“I felt like it was very harsh, but it was very honest”: Danish-Japanese artist Mina Okabe’s new album gets personal

Mina Okabe is sitting with her acoustic guitar by the pool. The warm LA sun is smiling down from a clear, blue sky and the palm trees above her sway in the slight summer wind. A hummingbird flits around in the background. It is an idyllic Southern Californian scene, and the perfect place to be creative.

“A lot of the music I make is really personal,” says Okabe. “I feel that this is an environment where I am comfortable opening up and writing the lyrics and music that I truly want to create.” It’s this approach that led to the Danish-Japanese artist’s breakthrough single, ‘Every Second’ off her album Better Days, released in 2021. Today, the track boasts nearly 50 million streams on Spotify.

Born in London, 23-year-old Okabe lived in New York and Manila before moving to Denmark when she was 15 years old. Raised by a Japanese mother and a Danish father, she belongs to both worlds. “I would probably say Denmark first if people ask me where I am from,” she says. “I feel one hundred per cent Danish… But then again, I feel Japanese too and I feel at home in Japan, too. I guess it depends on where I am when you ask me, and who I have just been with and which language I have just spoken.” Emphasising this point is Okabe’s Japanese version of that aforementioned hit, ‘Every Second’.

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The pool Okabe sits by is in the backyard of a Sherman Oaks studio belonging to Leroy Clambitt, a Grammy-nominated producer who’s worked with Dua Lipa and Justin Bieber. Inside, the space boasts a certain warmth – wooden furniture, earthy organic colours. But it was the pool area that Okabe found especially attractive. “I love writing songs in different places and environments and I feel like it always inspires me to get new ideas, especially in Los Angeles,” she says. “It is great being in a place where everyone speaks English around me. I feel like it inspires new words for new lyrics, so every new place inspires something new.”

One of the songs written by this very pool is ‘Maybe One Day’, the first single from her forthcoming new album, releasing today. The song is a love song or, to be more specific, a break-up song, in which Okabe tells a guy to back off. “I am not good at talking about very private things, and especially not when it comes to mentioning names,” she says when asked about the personal experience that inspired the lyrics. “That is never going to happen. But I like to use songwriting as a way to express myself and it is a very personal song.”

Did she hesitate to include lyrics like “We’re not good together”, “I cannot look at your face” and “I get annoyed when you call”? Yes, she did. “When I wrote this song, I felt so bad,” she says. “I was telling Leroy that I thought it might be too mean. I felt like it was very harsh, but it is also very honest, which is the case with all my music. So I was like, ‘You know what… let me just tell it as it is’.”

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That is Okabe’s approach to just about everything; be honest and be true to herself. This extends to her music, her personal life and even her wardrobe choices. Okabe would rather use clothes as means to express herself than follow a trend. “My personal style is that I want to wear things that I feel comfortable in and that feels true to me,” says Okabe, who favours relaxed denim and easy, summery knits . “It is really important that everyone who works with me understand the kind of person I am and the kind of style I have. I feel like that is the case with everything: With my music, visuals, styling – every way I express myself creatively.”

Most of her favourite pieces are culled from secondhand stores, particularly one in Tokyo, close to where her grandmother lives. “But I am not telling you the name,” she says with a sly smile.

Though Okabe is spending more and more time in Los Angeles, drawing inspiration from her surroundings, Copenhagen is still home. “When I was younger, I would definitely say that I would go and live somewhere else, and I love travelling,” she says. “So it is my dream that I can travel with my music but at the same time have my base in Copenhagen, Denmark and be able to recharge here. The plan is that I will stay in Copenhagen and just keep travelling.”