Didi

Catch up with international pop singer Didi and watch the video for her debut US release, "Tell Me Why".

What first got you interested in music?

Didi: I’ve wanted to be a singer since I can remember first hearing a great song on the radio. Probably, the biggest thing that made me really want to be an artist was watching JLo videos.

Which musicians have you been influenced by?

I grew up listening to Britney, Madonna, JLo, Beyonce, and Rihanna. From the moment I saw them, I loved the way they performed, their costumes, their personal style, and that you could have fun and dance to almost every one of their songs. They make music that makes you feel good. That makes you feel beautiful, strong, and sexy, when you sing them. I love Beyonce and Rihanna’s personal fashion; I think they are the queens of combining their music with their fashion.

If you were to make a playlist for your fans, which 3 songs - from other artists - would you have to include?

It really depends on if I’m choosing songs that are on the radio today or songs that I love overall (new and old).

If I had to choose 3 songs that are on my playlist today, I’d choose:

1. Ariana Grande – "Side to Side"

2. Daft Punk feat. The Weekend – "Starboy"

3. Lady Gaga – "Illusion"

3 songs (including older songs), I would have to choose:

1. Aerosmith – "I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing"

2. Celine Dion – "My Heart Will Go On"

3. JLo – "I’m Into You"

How would you describe your sound to someone who had never heard your music?

I would have to describe my music as fun, energetic, sexy, dance-infused, and high fashion.

What were your inspirations behind your single and the video for "Tell Me Why"?

As with all my music, I am inspired by love. I was inspired by my relationship for this song. As for the video, I was inspired by a video I love by Duran Duran. I felt it would be great to have a song about a strong love represented by fierce, strong, beautiful women.

Do you have plans to release a new album or EP?

We will actually be releasing a new single called “Say No More” digitally and for radio this month! I’m very excited!!

What do you hope listeners are able to take away from your music?

First and foremost, I want my listeners to be able to have fun and to feel sexy and confident when listening to my music. I want them to be able to feel the emotions through my music... Primarily, that I love life, I love living my life, and have fun living.

Is there anything you want to add?

Yes, just one more thing. I’m inspired by artists that make music that makes you feel good. That makes you feel beautiful, strong, and sexy, when you sing them. I want to make great music that makes people feel good and dance. I want to be a fashionable artist, as well as an artist that inspires people to be their beautiful selves!

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Melodime

Catch up with Melodime's Brad Rhodes, listen to the DC-based rock band's latest single "Little Thing Called Love", and look for more new music to come soon.

What brought you all together?

Brad Rhodes: We kind of fell into it, to be honest. I was introduced to our drummer, Tyler Duis, when we were seniors in high school - just by a mutual friend, very randomly - and we started playing together for a couple weeks and then I learned that his brother Sammy played bass and piano, as well, and so we had our high school Battle of the Bands coming up and it just kind of formed that way. And now we haven't quite looked back since then [laughs].

Which musicians have you been influenced by?

We were all raised on classic rock and stuff that our parents played. A lot of Led Zeppelin, Billy Joel, Elton John, and Tom Petty: I think those are more of the bands that we all identify with and shaped our writing and our music.

What words would you use to describe your sound?

You would think after 10 years I would be better at answering that question. We've bounced around a little bit. Right now, it's alternative rock but it's leaning more on these Southern genres. I think we're getting a little more in touch with the roots of the music of Virginia and throwing some more mandolins in there and stringed instruments to accompany the piano driven sound that we've always centered around.

What were your inspirations behind your single "Little Thing Called Love"?

It was written when we had been on the road for quite a bit. We actually wrote it on the bus when we were on our way back from one of our tours and the lyrics flowed out pretty easily 'cause we were all in the same boat of missing loved ones back home. It was an inspired one for us since we lived in that moment.

Do you have plans to release a new EP or album?

We do. We just got off the road a couple weeks ago and while we were on tour, when we would have these little breaks, we would get into the studio and record a few songs. We kind of accidentally recorded half of the album already. So, now that we're home, we're looking to finish that up. We don't have a date in mind yet but, hopefully, that will be before Summer or during Summer or something like that. And then we have a bunch of singles, as well, that we'll be releasing in the meantime.

Is "Little Thing Called Love" indicative of what we can expect to hear on these new songs?

A lot of the stuff that we've recorded so far for the album is similar to the genre and the style of "Little Thing Called Love". Like I had said before, we're at this point where we're focusing a little bit more on a genre and I think the fact that some of those Southern elements are sneaking in has been inspiring us on this new stuff we've been writing. I think people can find similar songs on this album that we're going to be putting out.

Is there a song on this upcoming album you'd say you're most excited to share with your fans?

Yeah, we recorded two in August when we were on tour in Atlanta and they're two of my, probably, favorite ones that we've recorded. One in particular that is one of my favorite songs that we've written and the production of it and all the instrumentation - that's one I'm itching to put out and I'm getting a little impatient at this point [laughs]. I'm excited to get those new ones out.

