Photo courtesy of Nina Gaulin

Bridget Stiebris and Haley Blomquist have been longtime collaborators and friends, with projects such as The Weekend Run Club keeping them busy, but when they found some free time in early 2020 they decided to write a song just for the hell of it. That song, “I Can’t Stand in Ice Skates”, led to their latest project, OK Cool.

Completing “I Can’t Stand in Ice Skates” was all the motivation they needed to keep this project rolling, and by the middle of the year they released their first EP, Anomia.

“The pandemic really gave us time to take this seriously,” Blomquist said. “We live super close and [Stiebris] has been in my pandemic bubble from very early on, so we had a lot of time to write and improve together.”

Blomquist went on to say that they were both getting their sea legs with writing Anomia, trying to get a feel for how this duo would work and the sound that would best encapsulate the project. For Stiebris, this was her first time diving into singing and songwriting, and found it difficult to get to a point where she was happy with the outcome.

“The most important thing I learned was how to better place my voice into the songs in a way that I’m comfortable with,” she said. “With the new record, I was able to think about other ways to write and perform that weren’t such huge downers for me to listen back to. I love thinking about the way songs are mixed and how much that can impact the final product.”

The new EP, Surrealist, is a more thought out version of the sound they want to focus on, and is composed of five tracks that really stuck with them throughout the writing process.

“When deciding to work on or not work on a song, it’s really important that both of us vibe to it,” Stiebris said. “We’re very honest about how a certain idea is connecting or not connecting with us as individuals. Sometimes you just have a really good day and you can do a five-hour writing marathon; other days, you sit at the computer for just as long and come up with nothing but duds. With these songs, we both felt that they had the potential to really shine in the recording and editing process, and we weren’t tired of hearing the demos a million times.”

They recorded everything on their own, minus drums, at Foxhole Creative, an award-winning production company with studio and creative space in Chicago. It made the process all the more rewarding, and gave them the opportunity to better themselves as musicians.

OK Cool hopes that the five songs from Surrealist are interpreted in any way that is meaningful to the listener, because that is the best part of listening to music - uncoding a message that will mean something different to everyone.

On the “up” side, we were immediately invited to play a music fest outside of Chicago and had the privilege of playing the iconic Cutting Room in New York City. We had a kick-ass 2020 scheduled including playing SXSW, playing fests with Jefferson Starship, Puddle of Mudd, Molly Hatchet and Blackfoot, and starting a tour.

Then the apocalypse hit and canceled everything.

But like life, the music industry is volatile and unpredictable. So we dug in and got busy.

Growing up in Calgary, Alberta, songwriter, producer, rapper and singer Emmett Lucius Pharaoh found himself gravitating towards music at a young age, driven by a deep passion and teenage rebellion.

“My love for music has always been very natural; I don’t remember a time I wasn’t completely obsessed with a song or studying a melody or baseline,” he said. “It always affected me differently.”

He remembers the R&B and soul artists his dad used to play around the house - Brian McKnight, Luther Vandross, Boyz II Men and Marvin Gaye, to name a few. He also found artists from his own generation, namely Lil’ Bow Wow, who he really identified with as a child. He said he would absorb every word, every cadence, every flow - and that the music he creates today is still influenced by those same artists.

When he turned 17, Pharaoh moved out into the winter streets - homeless, but motivated. Finding solace in his obsession with the art of music and sound, he knew that this was something that he wanted to dedicate his life to mastering. He has since spent over 10,000 hours in the studio, learning every process of music creation.

“I honestly love each process almost equally,” he said. “There’s something about bringing a rough melody in your head and seeing it through to even a visual aspect. That is true art to me.”

He just released his latest single, “Sleepless Nights”, which gives listeners the chance to appreciate the unique sound cultivated by producing, writing and recording all of his own tracks.

“‘Sleepless Nights’ is a song with rooted emotion and tells the tale of a broken love,” he said. “The pain that was once hard to cope with, that eventually transformed into beauty. I know we all go through the trials of love, the turbulence that may seem endless at times. I want this song to at least decorate that pain. That’s what it did for me.”

Emmett Lucius Pharaoh has already put in so much effort to perfect his sound, and continues to find opportunities to master these techniques. As the music industry continues to evolve with the times, it’s clear that his dedication to the craft will continue to showcase his talent.

One day in my life! Well now the days that have been for the last year have not been like any other days in my life. But if you think about it, every day and every situation is unique. These hard times have been tough for a musician, but you must try to use the hard times as well as you can. At the end of your day you have to decide your own fate. Many people can try to help you and some people may lay down hurdles before you, but in the end you have to be strong in yourself.

