As a high school and college music teacher, Sarah Fard — known by her stage name Savoir Faire — is keenly aware of how people’s race, gender, disabilities, and other factors can affect how they’re treated and what opportunities they have access to.
“There’s a lot of gatekeeping for people with disabilities because of how we are traditionally taught is the correct way to do things; there’s a ‘correct’ or more esteemed way to read music and hold an instrument,” says the Boston-based musician. “Often, it’s the old dead white guys; we’re supposed to be upholding this music as the end-all be-all of what should be in a music curriculum.” To challenge these conventions, she once tried to teach her students hip-hop, and a superior told her that was “something they should do after school.”
She became inspired to write about this topic early in the pandemic while watching the show Alias, which features a spy who thinks she’s doing good work for the CIA but is actually working for a criminal organization. Fard saw connections between this show and the current political climate, where discussions of critical race theory were becoming more prominent throughout the U.S. and also were scorned. In her hometown in New Hampshire, people had trouble acknowledging the lack of diversity in the schools. “There was a lot of ugly talk on social media, and people were saying, ‘This town doesn’t need this, there is no racism no sexism here,'” she recalls.
“I started thinking about this duality of who we like to think we are [and how] we all have this implicit bias,” she continues. “And if we think we don’t, that’s actually really dangerous because then we’re not reflecting on it; we’re not addressing it.”
These implicit biases are the subject of her latest single, “Alias,” which uses jazzy guitar, dark, pounding drums, and deep, rich vocals to explore the hidden sides of ourselves we don’t like to look at. “It’s not a face you think you’re wearing/The identity you think is you/You see, they fed you a backstory/That you think, you think tasted true,” she sings. The highlight of the track is the very end, where Fard’s voice echoes itself against heavy guitar, repeating the lyrics: “Your cover’s been blown my dear/And though you seemed sincere/I found you, I found you, I found you out.”
Fard’s goal was to have the song carry a nostalgic, vintage vibe, as well as a somewhat abrasive, moody sound that might force people to confront themselves. She recorded a demo with the vocals and guitar, then sent it to drummer and producer Dave Brophy to mix it. “The song is kind of an inquisition with the listener, sort of an old noir film where the detective is interrogating the suspects,” she says. “I hope with this song that anyone listens to it who understands its message might have a moment of reflection.”
Trained as a jazz guitarist, Fard released her first album Machine with a Memoirin 2018, followed by the 2020 single “1945” and then “Sweet,” a jazzy single released earlier this year that deals with sexist stereotypes and belittlement. “Don’t confuse helpful with helpless,” she bellows theatrically on the track, which claps back at people who pigeonhole her as spineless or easily manipulated because of her kind demeanor. “I just don’t know that men who are good at their jobs and helpful get called ‘sweet’ in the same way,” she says. She plans to compile “Sweet,” “Alias,” and another soon-to-be-released song called “Think Twice” into an EP within the next year or so.
Her desire to prompt listeners to question their assumptions and biases stems in part from the stereotypes she has faced as a female guitarist. “I didn’t feel like I had that representation growing up to feel it was possible to play,” she says. “That was because all the guitar players were men. You can say the same about flute-playing; boys don’t play flute often. Is it because they don’t enjoy it or because we’ve made it a feminine instrument?”
She makes a point to showcase her own guitar playing in her songs to combat the common assumption that as a woman, she must be primarily a vocalist. All three songs on her upcoming EP feature guitar solos. “A lot of my peers in college thought I was a vocal major or a flute major because people didn’t see me as a guitar major,” she says. “I think it never hurts to have more songs with killer guitar riffs and guitar solos by female-identifying people for the young female-identifying people who need that representation.”
All in all, she hopes her music questions — and causes listeners to question — the social constructs that limit people. For this reason, her songs can be confrontational, which serves an important purpose in today’s world. “Some day,I’m gonna write a feel good song,” she says. “But today’s not the day.”
Raised in Corsicana, Texas, Jalesa Jessie, a.k.a. Chief Cleopatra, grew up feeling stifled by the limitations of her rural environment. In a small town best known for producing honky-tonk songwriter Lefty Frizzell and a “world famous fruitcake,” according to Jessie, she always felt like an outsider. But this outsider status has carried her all the way to the precipice of something big, with the imminent release of her second EP Luna, a follow-up to 2020’s self-titled EP and her first on Park The Van Records. Today she premieres “Afrodite,” the final single before the EP drops on March 4th.
Luna finds Jessie delving deeper into her psychedelic soul roots and more experimental instrumentation, with featured production by singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Walker Lukens and performances by Curtis Roush and Jack O’Brien (The Bright Light Social Hour). “Afrodite” evokes the joy of love – not the heady ephemerality of infatuation, but the peace of consistency and belief in its lasting power. In the chorus she sings “I ain’t got nowhere to be, but with you,” layered over riffs that float along as though suspended in air, flecks of dust captured in the sunlight of a summer golden hour.
“‘Afrodite’ is myself in cosmic form… The goddess of love, eternal and insouciant,” Jessie says. “It’s a special, carefree, universal love song that ties together the very human yet otherworldly intergalactic joyride that is Luna. It’s a romance that starts on the ground and moves beyond the stars as they align.”
There is no insecurity here; there is no question of when or if the lover will leave. There is only right now, and the choice to enjoy the beauty of the present moment, rather than worry about when it will dissolve.
Jalesa Jessie’s first foray into music was classical training on piano, learning in competition with her sister. She quickly realized she lacked the patience to sit and practice for hours at a time, but those lessons revealed her ability to play by ear.
As a teenager, she dove deep into the sonic influences surrounding her (mainly gospel and soul) as well as exploring her newfound interest in rock ’n’ roll: Talking Heads, Smashing Pumpkins, Led Zeppelin. Her parents bought her the Zeppelin discography – alongside her first drum set. “I taught myself how to drum listening to John Bonham. [My parents] didn’t know anything about Led Zeppelin, but they knew I was really into it, so… that was cool,” ,” she says with a laugh.
She moved to Austin 2012in search of greater musical opportunities, and quickly connected with guitarist Leonard Martinez, who would become her longtime collaborator. They began jamming together with a series of bands over the next few years, but when none of it panned out, the pair forged their own path and began producing music under Jessie’s new moniker, Chief Cleopatra. They released a collaborative EP, Lesa x Lenny Vol.1, in 2019.
From there, it’s been a constant up-and-up. Her biggest inspiration these days is Tina Turner – after watching the recent HBO documentary, she realized, “I wanted to be the next black female rock star.” And she’s well on her way – the band was quickly noticed by and featured in the Austin Chronicle, as well as by KUTX, performing on the station’s popular hip-hop and R&B show The Breaks in 2019, resulting in the band being invited to play the third annual Summer Jam in 2020.
Though Cleopatra’s new sonic direction echoes fellow pop experimenters Blood Orange and Thundercat, that isn’t to say it will remain that way. “I’m an outsider, I’m an underdog,” Jessie maintains, describing her own genre-bending sound. “Being a Black kid growing up in Corsicana, nobody expected me to be over here liking rock bands, so I’ve always been an outsider in a sense, or outcast, in my hometown. My music is for people with no limitations. People who want to mix all these genres together to make this universal sound, and that’s really what I’m trying to accomplish.”
Follow Chief Cleopatra on Facebook and Instagram for ongoing updates.
Carli Brill is a lover of items from the past. Growing up in Southern California, Brill and her mother spent countless hours shopping in antique stores, discovering hidden gems and imagining the stories behind them. Now based in Nashville, the singer-songwriter says she draws inspiration from the unknown past still clinging to these objects.
“As a songwriter, I’m always trying to think of new concepts and ideas, so a lot of ideas actually do come from my time out at antique stores sitting and pondering ‘I wonder who owned this? What were they like and what would they think about today?’” she tells Audiofemme. “I love that vintage and antique items tell a story. They have so much depth to them. I like the mystery behind antiques and anything from the past.”
But for her latest single “Concrete Jungle” – officially out February 4th, but premiering today exclusively on Audiofemme – Brill didn’t have to imagine someone else’s life. Instead, the ethereal tune is inspired by the singer’s personal experiences and memories: visiting New York City; meeting her husband Jordan, with whom she recently celebrated eight years of marriage; paying homage to the city’s “rich music history” and all the “people that have fallen in love in this city.”
“It was such a sweet time that I had there, and the beginning stages of falling in love I think for all of us are moments that we cherish and we never forget,” Brill expresses. “I really wanted to capture that feeling and put it in a song and have the listener almost feel as if they’re falling in love as they are listening to the song.”
The pure-hearted singer accomplishes this by crafting lyrics rich with personal anecdotes; she cites the line “your smile is as bright as your tattoos” as one of the most authentic she’s written. “That’s a very dear line to me that made it in the song,” she says warmly. “The first thing that I noticed about him was his smile. It was just so bright and joyful and wide.”
She also nods to late rapper and Brooklyn native Biggie Smalls as she sings, “Baby come closer/Spread your love on me/It’s the Brooklyn way,” in the doo-wop style number, complimenting the romantic lyrics with a melody that transcends musical genre. Taking listeners on a “melodic journey,” the song begins with a slow-tempo electric guitar, leading into an up-tempo second verse incorporating “vibey” drums; Brill describes the bass as the “heartbeat” and “backbone” of the track. By song’s end, Brill layers ‘60s girl group vocals that turn the song into an experience.
“That was really important in the creation of the song,” she asserts of how the melody matches the story. “[It] almost feels as though your head is spinning at that point when you’re falling in love and you’re like ‘I don’t care what happens, life is great, nothing can upset me.’”
These intriguing instrumentals are a common thread across Brill’s compelling catalogue. The eclectic artist began this process with one of her recent releases, “Hey Little Girl,” an upbeat, genre-defying number that encourages optimism and smiling through life’s misfortunes. “I discovered a lot about myself and I gained a lot of confidence in writing that and I realized I was writing this song to myself,” she explains of the song’s conception. “I was able to see what kind of artist I wanted to become.”
Her songs act as a time lapse, transporting the listener through multiple eras with ever-evolving melodies that match the old soul that shines through in her lyrics, harkening back to the days when Brill and her mother would frequent vintage stores.
With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, Brill hopes that “Concrete Jungle” will inspire listeners to lead with an open heart and express their feelings to the people they love. “I would hope that they would feel encouraged to tell somebody that they love them, even if it’s not in a romantic way,” Brill shares. “We often associate Valentine’s Day with a romantic love, but… it doesn’t have to be romantic love.”
Brill is set to release more new music in the coming months, focused on cultivating an audience of kindred listeners. “I hope that what I create is going to speak to people and I want to always create from an authentic place. It’s sharing what you actually think and what you actually feel about something regardless of how others are going to react to that. It’s how I feel and what I actually believe inside,” Brill says. “I hope that people will connect with that.”
Growing up in Los Angeles, Lily Donat always had a knack for storytelling, especially through sound. The granddaughter of Helen Reddy, Donat has songwriting in her blood, honing her craft and learning on the go. But to commit to a career as a musician, Donat had to shed some of her pain and focus on finding her emotional center. “I was always writing songs, but just kind of waiting for opportunity versus chasing it. Recently, within the last year, I was like, there’s no option but to give this my all,” she tells Audiofemme. “You find your way and you learn on the fly and cool things happen that way. There’s no one way to do things.”
That commitment has paid off – Donat released her debut single “Supernova” in November of last year, following it up in December 2021 with “Most Important Man.” Today, she premieres “How It Feels” on Audiofemme; taken together, the three tracks tie loosely together in a trilogy that documents Donat’s personal journey in overcoming a toxic relationship fueled by obsession and heartbreak. “How It Feels” is the story’s uplifting conclusion, analyzing how the singer-songwriter felt after that period of emotional turmoil, and the subsequent growth from the experience – the musical equivalent of the notion that with the closure of one door another opens.
“It’s a three-part story and each song is like a story on its own. With this song, I wanted to kind of be… truthful, but optimistic and hopeful. It’s the emergence of hope… the song of recovery and healing,” Donat explains. “I hope it’s energizing. I hope it’s that kind of song you hear when you think you might be coming on the other side of something [and can] see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
That contrasts sharply with her previous singles, which depict being trapped in a vicious cycle that seems impossible to break. In “Supernova,” Donat sings, “I wouldn’t go back to the dark alone/But I’d meet you there,” and “I know why I fell in/Into your well of love and rage and sin/All the chaos and the anguish/Somehow better than the absence.” Musically, the track incorporates elements from electronic and pop music to reflect the deep sense of isolating darkness she felt at the time.
