Androgynous electropop 'Alien' Morgan Saint talks otherness, inclusivity: 'I don't live my life in a box'

When 24-year-old rising electropop star Morgan Saint was creating her music video for “Just Friends,” a song inspired by an unrequited love story in her own past, one thing was very important to her: that its narrative be inclusive, and not just focus on straight relationships.

The Parsons School of Design graduate and androgynous fashion trailblazer, who maintains artistic control over all aspects of her career, explains to Yahoo Entertainment while hanging backstage at Las Vegas’s Life Is Beautiful festival: “I want to make sure that everybody feels involved in what I’m doing. I certainly don’t live my life in a box, so I just don’t want my music videos to live in a box. I want everyone to feel really involved. My whole thing’s about just making people feel welcome. That’s kind of a goal of mine.”

The genre- and label-defying Saint — who grew up listening to “anything from reggae to rap to folk music” and cites Bon Iver, 50 Cent, and Bob Marley as influences — was recently named one of Paper magazine’s “100 Women Revolutionizing Pop.” And she does feel like she’s a part of a musical movement bigger than herself. “Well, I hope so,” she says humbly. “I think it’s a really cool time where music is going beyond just the music. It’s more about, what’s the story and what’s the narrative? I know that [Paper accolade] was a huge honor. I feel grateful for that.”

Saint, whose first full-length album Alien comes out Oct. 5, says her ethereal music, poetic lyrics, and ghostly vocals tend to attract fellow “sensitive souls” who relate to her vulnerability and otherness. As a shy, troubled teenager in Long Island, she turned to music for comfort –“I think especially high school is hard, and it’s hard to be different, and it’s hard to feel like you don’t quite relate to people; so, I personally just turned to music to kind of get me through those tough times, and I still do,” she explains — and now her young fans are turning to her.

“I’m obviously a new artist, so I just get overwhelmed every time someone messages me and explains how my music has helped them through a dark time or a happy moment or whatever,” Saint admits. “It’s just really a cool connection when that happens. It’s really awesome. It makes me feel that what I’m doing is… it’s worth it.”

As to whether Saint feels a responsibility to her young fans, she says tentatively, “I suppose. I think I’m grateful to be in the position where I am, where I have some sort of platform, and so I hope that just by being my authentic self, that that naturally kind of hopefully connects to people in a positive way.”

Yahoo Entertainment’s live stream of the Life Is Beautiful festival concludes Sunday, with performances by T-Pain, Bastille, Tyler, The Creator, and more. Click here to watch.

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:

• What a ride: How rapper Mike Xavier went from making Uber passengers cry to changing lives

• How rising star Knox Fortune won a surprise Grammy — and why he wasn’t there to accept it

• Travis Scott honors Vegas shooting victims during Life Is Beautiful set

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