Premiere: Cody Simpson, "captain's dance with the devil"

The singer-songwriter joined office to discuss her creative processes, the drain of overthinking, and why her most intense criticism is directed at herself. Read our conversation below.

Hi Samaria! Thank you so much for having this conversation with me. I'm really excited to be able to talk to another Bay Area native.

Hey! That’s sick, what part of the Bay?

Oakland, I grew up right by Lake Merritt. What part are you from?

I lived in Oakland, but I was mostly raised in Berkeley. My dad lived off High Street, but I always went to school in Berkeley because he didn't want me going to school in Oakland. I went to Berkeley High. I always try to correct that when people just say I'm from Oakland because I'm probably actually more from Berkeley.

I feel you. Technically I was born in Berkeley. I feel like everybody in the area was born at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley back then —  

I was just about to ask, were you born at Alta Bates? That’s crazy. Small world, very small world.

Indeed! Can you tell me a little bit about the early days of your relationship with music? Did you know that you wanted to be a musician when you were a kid, or was that something that came along later?

Oh, 100%. I never really saw my life going any other way than me being an artist. Both of my parents were really influenced by music and both of them were chasing a music career when they were younger. My biological mom was a singer, and my dad was in a rap group with him and his cousins, all from Oakland too. He's like, a business, corporate man, basketball coach now, so those days are behind him. 

But yeah, I was just grew up around a lot of neo-soul, and I was really influenced by Justin Timberlake's Justified album and Aaliyah when I was a kid. I just always wanted to be that person singing heartbreak records in the rain when I grew up.

I love it. What was your first tool or instrument? Was it singing first, or did you start off playing something?

It was actually singing and songwriting. I started writing really stupid songs in the sixth grade. That's around the time I started to realize I may have had a gift for it, because my cousins used to hype me and tell everybody that I was gonna be like a famous singer one day. They made me feel like I was really good at it, so I kept at it.

One of my first songs that I ever wrote was on this keyboard I had been gifted by my neighbor who was moving. On the old electric keyboards, you could press a button and it would just give you some kicks and like the most basic drum loop ever. I made a song about my sixth grade crush. From there, I was like, Yeah, I can do this.

Shoutout the sixth grade crush! Sparked something great.

And like, I recorded my very first song ever to like a Chip The Ripper instrumental. He's a super underground rapper and I got it off YouTube and a friend of my mom's used to come by the house to record her and just set up his equipment in the kitchen and any, and I have been begging me to let me record and I was like, I want to make a song, I want to make a song.

But they have finally let me make one. And like, that was like, when I realized that like, oh, like recording really isn't as crazy as I thought it was like, I thought you had to be in like a multimillion dollar studio. And once I realized that it's just as easy as having the right equipment and setting it up in any room and soundproofing it somehow I was like, Oh, yeah, it's up. It's up.

So I ended up making a SoundCloud account. I put out my very first song ever in my junior year of high school. I was 16. The song was called “Love Better.” I took it off SoundCloud a long time ago but I still have it in my email, and sometimes I go back to it and I'm like, Oh, I sound like a baby. 

I mean, you were a baby in a lot of ways! We all gotta start somewhere. Do you write all of your own songs in full, or do you ever collaborate with other songwriters?

Everything that I’ve put out thus far has been all me lyrically. Within the past year and a half, I would say, I've started working with other artists with the pen. Normally it's just like me and a producer, but I started to feel like I was hitting a wall with my writing and I was like, You know what, maybe I should be open to working with others. 

It's not that I ever turn my nose up at working with other people. I think that I had this block up, because everything I write is from such a personal place and I really treat my music like it's like my child. You know what I mean? Like, I don't always feel like other people can successfully relay the message that is coming from something that is so personal to me. It's kind of narrowed down for me who I actually feel comfortable allowing into that vulnerable space of mine, and I think that the people I have recently chosen to sit down and write with also share very similar experiences to me and also handled similar situations the same way that I would.

I’m also curious, when you write songs, do you write with melody first or lyrics first? 

Usually the way I do it is I kind of freestyle, like a rapper. So there's definitely words involved when I'm doing top lines and stuff. And there will usually be something that I say within that where I'm like, oh, that's cool, and I'll run with that and build the song from there. Very, very rarely do I ever sit down and like, write a full song out and then go in the booth and record. I'll just go freestyle, pick something that I like and then just start rhyming from there off the top of my head.

It feels more authentic that way because you're not thinking too much about it. I hate thinking. When I feel like I'm starting to think too much about the songs that I'm writing, I always end up not liking what I make. I don't know what that's about. I've always been that way.

Is your writing always or mostly autobiographical? How much of it is based on your own experiences?

I throw myself under the bus in my songs more than I do anybody else. I will go in on myself. I've noticed that, like, the last few people to write about me use the words “self reflective,” and I think that's putting it nicely. I really have a habit of tearing myself apart in my music. It's not always in a negative way — even with this project that I'm getting ready to release, it's like taking a look inside myself and picking myself apart in order to be able to do better.

Speaking of the project, I was able to listen to it ahead of time. It's beautiful. Congratulations. From your ep last year to now, did it feel different in any way, both in the process of creating it and also now in the process of building up to the release? 

That's a good question. With every project that I release, there's always growth, of course. But I'm learning now, listening back, each project displays a different type of growth within my life.

The last one — I was going through a really bad breakup, and I think that the songs on that for the most part were really geared towards getting over that person, that one individual, and getting myself through that breakup.

Now I've kind of stepped back from the situation and looked at it from angles that I hadn't before. and like I said earlier, like, just really tearing myself apart as opposed to the situation itself and dissecting myself in the way that I chose to handle things in the past. Not even just in that relationship, but just in my life.

I love that. Final question: is there a song or an aspect of this project that you are the most excited or the most proud of for people to hear?

Yeah! I kind of stopped listening to the project for a while because I wanted it to feel new to me again when it came out, so I gave my ears a break. But I listened to it again the other day, just out of excitement because the release is approaching quickly. One of the songs that wasn't necessarily a favorite of mine just became a favorite of mine. It's called “Three Rings.”

There’s a movie I watched called Good Luck Chuck, about a guy who, I think he gets cursed as a young boy and the woman who cursed him pretty much made it so that every woman who sleeps with him will end up marrying the person that they sleep with him.

So women realize that he's this good luck charm to getting an engagement ring. At first he's like, “Oh this is great, all these girls want to sleep with me.” But then after a while, he becomes lonely because nobody actually wants to be with him. He ends up meeting this girl that he just absolutely falls in love with, but he doesn’t want to sleep with her because he doesn't want to lose her to someone. 

Many times in my life when I end up dating somebody, I’ve felt like they always end up finding their forever person after me. So I wrote this song called “Three Rings.” And in the song, I say “that's Three Rings given to someone who should be me.”

And like, I never realized how deep that song hit for me until I just listened back to it a couple of days ago and the lyrics just started hitting me differently. So, yeah, “Three Rings” would probably be my favorite right now.