Right. So that brings us to now. Your new single, "Nature's Voice is a Cry": Where did that title come from? Could you tell me a little bit about the origin of that song?
The title is definitely a bit like climate changey. Here's the thing. At the end of 2020, we drove to New York from California. We left because the fires were just so outta control.
I remember.
Yeah. I mean, it's almost every year now, but, the fires were so outta control. This was the third time that I had dealt with the fires. I also had my partner with me, and I was like, This is so whack. I don't want you to have to go through this ever again. I want to try to build a healthy life and a healthy home base, you know? So, we left, and we came here to New York again. We got here in December and then in June I went back for my friend's 31st birthday.
I flew back to California and I had this new panic disorder that had just hit me. I just started going to therapy again. I was struggling a lot, as I think a lot of people were after the pandemic. The vaccine had just been rolled out. So I went back to California in 2021. I was driving through my hometown and everything was burned, bro. Everything was black and crazy. Charred and weird and eerie. And my buddy was like, Wasn't that drive beautiful? And I was like, Dude, not really. Like, it's actually pretty depressing. It was not what I remember as a child. So I’ve been writing about that.
For the last year, I’ve been capturing that element of me kissing California goodbye and being kind of like, Farewell. I will always identify with you and love you as a state and as a culture. And just as bringing me up as a human being, but I've gotta move on. And so when I wrote this song, it was this homage to California and, not only just California. "Nature’s Voice is a Cry" is kind of this cry out for help.
Can you speak to a particular lyric that you feel illustrates that the most?
Writing lyrics for me is super avant garde and secondary. I mean I can answer the question. Yeah. But writing lyrics for me is usually secondary. I try to write the music first. And then I come up with melodies that hit the vibe, and I'm not really saying that I'm I have synesthesia—I don't really know if I do or not—but the way that I've always put it is, I try to capture just an overall feeling. And vibe. I'll make a hundred versions of it and then I'll know which one's the right one.
The first thing I wrote down when I was listening to your song was the word "nostalgia," and I feel like that was part of what you were going for. You're thinking about growing up in California and how things used to be greener. You were a child, but—
Used to be more wet
Used to actually rain. Yeah, so you accomplished that, for sure. I wrote down “nostalgia” and “sweetness”. That’s what I thought while listening to it.
Thank you. The lyrics that say, “Walk down lovers lane. Nothing but this gravel road,” it's like the first line. My grandmother's property where we all grew up, my mother, my aunt, and a lot of my friends grew up there. It was just this super rough property that has all these outbuildings. And if you go into town and you meet any of the locals, half of them have lived there. It's always been this old stomping ground. It's very West Coast hippie, in a way, which is where I get a lot of the sound for that song. That one lyric was kind of like, you would always walk up and down the driveway and it's this long gravel road. It's the only road that's gravel too. It's like the only road that nobody's paved yet, you know? I think that it's more just imagery. I just kinda write from images.
The nostalgia definitely comes from missing stuff and missing what it used to be and not in like an old head kind of mentality, not in like a “Make America Great Again” mentality, you know what I mean? Of course not, but more, I just wish that California wasn't burning. I just wish that there was more water. Just wishful thinking. I try to capture that over and over and over again.
In terms of your creative process, like you said, you focus on the music first. Can you speak more to that, particularly for this upcoming album?
Yeah. I definitely focus on the music first. Singing was the last thing I ever did. I was always playing instruments and writing songs with other people in mind for singing or for other vocalists. My first step in the creative process is always coming up with music. When I listen to songs that I think think are inspiring or that I have on repeat, you know, I was just telling somebody the other day, actually. We were all super high, sitting around a campfire, talking about music and art and the current climate of the world when it comes to the art world and stuff like that. I was kind of going back into what I've been doing over the last couple months of just writing and producing for people and myself and whatnot. And I’ll just, whatever I have on all the time, I'll just listen to it for two weeks straight. It'll be a couple artists that are usually a vintage record or an older artist that I just really identify with. Lately I've been listening to a lot of Joan Baez. Maybe it's one measure of a song that just hits me right. I'll be like, I wish I could write a whole album off just that one moment of that song. So I'll try to do that over and over and over again. And try to harness that more and more and more.
I feel like there's a great comparison with a painter or something. Or writers, writers are like that. You just write, you know, hundreds of drafts. Or maybe not hundreds, but you know what I mean? You write hella drafts and then, like, you finally nailed it and you know, your intuition is like, oh, that's the one. Yeah, that’s the right one for sure. And so when it comes to vocals in lyrics, it's unfortunately a lot of the time, if my vocals don't sound good over it, then I usually just scrap it and it sucks. It'll be like the coolest piece of music. And I'll just be like, oh, I'm just gonna put it over here and just save it for somebody else down the road. But the lyrics are always kind of hard 'cause I really don't like writing conventionally.
Verse, chorus, verse, chorus.