It is easy to mistake Lisa Goldin’s musical catalogue for a polished time capsule of love ballads and layered drama.

What it is, in fact, is a series of deliberate choices: moments where production restraint does not mean creative scarcity, and emotional storytelling is valued over clickbait crescendos.

Her latest single, How Love Can Start, is not an accidental anthem. “I wrote it in about thirty minutes to an hour,” she says, as if writing a track that’s now being shared across continents is a casual Tuesday activity. Then came the studio work—four recording sessions, two mastering rounds, and an almost religious commitment to leaving the message intact.

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“The production is based on simplicity for the song to speak for itself.”

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Goldin, raised across South Africa, the UK, and now based in Dubai, may carry the résumé of someone schooled in global pop theatrics, but she does not manufacture her music for virality. Her world is one of res firma—firm ground in intent, even if the industry shifts beneath her. “I don’t write music for universal resonance because the song would lose its intent,” she says. “The meaning is still very much the same for me.”

That does not mean she is disconnected from her audience. Far from it. But for Goldin, resonance is a side effect, not a KPI. “Knowing my audience now relates to How Love Can Start is the loveliest feeling,” she admits, but quickly clarifies:

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“I don’t like influencing that moment because it’s theirs to have.”

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The song itself is inspired by a story too sweet to be engineered—a friend rekindling a teenage crush after ten years. How Love Can Start might sound like a fairytale for the Spotify set, but its emotional architecture is built on precision. “The song needs to breathe,” she says, describing how she arranges orchestral swells against stark piano-led verses. Visualisation plays a key role. “I imagine performing the song and taking the audience on a journey. From there, I can feel where the crescendos and stand-alone spotlights land.”

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Goldin has had her maximalist moments. Her previous single, Something I Used to Wear, took over three years and 50+ vocal layers to complete. A layered affair for a lyric about discarded clothes and discarded people—what she once called “comedic-sadness.” But the new single is leaner, if no less expressive. Think less Baz Luhrmann, more Greta Gerwig—emotive, but with just the right amount of restraint.

Still, the international scale of today’s music industry, flooded with over 120,000 new tracks per day according to Luminate, forces every artist to answer an implicit question: Is emotional subtlety still scalable? Goldin’s answer is refreshingly analog. “Trust the process,” she offers. “Time reveals all.”

For her, cultural identity shows up less in instrumentation and more in attitude. “I’ve lived in the UK, UAE, and South Africa. My friends are from everywhere,” she shrugs. “But the biggest lesson I’ve learned? People are the same everywhere. Being kind, loving and honest are the colours of the mosaic that really shape me.”

It is a sort of carpe diem with boundaries. She admits the album Something I Used To Wear—which How Love Can Start closes—marks a transition into mutual, rather than one-sided, relationships. “Perhaps the meeting of two minds that are both willing to start again,” she says.

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“Let better choices, better self-care, and better loving lead the way.”

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Goldin is not immune to industry pressure. “It takes courage launching an album of my stories,” she confesses. But she remains committed to building a catalogue that ages with her, not past her. “Being fearless in studio—that’s the running theme of this album,” she adds, laughing about her final vocal take requiring “lots of deep breaths and patience.”

So what line does she hope gets tattooed on a stranger’s heart? Without hesitation: “Take your time to get to know.” It is not a pop hook. It is an emotional pre-nup.

And in a culture of instant gratification, that alone feels radical.