Miya Folick gets down and dirty on ‘Erotica Veronica’

AC: It’s an excellent pairing of photography and the track list. Now that I think about it, you put the record together pretty quickly, right? It was a month that you were in the studio?
MF: No; there are some songs that I started earlier, like “La Da Da”  and “Erotica,” but most I wrote within the same month, which is unusual for me. In the studio process, we were in the studio for about a week, and I brought the files home and tinkered with them for two more months. We went back into the studio to redo a few songs—“Fist,” “Love Wants Me Dead,” and one other that didn't end up making the record, but might come out later. We wanted to record them in a bigger room for the drums to feel big on those songs. We recorded those at Dave Grohl’s Studio 606, which is a really cool space.

All in all, it took at least five months, maybe six, but I think even that's not that long. So (Erotica Veronica) felt fairly like it was “bang, bang,” delivered it to Chris Coady to mix, and then it was done.

AC: For me, that suggests urgency. Something can be radiant and also sad, or in some cases frightening; the tracks alternate between capturing emotional pain, but also the natural fear we feel the first time we’re with somebody, or have feelings for somebody, and we don't know how they feel back. All those things combined give the record immediacy. Was that important to you, or was that your mind while you were recording?
MF: I think that’s true. The process of making Roach and putting it out was impacted by the pandemic, obviously, and other music industry boringness—I switched labels, blah, blah, blah. [Laughs.] But the process of writing, producing and putting out Roach took four years, something like that, and by the time it came out, I did not care at all about any of the songs. I was doing interviews, and playing them live, and trying to muster up to a sh*t to give this music that had been bouncing around off different hard drives for years. And I really didn't like that experience.

At the time, I didn't want to say anything about it, because I think it’s rude to impose that on the listener. I just wanted people to be able to listen to the music because it was new to them. So I didn't want to say, “This music sucks, I hate it.”

AC: Not a great way to sell a record.
MF: No. I was just very over it. When it came to this record, I really wanted to protect myself from that experience, and to put the music out while it still felt emotionally relevant to me. So that was one reason why I wanted it to come out fairly quickly. The other reason was also a creative parameter, or limitation, that I wanted to put on the process, because I did want it to feel raw, and I did want it to feel immediate, as you said. I felt like the best way to do that was to make it quickly with instinct, and to not overthink, or over-edit, or over-analyze anything. It honestly worked, because I still love these songs, and I'm happy and excited to talk about them, which feels good.

AC: Creating the record and capturing that immediacy, I wonder when you had those “eureka” moments where you realized, “This is the music that I want to pair these lyrics to, this is how this song should sound.” How do you match the aural aesthetics to the words?
MF: The way that I make music is very cohesive; I write melodies, lyrics, and chords all at once, and I write on a certain instrument that ends up dictating the quality of the final production. This album I wrote on acoustic guitar in open D, which has a very specific quality to it, so the way we finished the songs felt obvious to me. It didn't seem like there was another option. That's an interesting difference between making music and filmmaking, because I feel like the way a film gets made is, you write a script, and then everything else that is attached to that film has to be decided on. With music, I think within the demo version, the first version of the song, there's already all these aesthetic choices that you’re making that color the demo.

It seemed very obvious, the direction that this album should go. Also, it's the type of music that I like to listen to, guitar-driven indie rock. I'm the type of person who's constantly exploring different things, so I don't know if my next album will sound like this again, but it made sense for the elements on this record to feel raw, organic, and analog. That paired well with the immediacy we were talking about before.

AC: What would that be like for you to evolve again—to leap from this urgency and make something unlike what you've captured here?
MF: That would feel very natural for me. I think there are certain artists who live within their lane so strongly that it’s hard for them to write anything outside of it. I’ve never been that kind of person. It's very easy for me to write in different styles, so I've had to be deliberate about figuring out what is the “Miya Folick project,” because left to my own devices, I would just write a different type of song every day, because it's really fun. So, I like the idea of my next album being completely different. That feels like the most natural next step to me. To make another album that sounds like this album would be more of a challenge. 

AC: You’ve struck on something here for me: the idea of agency. I get a sense of you as a self-possessed person, listening to the record. It sounds like you’re telling the story about figuring out how to conduct your life on your terms, in your way, under no one else's influence. I wonder how true that sounds to you.
MF: That sounds about right. The one thing that I would say additionally is, I feel a great sense of tenderness towards the other people in this story. When I say I want to do it my way, it's not “eff you,” it's, “With love and, and compassion. I would like to do this my way, and I'm going to be honest with you along the whole journey.”

I don't have traditional desires. I'm not saying that I'm abnormal or unique; I just don't have the traditional Christian centric Western desires. So growing up has been, in certain times of my life, a very lonely experience because I don't feel like I have elders or mentors to look toward, who have the kind of life that I'm hoping for myself. I think that's why people like me become so drawn to literature and movies and music, because we can see in those stories something closer to what we're hoping for.  The journey of the album is this struggle toward trying to figure out how to live my life on my own terms without hurting people around me. So many people are so used to the way that we're told to live our lives, that anybody having a different idea of that frightens them. It scares them. 

AC: Yeah, that’s true.
MF: Yeah. And it threatens their sense of security, even though it has nothing to do with them. That’s a fear that I understand. It’s very important to push against it; I don't think it's healthy or good. This is so present for us as a nation right now. There's so much fear mongering because of our new president. He is pointing a finger at trans people and migrants, just because they’re different and their existence threatens the safety and security of people who want to live in a bubble, but it doesn't actually threaten their safety and security; they just think it does, and he's telling them that it does.

It’s kind of the same thing I'm talking about in this record, but in a different way. For me it's about my bisexuality. I'm saying this as someone who knows there's a deep privilege to being cisgendered, and my safety is not as much of a concern, but I do see the way my mere existence threatens people's sense of security. I'm shaking the normalcy that they want to live inside of.

I was raised in a Buddhist household, I think that shapes the way that I think about and approach things. I want to approach it from this place of empathy and compassion and love, but at the same time, I don't judge other people who want to approach it with a sense of anger. For me, for whatever reason, it feels important to be able to forge my own path while also understanding that I live in a community of other people. I don't exist in a bubble.