An Interview with Jay Som's Melina Duterte
Touring with boygenius, fighting the algorithm, and taking a long break.
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Six years is a long time to be out of the spotlight these days. Culture moves so fast that every day you’re not in the conversation is a day you’re forgotten. Six years is an especially long time for an up-and-coming indie artist like Melina Duterte, who had a ton of momentum behind the early work by her bedroom project Jay Som.
Duterte released two self-produced albums in her early 20s under the Jay Som moniker, Turn Into in 2016 and Everybody Works in 2017, which received attention for their dreamy, lo-fi pop sound. It was a growing trend that—in my humble opinion—she was a bit ahead of the curve on. High-profile publications like Rolling Stone, the New York Times, and Pitchfork praised her songwriting. But after the release of her 2019 album, Anak Ko, Duterte took a break.
She has been anything but unproductive in that time. She spent a year as a touring member of boygenius, and has turned her studio skills on artists like Whitmer Thomas, Chris Farren, Lucy Dacus, and more. But Jay Som was always there, waiting. Now, she’s about to release Belong via Polyvinyl Records, Jay Som’s first full-length in six years. And she had help this time, with cameos from Jimmy Eat World’s Jim Adkins and Paramore’s Hayley Williams. She also let other producers into the studio in an effort to be more open to spontaneous collaboration.
I talked to Duterte about the importance of waiting until the right moment, how much the music industry has changed since before Covid, and letting other people in to her process.
I keep seeing Belong billed as your first album in six years, which is technically true, but I think of you as a pretty busy and prolific person. Was it always the plan to take this long of a break between albums?
Melina Duterte: It definitely was not the plan. In this press cycle, I’ve been talking about the six years, and it doesn’t feel like it’s been a long time. Like you said, I’ve been working for a while now, just doing production and engineering. I like to think of it as: I went to school. I’m not formally educated or anything. I went to community college, shouts out. But I just needed that break. And I feel like every year I kept checking in with myself. Do I really want to get back into the solo artist project stuff? And every year it just didn’t make sense. So I just waited.
What didn’t feel right?
I hate doing things I don’t want to do. If I don’t like writing, then I’m not going to do it. There were many failed attempts at forcing myself to sit and write, and that’s just not my process. It has to come naturally. I also just needed help. I had basically four co-producers on this record. And my past albums, I’ve only worked by myself.
Working by yourself can be educational because you have to teach yourself everything. But working with other people offers a different education. What did you learn from working with others that you weren’t getting from just working on your own stuff by yourself?
Oh, for sure. I had to learn how to get out of my head and be a little bit more flexible and open. I feel like I am an open person, especially when it comes to my own music, but there were moments where I was like, “Oh, shit, I really need to not be so stubborn about my choices.” Most of the time, it’s not even about the music. It’s just feeling like your choices matter in the moment. So I think that that’s something I had to work on, just little micro moments that made a huge difference.
I used to think of myself as a creatively stubborn person as well. And then you work with the right person and you start to trust them and you think, “Oh, okay, I wasn’t stubborn. I just needed to work with the right person.” That pairing is everything.
Yeah. And pairings for certain songs, too, because one person can be really important for a certain genre and then another person doesn’t work as well. So it’s just the material that matters, too.
I’m sure you’re getting asked a lot about the gap between albums, but I was really thinking today about how long six years actually is. That’s not only a long time but that’s 2019. So, pre-pandemic. That feels like an entirely different time.
That’s like two decades.
Yes, each pandemic year was one decade. So, after enough time went by, did it feel impossible to get back to making albums? Did it ever feel like maybe you weren’t going to do an album again?
There were some of those moments. I think at my highest level of insecurity, I’m sure I was like, what the hell? Why am I doing this? I should just go back to working at restaurants or just having a stable income and not chasing this dragon that everyone’s chasing. But I think there were enough people and friends to encourage me to keep going. I just remember thinking, I’m still young, I can do this, I have the energy, I love music. I think I just want to see what will happen because I still have some fuel left.
We were talking about how a pandemic year feels so much longer than a normal year. I also feel that I’ve lost all sense of time in the social media age. I feel like culture moves so fast these days, and I find it incredibly stressful to try to stay in the conversation. Were you worried at all about being forgotten in that time between albums?
Yeah, that’s something I am talking about every single day now. Maybe a little bit forgotten, but mostly like, “Oh shit, I need to move through this world as if I’m a new artist again.” I’ve been around for a while and I feel lucky to have been a part of the SoundCloud/Bandcamp/Blogspot era, where blogs were the center focus of how we consume music back then. But now it’s so different. Like you said, everything moves so fast. I see these kids that are now teenagers that are the tastemakers. There’s a whole different generation of music lovers. Even concerts feel a bit different, and I know COVID is a big part of that. I feel as though I’m even more confused by indie rock or whatever this environment is and how fast it moves and how important social media is right now. And I hate to say the word, but the algorithm is really messing with me and it’s difficult to be a smaller artist right now.
Sure, because the algorithm rewards like the lowest common denominator content and it pushes the real art out. And I think the people who have succeeded are the people who are good at doing a clown show to get attention for their art. But doing that seems like so much work that I don’t want to do. Have you been having people push you to do TikToks?