“Most Important Man” is sonically lighter, with a fast, punchy beat and energetic piano, but its lyrics are even more bleak: “They must think that I just love the pain/You’re the dark side/I’ve got dark sides/Now we’re both fucking insane.” There’s a sense of realization about the situation Donat describes in the second verse, when she sings, “Oh, can you see yourself?/Clearly I couldn’t/I thought your violence was for everyone else,” before she finally admits, “I have made a grave mistake/Confusing the torment with pleasure.”
But without these dire lows, Donat may never have arrived at the sense of freedom she captures on “How It Feels.” There is a tangible sense of sailing through the ups and downs, with Donat’s gaze fixed ahead.
Soft acoustic guitar accompanies Donat’s resolute opening lines: “I push my crown through the crest of a wave/The water’s deep, it’s the color of jade/And I love the crash, it’s the sound of escape/You slip my mind most days.” Like those waves, each verse builds layers of instrumentation and with each chorus Donat gains increased strength from her conviction. Airy synth, resolute percussion, and a subtle but triumphant electric guitar riff come to the fore as Donat literally belts, “I feel stronger.” It’s easy to imagine Donat sailing through the waves in the direction of the sun, toward a new horizon.
This is in large part a result of how Donat communicates via natural metaphors. “How It Feels” is abundant with references to swimming, the ocean and the natural setting in which she says she can express her most authentic self. “I use nature in all my songs and sometimes there’s deeper meaning,” she admits. “Things can be kind of layered in my songwriting, and be more personal than maybe meets the eye.”
Like with any good poetry, there is more in what’s unsaid than said. Donat’s lyricism transports the listener and empowers them to fill in their own blanks and relate their own experiences to the vivid imagery Donat creates; her powerful visuals allow the resonant emotion to sink in. In this case, it’s the positivity that comes from striving forward – and maybe even a little glimmer of satisfaction from glancing back at a bad situation that’s lost its once powerful grip. “Is this how it feels to win? Cause didn’t I? Is this how it feels to live in one world at a time?” Donat sings in the song’s chorus.
“Essentially, it is kind of about revenge,” she says. “My revenge is… a display of the maturity that can come when you are actually removed from the emotional pull of something that caused a lot of pain and anger.”
Ultimately, “How It Feels” is a tale of healing and inner peace, and Donat knows the journey is ongoing. “There’s always that pull, right? To turn back and return to the darkness – I’ve written a lot about that. My first two singles were about that [need] to look back, and to go back,” she says. “I hope [“How It Feels”] propels you towards the momentum… realizing that this appreciation and gratitude is only possible, because of healing and a deeper personal peace.”
Follow Lily Donat on Instagram for ongoing updates.
Relationships that burn through our lives like meteors can be revolutionary. After a wine-soaked evening out with her BFF and frequent creative collaborator Jess Sweetman, singer-songwriter Dyan Valdés found herself reflecting on just how important those relationships can be.
“We often get together and plot how we are going to change the world, and this evening was no exception. On the way home, I kept thinking about how much my life has changed for the better because of this friendship,” Valdés says, “and how much she has energized me to tackle painful and difficult issues with my music and my career in general.” This personal realization became the basis for a new song called “Be My Revolution,” coinciding with worldwide protests and social justice movements.
“By the time my taxi arrived home, I had thought up the first verse and chorus,” she continues. “I went straight into my music room and recorded the first version of the song, hopefully not waking up my poor neighbors in the process. The idea behind the song was to capture all of the love and excitement that go along with political awakening, that delicious feeling of finding your ‘people’ as you try to make the world a better place.”
Initially, the line “she’s my revolution” erupted in her brain, but eventually morphed into the hook as it’s heard now. “Storm my walls and take me/Break me down and change me,” she provokes, funneling passion like fresh chopped kindling into a fireplace. “Shake me up and wake me/Be my revolution.”
“Protest was in the air,” Valdés notes. Black Lives Matter, Fridays for Future, and protests surrounding the assault and murder of Sarah Everard converged into a boiling vat of pain, police brutality, and a long-overdue reckoning. “All of these movements were responding to horrific circumstances, but it was invigorating to see people take to the streets in solidarity and with a vision for a better world. Whether on a larger social level or on a personal level, the connections we make with people who give us hope can be truly revolutionary.”
“I realized that this awakening feels a lot like falling in love and vice versa,” Valdés adds. “You are terrifically excited, a little scared, and yet full of hope for a future you can’t quite imagine.”
“Be My Revolution” leads into Valdés’ forthcoming solo debut record, Stand, expected early 2022, and also siphons rage and rebellion from her own very personal experiences. Now based in Berlin, the Cuban-American artist was attacked in broad daylight by a man in the early days of the pandemic. She was rattled but “arrived home, fortunately safely, and felt overwhelmed by my own experience, by reports of increased domestic violence and the exploitation of female labor at the frontlines of the pandemic response.”
Stand sculpts its lyrical venom and torrential emotional winds from this specific moment but appeals to the universal institutions long built against women and for men. As such, Valdés, known for her work as founding member of The Blood Arm and Mexican Radio, as well as keyboardist in Die Sterne, turned to working exclusively with women on the record, from production to styling and design. It’s a reclaiming of agency – and “Be My Revolution” simply sparks the ignition.
Follow Dyan Valdés on Twitter and Instagram for ongoing updates.
Nicole Marxen says that she was “really insecure” when she started out in music. “I didn’t grow up playing music,” she says on a recent phone call. “It’s something that I got into by accident in my early 20s and was obsessed with it, but I always felt a little behind everyone else.”
Earlier this year, Dallas-based Marxen, who cut her teeth with the band Midnight Opera, released her first solo EP, Tether, and since the summer she’s been playing live solo as well. “Forcing myself to do it on my own really helped me navigate some of those boundaries that I could not get past,” she says. “Playing live by myself too has been a really good experience because you don’t have anyone else up there to bounce energy off of or depend on. It’s just you, so you need to be able to work a room.”
Today, Audiofemme premieres the video for “Bones / Dust,” directed by Salt Lake City-based Richard Krause. “The first time I heard ‘Bones / Dust,’ I knew I wanted to make a music video for it,” writes Krause in his director’s statement. “Nicole’s vocals are haunting yet beautiful, like a siren’s call. As I listened, atmospheric black-and-white images flooded my mind. A world encased in fog. Giant monsters emerging from the earth, coming for humanity. Shadows and light painting the scenes.”
“He came to me with some test renders and I was just blown away,” says Marxen.
“Bones / Dust” was one of the earliest songs that Marxen wrote for the EP, dating back about five or so years prior to the release of Tether. Much of the rest of the collection was written around 2018 and reflect Marxen’s grief over the loss of her mother.
“She passed away ten years ago, but because I was so young when it happened and my life was so busy, I really didn’t grieve until 2018,” she says. “Things were just moving so fast and I had a lot of living to do before I was in a place where I felt safe and secure enough to do so.”
Marxen was inspired to write – and to process that belated grief – while going through her mother’s belongings. “Sorting through her stuff was really the thing that triggered it and left the floodgates open,” she says.
She points to “Moonflower,” from the EP, as a song that came out of this process. Marxen notes that, at the time, she was getting interested in plants and gardening, as her mother had been. “I wish it was something that we could have experienced together, bonded over, but the fact that it found me regardless, I thought that was really beautiful,” she says.
To bring these songs to life, Marxen knew that she would have to work solo. “Looking back on it now, I understand it a little more, that it was a pretty integral part of my grieving process to do something with those songs alone,” she says.
For her solo debut, Marxen turned to producer Alex Bhore, with whom she had previously worked. “I just had 100% trust in him that he was going to help me do the songs justice,” she says. “I’m still super proud with what we were able to come up with and I love working with him.”
Gradually, the EP came together over the course of about a year and a half. “Now, I just trust the process so much more,” she says. “I trust that we’re going to do songs justice and, if it takes a while, that’s okay. Sometimes, it takes time to find what’s right. That’s the only way that I want to write music right now.”
Marxen began performing live again in July; she’s been playing mostly in and around Dallas, but one gig took her to a Victorian home in Wichita, Kansas. “They were just the coolest family ever that opened their house to this goth night,” she says of the hosts for the show. “The promoter found my music somehow and asked if I wanted to do it and I said yes, so I went and didn’t know a single person, but by the end of the night I had a million new friends and it was really cool.”
With shows lined up in Fort Worth, Dallas and Denton this December, Marxen is also at work with producer Bhore on a full-length album. “I feel like I’ve expressed my grief fully and now it’s time to figure out what else I need to say,” she says.
“Honestly, [Tether] just helped me find myself as an artist. I couldn’t really write any truths without going for my most painful one first,” says Marxen. “It was something that I needed to deal with it and it wasn’t until dealing with it that I was able to set myself free.”
Lily Vakili once asked her mother, “What do you want me to be?” She was never one to give “easy answers,” as Vakili recalls, and her response propelled the singer-songwriter to question her place in the world. “I want you to be a compassionate human being,” she told her daughter. Vakili’s mother died from Alzheimer’s disease, and in many ways, the long goodbye served as the catalyst to revisit a previously recorded song.
“Dreamy Dreamer,” originally appearing as “Dreamy Dreamers” on the Vakili Band’s 2018 LP Oh Alright, wound itself around Vakili’s brain. “My mother was a dreamy dreamer, a deeply ethical and compassionate person,” she muses. “In some ways, she’s a catalyst for everything that I do, creatively – not the only catalyst, but a catalyst.”
With “Dreamy Dreamer,” Vakili and bandmates Ben St. Jack (guitar, songwriter), Joel Dorow (harmonica), Gordon Kuba (drummer), Jim Tyndall (bass), and Matt Jovanis (bass) worked with producer Dave Amlen, who suggested a back-to-roots adaption. “This is a great thing about collaborating with other artists and friends and just listening to people paying attention,” offers Vakili.
In their creative endeavors, she discovered a vocal approach “that changes the way I feel about it, and I think it changes the way the listener feels about it.” And “Dreamy Dreamer” exemplifies the best of Vakili’s work, often calling to touchstones like Patti Smith and Brandi Carlile. Her voice is as butter on a hot tin roof, just enough sizzle to drive home the emotional anvil.
Initially intended as a social justice meditation, the song’s transformation into a universal plea for love in all its forms, even the damaged and broken, was reaffirmed recently when Vakili read a piece on Ashley M. Jones, named the new Poet Laureate of Alabama, a role she’ll hold from 2022-2026. What struck Vakili deep in her soul was Jones’ description of love, felt like unshakeable tremor, that now guides every facet of Vakili’s life. “The biggest thing that I learned moving away is that love is a complete word,” Jones explained. “It’s not just, ‘I like this thing, it’s always good to me.’ Love means also understanding what’s wrong and committing to change for the better.”
In the last few years, she has been doing much of this deeply personal work in her life, confronting herself in the mirror with a searing honesty. “I guess, sometimes it’s about change, and sometimes it’s about honesty,” she says, recognizing “that there’s probably much more that I can do as an individual” and understanding “where I am in society and what I am able to do and contribute, so that I can approach people with a greater sense of compassion.”
The role of grief appeared as an integral thread to the song’s thematic fabrics of love and empathy, as well. “My son was diagnosed very young on the autistic spectrum, and had an underlying medical condition. That’s pretty serious. That puts you in a whole world that one never anticipates,” she reflects. “As with a lot of grief, you can either shut it off and proceed as if it isn’t altering you at a cellular level, or you wade in and experience it. There is one solution, and it’s exactly what I wanted to end up singing about in the song, which is love.”
“Within that world of great grief and exhaustion, there is the physical challenge of being a character,” she continues. “There are these extraordinary gestures of kindness and solidarity and compassion, and my son’s been the beneficiary of those things. So, I’ve witnessed the way any elder hopefully can teach someone else in how you do this. This is how you’re kind. This is how you ease someone’s mind for a little bit. This is how you show solidarity.” Those experiences served as the blueprint for the song’s rousing refrain: “I stand with you in your quest to believe in justice/Tempered by compassion/Yeah, truth without deceit/Where everyone can say without hesitation/Love is all that matters.”
Her father, an Iranian immigrant who became a plant geneticist in Honduras, and her mother, an Irish-American librarian, believed in the power of music, words, and dreaming beyond the here and now. Vakili first began writing poetry for her mother when she was only six years old, and despite not quite understanding the gravity of her work then, it became evident she was onto something huge. “I didn’t even characterize it as poetry. I loved her, and I was a writer, so I wanted to express myself. Then, I started to realize that the things that I’d written were all stories, fundamentally,” she recalls.
