Black is the New AP Style

March 2020 sucked. My grandma died and the day after I got back to LA from her funeral, COVID-19 got real and the city locked down. Not a good vibe.

For the next three weeks, it was me, my girlfriend and my dog in a tiny apartment in North Hollywood, going hard with the Uber Eats and airport drinking rules. I put The Office on loop, scrolled miles through Instagram and slept too little, but at all the wrong times so every day bled together in a smear of fuck.

Every day was a little more disorienting than the last and everything was the same muted shade of eh. The worst part wasn’t feeling shitty, it was feeling nothing. Finally, I just hit a wall. I figured if I was gonna be miserable, the least I could do was be productive at the same time. So I got out of bed, put the phone down and went back to work. Since then I’ve been in the studio every day.

I’m lucky; I’ve been able to make music a day job. I get up every morning at the same time, get a coffee and drive up the coast. I stop, get a second coffee by the beach and take a few minutes to be completely alone and disconnect from the world before heading to the studio. Normally the monotony of having the exact same routine every single day would be like sandpaper on my soul, but right now it’s the only thing keeping me sane. Without the ritual, I’d be a wreck.

For everything horrible that’s going on around us, my quarantine has actually been great. I cut out the noise and reconnected with me. Because I can’t use people or places as a distraction, I actually just have to sit with myself and deal with my shit. And it’s paid off - I’m making the best music I have in my life.

Now that it’s been a few months, I’ve got a whole quarantine folder to dig through. I love getting to pull up songs I forgot about and play them back with distance. There’s nothing better than listening back to a track and knowing how jealous I’d be if I heard it on New Music Friday. That feeling is worth everything - it’s brought the color back to my world. Having something to chase gives me a reason to get up every morning. And since every song is better than the last, I’m just gonna keep at it with this Groundhog Day thing until we get a vaccine.

I got a lot of music coming your way starting in January. Until then, be safe and find me online.

2020: another orbit of Earth around the sun to start a new (what we humans call) decade. Some things haven’t changed - waking up in the morning and going to sleep are still the same. Hanging out with my lazy cats and pup still happens. More obvious than the things that haven’t changed though, are the things that have. This has definitely been the longest time since I've gotten a haircut. Some days it is out of control but I’ve been learning to love the feel of it as the colder temperatures set in and am continuing to let it grow out. Haircuts aside, there is still a lot of change to talk about.

One major thing that changed this year is I returned to the veterinary field. Before the pandemic, a lot of my income was from pet sitting, and when people stopped travelling, much of the demand for my job vanished. So I joined the team of a relatively new veterinary clinic and became the lead technician there. We have stayed busy throughout and have been doing curbside service. I did manage to fit one vacation in and slipped down to a Texas beach for the weekend to relax in the waves.

Not leaving the house as much has definitely provided time for me to write some songs as well. I got to be part of a really cool project with a bunch of other bands from Austin. The curators (a band called Zettajoule) gathered the artists together once we found out about the cancellation of South by Southwest. Aptly, they named the compilation album Lost by Lostwest. It's a two volume album as there are over 50 artists on it. My contribution is a song called “The Pangolin” and you can stream it as well as the rest of the album pretty much anywhere.

I knew I also had to release something myself this year. I had a few partial songs from which to choose. Once the chaotic feelings of this season set in, I knew which one to release. On November 13 I put out a new single and music video called “The Echo”. It is a song that counters the tone that a lot of people are hearing this year. In the midst of uncertainty, this song is to plant seeds of hope and assurance in the ear of the listener. While our aspirations and dreams may be on pause, we have them for a reason, and our potential as individuals does not have to wane in these crazy times. I've had the music written for a while, but really dug into the lyrics at the beginning of the year.

2020 has certainly been a year of change for us all, and we all know more change is coming. My hope is for that change, at least in part, is people experiencing, appreciating and supporting art. And for that art to be filled with love and that it resonates with every person it touches. After all, art can do more to change culture than someone in the Oval Office ever could.

