Faye Meana Writes in Hindsight on ‘I Meant To Say’

Faye Meana does not write in the moment. The London singer, songwriter and producer tends to find the words months or years after a feeling has passed, once she can name what she should have said at the time. That delay gives her new EP its title and its structure.

‘I Meant To Say’ collects five songs about unspoken love, misplaced trust and boundaries that were never drawn. It arrives after 2025’s ’80s-leaning ‘ninety8’ and is out now via Black Butter, with a launch show at Doña in Dalston on 5 November.

Meana is classically trained on piano and produced every track on the EP herself, a habit that goes back to teaching herself GarageBand at 14 on her father’s MacBook before moving to Logic. The sound stays close to her blend of electronic soul, pop and disco.

One track, “Mine”, was written in Los Angeles a few days after she got engaged, in a session with Dana Williams. “We wrote it so quickly, it really was sappy word vomit,” she has said of it. Other songs reach further back. Meana describes returning to her younger self, and to the closed-off concentration of a childhood practice room, as a working method; travel and proximity to the ocean do the rest.

It is a personal record in the plain sense: songs drawn from a specific life rather than an assembled mood. Meana has said that every love song she has written has ultimately been about her wife, and that those are the ones she returns to.