You just got back from tour and you're heading out again in December, do you have a favorite song to perform live?

We would probably all give you different answers for that one. I always like playing whatever's the newest, so "Little Thing Called Love" was really fun to play on this last tour. By that point [December] we'll have one of those new singles out and I bet that that will probably be one of my favorite ones to play on that tour, as well. We have one called "Love Songs and Lies" that tends to be a favorite, too, just because it's the loudest one that people sing back to us and makes the show special in that way.

Could you tell us more about your Now I Play Along Too charity?

Now I Play Along Too is a charity we started with the release of our album Where The Sinners & The Saints Collide and we made a deal with our fans that, if they helped us raise money to record that album, that we would donate 100% of the profits into this charity we were starting that would give instruments and music lessons and things like that to disadvantaged youth. We got such a cool response from that and immediately hit the ground running. We were able to start a music school in Port-au-Prince, Haiti at an orphanage there; we have an ongoing project in Florida near Tallahassee where it's at an after-school music program with kids that we've been working with for a few years; as well as just individual, one-off, types of deals here in the DC area, but it's been great for us. We just got back, last month, from running a two week music camp there in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and it's awesome to be able to see them, after 3 years, being able to play their instruments and they have teachers who come weekly to teach them individual lessons and group lessons, as well, so it's been really cool to watch.

What do you hope listeners are able to take away from your music?

We've always written about wherever we are in our lives at that time and our albums tend to be easily stacked upon each other - it's like each one is a sequel to the last - and a common theme we always have is this idea of redemption and second chances and hope. That's been the biggest response that we've gotten from fans is, when we get messages or emails about how certain songs or certain albums hit them just at the right time, and that's really the whole reason why we're doing it. That's why we try to wear our hearts on our sleeves with all the songs we put out, so that they can, hopefully, resonate with people with what they're going through at that time.

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Late Sea

Catch up with Late Sea's Izzy Gliksberg and listen to the art-rock group's latest single "The Great White" off their upcoming visual album, The Writers Trilogy.

What brought you all together?

Izzy: We are a group of three international people. Sam (trumpet) is from Australia and Joe (drums) is from New Jersey and I'm from Jerusalem, Israel, originally, and we met at Manhattan School of Music. I was doing a project back then and things just came about. Sam was a good friend of mine and he also conducted some of my music because he's a great conductor, also. Then Joe came in, he was studying for his Master's in jazz drums, also at Manhattan School of Music in the city, and that was it.

Which musicians have you been influenced by?

As a group we're very diverse. Sam listens, mostly, to classical music; he's especially fond of Bach and that type of music. Joe is a jazz drummer and he always listens to jazz music. And I'm more influenced by instrumental rock and that stuff: Sigur Ros, Björk, obviously Radiohead. And I also am very fond of artists that have a big emphasis on the text; Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, the usual stuff.

What words would you use to describe your sound?

I think there is something ceremonial about the music and there is some type of hypnotizing quality that we would like to achieve there. I always imagine, like, this weird rite going on with the music, like a virgin sacrifice or something [laughs], but that's just me, maybe that's not politically correct to say. But, going back to music that brings you some kind of an intensity.

Where does your name, Late Sea, come from?

Our name used to be Berg and then we released one small EP with this British label but then it turns out there was another guy called Berg who was really out on tour back then and the whole thing got really messy on iTunes and stuff. Then I just had to come up with a new name, which was a nightmare, 'cause I'm very bad at making decisions. It was just looking for lots of things and, mostly, finding something that would resonate with me, not exactly knowing why and, I don't know, Late Sea just stuck. I had humongous lists of tens of combinations of words, maybe even hundreds, which I used to make on the train all the time, write them down and erase them, and that one called to me and I'm very happy with it. When you get something right, you know that you got it right; you don't really care what people say or if anything happens, you just say, 'okay, this is it'.

What were your inspirations behind your single, "The Great White"?

First of all, the song, lyrically, is a homage and a sort of farewell song to Paul Celan, the Jewish German poet who died in 1970. I guess, for me, the words came first in this one and I was reading this correspondence with him and another German writer, Ingeborg Bachmann, and it's like, you know someone, but then when you read the letters you get to meet a whole other side of him and I thought that it brought me really close to the poetry and then that took me to now. Musically, it's funny to say, but it's influenced, first and foremost, by Renaissance choral music that I really like, and that was the whole idea behind doing the song just with a choir behind it - also, Björk did it in her album Medúlla which was made only with human voices and just beautiful - but we did that and that was the basis of it. We got a small choir into the studio and we recorded them and then the rest was to expose the other side, where it becomes more heavy, more with guitars and trumpets and drums and all that. I guess that's the other side of the arrangement.