I am a story metal songwriter. I collect stories from my own life and from others around me. There have been a lot of stories to collect, both full of happiness and hard times during the pandemic. I have listened to a lot of people talking about how they struggle with their work, with their friends and relatives and just how important that being close to your loved ones really is. I say that it’s important to dare to live life if you want to write about life. All my songs that I write are based upon true stories, experiences and emotions. This has taken me to many different places and situations. I want to tell you about one in particular.

Photo courtesy of Ana Azarov

For Horace Bray, one of his earliest memories involved falling asleep to the sounds of his mother’s songs. He said they were written more as medicine than with the intention to perform, but it was his introduction to music, and it wasn’t long before he took a real interest in it.

When he was first introduced to the guitar, there was no looking back for him. He would play all day, every day - even if that meant skipping classes. He took lessons from a local jazz guitarist who frequented the same church as his family, and at the last minute applied to the University of North Texas to study jazz performance and music theory.

Once he graduated, all it took was his 1995 Ford Taurus’ engine essentially melting in his driveway to decide that New York City was where he would go to pursue music. He was ready to begin his career as a “super hyper athletic guitar jazz player playing all the notes as fast as I could” when he kept finding himself at predominately singer-songwriter gigs.

“I quickly stopped pursuing the jazz thing as hard because I was starting to become really obsessed with these shows,” he said. “I wasn't crying at a jazz show, but I would get completely wrecked going to Rockwood Music Hall and seeing someone like Julia Easterlin play. I'd be thinking about my whole life, and I was [thinking] jazz music doesn't really do this for me. It hits me hard, don't get me wrong, but not like this. You don't think about your traumas and your emotional development and how you learn to love from jazz music necessarily.”

These shows inspired him to begin songwriting, which quickly turned into his first EP, How It Ends. He wouldn’t say goodbye to jazz completely, however.

“It definitely helps a lot with composition,” he said. “By using bits of jazz theory responsibly, it’s a really nice sweet spot where it feels intellectually satisfying for me to play and write without it being too othering to the average listener.”

Once jazz took a backseat to songwriting, it was clear to Bray that New York would also be taking a backseat. All it took was one torrential downpour, two bags of groceries from Trader Joe’s, Sylvan Esso’s song “Slack Jaw” and a subway ride home to convince him that Los Angeles would be better for his career and his mental health.

Just before he moved to Los Angeles, he had written a song called “Let Go”. It gave off an 80s vibe - more of a dance track than what he had previously been writing - and he thought it would be stimulating to explore more of those sounds.

Then the global pandemic hit.

He decided it was the perfect time to take the opportunity to switch up his compositional process. With the help of a basic home studio setup, he set a goal to create a song every single day. It was his first time really diving into the production side, and with the help of friend and producer Juan Ariza, his next EP started to form.

He compared the process to a watercolor painting. “There's very much a point where if you keep on going, it turns to mud. You have to not only leave enough space for the piece, but you have to leave enough space for the piece to settle.”

As satisfying as it was to work on his own, having Ariza as a supporter truly helped the songs come together. What started as 20 or 30 songs slowly trickled down to five - “Get It Right”, “Waiting For You”, “Close to Calm”, “Let Go” and title track “Fame, Fortune, and Perfume”.

“I think they were the ones that felt like they were the strongest,” Bray said. “I wanted it to be something that we were both really stoked on; that way it really brought out the best in both of us.”

To Bray, the songs ended up telling the story of his process of moving to LA and his view of how relationships work out there, but he knows that he only has 50 percent control of its perception.

When he first released “Let Go”, a young woman reached out to him and told him that the song inspired her to come out to her parents. He never thought to think about it through that lens, but hearing that changed his perspective of just wanting to create a song to dance to.

“I'm never ever going to forget that, because I think especially when you're writing songs about relationships and trust and not necessarily plain ole falling in love but falling out of love and some of the harder angles about romance and relationships, it becomes very much like the inkblot test for a lot of people,” he said. “People start to see what they want to see in it, which has been really interesting with this [project] because a lot of my older songs feel like the lyrics are a little more direct and specific about an experience I had instead of something slightly more up to interpretation.”

Horace Bray has already lived so many different musical lives, and at some point he would like to elegantly bring all of them together. As he continues to explore new aspects of his music, it’s his journey to today that inspires him to embrace the old and the new.

I’ve learned a lot this past year.

I’ve learned about myself, but mostly I’ve learned about other people.

I’ve learned how often people don’t choose love and that facts don’t matter. And I’ve also learned how easy it is for people to silence the voices of others.

As a Black female, I think about how often micro-aggressions have found a way to maneuver themselves into my life - the little ways in which my voice has been dismissed by random strangers on social media or even by some of my closest friends.

