Kate Faust remembers the first time she heard Jeff Buckley. She also remembers the first time she heard Bjork. And Jill Scott. And Tom Petty.

She remembers the dinky little keyboard her father bought her as a child and how she begged for a real one when she was a teenager. She remembers taking care of her grandfather as an Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong CD played in the background.

She remembers it all.

Recently, she found a journal she had written in as a child, where there was a full-blown song that she still remembers the melody to. She mapped out the chorus, the verses, everything.

“Before I knew how to write words, I wrote songs,” she said. “I trained my brain to understand songs in that way so I think I was always receiving transmissions of songs. They were always coming to me; coming through me but I needed a vehicle, I needed some support in how to get them out. I don’t know if I came first or if the music came first.”

She played in different bands of different genres but always knew she belonged on her own. As she began creating her own records, she made everything herself. Her voice is big in more ways than one, and she wanted that big voice to stand out in its own way.

“I always had this sense of humiliation that I wanted to have; this tenderness and femininity that I expressed in my music and I had a really clear signal while in those bands that it was not cool,” she said. “I think that’s why I gravitated towards soulful music because it has this incredible femininity and openness to it that just completely enraptured me.”

Her latest EP, Savior, actually steps out of that comfort zone and back into working with others. This time around, Faust worked with two other producers to create a blend of styles and genres that explore different themes.

She also wanted to change up her writing style to focus more on the audience and think more about where and how the songs would live. While she was still writing music for herself, she was also taking into account the credit that the songs deserve.

Kate Faust remembers the music that surrounded her as a child and the music that surrounds her as an adult. She remembers how to express herself creatively. Most importantly, she remembers who she wants to be.

“I'm like a lot of people who read them as a kid but then rediscovered them as an adult,” says Cody Meirick, creator of the Scary Stories documentary. “There is that very common, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember. I loved those books!’ that tons of people in their 20s, 30s, 40s experience.”

For Schwartz, he drew heavily from folklore and urban legends as the topic of his stories, researching extensively and spending more than a year on writing each book. Meirick spent nearly four years taking time to focus not just on the books but those who have an attachment to the books.

This crowdfunded documentary examines the legacy of the three-volume set, from its influence of generations to its time on the banned books list. It focuses mostly on fan accounts of their favorite stories, memories of the nightmarish illustrations and passing the stories down to their children. Goosebumps author R.L. Stine, folklorist and sociologist Dr. Gary Alan Fine and Schwartz’s son Peter are some of the interviews shown throughout the documentary, getting their take on the impact these stories created.

“I can't tell you how many times I've heard someone think that they were one of the few who had an ‘experience’ with these books,” Meirick said. “And then they discover that generations of kids loved them. And it becomes a shared experience. We certainly touch on that in the documentary.”

Creating a documentary that touches on a nearly 40-year-old story was challenging and rewarding in the fact that Meirick wanted to focus on pieces he found fascinating but didn’t want his viewpoints to overshadow the overall story he wanted to tell.

“Plenty of it is having a good sense of what I think people would expect and want, but then relying on instinct as far as telling a story from what I thought was interesting,” he said. “It's being ready to upend a few expectations for some people in order to tell the story I thought should be told.”

Meirick saw that there was a story to tell with Schwartz’s writings and Gammell’s illustrations. He wanted to touch on the black and white of those who grew up loving them and those who questioned whether they were appropriate. This documentary was created as more than just a love for scary stories, but as the beginning of a conversation about the issues regarding how books are kept or removed from schools and libraries.

As Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is passed down to new generations, the legacy Schwartz left behind makes for a great documentary. From spooks to chills, each set of stories is reminisced through the eyes of those that got to experience its brilliance first.

Songwriting at the age of five started as Maya Belot’s own gratification and turned into a complete obsession. She went from songwriting to self-taught guitarist by the age of 7 before getting accepted into the BRIT school at the age of 14.

“Thankfully the fates aligned for me and I was lucky enough to get [accepted], which to this day has had an extremely positive impact on me as a person and a musician,” she said. “I honestly believe that you can only be the best version of yourself if you have a supportive team of people around you.”

She acknowledges the warm, talented individuals she met throughout her time at the school as people who gave her the confidence to become the musician she is today.

“I am and will be forever grateful to those people, many of them I’m sure will impact this world as wonderfully as they did my life.”

Her EP, City Parks, is a collection of songs from two years of her life, ages 16-18. The title comes from the amount of songwriting she did while sitting in parks around London while the concept is very much a public diary. She decided that if she was going to put out her first piece of art, she wanted listeners to know her and understand her.

“The music I love the most is honest, and removes the barrier in between audience and artist; if just one listener heard one of my songs and felt they could resonate with the topic or story then that makes recording it and putting it out worthwhile,” she said.

Belot compares the EP’s honesty to the honesty she shares with her best friends. Although risking vulnerability, it’s ideally the sense of comfort that triumphs. Everyone falls in and out of love, everyone makes and loses friends; everyone goes through the same motions, and that’s who this EP is for. It’s the same conversations she would have with a group of friends, and the same conversations she isn’t afraid to dive into.

“At the end of the day, if any of the songs means anything to anyone then I have done my job, so I will live in hope!” she said. “I also think that there aren’t enough women in the music industry right now – the main stream one anyway – holding a guitar surrounded by a big band and I would love to be one of the women breaking that boundary.”

“Going on hiatus was definitely the best decision we could have made for that time,” Towers and Trees lead vocalist Adrian Chalifour began. “We were all exhausted, we'd lost a cohesive vision for the project and we had all been deferring other important life decisions without realizing it. The hiatus was like releasing a valve, and a lot of big changes came bursting out right after the decision.”

The Victoria, British Columbia indie pop-rock band started in 2013 as a solo home-recording project that quickly grew into a full band movement after their first single, “Montreal”, became a surprise hit on local radio. It didn’t take long for Chalifour as well as guitarist Dave “Shredlinsky” Zellinsky, bassist Dave Arter and drummer Jesse Boland to realize that there was something magical about this quartet.

Fast forward four years and the band announces an indefinite hiatus. Boland moved to Toronto, Arter went back to school, Chalifour became a father and Zellinsky started a side project called MIND and launched a sex app called BedBeats. Yet hardly a year later, they regrouped.

“Quite quickly after that initial release, the creative chemistry started drawing us together again,” Chalifour said. “I started sharing demos from Germany to Jesse in Toronto and the Daves in Victoria, and eventually there was enough there that it was like, ‘okay… do we do this?’ The collective answer was a 'hell yeah' so here we go, another kick at the can!”

The concept for “Head Down Heart Up”, their first post-hiatus single, started as Chalifour’s mantra during that time of change and uncertainty. Not only were the lives of each band member going in different directions, but so was the majority of the world. “Head down, heart up” was his reminder to trust his heart and turned into an anthem for the fellow overthinkers of the world.

The biggest lesson they took away from their brief time apart was the concept of collective trust. By learning to share the workload, maintain the sense of vision and find the joy in the project, being a band was all the more easier. While all the songs still begin with Chalifour and an acoustic guitar, its evolution into a group effort is a step forward in their sound as well as their process.

“That's something we want to embrace in this new chapter: sharing the songwriting process more and trying to push each piece of music to that 'goosebumps' point,” Chalifour said. “With all our different sensibilities, it can be a winding road to get there but what's interesting is when we do achieve that, the consensus becomes universal quite quickly.”

Photo courtesy of Melissa Salmeron