Spending part of her childhood in Puerto Rico, home life was filled with a “wild mix” of sounds which included the West Side Story soundtrack, traditional Peruvian music, R&B, funk, honky-tonk, and Merengue music. “These rhythms were just everywhere, and I was like a sponge. I love music. I love rhythm and percussion,” she says. “Of course, the acoustic guitar really is in its essence a percussive instrument.” She picked it up around the age of 14, when her older sister left for college. “I am a believer that strange things happen all the time. Sometimes, you don’t know until much later what that thing was that unlocked what you’d maybe been seeking or hoping to explore. Playing the guitar was a mixture of an escape of sorts and meditation, a way of being super present.”
Now a biotech lawyer by day and a musician by night, Vakili is more present than ever. With two previous solo records and one band LP to her credit, her love for words and music-making is only growing stronger and brighter with each project. “I love writing. I love words. I love intentionality. And I love listening. So, I try to make myself available,” she offers about her growth as a songwriter over the years.
Her favorite words? “You mean, other than curse words? I am embarrassed to say, but I just have a phenomenally filthy mouth,” she says with a laugh. “I think it’s because curse words are highly percussive.”
More seriously, Spanish, her native language, is home to many of her favorite words and phrases. “I love ‘te adoro’ — I adore you. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? Spanish itself is such an incredible language to listen to,” she says. “As my mother went further and further into Alzheimer’s, one of our favorite pastimes was, I would bring a dictionary or a newspaper, and I would read it to her. I would read simple things that I knew she would appreciate. She still loved words so much.”
“Dreamy Dreamer” arrives as not only an important marker of the past, its emotional messaging scrawled in acoustic tears, but a bellwether for the band’s future — one carved in compassion and musical excellence.
Follow Vakili Band on Twitter and Instagram for ongoing updates.
Cat Valley, a self-proclaimed “angry lady band” out of the small, bay-side Bellingham, Washington just North of Seattle, aren’t shy when it comes to calling out sexism—particularly within the music industry.
With that familiar Riot Grrl verve, relatability, and self-possession, the feminist foursome lambast crude Craigslisters, interruptive male coworkers, and even their own fathers on their new track “Manager,” a new single off their forthcoming EP Feral.
Along with being a clever, catchy, feminist banger, “Manager,” is a pertinent representation of the group’s folksier roots, and the louder, more electric sound they’ve landed on now.
“‘Manager’ is kind of an interesting song. It does start a little softer and you can hear some of our singer-songwriter-y roots in the beginning and then it gets really loud and surfy at the end,” says Abby Hegge, guitarist, vocalist and one of the founding members of Cat Valley.
Originally, Cat Valley was a duo, formed when Hegge met guitarist-vocalist Whitney Flinn in 2016 at her house show birthday party, organized by a mutual friend. “She asked my friend Tyson to book the house show for her and she and I were both playing singer-songwriter music at the time – she plays harp and I play acoustic guitar music,” remembers Hegge. “It seemed like a good genre match so Tyson got me on the bill. I heard her play and I cried, and she heard me play and she cried, and then we were like, can we jam?”
They named their band “Cat Valley” as an ironic nod to another all-male local band playing around at the time, “Dog Mountain.” “They kind of had some dudebro energy and we thought it would be funny if we named ourselves Cat Valley because it was the opposite of Dog Mountain. I did text them and asked them if it would hurt their feelings if we did that and they said to go for it,” Hegge says.
The origins of their name also complements the feminist themes that arise naturally in their collaborative songwriting. “We knew we wanted to write songs about feminism because we were both getting fed up with different things we were doing within our lives. And so, kind of through the songs being angry, that kind of elevated them to a louder place,” explains Hegge. “And then we realized we wanted them to be louder, so we started playing with more effects, started adding distortions, and then one of our friends offered to play drums for us.”
When that drummer friend had to move on, Hegge and Flinn were able to find drummer Melanie Sehman through their volunteerism with Bellingham Girls Rock Camp, a youth program that encourages social change through teaching music. Shortly thereafter, they recruited bassist Kristen Stanovich for the band, too. “Melanie was like, I’m a drummer, I like your music, let’s play,” says Hegge. “And then our friend Kristen joined the band, who is actually the partner of Tyson, the friend who initially introduced Whitney and I all those years ago.”
From there, the foursome began churning out fresh music, which they say is inspired by groups like La Luz and Sleater-Kinney, two all-women rock bands that also have ties to the Pacific Northwest and, like Cat Valley, draw from the patriarchy-bashing tradition of the Riot Grrl movement.
Their first demo, which features a cover image of Hegge’s orange cat, came out in 2016, followed by a self-entitled EP released in 2018. 2021’s Feral EP, while similar to past work, takes the themes they’ve always explored even further, and showcases how far they’ve come as a group.
Sure enough, Feral strikes a brilliant balance—it’s charmingly relatable, unabashed and bold. “Manager”—which begins somewhat sweetly before seething with rage over the intergenerational trauma of limiting gender roles by the end—is a perfect example of that.
“We were thinking about seeing our mothers feel more of the burden of raising children than our fathers and taking the kids to school and doing what their husbands say and those kinds of ideas,” says Hegge. “And we’re kind of yelling about some of our experiences that we’ve had, like Whitney getting talked over at a meeting, and a gross guy who answered one of my Craigslist ads by hitting on me.”
In fact, the title “Manager” comes from Hegge’s experience of watching her manager at Guitar Center—a woman—have to continually convince customers that she was actually the manager.
“[Customers] would come in, talking to her about something, and then she’d be like, oh yeah no this thing can’t happen, sorry. And they’d be like, can I talk to the manager? And she’s like, I am the manager. And they’re like can I talk to your manager. And she’s like, no I am the highest manager here. And they just wouldn’t believe her and would leave,” she recounts.
When asked if the band ever worries about the audience’s response to the “angry feminism” in their songs, Hegge balks. They are proud to be angry. It offers them a source of catharsis, particularly in a music industry that continually underestimates them because of their sex. “One time somebody wrote an album review of us and said it was all acoustic. We were just like, is this because we’re girls? What? There’s literally not one acoustic instrument on this album,” says Hegge. “Stuff like that.”
“I didn’t realize how angry I was – Whitney was a big catalyst for me realizing I was angry, honestly,” she continues. “She was already fired up and she’s a little older than me so she had experienced more and knew what sexism looked like and she’s very good at standing up for herself. I was like, oh wow, she’s really angry, she’s got a lot to be angry about. I bet I do too! And then I realized that I did and I was like, wow, I’ve really been playing it nice and pretending like nothing bothers me, but I don’t have to.”
Cat Valley’s fierce and original Feral EP drops November 12th. Additionally, the group will be playing a handful of shows around Seattle and Bellingham over the next few months. Their next show (with Kitty Junk) will be at Seattle’s High Dive on October 28th.
Follow Cat Valley on Facebook for ongoing updates.
Since releasing her first album in 1990, pop-folk singer-songwriter Dar Williams has been known for songs that critique social norms around gender, capitalism, and more. She’s gearing up to release her first album in six years, I’ll Meet You Here (out October 1), and her latest single off the LP, “Berkeley,” celebrates those who don’t fit into the boxes society prescribes — even going so far as to question the validity of the boxes themselves.
Williams wrote the song about a summer she spent in Berkeley, California when she was 20 years old and how the spirit of the city inspired her. “I was amazed at how hard Berkeley was holding on to its ’60s roots and how much I loved it,” she says. She remembers going to the city’s famous People’s Park and meeting communists, people who didn’t believe in property, and others who taught her new ways of thinking.
“The romance of the city, that dreamer mentality… that kind of poetic environment makes for a good song,” she says. “What I really hoped for was to be a witness of Berkeley, but also a participant — still a believer myself.”
Her warm, rich voice sings a hypnotizing melody against simple acoustic guitar and strings, with lyrics that welcome the listener into the unique community she writes of: “The old world was fading/The canvas was waiting/Pale eucalyptus and lavender light/We courted the mayhem.”
While “Berkeley” commemorates a spirit and attitude that has persisted for generations, much of Williams’ upcoming album thematically deals with accepting change. Soothing previous single “Time, Be My Friend” makes peace with the uncertainty of the future through an open letter to time itself: “You will never tell me something/That has not happened yet/And you will never make a promise/But I can get just what I get.”
On the spirited “You Give It All Away,” she sings about dealing with the music industry’s transition from CDs to streaming, which made it more difficult for indie artists like her to break into commercial radio stations. “A lot of bandwidth was given to a very theatrical, sensational kind of pop music that was more spectacle, that was really beautiful but was very high production,” she explains. “Back in my day, I did Lilith Fair based on the response of my audience, so I had what we would call an audience-based career. Your audience-based career could hit critical mass, and you could get reception from that, like Ani DiFranco.” The song mourns the loss of this culture with lyrics like “The silver hope kaleidoscope is spinning us away.”
On the more upbeat and charmingly catchy single “Today and Everyday,” Williams sends a message contrary to the narrative most of us are hearing these days: “I can save the world today and every day.” The video, which captures a sense of childlike innocence with stop-motion animation, is meant to encapsulate the “beauty and magic in keeping our optimism alive,” Williams explains. “It feels like an uphill battle, but actually the tool box has never been more full for us to take on both the issues of social diversity and biodiversity.”
Williams has been a part of this fight herself. In 2017, she released her first book What I Found in a Thousand Towns, which documents what she’s learned during her time touring and talking to people in various cities about community building, sustainability, and urban planning. It’s based around the concept of “positive proximity” — that people do best when they’re living close together, both physically and emotionally.
She’s currently working on her next book, A Song That Matters. The songwriting guide is based on retreats she runs, as well as her overall songwriting approach, one she describes as “a patient one,” explaining, “I create the song, but I listen to what’s happening as it’s being created, so I’m guiding and listening as I go.”
Williams, who resides in Cold Spring, NY, is also known as a pioneer for advancing the recognition of women in the music industry. In 1997, she performed in the very first rendition of the Lilith Fair, an all-female music festival. “The ’90s were so much about women making acoustic music and sort of getting off of some of the mainstream grid to build that subculture,” she says. “The fact that Lilith Fair happened was a really big milestone.”
Now that restrictions are lifting, she’s excited to be playing live shows again. She’s currently gearing up to tour around the country to promote I’ll Meet You Here. “I’m finding that people are showing up game to wear masks and do all those things, and when they do, that it works,” she says. “It looks like people are more than happy to do that to have live music, so I’m confident that we’re going to be okay.”
In the eyes of Nashville-based Kayla Graninger, who performs art pop under the moniker Elke, words are gifts. As a lifelong reader of poems, books and lyrics, she turned her attention to music full time at the age of 24 after having an epiphany when talking to a friend and fellow writer. “She always told me, ‘Don’t miss an opportunity to say something.’ That was super essential as I’m trying to find a voice,” Elke tells Audiofemme. “I think words are super important and I think they get taken for granted, so I see myself having a purpose in that way. I’ve always paid attention to words. When somebody says something that uplifts you or it’s an arrangement to say something that wakes you up in a way, I really was striving for that.”
Raised in Illinois, Elke left high school at 17 to pursue a modeling career in New York City, yet came to the city equipped with a guitar in hand. She channeled her passion for words directly into her 2018 debut EP, Bad Metaphors,as well as the singles she’s released since. “The Bad Metaphors EP was really honing in on words and what they meant to me. I went about that wanting every word and every part to say exactly what it meant to say,” she says. “That was really good practice for me and a good confidence booster too.”
The EP was something of a musical experiment where she flipped the idea of what a female vocalist is expected to sound like on its head: embracing a rock sound; leaning into the masculine side of her voice; challenging the traditional gender roles foisted upon her, first by her conservative upbringing, then reinforced when she began modeling as a young adult, with her appearance under constant scrutiny. “I was sick of this whole privacy, feeling reserved, feeling like I need to sound a certain way. I really wanted that to be the focus for that EP specifically,” she explains. “I was really inspired by not feeling like I needed to be tied to a genre or a gender. That was really important for me at that time to feel like I could freely write about experiences and singing in a way that I felt empowered by.”
All of these efforts have paved the way for Elke’s upcoming debut LP, No Pain For Us Here, out September 24 via Nashville imprint Congrats Records. The album marks new territory for the singer, as she rediscovers her feminine voice. The refreshed sound is a result of calling on boyfriend Zac Farro, drummer for Paramore and producer behind Becca Mancari’s 2020 album The Greatest Part, to produce the record and help broaden Elke’s approach. “I got to express myself in different ways that have inspired me to not feel so trapped behind a guitar and to perform more,” she explains. “It’s brought out more of this feminine side too, which I enjoy now. I feel balanced in a weird way because of this entire journey. Being able to find that voice was super helpful with this balance. I know moving forward, I’ve been thinking about even more different ways to sing. It’s definitely helped me grow and look in an upward direction.”
Her artistic reimagination is exemplified by her latest single, “The Pink Tip Of A Match Turns Black,” premiering exclusively with Audiofemme. While the song honors her rock roots with electric guitar, Farro’s production efforts accentuate the lighter, more delicate aspects of Elke’s naturally rugged voice, tinged with warm, feminine notes.
