Scout Willis is preparing to host an “experiment party.” She’s picked a bar in Los Angeles and sent out the word on her Instagram close friends Story. Originally the message was to come celebrate her belated birthday and the release of her new single.
“Then the next time I posted it, it said, ‘Come celebrate my belated birthday and my song release and being young and hot and alive.’ And then I started calling it ‘the people’s party,’” Willis says. “I don’t know who’s going to come, but I love the idea that I’ve just sent this out, to just see what happens.”
Willis, the 33-year-old daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, is quick to admit that it “feels funny” to throw a party in celebration of oneself, but she’s embracing any embarrassment that comes with.
“This year I have been really leaning into being cringe, just embracing the things that I find mortifying because I think there’s actually great power in not trying to avoid those things,” Scout Willis says. “Part of which was starting the year with an acting class and being like, ‘You know what? Yeah, I’m going to act, whatever. Who cares?’ It is kind of mortifying and there’s all these implications for me, specifically, and just in general. And I was like, ‘I don’t care.’”
Willis has been releasing music since she was in college, first as a duo called Gus + Scout and then as a solo artist, since the 2022 release of her debut solo album “Scout LaRue Willis.” In early August, she dropped her first single from her new batch of indie pop songs, “Over and Over.”
“Releasing music in a modern world is sort of contingent upon social media in a way. It’s like doing a whole art show with large-scale paintings and then you’re only releasing it on Instagram,” she says. “So you have to create the art, feel comfortable with it, put it out into the world and then absolutely let it go. It’s kind of an amazing practice in just feeling it. And I also think there’s this really sweet grief of just the completion of a cycle.”
Therein lies the desire to mark the occasion with a party, something tangible she can experience outside of her phone.
“It’s nice to ground something in real life,” she says. “And everyone wants gathering spaces. Everyone wants to know just where they can go to just meet and be in community and be in this excitement and this current, being young and alive. And I think we all feel a little isolated sometimes. It is for me and it’s for everyone, and I just want everyone to have fun and feel themselves. And that’s sort of how I perceive my music, too, because it is about me and the art I’m creating. But really my intention with it is for people to feel really good in themselves and have fun and feel turned on, or emotional, or whatever that is that they need to be feeling. Just helping create a space and a context for that.”
“Over and Over” existed as a “little finger plucking tune” for the better part of a year before Willis went into the studio this past November to see what it could become. While her first album was very much driven by her own vision, she wanted this time around to be the opposite: heavy on collaboration and experimentation.
“I really was like, I want everyone’s creative input. It became this really collaborative, cool experience that just is my favorite music I’ve ever made so far. It’s the best music I’ve ever made,” she says.
Up next will come a fall single release, which she describes as “the most sexually embodied song I’ve ever written,” with an album, tentatively titled “Songs for Sorrow and for Pleasure,” on the horizon.
“A lot of the songs on my first album I carried with me from when I first really started writing music. And a lot of them I needed to honor by completing, but I had them for five years,” Willis says. “And with these, they’re a lot more current to what’s happening in my life right now. My life is very different: I went through a big relationship transition about a year ago, and I’ve just kind of been entering a different era of my life. And a lot of this feels like a reemergence into music as the new version of myself.”
Willis was introduced to music by her parents; her mom showed her Patsy Cline, Beth Hart and other “’90s singer-songwriter girlies.” Her dad, meanwhile, introduced her to a range.
“My dad was the one who was always showing me music. It was The Coasters, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Monkees. But then he was the one in high school showing me Daft Punk. My dad loves music. He truly always was showing me new music,” Willis says. “I remember in high school, Tallulah [her sister] and I were driving to school — I’d gotten my license, so I was driving her — and we would have phases with a single artist. One of them was Roy Orbison, where all we listened to was Roy Orbison.”
Much like how she approached her new music, Willis is eager to collaborate with other artists, listing Cher and Nancy Sinatra off the top of her head, before settling on Harry Styles as a dream collaborator.
“I just dream of doing a song with Harry Styles. I always have. I love him so much,” she says. “There’s so many people I want to collaborate with. I want people to remix my music. I want to do dance music. I want to do everything. I just want to play.”
