No.1 How would you describe this week in a sentence?
Woah.. this week?
Yes
As in a week from today or starting from Sunday?
Whatever you want.
Wow. Okay. This week. God, I really gotta reflect more. I would say… a week full of learning, for sure. And.. I don't know. I just turned 26 on Sunday so I feel… kind of like becoming. Something about becoming, something about trying to be an adult, and trying to grow the hell up, I would say. Is that too vague?
No, that’s amazing! Happy birthday!
Oh, thank you!
No.2 An artwork that inspired you this week. It can be anything, an album, a song, a movie…
I've been listening to Little Simz's latest album Lotus a lot, which I love. She's someone who is still so young, I think she's 31 now, and she has released six or seven full albums and they're just consistently great. She consistently uses her art as a way for self exploration. It always seems like something her heart is fully in. And it's always inspiring to me to see someone fully become themselves more and more with each project, and it's a way I would love to live.
No.3 A memorable moment from this week.
I saw Mission Impossible 8 on my birthday and frankly, I love those movies. Have you seen any?
Not yet..
That's okay. But they're usually awesome, and it was honestly largely pretty bad. And it's the last one. That was memorable because I was just like, this is how you don't make a movie. The first hour… it gets so bogged down in being concerned about what people think and catching people up when they haven't seen all the movies and all of that sort of stuff. This seems like something that doesn't apply to this week, but I don't know. It made me think about the pitfalls of making something for the largest audience possible.
And a backup answer would be… I had a nice sit in the park the other day and people watched.
Those are so amazing.
The fourth one is a two part [question], and you can choose which one to answer or not -
No.4 A motto you swear by, and/or advice you received and would like to share.
I don't know if I have any mottos. Advice, though… The one piece of advice I think about a lot was, I met this documentary filmmaker, actually, at South by Southwest a few years ago. My school set up one-on-one interviews with people, and I was telling him about a project I was working on, and I was like, “but I don't know, I just always then think of a new idea that's better and I forget about the old one and never actually do anything.” And he was like, “Oh, yeah, so that feeling never goes away. You just have to commit to an idea and find new ways to get excited about it. Because you're always gonna have another better seeming idea that's more exciting, and then you're never gonna get anything done.” So that helped me actually get things done.
Wow. This is so good!
No.5 So this is supposed to be the last question, but I will add another one, if you’d be down. What would you like to share about Spun You to Sleep?
Oh, man, I don't know. Just listen to it would be the big one. But what would I like to share?
One of the reasons I'm proud of it is because to me it feels very earnest. And people seem to be less and less concerned with earnest[ness]; earnest and cringy seem to be very closely associated. And I think it's the least self conscious piece of art I've made so far, and that's one of the things I love about it, and I would imagine that makes for a good listening experience.
What, [or] if you’d like to share anything about the music videos you’ve made, either for your song or for Dogwood Gap
I guess, If I can go more down the lessons learned route, music videos are hard for me. I get excited about larger projects, so music videos, even making a short film, I kind of struggle with, because I want to put all this emotion into it, but it's gonna be ten minutes, so how do you authentically try to do that? And music videos are even shorter. So I've learned, and I hope to keep making them and they get better, just to focus on smaller ideas, every ten seconds. How to make it more visually pleasing, and just put more motion in there and tell a story for sure, but not…I don't know. I think that's a good way to make it a little boring, if you're too concerned with the story of it, and not with the visual and the potential of film and all the exciting parts of it that don't necessarily have to be tied to a linear story. And I don't think I've done that well yet, but I think we're getting there.
I think so too.
Snapshots by Rachel Bard
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