In my own studio, I can just lock the door and record myself, do layers of vocals not knowing how they are going to turn out, and just scrap it if it doesn't work. It's my space. I'm running everything.
I'm the type of person that doesn't like to wait for people to do things for me, and I never want to feel stuck. Why sit around and be like, 'I wish my label would book me some studio time,' if I can just buy my own studio equipment and figure out how to run Pro Tools and record it myself?
If you look around anywhere, layers are an important part of, not just the story and the concept, but the world you're in. If you just turn around and look at your office door, there's a door, and there's something behind it.
In order for me to get right, I had to go back to Memphis, I had to close myself in, get in the studio, lock in, and just think about everything before all the ice, before the money, before everything, and just vent.
I'll play about with different sounds in the studio with no concept of music at all. I'll just build up a song in layers and when it sounds all right and gives me a vibe, that's enough, and I'll add vocals and move on.
Just going through a lot in my life, becoming more confident in myself, writing my own music and just really getting in the studio and just doing it.
Eight years ago, if I wanted to do a YouTube video, I broke out my camera and filmed everything myself and learned how to edit and kind of become a one-woman studio. But we're living in an era now, thanks to ICON, where any creator who is online, they can create in their own space.
When I started working on my own music, I didn't have the chance to record in a big music studio, so I had to record everything myself.
Once you work with a studio on a film, the studio is sort of like this enormous clam that just opens, takes everything and then closes, and no one enters again. They own it all.
I had to learn the hard way. There was a blindness, without any education or will or drive. Everything I started in the beginning from skate shops to record labels to a million and one side hustles that I went in without knowing how I was going to do it, a lot of those ventures just went out of business.
I don't even like to sing in front of my own band members so it's easier for me if they send me the music and I record my vocals in my own studio.
I do think it's possible for me to go back to the studio, and for a lot of women filmmakers to be going back into studio filmmaking with a different sense of their own agency, and a different sense of the respect that they can command. When you asked the question about whether women want to be making big studio movies, the answer is almost always yes. It's just, how do they want to be treated? What is that experience going to be? And if you know the experience is gonna be shitty going into it, I personally am at a place where I'm not willing to punish myself any longer.
We all just meet up and someone's house or the studio and we'll just jam and we'll lock into something that sounds cool. I'll go home with tracks of cool parts and work on words. Everyone in the band has a job to do and everyone knows their job and we all do it really well. So, when we're writing, we can just look at one another and say, 'OK, go write this part'. It's not just one person writing or producing everything - everyone's working to product what we have.
Maybe I was just born with a little bit of vocals or natural talent, but I feel like I taught myself. I just started taking vocal lessons to just work on my breathing, my vowels and stuff.
In the studio you can auto tune vocals, and with drums, you can put them on a grid and make them perfect. I hate that sound. When someone hands me a record and the drums are perfectly gridded and the vocals are perfectly auto tuned, I throw it out the window. I have no interest in rock music being like that.
I run because it's my passion, and not just a sport. Every time I walk out the door, I know why I'm going where I'm going and I'm already focused on that special place where I find my peace and solitude. Running, to me, is more than just a physical exercise... it's a consistent reward for victory!
I've been a teacher all my life. I've had my own dance studio, my own acting studio for 18 years out here... I'm just a natural teacher. I teach on all my healing work now. I think actors teach any time they work anyway. We're teaching emotions, we're teaching how to deal with emotions, we're teaching how to get around issues and deal with them. Actors are some of the best teachers in the world, because they're teaching you through entertainment, and you don't know you're getting a message.