No, I haven’t, luckily. Especially my label, Polyvinyl, they’re really sweet. But now I’m realizing that that does go hand in hand with asking people to pay attention to you. There used to be a different way of showing your authenticity, and I feel like you could do it in a more mysterious way. And now you can’t. I feel like even authenticity is inauthentic now, or it’s a forced thing. I feel like I’m acting like a boomer right now, but I understand why boomers were like, “Back in my day…” [Laughs]
I feel like that all the time. I feel like I just don’t want to participate in it. I would rather do this in my own way and have lesser returns than play the game and succeed. I just don’t want to do it.
Yeah, I do feel like there are some complexities within those choices. There are some things you should do that won’t make you feel gross. Maybe you do need to post a little bit more than you usually do because more people will see it, and that is the easiest way to get people to pay attention to your friends and followers. And then tomorrow, if you post again, the non-followers and a different group of people will see it.
You’re an interesting case because I feel like people use social media to inflate the sense of what they’re doing. I always see those posts that are like, “Big things coming!” And then nothing ever actually comes. You are more humble on social media, but you actually do big things in real life. You were touring with boygenius for a while. What did you learn from playing shows on that level with them?
I’ll start off by saying that that was one of the best times of my life. And I love talking about the boygenius experience because that was fucking awesome. I’m honestly really happy that it was only a year, because I look back and I think, “Wow, I want more of that.” And I’m happy to have had such a short experience with them. The exposure and the experience of working alongside and adjacently with Phoebe, Lucy, and Julien was really cool and fascinating, just seeing how much work they put into the project and the work that they put into each other’s friendships was really cool to witness as a hired gun. And they worked incredibly hard as did the crew and their management. I just think that it was one of those moments where everyone really took the opportunity to go for it. And that inspired me to just say: yeah, you actually do have to really go for it. In the studio, in the live sets, and in your personality.
As a hired gun, you’ve got to be along for the ride, slightly out of the spotlight. Did you enjoy that aspect?
I loved it. I wasn’t doing any press. I was hanging out. The first show in Europe was in Oslo, and we did a floating sauna on the sea. We would just do things like that, like riding horses, and it was an incredibly easy job in terms of the roles that I had to play. I just had to practice a lot, I had to be there, I had to be a good hang. You have to be nice and you just do what you’re told. That is a dream job. You’re on a bus and there’s a chef on tour.
When you started to work on this new album, did you go back and do a lot of listening to your old records or do you not like listening to the older material?
I do actually love listening to the older material, but only certain songs. I can’t do a full-album listen because I’m like, “Oh my god, what the hell?” It feels like I’m getting shot or something. Sorry, insane thing to say. [Laughs] I think because it’s been such a long time since I’ve made my last record—all of my albums were made in my early 20s—there’s something so raw about that time, and I know everyone feels that way when they look at things that they’ve done, or even pictures or experiences from their 20s. You kind of look back and you cringe. You think you’re invincible and you make choices that are really free, but I think I’m just a little too critical of myself. So I pay more attention to the production and how bad it sounds.
To the surprise of no one, I love that song with Jim Adkins. How did that come about?
I basically wrote the song and recorded it with all the co-producers. I remember throughout that process, I kept thinking, I really want to hear a guy’s voice on this. And that doesn’t usually happen. I never think that. Jim Adkins’s voice kept coming up because I’m a huge, gigantic Jimmy Eat World fan. Bleed American is one of my favorite records. My brother and I bought the CD at Barnes and Noble and we used to fight over it so much that we scratched the CD. Our boomboxes just ruined the CD and it doesn’t play the music anymore, just skips all the songs. My manager manages Courtney Marie Andrews, who serendipitously was in Jimmy Eat World. So it felt like a fate-kind of situation. And he was super kind. We talked on the phone, we texted, and we did this remotely, and really last-minute after the album was mixed and mastered. He went into the studio and he recorded all of his harmonies and vocals.
So it was all written before he got involved?
Yeah.
See, that’s funny to me because I think what I love so much about that song is that it sounds so specifically suited for him.
That’s how I feel, yeah.
This is why I feel like you have a really good studio mind. Because you are really good at getting the best versions out of people. Do you have a studio philosophy?
I don’t really know if I have one. Maybe that is the point. I think just maybe, like I was saying before, I just feel like you have to be open. You have to be willing to meet people where they’re at and in general be open to connections. So that’s what the studio is all about for me.
Does producing your own work differ in process from producing other musicians?
It’s actually not as different now because I feel like I’ve learned so much from producing others that I’ve taken all of those techniques and little quirks that I’ve picked up from other people and brought it to myself. And I feel like I work even faster now because I know how to schedule myself. I’ll be like: wake up early in the morning, walk outside with my dog. Coffee, really important. Make sure we have lunch at a certain time. I’m not that type of musician that doesn’t eat in the day. I have a lot of friends that are like, “I can’t eat because I don’t want the midday slump.” So they record from 10 to 7 PM, no food. I can’t do that. But I’ve just learned how to manage myself better and be more kind to my body and my brain, if that makes sense.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
