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// Letters to YVYNYL //

Kennedy Shaw “Heaven”

/ Sometimes I get letters from right here in my hometown. Kennedy sent this one over and I think it perfectly encapsulates the feeling a lot of my readers are going through. Those of you who are struggling to make their music despite all odds, to make a life of music, to grasp on to the love they get from putting it out there. We are all in this together, our weirdo crew of misfits and hooligans who’d rather make a song that rips out our hearts and lay it out on the table for all to hear than just ‘be normal.’ We hear you. We hear you. Keep it going, friends.

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Hi Mark,

When I think of music, I think of my grandmother singing me a song titled “don’t fence me in.” There's a home video of us singing it somewhere. Music to me feels no separate from myself. My mom used to listen to Tori Amos when she was pregnant with me and always told me that's why I started playing piano the minute I could.

My name is Kennedy, I’m a 21-year-old songwriter in Philly - or was in Philly - until a global pandemic interrupted my second year of college.

I’m only 21, but as far as coffeehouse music goes, I’ve probably seen it all. My parents used to take me to perform once or twice every weekend. They critiqued every show and were extremely supportive of how loud and passionate I was. Because of this, I know every jam band and bluegrass cover group that plays in the bookstores of the East Coast. I know which ones have AC and which ones make you pay for a meal after you perform. I have the stories of men telling me I’m “mature for my age” and taking photos of my 14-year-old legs while at the piano bench.

After I went to University, I knew a lot about basement scenes, too. I got too drunk while performing a few times, I kissed audience members during the choruses and band members during the verses. I drove off in the wrong uber twice. When the residence hall elevators shut down, I carried the keyboard, amp, stands, and book bag down 9 flights of stairs, and carried them back up at 2 or 3 AM less tired than before.

During this pandemic, and being back home in NJ, I’ve been asking myself why I continue pursuing music as a career, even though I never feel entirely validated or see financial gain from it. If anything actually, I see loss.

I switched my major from Music to English just before the pandemic broke in the U.S. I decided it was time to focus on a 'real career’. Then, I listened to some rough mixes of mine and decided to use all of my savings, every penny, to buy recording equipment and finish my EP in my bedroom. Clearly, I don’t have any answers on why, or what’s logical, or what's smart. I’m literally a crazy 21-year old girl-woman doing vocal takes in my parent’s shower when they let me and finding the personal information of music bloggers and emailing demos to small labels like I’m their musical messiah. I’ve never filmed anything for anyone, and yet I’ve been dressing in vintage clothes and setting up “sets” (a bedsheet usually, chair, flowers) and recording them on my iPhone.

Even when I want to move on, the feeling of working on my music creatively is something so close to my core I don’t think I can ever stop. Not because I think my music is worth listening to, or even good, I just can’t stop making it. When I think of music I think of waking up from a dream and jotting down words. My dad saying to 'turn it down,’ and then 'close your door’. I think of every love I had in high school giving me mixtapes, my best friend passing out on the train ride home with my amp in their lap. I think of watching strangers cry while I sing to them, basements of sweaty chances moshing, and my bandmates cans of beer. Every car ride with my parents I took for granted then, oblivious to the cost of gas and how many hours it took to get to the record shop where one person listened to half my set. I think of my younger sister listening to music to avoid new driver anxiety, and I think of my grandmother singing me songs, telling me to sing my own.  I think of pausing the youtube tutorial, running from the desktop and to the piano upstairs. I'd make this hike a million times a night but never felt tired, and when I think of these things I don’t have to wonder why. 

Music is by far not the smartest choice as far as a career- maybe if I was smart I’d choose doctor, or scientist, or engineer, but feeling “smart” doesn’t feel half as good as these memories music has given to me. “Heaven” is the first song I finished when I decided to work on rough mixes I had in my back pocket. It sounds haunting and compares heaven to a first love- the romanticization of first relationships is something that still pulls me in lyrically. I wrote it on bass, alone in my dorm room, probably crying. I hope you like it.

- Kenney

…

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Pom Pom Squad “Head Cheerleader”

/ “Scariest girl on the cheerleading team…”

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CHVRCHES “He Said She Said”

// Letters to YVYNYL //

Frail Jonny “What Happened to Your Coat”

/ Being connected to your own mind and remembering to feel through listening above seeing has shown to be fruitful for me. Perhaps that’s why it’s often one small tip they give you in meditation classes. When I’m listening to Johnathan Peter Wright’s music, I can grasp the deliberation of these sentiments that he feels through his music. Then I watch this video and think of, well, death. But in a funny way, it’s kind of comforting.

