Aryn (Feature/Interview)
How did you get your start in music?
I have always been singing honestly. I was 5 when I first started voice lessons. I started in a group class and after we discovered I had perfect pitch, I was moved to a private instructor. I was classically trained and the genre that piqued my interest for a long time was musical theatre. I actually did a diploma program at MacEwan University in their Theatre Arts program before going to Berklee to focus primarily on vocal performance in contemporary genres.
How are you enjoying your time at Berklee?
I absolutely love Berklee. It is the best decision I've ever made for myself as a person and as a musician. It has taken me to a level of knowledge and confidence I never even dreamed I was capable of. I am incredibly grateful for the team I have through Berklee and I know so many of these people will be with me for life. My time at Berklee has absolutely prepared me for gigs as well, such as helping open for David Foster and Katherine McPhee and taking part in Crescendo, both with the John Cameron Changing Lives Foundation. I find it so hard to believe I'm over halfway done so I'm truly just taking in everything that I can!
How do you find inspiration?
I find inspiration for music through either my own situations or channeling through someone else's experience. My music is always based on emotions and thoughts that someone has had at some point in their life. I am only 22 and have so much life yet to live, so I love dialing into someone else's brain for musical material and inspiration. For example, all of the songs off my album "No Labels" are written about a certain event in my life and are in chronological order in the track list to the order they happened in my life. But while they all are something I have felt at one point or another, they aren't all originally inspired by an event in my life but happened to reach a point where I could relate something I have experienced to the original source. My song "Yesterday" was inspired by Olivia Rodrigo's incredible album "SOUR", and started writing the song by thinking in the style she writes in.
How do you describe your sound and/or genre?
I have SUCH a hard time answering this question haha! I have started to begin to understand where my music fits but for so long I felt like it goes into so many different boxes that it's hard to just name one. I for sure write a lot of soft pop with pop R&B sprinkled in. But sometimes for simplicity I just call it "Singer/Songwriter"!
What is your songwriting process?
I always start with the melody or lyrics. Don't tell my profs, but chords and harmony are NEVER where it starts for me. I am horrible with chords. But my professor Peter Eldridge who I had for songwriting for 2 semesters really pushed me to use more unique chords in my writing. But with that being said, I love a gorgeous chord I just am never the person to think of it! That class also helped me be a lot more intentional with my songwriting. It used to be very sparse and only happened when I had an idea, but now I can sit down and intentionally write something and usually have a song within an hour or two. (My record is 30 minutes for finishing a whole song!) With that being said, I still have a lot of song ideas that come to me at very inconvenient times haha! A lot of ideas happen while I'm driving and I safely have to pull out Snapchat or voice memos after pulling over to make sure I don't lose the idea! After the song is actually written, I take it to my producer, mixing and mastering engineer extraordinaire Saul De Anda and we start fleshing out production ideas!
How did you get through the pandemic creatively speaking?
My album was fully written during the pandemic. I was home in Edmonton, Canada doing my Berklee studies fully online. Before 2020, I have maybe written 3 songs in my life and hated them all. I would have never considered myself a songwriter. I started to play with the idea of writing songs and learning how to play the guitar when the pandemic struck. It was a very interesting process of growth and not judging myself. The first song I wrote for the album was "Never Gonna Let You Go" and it was after speaking with my friend and fellow Canadian artist Mathew V about how to get out of a music comfort zone (Because I never envisioned myself being able to actually write an upbeat pop song).
What else can we expect from you this year?
I have some really exciting projects happening in some classes this year that will be shared with the public, as well as original music of course! I have about 15 songs and counting that are waiting to be produced, it is SO hard to work on my career while doing school so whenever I have spare time in between that's basically all I'm doing! Hopefully some winter performances as well. I will also be starting my Christmas body of work around September so you can expect that to come as well!