While practicing social distancing, listen to my latest song, "The Echo":

Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, I had spent most of 2015-2019 touring as an artist and living on the road, playing about 150-200 shows a year. I’m also a producer, songwriter and run an artist development label so in between I would record and work with artists remotely, so in some ways things haven’t changed for me. I moved to Brooklyn from LA in mid-2019 and had the plan of a little less touring but traveling from NYC as a home base and focusing more on honing in on my music production as well as releasing one single a month as an artist. I had multiple tours, work traveling plans and recording sessions scheduled but little did I know that the phrase “bloom where you’re planted” would be 2020’s motto.

Though I had a lot of things canceled I immediately adapted to the climate, focusing online and started livestreaming weekly; playing songs and picking recording and music business topics to talk about to help motivate artists as well as entertain supporters. I definitely got my chance to work on my music production more, writing as well as seeing through my singles plan. My drummer, Ryan Carnes, and I actually started working remotely in 2019 so we just continued to go back and forth working on music during all of this. I also have just continued to do remote songwriting, music work and production (with a lot more Zoom calls and explaining to artists how to set up their sessions and send the files). Remote production takes a bit more time versus being in person but I’m so grateful that I can do that still plus I’ve done a lot more mixing and mastering as well as remote webinars.

When I haven’t been doing music work I’ve been spending as much time outside as possible. Instead of the gym I took up biking - I ride to Central Park at least one or two times a week and during the summer I was going more. I also have enjoyed getting a chance to read and write in the park. I’ve been listening to a lot of different types of music too (everything from JJ Wilde, Reignwolf, Sister Rosetta Tharpe to M83, Caroline Rose, Yungblud, Wolf Alice, Colleen Green, Sia and Whitney Houston), making playlists as well as have been gifted some amazing Spotify playlists of new artists. My latest favorite shows on Hulu and Netflix are any kind of animal, nature or music documentary as well as I have been loving the comedies! Like Pen15 and Schitts Creek are so hilarious (my girlfriend turned me on to these) and sometimes to mix it up with Fear the Walking Dead.

While practicing social distancing, watch my music video for "Something to Believe In":

When Frally Hynes was approached by director Alexandra Dean to work as a music supervisor on an upcoming documentary, she wasn’t entirely sure she could connect with its subject. It was a subject that a majority of the world had an opinion on, and it wasn’t a positive one. As the project progressed, Dean asked Hynes to create a song that would work throughout the storyline. Dean gave her the description, “Imagine Paris crying in a hotel room in Korea.”

This Is Paris follows Paris Hilton as she shares her traumas and learns to heal from them. Dean wanted a song that brought out the other side of Hilton that the audience would experience in the documentary, and Hynes had the idea of a more somber version of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”.

Hynes went straight to the studio to record what she believed would be a sample for Dean, and that the two of them would decide on the artist they would like to have perform it. Her idea of what the song should sound like materialized in a matter of just two takes and when Dean heard it, she knew it was exactly what she was looking for - and she didn’t want to replace it with anyone else.

In the original version of the song, the upbeat approach focuses on the actual name of the song - girls wanting to have fun. In the version recorded for This Is Paris, its somberness showcases the lyrics about the judgement that a woman faces on a daily basis. The lyrics ring true for Hilton and how her fairly typical rebellious teen spirit got her sent to reform school.

Recording the song gave Hynes the time to reflect on its message and how often women are forced to change themselves or act differently due to public image.

“Usually what I have noticed is that when somebody is not speaking in their authentic voice, there's trauma underneath that,” she said. “[Paris] is actually this highly intelligent girl who works so hard and had a major trauma as a teenager that meant that she needed to create a persona to survive that and dissociate from herself. If you think about that on a bigger scale of how many influencers in the world - in the arts or any sphere - who are often super successful but also super wounded because they've created something out of that pain or out of that wound.”

Hynes also said that Hilton has become a voice to a lot of people who share similar traumas. It required a certain amount of vulnerability and trust to release a documentary of this nature, and she was brave to let Dean and the rest of the crew share her story.

“She holds this energy that just really is very magnetic and she's a badass in a lot of ways,” Hynes said. “I really hope she continues to heal and I can't wait to see if she continues on a path of healing herself and who she really ends up becoming on the other side of it.”

This quarantine has been an exercise in self-motivation. While I’m usually not the best at motivating, social distancing has given me little-to-no choice. Nobody was around to care if I did or didn’t do my work, so I had no other option besides working for my own sake.