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Dear Mark,

I’m here in a house in the mountains of Asheville, NC, lying on a bedroom floor with the afternoon light streaming in, and I’m confused. I’m confused about the way a single life can be divided and fractured into its chapters.

I’m confused about the way that the past simultaneously lives into the present and falls away into an untouchable, unreachable place. I’m confused about the future, and how it somehow stays future and never comes toward us.

It’s not that I always dislike confusion. Last year I finished a graduate degree in film studies up in Toronto, and my topic of research was the experience of confusion in film viewing. I loved it.

On blustery fall days, I loved taking apart films that puzzled me with their discontinuities and mismatches. But this year confusion is burdensome. It’s all-encompassing and too close to home. My stomach tenses and my vision tunnels when my mind begins to race.

Sound is confusing too, but a different kind of confusing. Recently, I’ve been closing my eyes at regular intervals in order to reduce my obsessive reliance upon sight and focus instead on other senses. When I do this, I’m thrown into a different space, swirling with dots and filled with sound. I listen and try to place each sound source. Still, it doesn’t feel like quite the same world.

Yes, being in the dark is different than reaching out with the endless arm of sight. But the swirling of shutting my eyes has a strange comfort to it because there is the possibility of accepting all that you don’t and can’t know. Accepting that you might never come to know it. And this is where music comes in: as the form of the invisible, as the acceptance of the ungraspable. To burrow down into a ringing tone, whether playing it or listening to it, is to cut away all that visual reaching. You don’t need to reach in order to hear. All you need to do is receive.

Over the past year I’ve been dealing with some things (ha! an understatement for most of us), things both from the past and the future. These things get muddled and mixed into the present, and pretty soon all my tenses are shot to bits. In those times, when I’ve picked up a guitar, or a violin, or stooped at the piano, and closed my eyes and pressed into the instrument, there was a release. A tearing free of the things I know and want to know and feel that I need to know.

This is not some gnostic tearing free from the body, but tearing free from the visual structures that surround me like ghostly cities, the visual mausoleum of the past, the half-abstract visualization of a multitude of futures, and the disembodied flashes of internet wastelands.

Music can cut through this. For months I struggled along, battling a simple dichotomy of sight/knowledge/desire and sound/ release/ acceptance. And I’ll probably continue the battle for years to come because I don’t see an easy way out of this predicament. Giving up on the former seems pragmatically impossible, and giving up on the latter sounds to me like signing myself over to self-destructive drives.

Music is what has given some ballast to my swaying ship. Because even in the darkness of sound, there is form. And while there may not be a strict right or wrong in the world of music, taste, balance, pattern, and movement act as guiding lights.

All this sounds conceptual, I’m sure. Maybe you’re thinking, “what does any of this have to do with your actual music, the music you share?” What I’ve been telling you is the story of the music, one of its stories. Here’s another way to tell it: I went into a room day after day, night after night, and made noises while sitting on the floor while pacing while lying down. These noises I then recorded. These recordings I shaped. These shapes I call songs. These songs, together, I call an EP, Afterlives, Vol. 1. Which is the truer story? Listen for yourself, what do you hear?

I hope this music gives something to you.

Sincerely,

Frail Jonny

…

Support YVYNYL, an independent music project here! Got a story to tell? Submit it to Letters to YVYNYL.

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Denmark Peoples “Mural For Our Time”

// Letters to YVYNYL //

HALAN “Little More”

/ When you love writing music that is sad, it tends to go slower and is muscled up through grumbling angst. It’s good to keep working on the craft of writing a song that feels danceable. Dancing is the antidote to being sad. Songwriter Helen Zhou’s new single was launched with the endeavor to stop moping and add a little skip to her step. The single came out on April 16th, 2021.

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Hi Mark,

I grew up in Singapore learning classical piano but was never really good at it because I never played any of the pieces according to the style of the period - I added too much pedal to Bach and played Mozart too aggressively. For that reason, and that reason alone, I failed my piano Diploma exam.

I moved to Los Angeles for college and sang poorly in various rock and metal cover bands before finally learning how to scream and sing properly when I graduated. Post-college I found myself in an original theatrical metal band which promised much but did not do much, so I decided to learn how to produce music and make my own songs, and actually get stuff done.

I released my first songs in 2020 of the dark alt-pop genre. I almost exclusively write sad songs because music is my outlet for sad feelings, particularly the “romance” kind. So I found myself releasing a debut melancholy alt-pop EP titled “Best Intentions” about guys who had the worst intentions towards me. Fodder for me to mope around.

Towards the end of 2020, I realized that my music did not really match up with who I am and want to be. Pre-pandemic I liked going to metal concerts and headbang until my neck is stiff or electronic concerts and dance until my body turns into meat pulp. I miss upbeat music, and I want to make upbeat music. So I decided to change my style of production.