I told my husband a while ago that I often feel invisible - in my career, in my circles, in my work - and that the only way for me to be seen and heard is to be loud.

But the problem is when I choose to be loud I am often accused of being angry or aggressive because the spaces I often inhabit are predominately white spaces: spaces where your Blackness often has to be defended; spaces where the checklist of how to act, what to say, how to present yourself, have to be checked off before you even dare think about speaking. As a Black female in predominantly white spaces, often you are not seen, at least not in the way you want to be seen. You see, if a Black woman speaks on what and how she feels, she’s angry. Suddenly, she isn’t a human being whose feelings were hurt and is letting you know how your words made her feel. Suddenly, SHE is in the wrong.

If we as Black women choose to do the natural human thing and defend ourselves from things that we find offensive, it is OUR fault for letting it affect us, and not being able to take it as a joke and laugh in the moment. If we as Black women bring to the attention of those around us that what they said or did was inappropriate - or, dare I say, racist - we are the ones who are immediately exiled from the community.

I’m a direct communicator. I get to the point and don’t beat around the bush, and I’ve realized a lot of Black females operate the same way. The problem is that being direct is often misconstrued as being aggressive and that trait is almost always projected onto Black women. So instead of going through the emotional checklist of how do I act, how do I talk, how do I change how people perceive me…. we shut down out of fear because we know how our voices will be misinterpreted and we will be deemed angry. The angry Black woman trope has always been used as a way to silence Black women and invalidate feelings that are completely warranted.

But I’m tired of having my voice chosen for me. I’m tired of not calling people out on the things they say because I don’t want them to feel bad. I wish I knew how to express my feelings without having a stereotype pushed onto me. But that’s the fear… fear of offending, of being misunderstood, of coming across the wrong way, of losing out for speaking up. It doesn’t help matters that there is almost always some form of indirect punishment for speaking out and speaking up.

I feel this way too often. It’s as if we have the audacity to speak up for ourselves, because when we do, we are viewed in a negative light. But if there’s anything I’ve learned recently, it’s that I don’t need to accommodate others and their feelings. I don’t need to conceal my voice or feelings because when I do, where does that leave me? It leaves me feeling like my feelings don’t matter and because I spent so much time and emotional labor making sure the other person doesn’t feel bad, I feel worn down.

So I challenge you:

Instead of thinking a Black woman might be angry, listen to her and understand her pain.

Instead of thinking a Black woman might be sassy, listen to her and understand her voice.

Instead of thinking a Black woman might be aggressive, listen to her and understand her strength.

Instead of thinking a Black woman might be wrong, listen to her… because chances are she’s right.

#ChooseToChallenge #IWD2021

Not to sound like a melodramatic 20-something, but I’m pretty positive that live music is the best thing that exists in this world, and if you asked me a year ago, I would have told you there was no way I could live without it. From basement shows to stadiums, I spent many years being at probably at least one show a week. I’ve traveled all over the country for live music and I do believe it is one of the most pure, wholesome and good things this world has to offer.

About five months into the live music dry spell that became life-during-COVID, after live streams had long become old news, The Front Bottoms announced a drive-in show at Monmouth Park Racetrack. Within minutes I had a car of friends set on going, and though I was positive it was going to be a strange show, it was still a show. A real show. And I was thrilled.

On a warm night at the end of August, in the home stretch of a summer that didn’t really feel like summer at all, we sat in the parking lot of a racetrack, surrounded by cars staggered out like we were pieces on a checkers board, ready to see a show. My three friends and I parked ourselves atop my friends’ SUV, two of us on the hood, two of us on the roof - masks on, pool floats as pillows, clutching boxes of Girl Scout cookies and Diet Cokes, waiting to sing our hearts out.

It was golden hour when the show began. By the end, the moon was shining perfectly above the stage. The sea of cars honked their horns after each song. People were dancing on top of their cars and screaming the lyrics at the top of their lungs. It was wholesome. It was perfect.

Photo courtesy of Sean Coakley

For the last few years, creating music has been an emotional outlet for the artist known as CMTEN (pronounced c-m-ten). He transformed his University of Utah dorm room into a studio, originally finding bedroom pop artists such as Clairo, Victor Internet and Billy Lemos as inspiration while incorporating concepts of EDM and dubstep into his own personal sound. When he found a community of artists known as hyper pop, he knew he found his place of belonging.