Could you tell us more about your upcoming visual album, The Writers Trilogy?

The Writers Trilogy is the project we've been working on for a year now and it's supposed to be coming out any day now. Basically, the whole project idea behind it was, instead of going the route of making the music and then making the music videos, conceiving the whole project as one, as something that has an inner plot of something that develops along the three videos. It's not exactly that the videos are 'to be continued' and are directly a continuation of one another, but all three are around the same themes and we wanted to create something that's audiovisual. I think that, soon, we're going to see that happening more and more; it's already happening, but it's going to be, 10 years from now, I don't think we'll see anything else. The idea was to dedicate one piece in the EP - it's 3 songs - and to dedicate each one of them to a different writer that has influenced us. In the music and the videos, we worked on sketches of the songs and I brought them to the movie makers - which is Noka Productions, it's a company in Brooklyn - and we were very fortunate to get Kevin Spacey's foundation to support this project. And that's it; we developed everything together, the visual ideas developed with the musical ideas until we got the final product.

How would you sum up The Writers Trilogy in one sentence?

Mind-blowing. No, wait! Subtle, but in your face.

What do you hope listeners are able to take away from your music?

I guess I would like the music to create a very personal space around the listener and put one in a very personal space and then, hopefully, they're in isolation emotionally, maybe physically; but it's all about creating a soundworld that envelopes the listener and getting to be with themselves in the music. I think it's very personal.

Is there anything you want to add?

Thank you so much for this interview!

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Vanda

Catch up with singer-songwriter Vanda, listen to her latest single "Feet First", and look for the music video for "Young For Life" to be released soon.

What first got you interested in music and songwriting?

Vanda: Well, my dad owns a recording studio in Chicago - he's a musician himself - so he taught me how to play guitar when I was 13, so I started writing with him.

Do you remember the first song you wrote with him that you were happy with?

Yeah, yeah. I actually wrote a song about veterans when I was 13. It was called "Broken Soldier" and that's one of the first ones that I was like, 'oh, this is kind of good,' and we recorded it and stuff [laughs].

Which musicians have you been influenced by?

Right now, I'm really into Rihanna. There's this up and coming singer, her name's Jess Glynn, she kind of really super inspired me with my writing path at the moment, so I'm listening to a lot of her. St. Vincent, I really like St. Vincent. I'm in the middle of writing a few songs with my producer in San Francisco, so we've just been really vibing in on them [laughs].

How would you describe your sound?

I would say it's very much like a pop/soul/indie type of sound. When I was younger, I was a little bit into country and, in the past year or so, I really adopted this new sound after meeting with my new producer, Brad, and so we added a little electronic influences into it, but still keeping soul and vocals in there.

What were your inspirations behind your single "Feet First"?

I co-wrote that one with Brad and we really wanted to write something very lighthearted and easy - nothing too serious - 'cause I tend to write a lot about love. Just, like, a lot. We wanted to write something carefree and fun so we wrote the hook and we were like, this is exactly that, just carefree, fun, and energetic. I was really happy with how it turned out actually, because we weren't looking for the song to be as catchy as we think it is now, so it was cool how it came across.

Do you have plans to release an EP and how will that compare to your last album?

Yeah, definitely. First, I'm releasing a music video in two weeks which I'm really excited about; it's my first music video. Then, after that, I plan to release three more songs to just follow up with "Young For Life" and "Feet First". It's a lot more mature sounding and you can tell they're all from the same EP. My first EP, I worked with a few different producers so you could tell that in the songs, they weren't really a unit. So, this time, I'm definitely focused on keeping that sound, the electronic soul vibe.

Can you tell us anything about your upcoming music video for "Young For Life"?

It's a storyline. You're going to be following two main characters in their journey from when they meet to just their whole experience with falling in love and then I'm narrating that story. You're going to see a lot of different clips. We actually shot it last weekend and I got the first rough cut of it a few days ago and I'm just blown away, so I'm really excited about that.

Do you have a song off this new EP you're most excited to share?

There's this song that I wrote called "Rise Up" and it's about mental health awareness that I would say I'm most passionate singing. It's kind of a modern type of ballad. It's just really strong and I think it has a really clear message, so I would say that would probably be my favorite. When I'm playing out, I already know that's going to be a song I'm going to be excited to sing.

In one sentence, how would you sum up the upcoming album?

It's very strong and romantic and powerful with fun vocals and fun choruses.

What do you hope listeners are able to take away from your music?

I like to tell stories in my songs. Like I said, I write a lot about love, so I hope that people can take away from that in their own experiences. And also, with the mental health awareness, I'm writing another song about that, as well, because I'm passionate about it, so I just hope that they can hear it and find some sort of inspiration from it. That's the hope.

Is there anything you want to add?

Brad Dollar, my producer, has been fabulous to work with and I'm really excited about that. The music video, if people can keep an eye on that, I really think it's going to be really cool.

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