This year I still write sad songs about romantic letdowns but what the hell, I make them so at least I get to party to the songs. I make dance-pop now and my first release is “Little More,” about a texting relationship with a guy who promised much but did not do much. I wrote the song in 2020 as a sad indie pop song initially but revamped it into what it is now, a fierce rebuke to YOU, Mr. Gif, who can’t open up or progress a romantic relationship. Bye!

I hope you enjoy the song.

Best,
HALAN

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Got a story to tell? Submit it to Letters to YVYNYL.

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Flu Flu “Mi Apotema Personal”

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// Letters to YVYNYL //

ALMA “#naturanaturans”

/ While they’re touching dream pop in other tracks, this raw statement of a song comes off a lot like a new Mountain Man poem (who, coincidentally, released a new single covering Fiona Apple’s “Not Knife” on the same weekend). Musicians Alba S. Torremocha, Lillie R. McDonough, and Melissa Kaitlyn Carter have put together all the feelings about “put down your phone” in one lovely folky song. Here’s a little bit about how and why they made it.

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Dear Mark,

We are a dream pop trio based in NYC - usually. The pandemic has separated us and we’re releasing our debut album during a time that is anything but usual. We’ve released our entire album behind the computer screen and via social media. It’s wonderful to have this privilege, but it also hurts. Not being able to be the social human beings that we are. Not being able to hug, to touch, to sing together and find the harmonic waves on our chest. That hurts.

Our newest single, #naturanaturans is tied to this experience. It’s a DIY anthem about the trials and tribulations of social media. Directly translated as “nature doing what nature does,” it explores the irony of how our natural choice is to not be natural when we have the chance, and how we lose ourselves in the scroll shaping our identities based on how others see us online.

The song came to one of us while we were chilling at home, scrolling through instagram. A targeted ad popped up, using female empowerment and body positivity prompts to sell… well, a corset. It was equally hilarious and infuriating to think that they didn’t even see the irony behind this choice. Just another attempt to make us feel like we should choose to be unnatural, no matter how painful or pointless. And that somehow we’re being empowered by doing so.

We started working on this project a year ago, before the pandemic. We wanted a song to perform live that would allow us to be truly raw and natural — just us, our bodies and our voices. #naturanaturans at its core invites us to feel into our own inherent completeness that exists beyond all of the likes, comments, and follows. There’s nothing that this song is without and the same is true for us as human beings. Then the pandemic hit and the song became the quintessence of ironic karma: we created a song to connect at a raw level, to be together, and suddenly we could only see each other through a screen.

For us, music IS medicine, you don’t need to purposely use it as such. It’s like going to sleep every night: you know you need it, and you don’t want to see what happens if you stop doing it.

With Appreciation,
Melissa + ALMA

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// Letters to YVYNYL //

Little Fuss “Watch Out”

/ I’ve been a bit checked out of the internet this year, despite endless swiping my way through my dumb phone. I came across this letter today and it made me remember how many wonderful songs I get here and how great it is to touch base with artists who are still slogging along in this swamp as the rest of us. Have a listen to this new lovely new song from duo Cody Von Lehmden and Olivia Martinez.

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Hi Mark!

First of all, I want to thank you for curating this blog and all you do for the music community. I know firsthand how big of an impact you have had on individual artists and creators as a whole. In fact, it feels like a wild, full-circle moment to be writing to you because, in a very direct way, YVYNYL is responsible for starting my own music career.

Nearly five years ago my brother, who was in my band, The Candescents, wrote to you in what we saw as a longshot that anyone would take a chance on a small, upstart indie band from rural Ohio. You decided to feature us, however, based on nothing but a self-produced song and a few grainy photographs. I remember waking up on the morning after it was released to a flurry of excited messages from my bandmates, and we watched as your blog post slowly caused the song to spread across the internet—gaining traction from an army of bloggers and deep-internet music lovers.

It was perhaps the most exciting and fulfilling moment of my entire life to see absolute strangers supporting something that I was a part of. Little did I know at the time, your decision to feature us and our music would start me out on a half-decade journey that would culminate with getting signed to Dirty Hit Records, going on several North American tours, and forming a life based around my love for music. While I consider myself lucky to have been a part of such a dream scenario, both my brother and I departed in early 2019—the reasons for which could be an entire article in itself!!