Making music was just meant as a way to keep from bottling up emotions, turning those feelings into a beat or lyrics after a night out with friends or studying for an exam. He took the username his father made for his Webkinz account, “netmrc”, flipped it and removed the R to form his stage name before sharing his single, “NEVER MET!”, on TikTok. He watched as creators started to use the song on their own videos, and as his video hit 1,000 views, he felt like maybe this was growing into something bigger.

“I think it's the best way right now to grow and, for better or worse, sometimes you can have that one song that goes up and nothing will ever compete with that,” he said. “But even if that does happen, I don't really mind because it's a really cool opportunity for me.”

That support grew into more than 30 million streams plus more than one million TikTok users utilized the song on their own videos. Although “NEVER MET!” was his first single, he had been working on the track “ALONE” with producer RILEY THE MUSICIAN months beforehand. It was the first time he attempted a sound that would be considered glitchcore, and as a longtime fan of RILEY THE MUSICIAN, decided to reach out to them.

“It was my first time collaborating with someone else and I was really happy with how their verse sounded,” he said. “It was pretty cool having a beat and then having someone send me vocals over it, especially going that crazy over it because their part is so good.”

Working with them exceeded his expectations, and led to another collaboration, this time with XIX for “I LOVE GLITCHCORE”. His latest track, “BORED”, is a solo endeavor but explores a sound different from previous releases. The main guitar loop was found on Splice, a music production platform, and mixed in with a big bass, drum samples and glitching the guitar a bit to generate a sound that represented how he was feeling in that moment. When it came time to add lyrics, he wanted them to be as personal as the beat was.

“From a surface level, it sounds like a love song to someone who's not interested in you anymore or maybe you're not as interested as you want to be, but it's more actually about my mental state,” he said. “The song is basically two versions of myself talking to each other; so there's one side of me that's super hyper emotional, just does things that don't make sense out of emotion, because I get in that place sometimes. The other side of me gets dissociated with stuff, feels pretty empty, and those two sides are talking to each other trying to communicate and understand each other's behavior.”

No matter the emotion that CMTEN is trying to get across to the listener, he hopes that his music sparks some kind of emotion. He is thoroughly enjoying creating music, no matter the sound or genre, and wants to continue to explore ideas that may or may not lead to the next big track. This project is about exploration, determination and a simple love of the craft.

Towards the beginning of the 1950 film Cinderella, her animal friends, including Jaq and Gus, help her sew together a beautiful gown for the prince’s ball. To the tune of “The Work Song”, the seamstress mice turn leftover fabric into an array of bows and frills perfect for Cinderella’s night out. While the film continues on with storylines for Jaq and Gus, what happens to the other mice? Find out in Disney’s latest novel, Delphine and the Silver Needle.

Author Alyssa Moon has always been fascinated by the animal side characters in fairy tales and deeply wanted to give a name to one of her favorites - the seamstress mice.

“The whole world of Cinderella is suffused with magic, so how might this little mouse’s life be impacted by magic?” Moon said. “What if she discovered that her true identity linked her to magic that had flourished long ago? As soon as I had given a name to that seamstress mouse, Delphine was born, and her story flowed out as if it had always been there.”

There were several stages to the creation process, including a year just spent on creating the overall world of Delphine, the system of magic and the overarching storyline for the series. Once all the details were fleshed out, Moon spent a year writing Delphine and the Silver Needle and a year working alongside Disney Publishing to create the book’s look and feel.

“The beautiful art, the layout, the design, the map, all of that - it’s absolutely gorgeous, and it perfectly captures how I had imagined the book…as if the reader had found it on the shelf of an old castle library, just waiting to be discovered,” she said.

Delphine’s story goes like this: She is a young, orphaned dressmaker living in the walls of Cinderella’s chateau when she stumbles upon an enormous secret. She takes it upon herself to uncover the truth about the past and save the kingdom before the evil King Midnight succeeds in harnessing the power of the tailor mice.

Not only is this Moon’s first novel for Disney, it is her debut as an author. The process was extremely rewarding for her as someone who thrives on receiving feedback and notes in order to improve.

“It’s like a puzzle,” she said. “Often, it’s an incredibly complicated puzzle where you only have a few pieces, and no box lid to show you the picture! But the process of sifting through and figuring out the changes that need to be made is like putting the puzzle pieces into place one by one. It’s incredibly satisfying each time you get another puzzle piece to fit just right. So although the process can make me want to tear my hair out, it’s the most rewarding feeling in the world when all of the notes have been addressed and the new draft is sparkling and perfect.”

Delphine and the Silver Needle is action-packed with magic, heart and something that ties the book together: adventure.

“Adventures can exist anywhere,” Moon said. “Sometimes the greatest magic isn’t about spells or wands - it’s about having the courage to chase your destiny against all odds. Each of us is capable of much more than we know.”