The song is deeply personal for the eclectic artist, as it was born out of a falling out with a close friend in New York that left Elke feeling pained and lost. “I wanted clarity from it because it wasn’t a pretty ending. There was no closure and I got really hurt from it,” she shares. “That was heavy on my heart at that moment, so I wanted closure.”
She compares the frustrating experience to watching one’s favorite TV show with foreign subtitles while stating point blank, “I may have lost this one/What I thought was a friend/Your face was easy from familiarity/The pink tip of a match turns black.” The song ends with an extended interlude as she softly repeats the word “bye,” the process of writing the song helping to heal the wounds that inspired it.
“I want every word to mean exactly what it means, and if I could have achieved that with that song to help me move on, it did,” she proclaims. “I think that you can really feel jaded by certain situations and I wanted to walk away from it feeling tall. It was meant be light, it was meant to be abstract. I really like the words for it, which makes me feel like I could find some clarity and meaning so I could move on, learn something.” Rather than focus on the dissolution of her friendship, Elke chooses to portray the feeling of waking up, or “feeling like you’re in a daze and then you see something and you feel enriched.” She hopes that fans won’t simply listen to the song, but truly hear it and be present in the moment to absorb its message, and “understand that life is actually quite good,” she says.
“The Pink Tip of a Match Turns Black” symbolizes the release of a dark personal experience, coming out on the other side more secure in who she is. It ties in to the album’s overall theme of freedom, each song representing a different stage of liberation in Elke’s journey. “Every other step of the way is either self-reflection, feeling like I know who I am and I’m cool with that. Every song ties together in that way of the steps to feeling free,” she conveys. “It was a part of the journey of freeing myself too from this New York attitude – feeling like I love being in love and feeling free and there being no boundaries to that. I still really held myself to every lyric saying everything that I wanted to say.”
While the album is inspired by her love story with Farro, its messages hit on a deeper level, celebrating fearless connection with one another as humans. “It’s definitely Zac and I falling in love, but not every song is really about that, but more so about the freedom that I felt after the conclusions of ‘I’m loved and people can be loved,’” she explains. “The idea that life is painful and that you need some sort of edge to feel present or to feel like you’re making it, I wanted to let go of all of that. I called it No Pain For Us Here because I think that the message is more important that there doesn’t need to be pain and that you can feel that to be a free person and you deserve love and your worth is so relevant. Everybody has a worth.”
Life doesn’t always unfold the way we expect. That’s certainly been true for Brooklyn-based polymath Reni Lane, who has had quite an unpredictable journey – taking her from New York, to London, to Paris and beyond as a touring keyboard player for British band Razorlight, contemporary composer, high fashion runway model, Ivy League dropout, and proponent of the slow conscious creativity movement. Though she’s been a creative force in numerous communities and varying scenes, the modern-day “Reni-ssance woman” always comes back to music, and today she premieres here latest single “Detour” exclusively on Audiofemme.
“We’re going on a detour/Show you everything you ignored/Going on a detour/All the magic outside of your door/We don’t need a map/Your heart is all you need to pack,” Lane coos with earnest sentiment and richness of tone, echoing influence from Aimee Mann, Chryssie Hynde, and Stevie Nicks. “Detour” is an upbeat, timeless ballad – rhythmic and existential, the song pushes us to reclaim our inner strength, when we seem to venture off track from our intentions. In an opulent video shot in Ecuador by Oscar Zabala, Lane dons mysterious robes and frolics through cinematic landscapes with the cool, calm, collected poise of an androgynous 1970s glam rock-era icon.
The symbolism in “Detour” will feel relatable to almost anyone, but Lane’s own meandering personal journey certainly inspired it. Born Reni Jablonsky in the idyllic college town of Corvallis, Oregon, she spent a lot of time in the woods as a kid, building forts and learning about indigenous cultures. Her childhood was mostly solitary; a sibling was diagnosed with autism, and their friendship didn’t blossom until their adult years. One of Lane’s friends began to study the Suzuki Method on the piano. Fascinated, this inspired Lane to start piano lessons, which quickly became a time-consuming passion.
“My study of the piano took up all of my time. My obsession didn’t seem weird or unusual to me or to anyone else, because in our town in Oregon, there were a lot of artists and creatives.” Lane remembers; she soon felt ready to break free of the structured Suzuki Method, and began writing and experimenting musically. Her parents were nurturing and supportive, buying her a thrift store piano, and allowing her talent to thrive through supportive teachers. The culture shock came when her family moved to a more conservative town Williamsburg, Virginia when Lane was eleven. “I had never had to think about what I wore to school, or what was going on in pop culture. My idols were people like Hans Zimmer, Jane Goodall and Frida Kahlo,” she says. “I remember starting my first day of middle school in Virginia and people thought I was strange because I had no idea who the Backstreet Boys were.”
Still a self proclaimed nerd, Lane admits this was a turning point in her personal development, and finding her voice and truth in music became a protective shield. “It set me apart. Sharing my music helped me fit in and find my place as a teenage adolescent. It really did gain me respect, in a traditionally vicious public school setting,” she recalls. “I stayed true to myself – I was weird, the preppy kids were still going to make fun of me, but they had nothing on how good I was at music. It was my thing.”
Aside from music, Lane’s extraordinary abilities in math allowed her to graduate high school early, and she moved to New York City and took a desk job at a real estate company while pursuing music professionally with the support of a management team. The following year she enrolled at the prestigious Columbia University, first as a Philosophy major before switching gears to Creative Writing. She began forming and embracing her DIY ethos, commuting downtown for gigs at Sidewalk Cafe. Around this time, she began throwing parties and putting on live shows in her dorm room around a makeshift stage; she independently released her album American Baby in 2007. “That record was like a really expensive business card and a litmus test all in one,” she says. A self-shot, self-edited spoof video called “Frontiers of Science” went viral, prompting major record labels to court the young performer.
Lane signed to Universal Motown, and began living the dream of jet-setting around the world to meet with one hit producer after another. The label pressured her to drop out of Columbia to focus on the release of her major label debut, Ready. Consumed with the expectations from her label, she began to feel disillusioned and isolated, with her image and visibility under lock and key. “I always saw myself more as a renegade, DIY type person, but I was constantly pushed towards the Disney model,” Lane says.
Then, after a solo gig in Los Angeles, Lane was approached by Z Berg and Tennessee Thomas to play keyboards in LA buzz band The Like, on their tour supporting The Arctic Monkeys. “Joining The Like was a contrast to what I was experiencing in my own career. There were a lot of handler-type people around me in those days telling me that there were certain ways things needed to be done,” Lane says. “Once I joined The Like and saw their ship was run completely differently, it took a bit of the credibility away from those handlers, which was both terrifying, because it meant I was more alone than I thought, but also liberating. They brought joy back into my life in terms of just having fun with music.”
Though nowadays playing in multiple projects is understood as more exposure, back then, Lane’s management saw her involvement with a band outside her solo work as a conflict. Warned by seasoned manager Jazz Summers that Universal Motown was likely to drop her, lacked resources to promote her as a unique entity, and would “screw it up,” the exposure likely to come from playing for The Like seemed tantalizing. “It was the first time someone really straight up told me what was going to happen with my record deal,” Lane says. “I had this moment where I was like, wow, I actually really agree with him, but I was only nineteen and I didn’t know what to do. It felt like the right thing to do was honor my commitment to the label.”
But just as Summers predicted, Lane’s label dropped her after all. “It took me a long time to bounce back from that trauma and learn how to regain control and confidence in my own judgment. It took time and healing to trust my gut again,” she says. “I was pushed to do things that didn’t feel right to me, and I just went along with it. It was the kind of low-grade emotional trauma that can really fuck with your sense of self.”
Still, Lane is still proud of songs from her major label debut, co-produced with “guardian angel” Sam Bisbee. Long before “left-of-center pop” rose into the mainstream, songs like “Place For Us,” “Even You,” “We Don’t Forget,” and “Never Be Another You” helped Lane carve out her own niche even under the constraints of the label’s so-called guidance, and helped her secure crucial licensing placements in series like VH1’s Secrets of Aspen and The L Word.
If “Place For Us” was a self-dialogue to gain reassurance and find secure footing for her career as a musician, then a decade later, “Love Too Soon” became its follow-up anthem, blasting a wisdom that comes only with experience. Released in November 2020, Lane sings, “You gotta get away from it all/You’re gonna try your best not to call/Cause no one’s on the other line/To help you figure out when it’s time/To cut ’em loose,” as though reminding her younger self of the dangers of rushing into love, collaborations, and life. Projected fantasies may not pan out the way we expect, and can be detrimental to our inner creative world. With mindfulness, we can move on quickly and gain acceptance.
That’s where “Detour” comes in; it provides a bit of that optimistic magic needed to get something fresh off the ground, while leaving the listener empowered, with the new found self awareness, an ability to let the feelings pass and go with the flow. The song doesn’t call to action; instead it empathizes, and reconciles the universality of disappointment. Lane’s effortless narrative lyrics and ear catching melodies come from the moral conscience and wisdom of a profound songwriter and gentle realist.
Though she couldn’t have predicted it at the time, leaving the major label freed Lane up to license songs and play in friends’ bands and projects. Notably, Lane formed synthpop duo Fever High (Sire Records) with Anna Nordeen and late songwriter/producer Adam Schlesinger (Fountains of Wayne). In her collaborative element, Lane contributed piano, guitar, bass, trumpet and trombone to the band.
“When we formed that project I had practically been killing myself working so hard, gigging with all these different bands,” Lane says. “Sometimes we have to let go of this perception that good things are always going to be really hard. Sometimes good things happen, and they’re actually really easy, you know? And that’s kind of like how things were a lot of the time with Fever High. It was just really easy, and fun and it was all kind of like a break and escape from our regular grind day to day.”
And Schlesinger had a big effect on Lane’s songwriting, too. “Adam basically combined all the things that are really hard about songwriting, with all the things that are the most fun things about songwriting. He had that dichotomy nailed down. He would always find the really wordy mathy theory kind of melodies, tweak those, and then he knew how to pull really silly lyrics out of you in the studio. Lyrics that were both silly and profound…” Lane says fondly. “He always said, ‘Listen, you don’t have to be the best singer, or the best songwriter, you just have to have fun and believe in yourself.’ I really, really miss him. It’s not going to be the same New York without him.”
Lane has been drifting between Virginia and NYC for most of 2021, Tidying up a slew of new songs. She recently traveled to the UK in April, doubling up as stylist and keyboard player for the post-pandemic reunion of Razorlight’s classic lineup for a livestream concert. “All of this privilege is pretty mind-boggling to me given the current trepidatious circumstance of the world. I’m lucky to be one of the ones who could keep going with my chosen career during the pandemic despite the monumental losses occurring all around me,” Lane says. “As lockdowns were hitting last year I was finishing an intense schedule of Razorlight tour dates and then my bandmate Adam Schlesinger died early on in the first New York COVID wave. It was like a kick in the head. I’d also just been through a breakup so I had to slow down and take every day one step at a time.”
“Detour” reminds us to let go of what we cannot control and try to enjoy our non-linear journeys to the fullest. And now that she’s gained some experience and perspective, Reni Lane has some more advice for her younger self. “Get out of your head and into your body as often as possible. Does it feel good? Then do it! Be brutally honest with yourself. Screw all convention and question what you’ve been taught concerning the ‘proper’ way to do things. You know a lot more than anyone who is profiting off of your ignorance wants to admit,” she says. “Trust your vision. It can be as simple as combining touches of things you find beautiful or hiring musicians you admire. We’re all naturally drawn to things we like but the key is to do them with your own twist. So keep the inspirational juices flowing and replenishing! The last thing you want to do is to copy someone else out of blind ignorance. Maintain a high standard for things coming into, whether it’s art, people, ideas, or food.”
Her career has been “a long series of breaks that never ends,” but “I still find myself in situations among incredible talent that blows my mind because of some random show I played or last-minute gig I took on. But to give myself some credit, I worked really hard to get to the place to even be able to take those opportunities and run with them,” she says. “It’s incredible that any of us are alive in the grand scheme of things, so why not try our best to enjoy it? And what I enjoy most is making music and being as vulnerable as possible with the art I create, so fuck it – as long as I’m not hurting anyone, that’s what I’m keeping on with.”
Trinidadian-American singer-songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Trish Hosein (known as TRISHES) is all too familiar with being branded as “angry” or “sensitive” for speaking up about ignorant comments and the same old insulting assumptions people make about women – especially women of color. Growing up, she was made to feel like the problem was her, and not society’s micro-aggressions. But her latest single “Venom” pushes back against those who gaslit her and invalidated her anger.
