Singer, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist who released three singles last year and is also a part of Climate Music, which she talks about in this conversation, recorded on-location in Anaheim, California, at the NAMM Show. She was a contestant on season 20 of “The Voice,” has been featured on PBS’s 30 Minute Music Hour, and was featured on NPR for their Tiny Desk Contest feature, “Top Shelf.” The videos on her official YouTube channel have a combined total of well over half-a-million views and she has more than 27 thousand monthly listeners on Spotify, where her top five songs alone have a combined total of more than a million and a half streams.
“I grew up in a small town as a young woman who was really always wondering why people did the things that they did… and I didn't grow up in an environment that was super diverse or in an environment that really rewarded outside of the box thinking, but thankfully I had a couple of parents who did.”
“I would go back to the city and go play with these guys two or three times my age.”
“I spend a lot of time talking to people and a lot of time in nature and a lot of time in silence and I've gotten just as much if not sometimes more inspiration there.”
“At the end of the day, I actually consider myself a writer more than anything.”
“Having the gift of all these different instruments at my disposal now, they lend themselves to different things… bass like wants to groove. It's not that you can't approach it differently. Guitar wants to scream or it wants to be pretty and harmonic. Piano wants to arrange. Drums wants to find pocket and they want to create dynamics. So, if you start at even just a different instrument, it will push you and then all the other instruments will kind of follow. It's like different main characters taking a lead… They each get their own episode.”
“Resilience and strength and self-love and respect are really fundamental parts to doing good and being well.”
“I've been pouring all of that into my music and I feel like I've almost been writing these manifestation casting spells of the person I want to be. I've been writing about surrender. I've been writing about acceptance. And now I'm getting more and more into embodying that so that I can be it and not just preach it.”
“What I would like to feel is fully present. I think that's part of why being excellent and being rehearsed and having chemistry with the people that you play with – if you play with anyone at all or having chemistry yourself – is really important because then you are able to remove the distractions.”
“It's better to be grateful and happy and present in the moment doing the damn thing than it is to be fixated on totally perfecting it.”
“People in the audience do want to be taken somewhere. They do want to be – people don't want to be bossed around day-to-day normally. But when they're in the audience and you're on stage there is sort of like a, ‘All right, take us. Where are we going?’ And so, you're really given an opportunity to do that, so you should.”
“I really think that despair is exhausting. I know. I felt it and I really think that if people are going to do the good work that they want to see in the world, sometimes that good work may just simply be finding the joy or believing in it or curating it. Sometimes that's enough.”
“Feel It All”
“Can’t Look You in the Eye”