A Chat With manny moura About “devotion”
Q: Hi! Your new track “devotion” is basically a massive love letter to fangirl culture, but what’s the absolute wildest or most intense fangirl phase you’ve personally lived through?
A: Without a doubt, it was One Direction from when I was around 16 until 19 (when they broke up). I woke up thinking about the band and went to sleep thinking about them, it truly consumed my entire life. When I think back on it, I realize how much that love and obsession shaped me.
Q: The song started because you heard Harry Styles was at a cafe literally right down the street from you. Take us back to that exact second—did you immediately freeze, or did your brain go straight into songwriting mode?
A: When I first saw the news, I was very surprised because I had been in that coffee shop the day before! haha. And then I went to a café to work on other things, but I kept thinking about this idea of just bumping into someone that I spent my teen years idolizing and the song started showing itself to me. I spent the next hour writing lyrics on my laptop with no instrument or melodies, sometimes you have to grab it while it’s there.
Q: You have this killer lyric, “I wanna see you on TV / That’s where superstars should be.” Talk about that feeling of wanting to keep your idols on a literal pedestal so the fantasy doesn’t shatter.
A: I mean, they say “don’t meet your heroes” and I understand that usually that is referring to a celebrity being rude and causing you to have a bad experience, but I also think that “don’t meet your heroes” is saying: if you meet them, they’ll become humans, real. That’s what I’m talking about in “devotion”. It’s sort of an extension of the concept of my album that I released last year “a crush is a creative act”. While that album is not about a famous person, it is about how creating this idea of someone is safer than actually knowing them. Fantasy as a place I can go to, an escape. I’ve always been fascinated by that concept.
Q: Moving your life from Brazil to Los Angeles is a huge shift. How has the city swap changed how you write music or just how you see the whole pop music world?
A: I’ve been in the US for almost a decade now! Before LA, I lived in Boston, where I went to college, so I’ve been around for a while. I’ve always written songs in English and been inspired by American pop music growing up, so being here just makes sense for me. I love living in LA. The industry is here, everything feels really palpable, Harry Styles can come into the coffee shop I go to, you know? Haha. I find that inspiring.
Q: Your visual style is so fun and a little chaotic—like the album art with the pink hair, sitting on a curb on a busy New York street with stickers floating everywhere. How much does that aesthetic tie directly into the sound you’re building?
A: I believe everything is connected and flows into each other. I make the music I make because I dress the way I dress and gravitate towards specific aesthetic choices. It’s always been pretty intuitive for me.
Q: You dive into some really dramatic feelings toward the end of the song—like that classic, completely irrational fangirl feeling where you love an artist so much you literally say you want to die. How do you balance those heavy, almost dark feelings with beats that make people want to dance?
A: My favorite songs contrast fun and light with dark and heavy. I love when that shows up in my songs because that’s what life is, a mix of all those things. It’s not something I plan on doing necessarily, but I think it usually ends up that way.
Q: When you’re writing about a massive celebrity crush, is it easier to pull from your own real-life memories or do you find yourself scrolling through stan Twitter to get inspiration?
A: I definitely have enough life experiences to write about, so this time around it was all me. But of course stan culture is ingrained into my brain, so it’s all happening at once, really.
Q: Doing the indie pop thing means you’re essentially running your own entire business. What’s the most tedious or random part of the job that you didn’t realize you’d have to deal with?
A: Probably just how long it takes to do everything. You can finish a song in a couple of days, but it’ll probably take more than 6 months to actually release, with the mixing, mastering, cover art, visuals, videos, marketing, promo and all of that. So the turn around is always longer than I want it to be, which can be a frustrating experience for an impulsive person like me hehe
Q: “devotion” is all about getting entirely consumed by something. Outside of music or famous people, what’s a completely random hyper-fixation you have right now?
A: Honestly, cherries. It’s cherry season and I’ve been eating multiple bags per week. I had to look it up if it was bad for me, and apparently I actually shouldn’t do that.
Q: Now that the single is officially out there, what does the calendar look like for the rest of 2026? Are we looking at a bigger project, hitting the stage, or what’s the plan?
A: I want to release a couple more songs this year, so I’m working on finishing those. I have a show on August 15th at The Virgil, which is the GRRRL Music Showcase (my distributors) which will be fun.