Full of experimental electronic manipulations and vocal warping that sound like male and female voices singing, though it’s actually all Hosein’s own voice, the song has a truly unique sound and fierce lyrics that appropriate the snake as a symbol of anger: “I got venom on the tip of my tongue/Just like a scorpion, just like a snake/I got tough skin/Armor I was made in/Just like a champion/Rattle and shake.”
TRISHES says the intention was to create a powerful, chant-like chorus. “I wanted the chorus to be a place where I could reclaim this characteristic that was either projected on me or that I felt shame about,” she says. As a nod to her roots, she incorporated South Asian scales, such as major sevens.
She hopes that the single helps people form a new framework around the concept of anger, not as an emotion that makes someone difficult or overly aggressive but as one that spawns art and social change. As an activist and multimedia artist in addition to being a musician, this is the function that anger has had in Hosein’s own life.
In fact, the creation of “Venom” helped her to look back at times she was angry and see that her rage was not only valid but also productive. “I grew up being seen as an angry woman simply for being an honest woman of color,” she recalls. “After I created that song, I look back on it, and that’s actually when I had more realizations: this makes sense. It makes sense that you are angry. It makes sense that you had this sort of rage because you’ve always understood the idea of justice, and you could always feel when injustice was occurring, whether or not you had the ability to articulate what that injustice was.”
She wants those who listen to the song to be able to see themselves in the same light. “I would want women and girls like me to understand that their anger is valid,” she says. “Anger is valid, period, but specifically the anger that comes from being in a society that devalues you is valid, and it’s not something wrong with you per se.”
“Venom” will appear on TRISHES’ debut album The Id, which comes out October 22. As a follow-up to her 2019 EP Ego, an exploration of our consciousness and spiritual selves, The Id is concerned with “fear, shame, anger, violence, and the things our subconscious builds when we’re not nurturing our inner child.” Through warped vocals, soulful singing, and R&B-reminiscent beats, TRISHES creates a thought-provoking meditation on racial inequality, consumerism, and other social themes. She provided the vocals and keys for the album and co-produced it with producer Hakan Mavruk, who layered on bass and drums.
The Id was written not in structured writing sessions but over the course of Hosein’s daily life as inspiration hit her. “I don’t really sit down and write music for myself — I wrote it traveling, and I write things while I’m walking in my head and when I’m driving,” she says. “I wrote this album at a lot of museums; I’m super inspired at museums. When I’d gotten all the songs together and sort of knew what I was doing, it was a pretty straightforward process, but the actual writing of the album was just kind of a thing that happened in my mind over time.”
As an artist, Hosein also creates visuals to accompany her music by stippling with a fine-tip sharpie. For the cover of “Venom,” she created an image of herself with her hair resembling a scorpion’s tail. “I guess that’s how I feel that I’m perceived often, but it’s again centering around anonymity, centering around shame and fear and anger, and they’re images that I feel capture those emotions,” she explains. After releasing Ego, she created a pop art and music experience where people could check out headphones and take a tour through the album museum-gallery style, and she’s hoping to do something similar with The Id.
She considers her use of vocal effects and wide-looping — elements that appear throughout her music — reflective of the tensions that TRISHES represents. “I started this project five or six years ago, and I think I was going through a moral dilemma in my life, figuring out my what my idea of morality was apart from the way I was raised or the structures I was raised in,” she says. While her music doesn’t offer a definitive answers, it asks those questions in unfamiliar ways so that listeners can reflect on the larger power dynamics affecting their own sense of morality and identity.
On Vestiges, her debut solo LP as Poise, Lucie Murphy spends a lot of time self-soothing, pumping herself up to face challenges head on, and generally standing her ground with integrity. When we spoke on the phone, she said that the overarching theme that ties Vestiges together is “resilience.” Early singles “Walked Through Fire” and “Show Me Your Love” see the Manhattan-raised, Brooklyn-based musician demand positive recognition outright, and with her fiery swagger, it’s certainly easy to pile on much-deserved praise. But on “New Kind Of Love,” the album’s third and latest single, premiering exclusively via Audiofemme, Murphy turns her affirmations toward a friend in a dire situation, counter-balancing self-assured guidance with sensitivity and grace.
“I wrote it at a time that a friend of mine was in this abusive relationship and a few of my friends and I were trying to figure out the best course of action, because it felt like any intervention would just exacerbate the problem,” Murphy recalls. “It was sort of all I could do for this person – offer my friendship and a place to stay. I could only offer what I had and I couldn’t really do much more and that was very frustrating and heartbreaking.”
What’s especially remarkable about the track is Murphy’s sensitivity to the fact that leaving can be complicated – and sometimes dangerous. “I wanted them to understand that I didn’t think that they were crazy for staying. Of course I can’t exactly understand, but I have sympathy,” she explains. “I tried to say it as succinctly as possible, and get across everything I was feeling.”
Because the situation “New Kind Of Love” describes is sadly all too common, Murphy says she’s been approached by those who can relate, either to her position as the empathic friend whose hands are tied, or as the person to which she originally addressed the song. In both cases, the track provides strength and comfort, and for those that don’t have firsthand experience with scenarios like these, the song is an excellent blueprint for approaching with nuance and compassion. “I’m really proud of that song,” Murphy says. She’s shared it with the person she wrote it about, too. “Thankfully they’re no longer I this relationship so I think they’re doing a lot better. I didn’t say that it was about them, and if they picked up on it they didn’t tell me. But they said they loved the song so that made me really happy.”
For the song’s lyric video, Murphy digitally collaged pictures of her femme friends from her teenage years, when she was first taking an interest in photography. She ended up studying photography and art history in college, seeing it as a more likely career path than making it as a musician (though her first official musical project, a three-piece called Bruise, was rather active, it fizzled before she was out of school). “I think it was a really nice way to repurpose the photos in service to my music, and it’s really nice to have my photo life work with my music life in that way,” Murphy says.
“A big theme of the song is childhood and people changing and growing up and patterns repeating,” she adds. “The person who was in this abusive relationship was someone I’d known for a long time and had a pretty tough childhood also, and I’d known them through all of it. It’s wild looking back at this time; we’ve changed so much but also we haven’t.”
Not only did Murphy edit the lyric video for “New Kind of Love,” she also directed videos for her two previous Poise singles, and is self-releasing Vestiges. “Labels were hit really hard obviously, in this pandemic, and it was honestly really hard to find someone who was willing to start a new relationship at this point,” Murphy says. “I think the next one will probably get a proper label home, but I’ve also learned so much in the process. It’s been cool. I’m excited to learn more and to get it out there.”
As for directing, Murphy says she “had never edited a video before. I just learned Premiere Pro by myself… I’m probably doing everything wrong because I’m not properly trained or whatever. I thought it was gonna be a lot harder than it was honestly, but it was a ton of work.” She has the added benefit of coming from a family who works in film, and growing up close to the industry. Her father, an avid record collector, guitarist, and East Village punk aficionado, made a huge impression on her.
“He was always playing at home and I think seeing him play guitar was like oh I wanna do that, that seems cool,” Murphy recalls. She started playing around the age of 12, and even formed an “after school band” in middle school with her current drummer, Theo Munger. “I started going to DIY shows when I was like 16 or 17 at Silent Barn and Shea Stadium. I heard about Frankie Cosmos and that was really kind of the catalyst that made me be like, oh, I can do this – it just seemed really accessible and inclusive and inviting to me at that time.”
Poise took on a life of its own as Murphy finished up college, with the addition of Munger and guitarist Sam Skinner, who were set to play in her backing band on her first tour under that moniker. But a year of grief, tragedy, and loss almost sidelined the project – Murphy’s father passed away, and just as she was about to get Poise going again, the pandemic hit. Murphy only became more determined and focused – and her resiliency allowed her to complete Vestiges, which is out July 30. “I came to realize this is really what I care about and this is where my community is, and this is really what I love to do and what I think about all the time,” Murphy says. “All of a sudden, having all this time for myself to write, I just kind of birthed this album. I wrote it really quickly because I felt really focused, like, okay, things are not gonna go the way I want them to maybe, so I’m just going to work really hard, be resilient and make this happen somehow, even though it seems kind of impossible.”
With the “impossible” accomplished, Poise blazes their way into the Brooklyn music scene, and are hoping to be able to play Vestiges live soon. The album is a stunning introduction to the person at the very heart of the project; Murphy doesn’t shy away from heavy topics, but remains devoid of self-pity. “I did feel like I needed to make a statement in some way. I think a lot of indie rock can be melodramatic in a way that I totally love sometimes, but is not very ‘me.’” she says. “I don’t want to feel sorry for myself. I feel like, especially when you’re a teenager that’s a lot of what you do. I was like, okay, I’m adult, I don’t wanna do that anymore. That was a big part of the statement – yes, bad things happen, but ultimately things are okay, I’m doing alright, and I’m lucky for that.”
Some ideas are hard to forget. At least, that’s the case for Dot Allison. The Scottish singer began working steadily on her forthcoming album, Heart-Shaped Scars, sometime around 2017, with some songs, like “One Love,” (premiering today via Audiofemme), taking shape in 2020.
However, the seeds of the album, set for release on July 30, go back more than a decade before that. “Ghost Orchid” started out as a poem called “Church of Snow,” written circa 2004. “Forever’s Not Much Time” was a title she had been kicking around since before 2005. In the interim, she released the albums Exaltation of Larks andAfterglow. She collaborated with artists like Paul Weller, Pete Doherty, Darren Emerson and Slam and sang backup for Scott Walker and Sun O))).
Allison also took off time to raise a family. “I kept writing, but I just wasn’t making it into anything,” she explains from her home in Edinburgh. During this period, she says, she would write “one day here, one day there,” gradually building up a body of new work. “The ideas kept coming. I was banking ideas because I was doing these little bits of writing and then the kids just got a bit bigger,” she says. At around the same time, Allison had been introduced to musicians in Scotland’s folk scene, which became crucial to the development of Heart-Shaped Scars.
Since the early 1990s, Allison has crafted an eclectic career. She first came to attention as the singer for One Dove, whose lone album, Morning Dove White, was released in 1993 and spawned the single “White Love.” Andrew Weatherall’s “Guitar Paradise Mix” of the song remains an impeccably cool slice of ethereal house.
Allison’s sophomore solo album, We Are Science, which was released in 2002, is one of the essential early ‘00s electronic pop albums, and Felix da Housecat’s remix of her song “Substance” was one of the big club hits of that era. But, she’s also made a lot of music outside the electronic realm, and for Heart-Shaped Scars, Allison delves heavily into folk.
“I suppose I’ve got really eclectic tastes in music and just butterfly around listening to different things,” says Allison. “That’s reflected in my work. It’s not like I started thinking that I was going to go to electronic to this and this. There’s no grand plan.”
Allison connected with folk singer Amy Bowman and the two collaborated on “The Haunted,” the first song she made specifically for this album. It was based on a poem that Allison had previously written and she worked on the chords while Bowman handled more of the melody. “I’m so happy with what we co-wrote together,” she says.
Through Bowman, she met singer Zoë Bestel and they joined forces for “Can You Hear Nature Sing?” Allison, who co-produced the album with Fiona Cruikshank, also worked with composer Hannah Peel, who provided string arrangements. The resulting album bears a tender, yet, eerie sound in the vein of Paul Giovanni and Magnet’s music for the 1973 film The Wicker Man.
Back when she lived in London, Allison had a CD copy of The Wicker Man soundtrack that she kept in the booth of her studio. “In my opinion, it’s just really great songwriting in that visceral imagery, and melodically beautiful, like ‘Willow’s Song,’” she says. “It’s so gorgeous and pulls your heart strings.”
In the late ‘00s, Allison performed “Gently Johnny” from the film on stage at Glastonbury with The Memory Band. “It’s been in my sphere for a while, that film or that soundtrack,” she says. Of “Willow’s Song,” which is associated with a quite memorable scene in the film, she adds, “I just think it’s such an important song, really. I just love that song. “
Allison had already done quite a bit of work on the album before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, but the 2020 lockdown resulted in some reshaping of the album. She wrote “Goodbye,” “Long Exposure,” “One Love” and “Forever’s Not Much Time” during this period. The lockdown also prompted her to learn to play and write with a ukulele. “I just thought, I’ll pick up this ukulele because it’s a lovely ukulele and I just can’t put off trying it,” she says. Allison normally writes on piano, which she learned how to play as a child, and guitar. Because she didn’t know how to play the ukulele, Allison had to figure the songs by ear.
It was a revealing experience. “I may have been slightly hampered by knowing the chords on the other instruments,” she says. Allison adds that the songs written with the ukulele are “possibly the most musical songs” that she’s written. It prompted her to wonder, “Why didn’t I pick up the ukulele before?”
