HP #54: Little Dog Star on Leaving Acting for Music

Izzy Steele had a full-time job acting on a TV soap, and left it to chase music before she knew if it would work, one of the hardest decisions she ever had to make. On this episode of The Hardest Part with Kieron Banerji, Izzy opens up "Something Infinite," the title track of her EP: a song about the frustration that comes with ambition, that awkward middle part between leaving something safe and arriving anywhere at all.

Izzy talks about how honesty is a job description: years of bottling emotions and saving them for the camera, then suddenly writing songs where the character is you; teaching herself guitar because her new London flat had no piano; writing the bones of the song in half an hour and finishing the second verse on the bus home; and the chorus lyric, "you want something infinite and need it in an instant," that came out before she understood what she was saying. Plus her cure for creative block: too much writing, not enough living.

00:00 "Why am I like this?"

01:29 Introducing "Something Infinite"

02:44 New to guitar, needing real sound

07:19 Leaving the soap for honesty

11:30 Half an hour in the studio, finished on the bus

13:09 The lyric she didn't understand yet

14:58 Too much writing, not enough living

17:27 What acting taught her about being watched

20:21 Editing: addicted to the demo

26:54 Full Track: Something Infinite