The world however keeps turning, and I have somehow found the past couple years to be even more exciting than the last. After leaving the band, I packed up all of my possessions and music equipment into my car and drove to the east coast—with little direction or purpose other than my desire to continue making music. I ended up in Boston where I auditioned for Berklee College of Music and was accepted to study in Valencia, Spain. While studying abroad, I met Olivia Martinez, and immediately we bonded over a shared passion for cheap wine and creating art. Since being kicked out of Spain due to COVID, we’ve remained singularly committed to growing together as artists, and our project, Little Fuss, has become our medium into which we have put all of our energy. Our single “Watch Out” and accompanying self-shot music video is the first taste from our debut EP.

Both lyrically and musically, this song represents the need for us to keep pushing forward as songwriters and not become complacent in following a set formula. The need for discovery is an intangible part of what makes this band so special, and that is perhaps best exemplified by our DIY approach to almost every aspect of our music. All of the supporting material, including the video and artwork, was completely done by ourselves during quarantine. The music video in particular was shot and edited over the course of two days and is our first foray into videography. We couldn’t be more proud to share this art with you that we care so deeply about, and we hope that you enjoy it!

Over the past year, this project has served as a constant reminder to only look back as a means to appreciate what you have. Because of that, I don’t view Little Fuss through the lens of The Candescents, but rather as a completely separate and important entity. This song is just the start of what I know to be a long and fruitful songwriting partnership, and we would greatly appreciate it if you considered featuring us on your blog!

Thank you for reading!

- Cody Von Lehmden

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Yumi Zouma “Cool for a Second”

 / It was a bad hesitation / A little stumble in the back of your soul / Another hard time alone in yourself / It was a step too far to know /

// Letters to YVYNYL //

Agouti - Chameleon

 / Somehow, music seems to transcend “death” a lot. Or maybe, death brings words or music or… Carmen Caruso has been writing music as therapy for a while now and you’ll hear it in her songs. She sent me this video and a letter to tell me - and all of you - a bit more about the impact some life/death experiences have treated in her creative process. Let us know what you think below. 

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Dear Mark,

I want to thank you for taking the time to read my letter. I spent some time reading through some of the other letters you posted here, and I’ve really enjoyed what other artists have shared. My album Nodes is rooted in dealing with the aftermath of death and trauma.

Watching someone you love slowly wither away is heartbreaking. You spend hours researching, trying to help them, but you feel so out of control as they become a shell of their former self. Over the past eight years, I have lost four grandparents, one to Alzheimer’s, one due to complications from repeated seizures, and two to declining health. My husband lost his mother to Parkinson’s, and we lost our pet Arthur to a tooth abscess, both of which were long-battled illnesses. 

I also lost a close friend who I used to play music with. He was about to start a new chapter of his life to study music abroad in Europe when he died on a camping trip from heart failure. No one saw it coming. I never got to say goodbye to him and that still haunts me to this day. I think that death was the hardest one of all: losing someone who was just starting out his life, and had so much life to live.

Throughout all of this, I was dealing with my own PTSD, brain fog and severe chronic fatigue. There were moments in trying to finish this album where I couldn’t write. Some days I just had to consign myself to the couch because I had no energy to do anything at all. I was tossed around from doctor to doctor, and tried everything from cleanses, sleep meds, naturopathy, acupuncture, nasal surgery, antidepressants, EMDR, heavy metal testing, and immunotherapy. My struggle to regain my health has been a long physical and mental journey that I’m still on to this day.

People have told me that my album sounds happy to them, even though the content of my lyrics doesn’t always match the mood. I think that’s almost a metaphor for how I try to hide my emotions, to pretend like everything’s OK. I feel like it is these moments of darkness that society never seems to want totalk about. I always find it unhelpful when I see people suffering from loss on Facebook, and commenters just say, “Thoughts and prayers for you and your family, give me a call if you need to talk!” People don’t understand how difficult it is for someone who is struggling to push through their own isolation to call someone else. I try to call my friends when they are not doing OK even when they don’t ask for it, because I know now that sometimes we need someone to be that person, to be a lifeline. Sometimes we all need someone to check in on us. And in a way, my album is trying to do that as well. Through my lyrics, I hope to connect with other people who have been through similar experiences and let them know that they are not alone.

This album is about turning something negative into something positive. As a node is the beginning and end of sine wave, I thought it was a fitting description as I saw several doors close in my life, and began to step through this new one with Agouti. Thank you again for taking the time to read this.

All the best,

Carmen

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Support YVYNYL, an independent music project here!

Got a story to tell? Submit it to Letters to YVYNYL.

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TOPS “Colder & Closer”

Oh yay! I’m so stoked that these fabulous Canadians are sending out incredible new work. Massive tour coming up, too, so be sure to see them live!

Lightning Bug “The Onely Ones”

Hot off the press!

Previously: “Bobby”

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