Introducing #180 - Daemes
Let us introduce you to Brooklyn based artist Daemes - who has created her own blend of dark indie pop on debut track ‘Riptide’. She took a moment to talk to us in more depth about her music.
Hey there Daemes, how are you? How does it feel to be releasing music during this strange time for music?I’m doing well, thank you! Well, it's a strange time for everything, I think, not just for making or releasing music. I think it's fair to say that it's not an ideal time for artists to put music out because touring to support a release isn't an option, but it's also become clear that inviting people to connect and share in a common experience is especially important when we're all apart and feeling isolated. I just released "Riptide," but it was written a few years ago, so it's not a product of quarantine or of the COVID era. To put it out now feels a bit odd because I was in such a different place when I made it, and the world was very different too.
Your new track ‘Riptide’ is out now, can you tell us what the track is about?
I wrote "Riptide" after falling in love for the first time, and it's my first ever release. It's about the phase during every blossoming relationship where you have to let your guard down a bit and allow your partner to see you, to understand your struggles and shortcomings, and to love you despite those things. So, "Riptide" is a love song for a person, but it's also an ode to those defining moments when you let your desire for connection overtake your fear of being rejected, reveal how you're perhaps not always as strong or put together as you'd like to appear, and trust that the other person isn't going to announce that you're no longer desirable. It felt fitting for my first release because the next few songs I'll put out are more about what happens when the tides start to turn. "Riptide" is more of an outlier thematically-speaking, so I'm looking forward to seeing how people respond to my upcoming releases. I like a love song, but I love a heartbreak song.
The track comes from working with producer Barb Morrison, who has worked with the likes of Blondie and more. How did that partnership come about?
Barb and I met in 2011 through friends, and they came to see one of my first shows while I was at NYU. After the show, Barb sent me a text that said something like "what the fuck? we need to get you in the studio immediately," which was exciting and terrifying, because I wasn't yet writing songs I was fully ready to stand behind. We made a few records back then, but I didn't release them because I was so new to writing music and to the idea of being an artist, and I felt that I needed more time to develop. I stopped making music for a few years and pursued a completely different career, but found that the further I strayed from songwriting, the more depressed and out of touch with myself I felt. I called Barb up in 2018 and we picked up again, and this time around I had a better sense of myself and my sound.
You are based in Brooklyn, what is your favorite thing about living there?
We have the best ice cream. Plus, most of my friends and family members live here.
What are your key musical influences as an artist?
I can trace a lot of what informs my instincts as a songwriter back to what I was exposed to in childhood and adolescence. I didn't start writing songs or singing until late in my teens, but music played a key role in many formative experiences. I have strong memories of my dad, who's from Northern Ireland, blasting Irish ballads before we had company over, and the low drone of the Irish bagpipes and all those mournful string parts really resonated with me. In fourth grade, I had what at the time felt like a life-altering moment when I had a fight with my friends at the ice skating rink and they went off without me at the exact moment that "Iris" by the Goo Goo Dolls began to play over the rink's speakers. I skated around by myself feeling like that song was the soundtrack to my life, and it was incredibly dramatic, but it was the first time a song arrived at the exact moment I needed to hear it, and I’ve never forgotten how that felt. That prompted me to start looking for music to download, and I started out listening to a lot of early Sia and Damien Rice before I discovered bands like Brand New and Paramore whose sounds had some more drive and grit. When I was ten, I heard Missy Elliott's "Get Ur Freak On" for the first time, and was completely floored; her attitude and cadence made me consider rhythm in a way I had yet to. I started singing along to Amy Winehouse and Adele's records when I was a teenager and given that I'd had no formal training at the time, practicing their phrasing and runs became central to my early vocal development. Amy Winehouse's death was the event that inspired me to enroll in my first songwriting course while at NYU, not realizing that I would be expected to sing the songs I was writing. It was an enormous oversight, but ultimately a blessing, because I wouldn’t have signed up if I had known we would have to perform, and because the people in that class were the ones who informed me that I could sing.
My instinct is always to make everything sound darker, and it’s undoubtedly rooted in my love for those really dramatic, cinematic records that resonated with me when I was young. Particularly in the past year or two, I've started listening to more Pop, and as result, my melodies have started to get a little more upbeat and my tempos have started to pick up. So, the music I’m making right now is some blend of those worlds, and it's what feels right to me at this moment; it’s dark and personal, but it's starting to veer ever so slightly towards sounding more like Pop. I’m still navigating that balance, and suspect I will be for a while. I care a great deal about lyrics, probably more than I should, and I do a lot of research on who's involved in making the songs I like. I've picked up on the patterns in the credits to a point where I now follow a lot of songwriters and keep up with their work, and sometimes I can tell who's been involved on a track just by listening. It's the piece of the puzzle I find most interesting, and those writers often go without gaining the kind of success where they'd be recognized by name, but they're the backbone of the industry. Currently, I'm feeling inspired by Arlo Parks, Phoebe Bridgers, Diana Gordon, and FLETCHER. I keep listening to this one transition in a Girl In Red song. It's simple but very impactful. Often I'll go back to find things like that, a transition or a snare or a synth I liked so that I can figure out what about it made me want to hear it again. Pharrell has a great conversation with Rick Rubin in which he talks about being inspired by a song, then figuring out how it makes him feel and working to reverse-engineer the feeling by writing something that makes him feel the same way as the inspiration song did. He put it better than I can, so I'd recommend watching that interview instead of trying to make sense of what I just said. Anyway, this changes all the time, but I do love that I just automatically named an all-female lineup!
Now the track is out there, what next for you?
I've started producing my own songs during quarantine and was unbelievably lucky to join a songwriting group this past summer with artists whose work has significantly informed my own. It’s been incredibly humbling, and it’s pushed me to level up and just get better at...everything. I have a bunch of singles coming out next year, and the music video for "Riptide" is coming out in the next couple of weeks. It's a compilation of lost footage that my mother recently found of my grandparents in the 1950s and ‘60s when they were traveling the world as newlyweds. They're still together all these years later, and it's been difficult not to be able to see them during COVID, but it was very moving to sift through these tapes and to create a visual narrative of their young love story to accompany a song about my young love story. And I like that I’m not the star of my first video. There will be plenty of opportunities for that.