Lockdown, Allison says, “transformed” the album. “It ended up benefiting the record, even though it’s not a positive thing,” she explains, adding that the stay-at-home period forced her to sit down and try creative approaches that she hadn’t previously used.
With Heart-Shaped Scars, Allison challenged herself, while also taking listeners into an aural world they might not expect from her. “I do think that I quite like trying to cut a new path for myself,” she says, “Hopefully, that’s embraced.”
Follow Dot Allison on Instagram and Twitter for ongoing updates.
Photo Credit: Dana D // Hair/Makeup: Zina Gladiadis
“It’s cool to depend on yourself and come out the other side and be like ‘cool, I did that.’” So says Ridgewood-based ambient experimental artist M. Maria. She is on the cusp of dropping her debut EP Saturn Returned, from which she premieres single “There’s A Spirit In My Body” on Audiofemme today. Entirely self-produced and recorded, it is yet another example of a project only dreamt about pre-pandemic but actualized once we were forced to stay home.
“Before the pandemic hit, I really wanted to make an album, but I hadn’t spent enough time in it to where I really understood how to record music, how to produce it,” M. Maria explains. “I feel like as soon as we had time to be by ourselves and shut the world out, I was able to just go straight into Ableton, just progressing and getting better until I had actual results.”
Though she began learning Ableton Basics and tinkering with the idea of making music two years ago or so, it wasn’t until she turned 27 that the urge really took over, in alignment with the astrological phenomenon from which the EP gets its name (the infamous Saturn Return is when the planet reaches the same celestial position it was in when we were born, approaching in our late twenties and making its impact felt through our early thirties). “It’s supposed to realign your life in a way, and make you go through these extreme changes, to be on a path that can better serve you,” M. Maria explains. “As soon as I hit 27, I was like, I need to do something. I need to make music. I felt this astrological push, and everything around that period going in a direction that felt more real, and more like it was supposed to be, you know? Sorry if I sound insane.” She laughs.
The resulting music is darkly ethereal, with M. Maria utilizing her high-octave voice as an otherworldly instrument, layered over darker, industrial elements. “I like that contrast so I like playing with it a lot,” she says.
“There’s A Spirit In My Body” begins sparsely, with only vocals and a light beat, and slowly different beats and vocal elements are introduced to build into a heavier, layered sound. It brings to mind the likes of Grouper or Holly Herndon, though M. Maria lists shoegaze bands like My Bloody Valentine and A.R. Kane as her greatest influences. The influence is there, but the creative decision to use the voice more as an instrument than a vehicle for delivering lyrics takes the sound to another world. The emotionality lies in the delivery, not the words themselves.
“I feel like I have trouble expressing with actual words,” she explains. “When I’m feeling something, I start singing, and just having the sound of my voice be an expression, even when it’s not saying something. I feel like the voice can express so much with noise.”
Having mixed and produced the EP, each song is a creation all her own. As she preps for release later this summer, and for her first live shows, M. Maria expresses some apprehension around releasing her first creative endeavor into the world. At the same time, though, she recognizes that Saturn Returned is only the beginning, and confidence in her potential provides some relief from that pressure. “There’s going be so much more to build off of it,” she says.
Just in time for a summer fling, Dasha narrates the complex emotions of a fleeting love affair in “Love Me Till August.” The acoustic track, premiering exclusively with Audiofemme, follows her debut EP $hiny Things; released in March 2021, the project contains half a dozen radio-friendly pop tracks, all embodying sharp lyricism. The folksy “Love Me Till August” continues that trend, a ballad that beautifully blends innocence and reality.
Over the course of the song, the character grows from an naïve young girl to a woman, the first verse laying out the couple’s fate, its narrator aware enough from the get go that the love affair has a time stamp. “We’ll blame it on the timing/What isn’t meant to be will never be,” Dasha sings, acknowledging that “it’s gonna hurt” at the end of the season when they have to part ways.
Meanwhile, the second verse is packed with nostalgia, following the pair on their last day together, capturing the moments through photos as to not forget the memories made, setting up a bridge that takes a subtle jab at the fact that he’s leaving their love behind with the ultimate goal of getting an office job like his father.
Growing up in the coastal town of San Luis Obispo, three hours north of Los Angeles, Dasha cut her teeth performing songs at local venues around town, cowboy boots in tow, as part of a duo with her friend’s mother, a songwriter. The 21-year-old moved to Nashville to study music at Belmont University. “Love Me Till August” came to fruition while Dasha was driving back to California from Music City, having to collect all of her belongings and leave the campus in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. During their 2,000 mile trek, the idea for the song began to formulate when the singer’s friend told her about a relationship she was in that she knew would only last a season. Dasha was experiencing similar emotions as well, having also been in a relationship she knew wouldn’t last forever.
“I think the cruelest thing the universe can do is bring you the right person at the wrong time, and that’s exactly what I was going through. The worst part is that it wasn’t anyone’s fault,” Dasha tells Audiofemme, adding that the song “was inspired by a personal experience of ‘right person, wrong time’ when outside factors were the reason things ended.”
The chorus leans into that emotion as Dasha describes missing her lover even before they’re gone, setting up a scene bookended by the last day of July and concluding with the song’s fateful premonition. “I thought this was a really cool way of emphasizing the timeline of the relationship, where at first glance it seems like you have months, but really you have a single day left together,” she explains.
“I love the wave of emotions in the song. It’s very honest and very me,” she observes. “All I ever hope for with my music is that my supporters can relate to my songs. I write very honest and vulnerable songs so that people know that they aren’t alone and that I’ve felt the same things they have.”
It’s regrettably easy to get sucked in to the cycle of surface-level validation we get from scrolling through social media – but Eleanor Rose Lee, aka Fever Queen, has a simple solution: “The world’s gone shallow/Find the ones who care.” It’s the opening line of her latest single “Taste of What It Is,” premiering today via Audiofemme. “We live in a time where people are almost praised for being self-absorbed,” Lee points out, adding that the pandemic, in some ways, made everyone realign those priorities. “It becomes very clear what’s no longer serving you and what relationships are deep and meaningful and what are just kinda vapid ones.”
On “Taste of What It Is,” intimacy, vulnerability, and honesty act as antidotes to cure a culture obsessed with self-image. “I wanna know your feelings/Don’t swim upon the surface,” Lee implores in a languid, bewitching tone. She validates the fear that comes along with opening up, but low, pulsing synths give a feeling of sinking into something comforting, the percussion sparse and relaxed. There’s nothing harsher here than a few washes of guitar reverb after the second chorus, most of the sounds a syrupy echo through an icy cavern. Lee’s primary goal was to evoke the feeling of sharing a deep secret with someone, and the metaphor of plunging into freezing water is particularly apt; in both situations, it’s necessary to brace yourself against the frigid shock before jumping in, before you change your mind.
It’s no surprise that the Great Lakes region’s intense winters were a primary inspiration behind the song’s subject matter and sonic palette. Lee grew up in Northwest Indiana, and has called Chicago home off and on for most of her adulthood, though she recently moved to a quaint lakeside town along Lake Michigan. “I feel like the seasons really effect my writing,” she says. “I definitely kept calling this my ‘deep winter single’ before I had a name for it. It’s now spring, but I feel like it’s a good song to thaw out, back into real life, as people re-enter society.”
Indeed, as a newly-vaccinated public sector reunites in re-opened restaurants and bars, we’re likely to skip the small talk, opting instead for candid catch-ups. Fever Queen envisions these moments beautifully in the song’s lyrics: “Like a wave that’s frozen/Thoughts suspended in the air/A language thawing/Words will spill out somewhere.” She’s nervous – we all are – so she “breathes in the salty mist” for a “taste of what it is,” her shimmering vocal overdubs calling back to her like sirens.
Lee says that the song, too, is a taste of what her sophomore album will be like; this is the first song she’s released since putting out her September 2020 debut The World of Fever Queen (via First To Knock, the same label releasing the single). “With the first album, I do feel it’s like a lot of different moods, kinda like a quilt – just a bunch of stuff going on,” admits Lee. “The next record is definitely more of a cohesive vibe, and this song just feels relevant and I definitely think it’s more of a similar vibe.”
The World of Fever Queen toys with off-kilter pop, doo-wop covers, surprising lo-fi rock moments, and even name-drops Phoebe Bridgers on the excoriating “You, You.” But one thing both the record and the latest single have in common are the distinct quality of Lee’s touch – she has a home recording set-up and for the most part, Fever Queen is a one-woman effort, as Lee writes, records, performs and produces with very little input from outsiders. By day, she’s a hair stylist, but once she learned the basics of recording (from a film score producer who lived across the hall from her during a brief stint in Los Angeles), she “started recording and actually building on songs, and at that point I was like, okay I’m never gonna leave my house again – this is so fun!”
Now, she’s living in a “time warp” of a lakeside town, driving back to Chicago two days a week to do hair, and is about halfway toward the completion of the sophomore album on which “Taste of What It Is” will appear. She’s in no rush to get back to the stage though. “I didn’t get to do a release show [for The World of Fever Queen] obviously, which would’ve been fun, but I feel like it also took a lot of the stress away for practicing and leading up to that,” she says. “I think with the next record I’ll just have to go extra big release show wise.”
Follow Fever Queen via Instagram for ongoing updates.
In the midst of our conversation, Bridget Rian makes it a point to note that her Enneagram number is a four, signifying a fear of not accomplishing anything of substance during one’s time on earth or not being remembered after they pass on. Rian channels that fear into her haunting song, “Trailer Park Cemetery,” premiering exclusively with Audiofemme.
Rian was on a road trip through rural Florida en route to a historic property that housed several Native American artifacts when along the way, she drove past a cemetery in the middle of a trailer park that immediately captured her interest. “I remember thinking how different it was. This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen, but I love it,” Rian recalls, describing the cemetery as both “spooky” and “cool.” Coincidentally, she was reading a mystery novel at the time, about a group of teenagers who escaped to a cemetery as their chosen hangout spot. “It reminded me of my childhood and how I literally ran through cemeteries with my friends,” she says. Rian turned this vision into song months later, while sitting in her Nashville home. As the concept for “Trailer Park Cemetery” materialized, the young singer immediately put her thoughts on paper.
“Thinking about the afterlife and the unknown, I think the scariest for me would be that nothing exists, that it’s just over, and you don’t get any second chance,” the New York native explains of the song’s meaning. “There’s an aspect of me wanting to stay young forever in the song. I have this fear of being forgotten or a fear of death where it’s comforting to think that people would live that close, or kids would come and hang out and my body wouldn’t be alone.”
She begins by gently pulling the listener in with a soft acoustic guitar, setting the scene of a trailer park set alongside a dirt road between tall oaks and pine trees, brought to life by community-oriented people greeting one another from their front porches.
“I don’t want peace and quiet/It’s overrated anyway/I’ll take loud voices over silence any day/I don’t ask for much/But to choose where my body lays,” Rian sings; she’d prefer to be laid to rest in a place where life constantly surrounds her, counteracting her fear of silence and keeping her youthful spirit alive.
The wise songwriter brings this notion to life through the chorus, which finds her surrounded by community even in death, symbolized by neon lights, the above ground pool next door and the littered beer cans that lay by her tombstone, left there by the young people partying in the cemetery like she and her friends once did. “The chorus is the part where I express that I want to be there forever. It’s direct imagery of people that were there,” she describes. “I don’t want to be laying on my death bed and thinking ‘I should have done that.’ I am a worrier, and I don’t want that to stop me. That’s a big fear, that I’m going to look back and miss out. Even if I’m dead and looking back at the people partying in my cemetery, I don’t want to be like ‘I wish I did that.’”
“Trailer Park Cemetery” is featured on Rian’s upcoming debut EP, Talking to Ghosts, set for release on July 9. It finds her exploring spirits from the past, whether it’s a loved one who has died, a past version of herself, or the ghosts that lie in “Trailer Park Cemetery.” “I know that there are people out there who have done weird stuff like party in cemeteries, and I hope that it makes people feel seen. I also want people to not take for granted the life around them,” Rian remarks when asked how she hopes “Trailer Park Cemetery” impacts listeners. “I like to call it my personality song. This is me. I’m kind of weird, but here it is. I think it goes down to the core of my personality.”
Among the hordes of New Yorkers who took a hiatus from the city for the last year is singer-songwriter Gianna Alessi. Having spent the last seven years bouncing around Brooklyn and Manhattan and growing her live show at venues like Bowery Electric and Arlene’s Grocery, she gave up her apartment and headed back to her hometown of Nyack, New York. She found the time creatively fruitful, honing her skills as an at-home producer with a microphone and a laptop and leaning into the feelings of anxiety and defeatedness to ultimately produce single “From Within,” which premieres on Audiofemme today.
