Dua Lipa discusses her roots and music in a new interview

Dua Lipa feels proud of her family roots and whilst the 26 year-old star was born and raised in London, her family hail from the Balkans and Dua thinks it’s a “big part” of her identity.

She explained: “It’s such a big part of who I am. Given my parents and how they came to the U.K., [the refugee situation] has always been something that’s really close to my heart.”

Dua – who lived in Kosovo during her teens – won’t allow anyone to deny her “identity”.

“I read a lot of comments from people telling me that I don’t have a country, I don’t have an identity, Kosovo doesn’t exist.

“I lived in Kosovo, I know the lives that were lost [during the war]. So for somebody to deny me my identity and my experience, it’s hard for me to stand back and not speak up about it. So that’s something that I will always do.”

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The ‘Levitating’ hitmaker previously revealed that she loved her time in Kosovo and that she felt safer there than she did in London.

Dua explained: “I got to Kosovo and I really loved it there. It’s way safer than London. There was a sense of community and safeness – everyone knows everyone in Kosovo, especially in Pristina.”

Dua “learned a lot” from her time in Kosovo and she also has fond memories of her time at school.

She recalled: “I was the youngest in my year, which was different and exciting. It was fun, we’d go out to the city center and they’d show me around, I learned a lot from being there.

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“My parents felt a lot more comfortable letting me go out with my friends, as long as I was back by a certain time.”

“Since I was really young, I’ve always kept lists,” she says. “My parents found it really funny, because they would find them all over the house, but it’s something that I’ve done religiously—I try a new restaurant, I write it down. Movies I want to watch, books I want to read, places I want to see, drinks, recipes, everything. So all my friends send me messages like, ‘I’m in Mexico City; what can I do?’ And I’d say, ‘Oh, this, this, this, you have to see this.’”

“I always have this viewpoint that you have to be outside of your comfort zone for things to be rewarding,” Lipa said on a recent snowy morning in Manhattan. “So when the pandemic happened, and everyone was worried about whether we should release the album, I was just like, F— it, maybe it’s just what we need.

While everyone’s at home, maybe this is the album we should be putting out. It was scary, because you had no idea how long we were going to be in this pandemic. Everything was a big question mark. But I had a sense that we just had to do it.”

“Nothing was planned,” she says. “It was all like, Let’s try this out—why not? The idea that people were liking the album was the extra driving force for me to create new things and work harder and try to give them more experiences.”

Lipa has worked with an unusual mix of other musicians in a short time, from rapper Pop Smoke and Andrea Bocelli to Miley Cyrus and the K-Pop group Blackpink. Her club smash “One Kiss” with Calvin Harris won the 2019 Brit Award for British single of the year, and “Electricity,” with Silk City (Diplo and Mark Ronson), won the 2019 Grammy for best dance recording. The Club Future Nostalgia remix album included contributions from Lipa’s childhood idols Madonna, Missy Elliott and Gwen Stefani.

Lipa is currently deep into making her next album. “I’ve done a big chunk of writing: It’s starting to take shape; I’ve got a lot of it recorded,” she says. “It has a vision. It has a name, I think—for now. It’s just been fun experimenting. I’m always going to make pop music, but it has its own unique sound, which is exciting and something that feels like a movement from Future Nostalgia. It’s still in baby form, so we’ll see as it progresses.

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