three years, including Max Martin, Frank Dukes, and Jack Antonoff. She has taken part in laid-back interviews with Jimmy Fallon, offered tear-filled performances at benefit concerts for cancer research and suicide awareness, and opened up about her drug use and the difficulties of moving on after the deaths of some of the most important people in her life in an emotional message she addressed to her fans on Instagram.

Draped in denim jeans and a baby blue crop top with fuzzy elephant-patterned white socks, Adira welcomes me into her home, a pleasant smile playing on her lips. The walls are a dark red to contrast the deep and rich brown of the hardwood flooring. "This is home-y," I say, and she lets out a hearty laugh.

"Thank you. Mom decorated." This time, her voice sounds far away as she leads me to the outdoor patio.

As I take in the scene before me, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: Adira is not the same 16-year-old girl who was playing Subway Surfers and braiding her brother's hair when we first met in 2012. This time around, she's ready to talk. Her hands sit comfortably on her lap. She offers me a small, barely there smile and makes a point of looking at you as she speaks, making sure each word sticks its landing so you cling on excitedly. She twiddles her thumbs—the only hint at the nervousness she feels.

She takes a deep breath before we delve into the process behind the making of her long-awaited album. "The writing process has been the craziest part. I mean, my friends came to my house one night with a bunch of snacks, and we just sat on my bed, bouncing ideas off of each other for some songs. We literally fell asleep at 3 a.m., and two songs were already done," she reflects. "I feel like that's what it's been like the whole time we've been writing the album because there are some verses and hooks that have been very impulsive or very raw. I think of what I want to say when I'm with my friends, or I'm in the shower, or I'm getting my nails done, and I have to shout for 'Mala [her younger sister] to open voice memos."

She laughs briefly. "I just think making the album has been so beautiful and therapeutic. You know, music has always been my outlet and creative space. It's always been a way for me to express myself and what I'm feeling, and there was a lot I had to deal with to get to where I am now, and I want this album to reflect that. And then, compared to every other album, I think this album has been the easiest because it's so, you know, personal. It's the most of myself I've ever put into a project, and it's easy to make music like that, but it's also been the hardest because I'm being so vulnerable and open and authentic. It's scary because this is real life—what I'm singing about is my life—and it's easy for people to forget that."

As she says herself, Adira's music has been heavily inspired by many of the events in her life. Some of her most shaping experiences were the deaths of the three people closest to her: her mother, Julia Flynn; her brother, Aden Flynn; and her childhood best friend, Derek Furley. "My life in the last few years has been shit, and I hate to say it like that, because I am so privileged and blessed, but in my personal life, I hit rock-fucking-bottom. There's no way around it. For a long time, I tried to hide myself from it. Tried to pretend it never happened. Like, if it didn't exist to me, it couldn't possibly be real. I would drown myself in anything and everything I could get my hands on—alcohol, painkillers. Anything."

When I ask how her new music reflects their deaths, she tears up, and I follow suit. It's a sobering, human moment: the two of us, in tears, in the middle of the day. "God, I'm sorry for making you cry"—I'm sorry for making you cry, too, I say—"but I struggled with this. Like, how do I put everything I felt for these special, special people into words? So, I finally felt at peace knowing there's a little piece of them throughout the album, because I've survived the years holding on to them. I've never let them go. I hope every more note I sing, every word I write reflects them. Like, if I try hard enough, it'll reach them eventually."

In her classic, slightly self-deprecating tone, the ever-candid singer notes: "Mommy always said she will be watching over me when she goes. I think I disappointed her for a bit there. A lot was going on, huh?" It's a rhetorical question, but a lot was going on. From nightly parties, to her time in rehab, to endless social media comments bashing her, to her arrests, Adira had seemingly fallen from grace for the entire world to see.

In the midst of it all—in a fashion only Adira could embody during the height of her controversies—she wrote on Twitter: "happy happy pills." And she sighs at the mention of the now-infamous tweet. "Yeah, I remember that. It was scary for a while. People didn't take that seriously. I remember logging on, and people were making jokes about it, after my manager's just walked in and found me slumped in my bathtub. I guess, as I grow older and try to make sense of everything, I understand where people were coming from more. I think people took the first thing they saw and just ran with it. I was never really given a chance to explain myself. I don't think people would have cared, though. I don't think anyone would've done anything differently if I told everyone what was going on in my life. I would've still been that one girl that went off the rails and started doing drugs. I would've still been held accountable, I guess, for what I was doing to myself."

A single tear escapes, but Flynn appears determined to write her own narrative in a world where much of her story was told and repeated by online strangers. "I'll be the first to admit I didn't handle the criticism well at the time, just because it made me want to find something to make me forget. I guess the criticism really only reminded me of where I was in my life. Like, every time I saw what people were saying, it just hammered home the reality I was trying to avoid, and then I needed an escape, and I found one."