Alessi is a classically trained theater singer, studying at the Boston Conservatory Berklee School of music, but her training as a musician began much younger. With two classical musicians for parents and the granddaughter of Maria Leone, a soprano in the Metropolitan Opera, Alessi had her first voice lesson with her grandmother at age 9. “I was always kind of nervous to sing around her, because she was very strict and opera is such an amazing art form that takes such control,” she explains. “But from there I started studying, and… just went down that rabbit hole.” Though her grandmother and she sing in very different styles, she says her family calls her the “reincarnation” of her, and often refers back to old photos and recordings for inspiration.
She eventually made the journey from theater to the soulful, R&B-flecked electro-pop she favors today after taking a songwriting class at Berklee and picking up a guitar. “I always loved theater,” Alessi says, “but the part I loved most about it was the music, so once I started learning guitar I just kind of blossomed and I began to write all the time.” Upon graduation she moved to New York City, where she began working as an actor and putting together a live show with background vocalists and a band, sharpening a sound that meets somewhere at the intersection of India Arie and Morcheeba.
“From Within” is a departure from her normal practice, however. Like many musicians lacking their usual resources due to the pandemic – like their band or proper recording equipment – Alessi improvised, setting up a small studio of sorts in her childhood bedroom and ultimately working to finish the song remotely with producer Joey Auch. Alessi turned the disquietude of the moment into lyrics like, “Waking up late/I pull the shades/Oh, did I miss the day?” The verses simmer in a sultry, dark space, and then burst open into a more positive, pop-driven chorus about finding herself amidst all the uncertainty of the present.
Overall though, the track was an experiment in exploring a more quiet place artistically. As a theater student, Alessi says, “I was always taught singing louder means more power, loud is good in performing… but with this song, I was like, ‘What if I make something really intimate?’” That intimacy leant itself to a more honest reflection of the “very dark place” she says she and many other creatives have been suspended in, but that “From Within” helped her meet herself “within this kind of sadness.”
“From Within” is Alessi’s sixth single, and though she doesn’t know if it will end up on a larger collection of her work, she hopes to jump into the studio in the spring or summer to record more tracks, with an EP or album in mind. “I’m just going to keep creating,” she says.
After her self-imposed creative retreat, Alessi feels she’s at a “crossroads,” having considered both moving back to New York City and heading out to Los Angeles. But the themes on “From Within” resonate with the age-old adage, wherever you go, there you are.
“I think the song is like, I’m going to find myself again, and I have – I was always here,” she says. “If I lost myself, it was only for a second, because everything that was still remains, and it’s all kind of within me anyways.” Wherever Gianna Alessi winds up, we’ll be listening.
Lindsay Ellyn can describe in detail the moment she became devoted to music. She was a college student working at Satya Jewelry on Bleecker Street in New York City when the store’s curated playlist turned to Lucinda Williams’ Grammy-nominated album, Essence. As a self-professed music lover who played guitar and piano, Ellyn’s perspective changed when Williams’ voice poured through the speakers, prompting her to study Williams’ catalogue and begin “listening to her obsessively.” “I remember this moment because it really changed my life,” Ellyn recalls in a wide-ranging Zoom interview with Audiofemme. “That album inspired me so deeply to the point where I was like ‘I don’t want to do anything else, I just want to write songs.’ That is what really made me want to start picking up the pen and paper and sitting down with my guitar and being like, ‘what do I have to say?’”
After moving to New York to attend Fashion Institute of Technology where she majored in advertising and communications, Ellyn spent years hustling in the city, working in the editorial and advertising departments for major companies ranging from Conde Nast to Bloomingdale’s. In the midst of her demanding career, Ellyn tapped into her love for music in her mid-20s, performing around the East Village and learning to write songs, leading to the release of her single “Gone” in 2010 and debut EP, Shores, in 2012. “It was around that time that I started thinking ‘I want to do this more. I really love this,’” she reflects. As she became “increasingly disgruntled” with New York, coupled with her desire to actively pursue music, Ellyn made the move to Nashville in April 2014, quickly connecting with songwriters who became friends and meeting her future husband while playing a gig, in addition to releasing her second EP, Out of Road, in 2015.
All roads lead to “Queen of Nothing,” the title track to her upcoming full-length album where she reimagines some of her previously released work. “When I wrote the song, I was in a place in my life where things weren’t going that great,” Ellyn describes of the acoustic number. A music career she was struggling to get off the ground, a day job that was detracting time from the music, and complicated relationships with family members were among the struggles Ellyn was facing at the time of the song’s conception. “I was having fun playing with this idea of, what’s the polar opposite to having it all and ‘yasss queening’ in your life? It’s losing across the board or feeling like, I’m going to surrender this feeling. I’m not going to be here forever and it’s going to keep going,” she explains. “I think when you are in the down moments of your life and you sit there and you run the diagnostic: why am I here? What’s my ownership for feeling like this? How did I get here? How can I change? That’s when the change starts to happen and that’s when you can get your life on the track to do the things you want to do and celebrate the things you want to celebrate and have the highs. But you have to sit in the lows.”
Ellyn finds herself embracing those low moments in the song’s opening lines as she professes, “I know about making mistakes/I know how it feels to miss your shot/So close I could feel it burning/And blowin’ out the flame was as far as I got.” “It’s really for better or worse, acknowledging some of my self-sabotaging behavior. I’ve definitely been in a place in my life where I’ve made decisions that didn’t pan out, and you’ve got to make those mistakes to understand that,” Ellyn says. “I think you learn more from the things that go wrong than you do from the things that go right in your life. Those things inform your way forward, so I’m trying to be grateful for that too.”
Nodding to the “self-deprecating” and “cheeky” nature of the song that paints an image of her donning a paper crown and proudly claiming the title of “the queen of nothing,” Ellyn also sees the magic in life’s darker hours that serve as the catalyst for healing and growth. “There’s this magic moment where you feel like you have absolutely nothing to lose, and that’s when you can just go for it,” she declares. “That’s why I think there’s such value in your down moments, because I feel like that’s when a lot of magic can happen. When you can embrace the times when you’re not killing it, that’s when I think you can rise up. That’s what this song is about.”
The album, out May 14 via Hail Mary Records/Queue Records, explores a variety of themes – toxic love, failure, and womanhood among them. Ellyn describes it as a journey of “self-discovery;” songs like “Helpless” capture the feeling of being stuck in a relationship she knew she needed to let go of, while “Mercy Drum” finds her reflecting on the past regrets and painful memories that continue to haunt her.
Ellyn cites the album’s creation as the “last memory” before the world came crumbling down, as a bulk of the project was recorded three days before a tornado ripped through Nashville in March 2020, destroying the office of marketing agency Red Pepper where she works as a senior copywriter, and just weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic altered life as we know it. The singer and her producer Brendan St. Gelais were able to safely finish the project throughout the year.
“I feel like the stars aligned,” Ellyn says of completing the album amidst the chaos. “I had more fun in those three days than I’ve had in a very long time making music. I think it reiterated, ‘I can do this. I love this. I’m having fun. I feel like I’m supposed to be here.’ It felt very validating for me, especially as someone who has a full-time job that takes so much of my life. It felt really nice to make the record.”
The open-minded creator views Queen of Nothing as an re-introduction to herself, and hopes that listeners find their own story in the way that she crafts hers. “I think the hard things in life are the deep canyons that you find yourself in. When people can relate on those levels, I feel like that’s what really bonds you with someone,” she observes. “I think the record overall is really a reflection of a human experience. All of those themes feel very human. I would hope that people could listen to them and relate to these human experiences I feel like we all experience at some point. I hope people enjoy it and can identify with it in some way.”
“I am the queen of self-doubt!” British electronic musician and producer Szou confesses over Zoom. It’s a feeling that many in music battle with, though it might seem contradictory to choose a career that requires this level of vulnerability on the face of it. But Szou takes it in stride, knowing that music is her calling.
Her conviction comes from remembering the feeling of going to her very first gig. At 12, her parents took her to family-friendly festival Camp Bestival in the UK. “On Sunday night, Friendly Fires were headlining and I had no idea who they were,” Szou tells Audiofemme. “At the time I remember feeling some kind of transcendent experience – something lifted me up, it was so euphoric… it was that first moment where I was like, I want to do that, I want to make music like that.”
Growing up in West Sussex, Szou went on to study at university in Manchester. Heavily influenced by the northern city’s vibrant electronic and dance music scene, her genre of choice is electro-pop and she cites Christine And The Queens as major influences.
“When I was in my teens I borrowed my mom’s laptop cause it had Garageband on it, so I started playing around with that and just wrote loads of songs about love that I’d never experienced. We all thought we were Adele at one point,” she jokes.
Though launching her career mere moments before the UK’s first lockdown in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic created its own set of unique obstacles, Szou has successfully weathered the storm, releasing two singles in 2020 and has since been championed by BBC Music’s Introducing in Manchester, the holy grail for many aspiring musicians.
With her latest release “Rose-Tinted,” premiering today via Audiofemme, Szou combines high-energy electronic beats with melancholic lyrics and rich vocals to create a wistful track high on the nostalgia of the freedom of choice before lockdown.
“Rose-Tinted” begins with a short intro and an off-beat melody. As the tempo picks up, Szou’s soft vocals materialise against delicate guitar. The energy of the track expresses themes of change, loss and nostalgia as she processes her yearning – not only for the good times, but also to the bad, and the general sense of how carefree life was before the pandemic.
“In June we were doing the whole Zoom thing and the quizzes and all of that and I was just really missing my friends and really missing the past life we all had,” Szou says. “I was feeling this really strong sense of nostalgia in a really unique way – when could we ever say, I’m nostalgic for the good, the bad and the ugly?”
This sentiment is evident in the lyrics. The line “I should be present but I get so swept up in it/The good and the bad/It’s all rose-tinted” conveys both the freedom to make mistakes that Szou misses and the inevitable nostalgia these memories have been painted with, juxtaposed with the “one big summer haze” that characterized her existence at the time of the song’s writing.
Not only did the pandemic restrict our physical movement but also created a pressure to make the limited interactions we enjoy with friends and family members positive and hopeful. “The small moments that maybe weren’t that good or enjoyable at the time – maybe they were even bad – but at least we were free, it’s a freedom that we don’t have during the pandemic. So it was this weird sadness, but I am also grateful that I have the friends I have so I could write about the good times,” Szou says.
“Rose-Tinted” follows Szou’s previously-released singles: her first release “Dystopia” is slowed by a heavy, rhythmic drum beat, while the lyrics and atmospheric flourishes draw from classic sci-fi; “Utopia” picks up the pace a little whilst keeping true to Szou’s signature style as her soft vocals convey an optimism for the future. But all three tracks tackle existential themes and have a the same sense of yearning; because they’ve coincided with a global pandemic, her work thus far serves as a sonic time capsule. “When this is over there’ll be one big party,” she promises on “Utopia,” and we can’t help but agree.
For Szou, “Rose-Tinted” also marks a solid step forward in her career. Recently signing to No Such Thing Records has given the artist the confidence to fight her own self-doubt and branch out. This confidence boost has encouraged her to begin collaborating with others. “I think it has confirmed that I’m on the right track. When I first started releasing music I was like, I’m independent, I’m strong, I can do this, and then I realised… that I’d need to get other people to give their perspectives who can give me solid advice and guidance,” she admits. “That has completely changed the way I work. For future songs I’ve decided to work with another producer; just getting the help has made me realise that [my music] does sound good.” It won’t be her first time collaborating with others, though – she’s appeared on tracks with Dirty Freud, Essa Weira, Waller and xato, and Goteki 45 as featured vocalist.
One of the most powerful aspects of sound is its ability to create a world within a world. Whether that world is in the flashing lights of the dance floor surrounded by friends or in the comfort of your own home, judged silently by your cat, music can take us places we never thought possible and inspire us. Szou’s music opens the door for her listeners to create any world; whether that’s the space-age influences of her previous singles or the hazy, sepia-filtered environment of “Rose-Tinted,” both can provide a haven.
Los Angeles-based pop singer Emlyn is set to have a big year; with two singles (“Had Me At Hello” and “cruel world“) under her belt, she’s prepping an EP to be released this Spring. There’s just one problem: the 24-year-old Nashville native needed a love song to really complete the EP, and she’s never been in love. “A piece of the project that felt like it was missing was a love story. I have never been in love, so it’s like ‘how am I going to accomplish this?’ I want to have this element of love in the whole project,” Emlyn tells Audiofemme.
