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Some artists spend years trying to figure out who they want to be. Sara Baroni is doing it in real time.
At just 18, the Singaporean-Italian singer-songwriter already has years of music behind her, a growing catalogue of deeply personal songs and the kind of story that feels almost inseparable from the music itself. Growing up between Singapore and Italy, navigating different cultures, languages and versions of home, Sara has turned many of those experiences into songs about identity, change and everything that comes with growing up.

With a new chapter of her career already beginning to take shape, 55 Magazine had the opportunity to chat with Sara about her journey so far. But to understand Sara Baroni as an artist, it makes sense to start with where she comes from.

Her story stretches between two very different parts of the world. With Singaporean and Italian roots, Sara spent part of her childhood growing up in Singapore before moving to Italy, a transition that would eventually become much more than a biographical detail. It became part of the way she writes.

You grew up in Singapore and then moved to Italy, and your music career really started taking shape after that move. Do you think growing up between two cultures has influenced the way you see yourself as an artist, or even the way you write music?
“Growing up between two very different countries has definitely had a huge influence on both my music and my songwriting. A lot of my songs explore themes of growing up, identity, and feeling caught between different cultures. Having both Singaporean and Italian roots has shaped the way I see the world, especially through my parents, and I think that naturally is represented in my music.”

That feeling of existing somewhere between different places comes up again and again in Sara’s work, but so does something even more universal: growing up. And listeners have practically been able to do that alongside her.
Sara released her debut single, Those Days, in 2022, when she was only 14 years old. Since then, every release has captured a slightly different version of the person behind it.

You released your first song when you were only 14, which means people can almost hear you growing up through your music. When you listen back to the songs you wrote a few years ago, do you still recognise that version of yourself? Is there anything you understand differently now?
I rarely listen back to my songs once they're released. I think it can be a little scary because, after some time has passed, you're listening to an older version of yourself, especially if it is myself at the age of 14. At the same time, though, it can also be really rewarding because it allows me to see how much I've grown and how much things have changed, both with my music and personally.

And there has been plenty of change to look back on.
Songs like The Clock’s Ticking, goodbye and Different continued building Sara’s catalogue before 2025 brought two larger projects, The Start Again and Dead End. Across releases such as giulia, They Don’t Know, Where did he go?, I lost it, I miss it and Your Eyes, her songwriting increasingly began to feel like documentation of a life still unfolding.

That might be one of the most interesting things about Sara’s music right now. She isn't writing about adolescence from a comfortable distance. She is writing while she is still in it.

You’re building a music career while still experiencing a lot of the things you write about in real time. Do you ever find it difficult to decide what belongs in a song and what you want to keep for yourself? Has songwriting ever helped you understand something you didn’t fully understand when you started writing about it?
Songwriting has always helped me understand what I'm feeling in a particular moment. At the same time, I think it can be difficult to find the right words to describe certain emotions or experiences while you're still living through them. With that, I've realized that writing often becomes much easier once I've had the time to process a situation and reflect on it.

Following The Start Again and Dead End, 2026 has started introducing another version of her sound, first with rom com and now with her latest release, bathroom stalls. The song reaches back into Sara’s first years of high school in Italy, when she was still learning Italian and struggling to communicate with the people around her. Eventually, she transitioned to homeschooling.

Your latest release, “bathroom stalls,” feels like the beginning of whatever comes next after The Start Again and Dead End. Where did that song come from, and do you see it as the start of a new chapter for you?
‘bathroom stalls’ does mark a new era of my music and it was written toward the end of my high school experience, just before I switched to homeschooling. This song is especially meaningful to me because it represents the isolation I felt during my first years of high school. At the time, I had just started learning Italian, and I often found it difficult to communicate with the people around me because of the language barrier. That transition being a huge shock, it is one of the first songs I have written about my experience in high school, which has become a big part of my songwriting in this new chapter. Sonically, the song also marks an important moment for me because it features a vocoder, which became a huge part of the track and something I'd always wanted to experiment with.

And that last detail matters. Because although much of Sara's evolution can be traced through what she writes about, bathroom stalls also suggests that she is becoming more interested in expanding how those stories sound.
The vocoder introduces something new without separating the music from the intimacy that has defined her writing so far. Instead, it feels like another sign of an artist becoming more comfortable experimenting while figuring out what this next era is supposed to be.

For someone whose career began so young, there is also something refreshing about the fact that Sara doesn't seem particularly interested in pretending she already has everything figured out. Her music has room for uncertainty. It has room for older versions of herself, awkward transitions, language barriers, isolation, relationships and whatever happens next.
And there is still a lot of “next” ahead of her.

Sara is at an unusually interesting point in her career: far enough into it to already have a body of work she can look back on, but early enough that the biggest chapters may still be completely unwritten. So we ended our conversation by asking her to look a little further ahead.

So much of your story so far is about growing and changing, and you’re still at such an early point in your career. If someone finds this article again five years from now, what do you hope will have changed about Sara Baroni, and what do you hope will still be exactly the same?
I hope to continue growing my audience and eventually achieve my goal of going on my own headline tour someday. At the same time, I never want to lose the enjoyment that comes from songwriting and performing. I think it's important to keep having fun and to continue making music for the same reasons that made me start this journey in the first place.

Five years from now, maybe Sara Baroni will be reading those words from somewhere backstage on that headline tour. For now, though, there is something exciting about catching an artist at this exact point: when the ambitions are getting bigger, the music is changing with her, and there is still no way of knowing exactly where any of it will lead.

Maybe that is the whole point. Sara Baroni is still becoming.

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