As her fans banded together to make hashtags showing their support for Adira, she says she purposefully never let them see the darkest sides of her life. "I never wanted my fans to see me like that. Sometimes I couldn't help how they saw me, but when I could, I tried to be brave. I tried to smile. I don't want people I love to see me breaking like that, because they worry. It got a lot worse than people know, though. I was so close to being gone so many times. I just wanted to disconnect from reality and stay there forever, so using became my answer to everything. There was a point where I didn't feel like I'd ever be able to come back down from that high I got. I was selfish. I never once thought about how anyone else was doing, because it was like I had finally found a wall that separated me from everything. I couldn't do anything. I felt like reality had its hands wrapped around my throat, and drugs were my oxygen."

Adira admits while she's grown a lot since then, she's grown apart from people, too. "I tweeted about my dad one time, then everyone's jumping down my throat about how important that relationship is because my mom's gone. Tons of people just feel obligated to share their opinions on your relationships. Like, I'm not going to keep every person I meet in my life. I'm grateful we shared that time, and I'm grateful we learned what we needed to from each other, but there's a bigger picture. Sometimes you have to distance yourself to protect yourself or protect them, but the distance feels amplified when you're in the spotlight."

This sentiment of new beginnings and self-preservation seems to ring true with Aya Simone, Adira's former friend who, along with Adira, was arrested after officers found drugs in Simone's car. Facing questions from curious fans, Simone tweeted that the end of the pair's friendship was "mutual" and "inevitable."

Adira frowns, thinking about it for a moment, before she answers: "Aya was a good friend. We went through a lot together, but it was definitely inevitable. It was a temporary thing, and I think we knew that, and we still had a beautiful time together. That's happened a lot over the years. I've let a lot of people go, for sure. I think the worst about letting people go for me sometimes is that I don't even think I let so many people go because I had a sudden realisation, like, 'You're toxic. I want better for myself. You're not adding anything to my life.' I don't think I ended the friendships out of toxicity."

"I think it's been difficult to move on from those friendships because some of them were all I knew. It took me a while to get out of this habit of them asking for something from me, me giving them that thing, and then them giving me what I want in return. And now, like, I see what was wrong with that, but I sometimes crave that order and structure and familiarity in my life." She says she gets that now from her sister, Amala, and her best friends, Vicky Ambler and Mikey Creque. A smile lights up her features as she talks about them. "I don't know where I'd be without 'Mala, Vicky and Mikey. Truly the backbones of my life. My forever family."

The star hasn't released an album since to my one, the tales of a 17-year-old girl who had found herself in the middle of a fresh and exciting love story. It's almost hard to envision Adira—the same girl who only recently swore off love—singing of picnic dates in spring fields, and she agrees. "I'm really proud of that album. I think I got to work with some amazing people, but I don't think I could ever perform some of the songs on there again." She looks up at the sky briefly. "There's been a stain on it because of what happened. Obviously." It's an unexpected turn for the star, who has kept her feelings around her former fiancé, ZAYN, unsaid ever since his arrest for domestic violence earlier this year.

I ask Flynn if her self-imposed isolation has helped her wrap her head around the past few months of her life. "Of course. As soon as I was released from the hospital, I told Robbie [her manager] to get me out, because I couldn't handle having to relive that shit every day. I've been talking to a therapist, and it's just given me a lot of time to process everything." She pauses for a moment, like she's preparing to bare her soul to me. We've both given up on stopping our tears. "That night replays in my mind a lot. I thought I was going to die. I was terrified. Like, someone I was going to marry . . . someone I loved . . . is going to kill me. And it's so easy to blame yourself. It's so easy to say, 'Well, maybe if I did this instead of this, things would've happened differently.' I've fought tooth and nail every day to remind myself it's not my fault."

Adira's words are a heart-wrenching remindernot only of her strengthbut her ability to unapologetically wear her heart on her sleeve—an element no more evident than in her latest work.

Flynn asks me if I want to go to her home studio so I can listen to a few tracks, and that's how I found myself being one of the first people outside her inner circle to listen to the magic she's created in her bubble. "This song is one I made with Justin [Bieber]. He's a great friend. We just get each other. It's amazing. We don't have a title, but the song is about something we both can relate to a bit, so it was really freeing, I think, to be able to create it with someone like him." She doesn't stay on the topic of Bieber long, but her admiration and respect for her music partner is clear. The track—a haunting and solemn pop track with powerfully vulnerable lyrics—plays. "I don't know tomorrow, if it comes or not," she sings, "but I promise you can brag 'bout tonight."

The next track "is inspired by an ex. He called me needy, and I was like, 'Fuck you for making me feel like I don't deserve better than you.' That's how I am, though. I'm needy. That's okay. I deserve to feel wanted. My partner deserves to feel wanted. That's how it should be. You shouldn't feel bad for wanting that," she tells me matter-of-factly, like if I argued with her (and I wouldn't), she wouldn't hesitate to call me an idiot. As I nod, the somber but hopeful lyrics fill my ears: "I can be needy. Tell me how good it feels to be needed."

We're back outside, and the sun is setting, painting the sky in blues and purples. Adira brings us lemonades. "Amala made this for you before she left," she tells me, smiling.

I ask her about her future, and she is clear: "I want to put this fucking music out!" After that, Flynn hopes to land an acting job, make more music as "my life probably falls apart again," and focus on her fans, friends, and finding her sense of self as the world watches.