Luckily, Emlyn’s a practiced songwriter who’s had a hand in co-writes with Kiiara, Stela Cole, Hailey Knox, Eben, and more. And for her latest single, “a thousand parties,” she took a cue from none other than Taylor Swift; after seeing an interview in which Swift discusses her chart-topping album evermore and how she was creatively challenged by writing from other people’s perspectives, Emlyn felt inspired to do the same, though she writes solely first-person narratives.
To that end, Emlyn has crafted her version of a love story with “a thousand parties” (premiering today exclusively on Audiofemme) by drawing from several sources. For one thing, she’s made a habit of putting pen to paper when friends and family share their love stories with her; one that stood out in particular is that of a close friend who told his story of meeting the love of his life, which Emlyn transformed into a rock-infused pop banger.
Additionally, Emlyn became obsessed with the grandiose galas in The Great Gatsby, which the title character would throw at his lavish mansion each night in hopes that his long lost love Daisy would return. Co-written with producer Mike Robinson over Zoom, Emlyn combined elements of the classic F. Scott Fitzgerald novel with the reality of her friend’s love story. “The feeling of being in love, from what I’ve heard, feels like magic, and I’ve never felt [that] magic before,” she says. “[But] there’s something that I feel is really special about this song and this love – there was something when we were writing this song that felt really magical.”
Though writing from a different viewpoint, Emlyn still manages to infuse her personality into the song by artfully blending wailing electric guitar and slick drums to establish an infectious pop beat that slowly builds to a catchy chorus, the melody juxtaposing the sweetness of the lyrics with the singer’s internal angst. “In any regard, when I’m writing a song, I’m going to implement my own personal touches into it,” Emlyn says. “I think the angst comes from me, because while I’m trying to write from someone else’s perspective, I’m also imagining my own feelings about this. Love is so scary and I’m kind of a tough girl, I have a tough edge to me. I feel like there’s a little bit of fear surrounding love. I have to grunge it up so it’s not too vulnerable.”
The singer embraces vulnerability by confronting the root of that fear in the song’s haunting third verse, recalling a moment of strife in her friend’s relationship as she sings with smoldering vocals, “I’ll never forget/The night that you cried/Your tears fell too softly to hide/You didn’t need to tell me I hurt you love/‘Cause hearing that hurt me enough.”
The lyrics establish the same pattern Emlyn has noticed in on-screen love stories: the couple meets and falls in love, as told through a series of joyful, laughter-filled sequences. “But then you get to the part in the movie or the TV show where you have to overcome an obstacle, which makes the main characters’ love even stronger, because that’s what life is,” Emlyn analyzes.
She wanted to be intentional about capturing the whole experience of being in a relationship. “The truth of my friend’s love story is that there’s been moments that have not been great. But those moments… stuck out to him, and to me, as moments that were really pivotal in their relationship and building to what they have now,” she observes. “I wanted that moment, both sonically, musically and lyrically to take you out of ‘it’s so great and it’s joyful and it’s love’ to ‘sometimes it’s hard.’ But those moments are when you choose to show up for this person and love them and tell them that you’ve got their back, or run away from it.”
For Emlyn, the second verse is where she feels most connected to the story, as she admits to not being a fan of crowds nor the type to “lose my mind,” yet would “throw a thousands parties if you’d go” in an effort to “try to love you like hell.” The lyrics capture Emlyn’s personal fantasy of what falling in love will be like for her: letting her guard down, doing “all these stupid, mushy things – spinning me under street lights and locking eyes and just feeling at home with somebody, just having somebody there to be like ‘I’m right here.’” she says. “It’s being able to soften some of the parts of me that are a little tough and hard.”
The bright-spirited artist is confident that she’ll find that kind of love when the time is right, and she knows exactly what she wants. “I used to think that love was about comfortability in a sense, and I realized over time that some of the things that I am familiar and comfortable with are actually not necessarily what I want,” she says. “I’ve had to really challenge myself to look for relationships that are not necessarily settling into things that I’m familiar with. True love to me is about every day, the consistency of showing up for the person that you’re with, even on the worst days, and vice versa.”
Emlyn theorizes that she’s never been in love because she’s extremely independent, and extra careful about who she lets into her life or shows vulnerability with. She’s looking for someone who will challenge her, and she’s content to wait for it. “I want to feel not just supported, but uplifted. I’ve never wanted to settle because I feel like I’ve learned how to be by myself and thrive by myself. If somebody is going to come into my life, I want to feel like they’re actually making me better, adding something that I can’t provide for myself in some way,” she reflects, while looking toward a hopeful future. “I’m definitely still looking. I definitely am a hopeless romantic – you can hear it through all my songs.”
To call a sound merely indie rock at this point leaves much to be imagined. For New York City born and bred singer-songwriter Nisa, who releases her forthcoming debut EP Guilt Trip on March 26, that sound more specifically borrows elements from the varying subgenres existing under the indie umbrella: the heartfelt sincerity of Julien Baker but higher energy; the emotionality of emo without its saccharine sweetness; the power-pop hooks of Tancred’s 2016 LP Out of the Garden. Nisa combines these elements in an irresistible way, but beneath the EP’s catchy exterior lies themes of emotional detachment and reticence born of anxiety, something of a defense mechanism against the guilt and shame that can pervade the psyche.
After studying abroad in London, Nisa returned to NYC, simultaneously nursing a broken heart and preparing to record her debut. The EP’s title refers to the shift in scenery, as well as the feeling that Nisa could see the break-up coming miles away. “I had been moving toward it but didn’t feel completely certain in my decision to do it, so once I was the one to break it off, I felt guilt,” Nisa recalls. “That guilt was followed by this emotional detachment from myself. That person and the reasons leading me out of the relationship were the ones keeping me there.”
The timing was serendipitous in a way; the geographical and emotional changes intersected with the onset of the pandemic. We’ve all been forced to turn inward and examine our own rough edges over the past year. Nisa says she “took to writing to deal with what I was struggling to vocalize,” given the time to hunker down and consider what she was feeling and how to translate it into music. She also co-produced and released her singles “Forget Me/Giving” and “Colossus,” waiting until it was safer to proceed with her stalled recording plans for Guilt Trip.
Having to wait ended up having a huge impact on the sound, Nisa admits, as did being able to record for the first time in a real studio, rather than her bedroom. “I’d gone in with a much more Americana feel, but then we got there and there was this unnatural energy, this eclectic anger and like, very hard-pressed feeling in your face,” she explains. “It was a confrontation of all that time spent pent-up.” She recorded with a smaller team than she initially intended, working alongside close collaborator/guitarist Fritz Ortman and producer Ronnie Di Simone, as well as a handful of local musicians, like Del Water Gap drummer Zac Coe and guitarist Nick Cianci.
So far, Nisa has shared four songs from Guilt Trip – “Common Denominator,” “Bottom Feeder,” “Ferris Wheel,” and “Growing Pains,” each offering a glimpse into the seven-song effort. Today, she premieres latest single “Turn Me Down” via Audiofemme, which fits squarely into its place on the EP, dealing with social anxiety specifically. It reads almost as though Nisa is giving herself a pep-talk to enter a party, that the “you” and “me” she refers to could be the same person. “If you want, you can turn me down,” she offers, proposing a lonely, late-night diner as an escape route.
But there’s a dare in her voice, too – she makes space for the anxieties at play, but is encouraging enough to push through them, to seek self-acceptance and the ability to embrace our limitations. “It’s always gonna be like that for me as an anxious person,” Nisa explains. “I think that anxiety can also be met with understanding yourself. I just started understanding anxiety as it relates to me, so rather than detaching from myself, I took the time to understand it fully, and sometimes it’s just about riding the wave. So I think this song is definitely a ride the wave song.”
The animated video for the song embodies the tunnel vision that anxiety can create. “We wanted to give it a cinematic feel, and the music video reflects that. It ends up being this grand journey, so super excited to have that come out,” Nisa says. The metaphor is crystal clear: once you give up the guilt about the things that make you you, you’re free to view them from a perspective of neutrality instead of self-loathing.
Nisa is set to release the full EP on March 26, and in the meantime finds herself remaining productive, recording two other projects she penned during this time at home. With only the smallest light at the end of our pandemic tunnel, she says that if nothing else, she’s “just really grateful to have the time and the right headspace to be writing now.” And, no doubt, to have put some of that guilt behind her.
In the past decade, it has felt as though the concreteness once known as “fact” is shifting. What were once black and white truths have now turned grey, good and evil have grown nuanced, genre and labels are infinite, and there’s a general acceptance of fluidity in the nature of being human. Floatie, a Chicago-based band comprised of tight-knit group of friends Sam Bern (they/them) Luc Schutz (he/him), Joe Olson (he/him) and Will Wisniewski (he/him), explore these ideas sonically and lyrically on their new record Voyage Out, slated for release March 26 via Exploding in Sound.
“We’ve been looking very seriously into binaries, and it turns out they aren’t real. Human beings are always drawing conclusions about the things we don’t fully understand,” the band says over email. “It is a perfectly natural defense against a strange and incomprehensible world, but we believe abstract questions require abstract answers, so we turn to the language of music, to the vibrations of the spheres, and all we have learned so far is that we know nothing.”
The lyrics on the record can at times feel like listening in on a refreshingly authentic contemplation amongst loved ones. The group have been playing music together for over a decade, causing them to grow a fan base and community of musical peers in the Chicago indie scene, but surprisingly, Voyage Out is Floatie’s first release. “Nothing crumbles that is built on a foundation of love. Playing music with each other makes us happier than little piggies in a watermelon patch,” they say. “There’s a level of trust and understanding and openness that makes writing music with each other really easy. It does make for some distracting band practices though – if we don’t see each other for a while we end up just chatting the whole time.”
Throughout the record, Floatie morphs conventional indie music into something mesmerizing and swirling. At times the instrumentation can sound like a voice all its own, as though a debate between guitar, vocals, and percussion is taking place. Both chaotic and organized, simplistic yet dynamic, Voyage Out sheds genre and rejects definition. The precision the band engages with doesn’t limit their creativity as much as it challenges them to explore something new, a restriction the group seems to thrive under. Voyage Out was recorded by Seth Engel, a local Chicagoan who has been working with up-and-coming bands for the past twelve years, such as Ratboys and Moontype – bands that Floatie played shows with prior to the pandemic. Engel is known less for the sounds he introduces on the record and more for the way he forms an artistic space, with warmth and security in order to yield genuine and open results.
“Working with Seth is like working with an angel in heaven. He’s always there in your corner, saying all the right things at the right time. He’s proven himself as a more than capable producer both with his own material he puts out as Options, and every other record he is involved with,” says the band. “He is also a dear friend and a fan of the music, so we knew we could trust his decisions when it came to translating the music into the recorded domain. Working with Seth is a blessing and a delight and a gift and we love him.”
The album’s second single “Shiny,” premiering today via Audiofemme, speaks of fate (“Some luck/It’s happenstance/Or consequence/I guess that’s the way it goes”) juxtaposed with choice (“I will try/Even if my brain says so”). Lyrically, it’s a narrative of rediscovering oneself in the wake of change caused by a relationship, and how partnership and the self interact. Floatie claims the song is about “forcing your own luck by committing to your decisions” – a sentiment which scoffs at fate while acknowledging that not all circumstances and outcomes are in our hands. The twisting and turning which takes place sonically reflects this concept; as the flow of the song recedes and advances, so does the confidence of its speaker.
“The guitar may seem a bit out of fashion these days, but that doesn’t take away from its power as an instrument for channeling divinity,” the band says. “Usually Sam will bring a riff or two – or sometimes many riffs – for the rest of us to play with and modify until we have something that we all feel a connection to. The meaning coincides with the riffs, the vocal melody ensues and lastly the lyrics are finalized, marking the end of a quest for a song that (hopefully) isn’t a stinker.”
“This is surely a tried and true method for us, but we’re looking forward to experimenting with other processes for the next batch of songs,” they add. They’re also looking forward to playing more shows, as evidenced by the line, “I’ll take all the spice in front of me/I’ll go to another show” from “Shiny.”
“The first live music event post-lockdown will be overflowing with spice, and we will all appreciate the live experience in a new and special way, and that is really exciting,” says Floatie. “The shift from counting on our fellow music community members to fill our creative cups has been an adjustment. What the lyrics are referencing are the things that we do in order to feel driven to challenge ourselves and sit down and write something. Without the stimulation and life of the outside world, I guess it becomes more of a personal responsibility and less of an active experience.”
As we come into a time where commonplace formulas for music, identity, and community are being challenged, Floatie pushes the boundaries of our familiar comforts. This isn’t an indie band that sticks to standard form and discusses conventional truths and dynamics – instead, Floatie experiments with something new on Voyage Out. Through hypnotic melodies and decisive rhythm, the band allows creativity to steer their path, a commitment which only yields new and exciting music from a band to keep on our radars.
