Blythe Woods is a loser.

And no, that’s not a dig— it’s an avowed accolade that she wears with pride. “Hell yeah, I’m a loser,” she laughed, more enthusiastically than anticipated. “I am a loser. I’m the biggest loser ever.”

Her debut album, aptly titled Loser’s Guide to Life and to be released on January 15, is less self-effacing humor, though, and more a beckoning to others similar to her.

“I feel like I was—I am the weird kid,” she openly admitted. “I always will be eating lunch in the art room, only ever have one friend. I also don’t think that’s being a loser. When you’re a creative kid, I just had so much in me and so much emotion, so many things that I was trying to do. The entire time I’m at school, I’m walking into my classroom, and I’m like, ‘No, I can’t stop thinking about music. I can’t socialize with people. I can only think about art.’ So I think being the weird kid has always been my thing.”

Sharing her music, however, hasn’t always been on Woods’s radar. A songwriter since she was young, she only recently decided to take the next step and release what’s been piling up in her personal discography.

“There was no real sudden shift,” she explained. “It was just that I was working with amazing people and I had this group of songs, and we were just like, ‘Well, what’s the next step?’”

The next step came in the form of “Rowan Wait Up,” her debut single that evokes the cosmic atmosphere of Phoebe Bridgers while demonstrating Woods’s natural penchant for beautifully raw lyrics. It’s a song whose maturity and confidence could easily pass as Woods’s fiftieth instead of her first. Her third single “Sweetheart” was released October 14 and coupled with a music video, the visuals of which are just as strikingly stunning as the lyricism it makes tangible.

“The visual world also means a lot to me because I love visuals,” Woods said in regard to her unique brand. “I’m just so happy that they could get brought to life. There will be many more music videos.”

Besides the obvious inspiration of indie rock icon Bridgers, Woods says that there are two sides to her tastes. “I love me some Phoebe Bridgers, some Sabrina Carpenter, some Taylor Swift,” she listed. “I love the pop girlies. I love them all. But then also, Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty. Bob Dylan is obviously a lyricist that I take so much inspiration from, and one of my favorite lyricists is Adrianne Lenker. I love all of her writing, so I take a lot of inspiration from her. I really listen to everyone, and I think everybody that I see, I get some sort of inspiration from.”

And to Woods, her motto is to take from music what you need. Where she takes inspiration from her favorites, she shares that her own self-discovery journey through Loser’s Guide to Life will have something for everyone. “It’s just about adolescence and finding yourself and self-discovery and just all of the teenage stuff,” she said, “like everything that you feel and like those years.”

As for the guide aspect of her upcoming album, well… Woods says that it is not, in fact, an actual guide. “Loser’s Guide to Life does not mean I have the ‘Loser’s Guide to Life,’” she clarified. “That’s not what it means. Do not take advice from my album.” The “guide” part of it, instead, comes in the form of solidarity, of standing with those who can relate. With this title, Woods is practically saying, Yes, this is me, and it’s probably you, too, and we can be weird together.

“Especially for kids who, like me, have never been in a certain big group of friends or had this general popularity, I feel like finding your art is just so much cooler,” she said. “I feel like the years of high school are for just you trying to find what you want to do in life.” And instead of having the loser’s guide, her advice is this: “Find that and stick to it and study it.”

Finding one’s art is really the crux of it all for Woods, too. As someone who said that she doesn’t wish for fame or visualize the crazy experiences that come with it, she emphasized that what she wants is what she’s been doing all along—writing songs.

“That’s my plan for years,” she said. “I just never want to stop writing. So I think success would be being an adult and not like steering away from who I am.”

And as aforementioned, who she is can be summarized perfectly through the parting words she gave her listeners: “Keep on being a loser.”

Image taken from Spotify | Interviewed on September 11, 2026