Q: Hey, can you tell us a bit about where you come from, and what made you want to start a career in music?
A: I was born and raised mostly in Austin Texas, which, as you may know, is a big live music city. My mom, also a native Texan, is a longtime lover of music and an amateur songwriter. I went to all ages shows at punk venues in Austin starting in my early teens and played in bands throughout highschool. Music has always been a part of my upbringing.
Q: Did you have any formal training, or are you self-taught?
A: I’ve experienced all kinds of musical pedagogies, but all in a very shallow way. I took piano lessons as a child, but never learned to read music. I also did a brief stint of guitar lessons when I was a kid, and picked up bass guitar, but eventually moved away from that when the next thing caught my interest. I’ve learned Ableton bit by bit over the last many years. I have a very undisciplined brain for music, and I often move on from what I’m learning before I get good at it. I think this is why the holistic songwriter/producer workflow appeals to me. I can attend to different things at different times and at different intensities, throughout the creative process.
Q: Who were your first and strongest musical influences, and why the name ‘Crystal Box’?
A: Crystal Box is loosely named after my studio space, a shed behind my house in New Orleans.The name is meant to conjure a small, intimate space, where pretty little multifaceted objects exist in total privacy. I think about my studio as my little gem factory.
(It’s occurring to me as I describe this that my father was an actual goldsmith who made rings with gemstones in a shed behind his house. I never really considered that connection.)
Q: You have just released your new album, ‘Bad Art’. Is there a story behind it?
A: Bad Art was an exercise in confronting my creative anxieties. It refers to all the junk you have to make before your music starts to get good. I had never written a song before the Covid lockdown in the spring of 2020. I got laid off from my restaurant job and I had a lot of time on my hands. My mom and I started playing this game where we would write a song to a prompt everyday. It didn’t matter how bad the song was. The only criteria were that it related somehow to the prompt and that you finished it by the next day. Everyday we would get on facetime and play each other our songs, then decide on a new prompt. My friend Leah joined us a few days in and the three of us did this for a couple months. I learned so much during this time, not only about production and songwriting workflows, but also about how to trust myself, how to quiet my hypercritical mind and how get comfortable with looking really stupid. A lot of the material on this record was made during this time. I can say for sure that Crystal Box wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for Covid lockdown. And, I don’t really know where on the junk/good music continuum these songs exist, but I do know that making them totally reset the course of my life, and I’m very grateful for that.
Q: Can we expect a new EP or even another album from you in the near future?
A: Definitely. I can’t say too much about it yet, but I have a lot of exciting things in the pipeline.
Q: What do you feel are the key elements in your music that should resonate with listeners, and how would you personally describe your sound?
A: It’s hard for me to know how this music should resonate with listeners because it’s so personal. What I try to do, though, is to create spaces where my most uncomfortable thoughts feel safe to experience. At times, I offer my voice as an honest vehicle of intimacy, and at other times, I distort it so much that it’s unrecognizable. Things I feel super weird about saying as myself sometimes get presented in hyperprocessed versions of my voice. I use big reverbs to reinforce a sense of loneliness or emotional isolation. I’m also really fascinated with using reharmonizations and buzzy synths to create these kind of ecstatic and confusing crescendos that disrupt continuities in arrangement. I think a lot about texture, cadence, and awkwardness when I’m making music.
Q: Do you feel that your music is giving you back just as much fulfillment as the amount of work you are putting into it, or are you expecting something more?
A: I don’t know, I’m a deeply insecure person. So, putting music out for the general public to consume is always terrifying. At the same time, these songs are registers of my own radical agency in life. They will exist in perpetuity to, in a way, reassure me that my life experience is real. That is as much fulfillment as I need right now.
Q: Could you describe your creative processes? How do you usually start, and go about shaping ideas into a completed song?
A: Most of my songs start with a beat and then piano chords. I will often build out a track with a preliminary arrangement before the lead melody reveals itself to me. Sometimes, discarded lyrical or melodic ideas will find their way back into the track in the form of decorative vocal chops or reversed whimpery flourishes. I keep a notebook of song ideas, but they almost never appear in the song the way they were written. The way words sound when sung makes a huge difference for me. Once I have a lead vocal melody, I set out to get all other elements out of its way.
Q: What has been the most difficult thing you’ve had to endure in your life or music career so far?
A: I have a huge amount of guilt for not having done all this work earlier in life, that it took a total disruption of life as we know it to get me to write a song.
Q: On the contrary, what would you consider a successful, proud or significant point in your life or music career so far?
A: That point is right now. The album is out, and people want to know about it. That’s already beyond what I thought was possible.