It started out slow– in March, my biggest goal was to finish the semester in one piece. I put off dropping my debut EP indefinitely, unsure of when the right time would be to release my music (Remember when we thought the pandemic would last, at most, a couple of months? LOL.) As the days in isolation added up, so did my commitments. I set the new release date for October 7, 2020, so I suddenly needed to make a music video and two album covers. I’d also agreed to direct a feature-length film for a student comedy club called the Hasty Pudding. On top of all that, I had to balance a school workload and my library job. By the middle of the summer, I’d obviously gotten a handle on motivating myself to do things. I’d felt so motivated, in fact, I’d agreed to do more and more projects. Suddenly, the question wasn’t whether or not I could motivate myself to start a project, but whether or not I could motivate myself to stop and breathe.

The second half of quarantine has been filled with me working as hard as possible to find (or make) time for myself. Halloween was my first day off in months, and I spent it as well as I could during this pandemic. I started carving mini pumpkin jack-o-lanterns pretty much as soon as I woke up until I had a whole army of them lining my windowsill. I went for a long walk (it snowed in New England the day before so I got to see a great mix of fall leaves and fresh snow). That night, I watched Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride with my childhood friend and neighbor (we both can’t believe we watched that movie as kids… it’s pretty conceptually frightening).

Clearly, I’m still looking for that elusive work-life balance, but taking a day off was a good start. Even though I’ve spent all of today running errands, doing homework, and cleaning my room, my little army of jack-o-lanterns is here to remind me to stop and breathe every once in a while… it’s worth it.

Georgia Feroce took a four-year break from releasing any music as a solo artist.

She collaborated with other artists, such as the track “All My Friends” with Matt Koelsch, and has been writing new material as often as she can, but the events of the coronavirus pandemic are what really pushed her to continue the process of finishing her debut full-length album.

“When COVID-19 hit, everything took a serious pause and I was able to reevaluate my plans and what I was doing because I had to,” she said. “No one could go forward with the plans that they had made before and in a way I think it worked out for the better in terms of my music.”

Since she was able to see the songs she had already recorded from a different perspective, it changed the way she planned on releasing singles. The first song she recorded, “Baby Blue”, was meant to be her first single but the more she listened to it the more she knew she didn’t want a ballad. The second song she had recorded, “My Own Head”, wasn’t what she was looking for either. Once she recorded “Must Be Nice”, she started to see the whole picture.

“Must Be Nice” is a departure from her previous material and made the energetic statement she was looking for. It also reminded her of a summer song, which made more sense for her release schedule.

“My Own Head” has been a staple in her setlist since she first performed it the same day she had written it. Initially she felt disappointed after the first performance because she didn’t believe that it was what she had envisioned, but after getting immediate positive feedback she knew that it was a song her audience could relate to.

“I could tell people connected with that song and it's definitely one I connected with,” Feroce said. “I think it was just me being really candid and it's interesting just looking back because I wrote it at a point in my life where I really don't know what I was doing as far as my career. I feel like my relationship and everything was in this weird space and I think we all have those moments in life where we wonder, ‘Am I just spinning my wheels or am I going somewhere?’”

She realized “My Own Head” was perfect for an end-of-summer release, meaning “Baby Blue” would be her winter single. “Baby Blue” is an ode to anyone like her who left their hometown behind in hopes of finding a purpose in life. It’s about finding someone that cares and having that support system to get through the good times and the bad.

“‘Baby Blue’ is specifically my inner child and it's this little innocent person that had these big dreams and they haven't lived enough life yet for someone to make them feel stupid about that,” she said.

Before she knew it, everything started to come together.

She knew going into this project that a full-length album was her end goal. She originally thought it would be a 10-song album but it grew to 12 as she found herself writing more during quarantine. Each song has its own identity, but they share a common theme of maturity. She has learned a lot since moving to Los Angeles six years ago and her songwriting has grown because of it.

Georgia Feroce loves having the opportunity to share the light and dark side of life through her music. The relationship she has with herself, others and the world around her inspires her to be as creative as she can while continuing to make music that she is passionate about.

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