If the capital is where the singer cut her teeth, however, then LA is the city that accepted her as a musician. She’s sanguine about her relationship with the British press, but recalls being mauled in one article when her 2016 debut single, Brutally, failed to chart. “I’d made about 200 or 300 songs by that point, and that was the first one where I felt I’d found this sound and actually made something to really be proud of, and then there was this piece saying that it was a chart disaster,” Waterhouse recalls. “It was an acoustic song, just a guitar, with no publicity or anything that actually ended up streaming really well in the end. But I felt for a long time that there was a push back [against my music career] that I think can happen in England.”
