Interview by Carol Wright | Photo Courtesy of Ginger Rodriguez
When did music become an outlet for you?
Music became an outlet for me when I was very young. I gravitated towards the keyboard when I was a kid since my dad had one in his office. There’s a photo of me playing his keyboard when I was about 3 years old which eventually became my album cover for my first album, I’m Crying In A Cool Way. My dad said he just walked into his office and I was there playing, and he was so surprised that he went to go grab the camera so he could take a photo. Ever since then, I’ve just always used music as a way to express myself.
You write and produce your own songs. Through that process have you become very attuned to what works and doesn’t work in your music?
Through writing and producing my own songs, I would like to think I have become attuned to what works and what doesn’t in my music. I have been writing and producing officially since 2015, and over the years, I feel like I’ve been able to develop my own style that people can recognize, even when I do experiment with different genres and sounds. Although I am always growing and learning, and I like to consider myself a beginner, I feel like with the years of experience I’ve had, I now have an innate feeling as to whether something works for me or not. I think developing your own style and point-of-view in your music is so important because not only do you get to share what’s unique about you, but I think it’s really helpful when connecting with new listeners, since they are able to recognize who you are just through the music.
Who are some of your musical inspirations?
There are so many people who inspire me but some people who really influenced this last album, Melancholy were artists such as Prince, Ms. Lauren Hill, as well as bands like Queen, My Chemical Romance, and the duo Daft Punk. Although each and every group and artist has their own unique sound, all of these influences are ones that have stuck with me from an early age, despite their contrasting genres. In the last few years or so, I found myself coming back to the records made by these incredibly talented people, and I feel like my album, Melancholy, was an outlet for me to explore all of these different sounds that I grew familiar with, while also being a way to share my own perspective and ideas.
You spent over two years working on your Sophomore album Melancholy. Did quarantine give you time to add all of the finishing touches?
Self-quarantine definitely gave me a lot of time to work on the album and add all the finishing touches on the record. I’m very lucky and privileged that I was able to isolate myself in a safe environment with my own home studio, which gave me a lot of time to just write and work on production. By the time the pandemic hit, I had so much material basically done, and I was at a point where I didn’t feel the need to tweak them anymore, so when my university moved to online learning, and I was home 24/7, I was able to use the moments when I wasn’t in my Zoom lectures to write new material that I would end up revising and adding to over the next year.
Tell us about the title track “Melancholy.” What inspired the lyrics?
I have been writing this album since my senior year of high school, which is when I wrote “Melancholy.” Back then, I was very mentally ill with severe anxiety and depression that went unchecked because I didn’t know how to cope well. Due to my struggles with mental illness, I found it difficult to maintain healthy relationships with my peers, and when I was a senior in high school about to graduate, I felt like all of my uncertainty for the future was heightened since I was transitioning into a new phase of my life. In “Melancholy,” I talk about this uncertainty while also sharing my past difficulties in my relationships. Although I had friends and people supporting me, it was very difficult for them to understand why I was ‘so sad all the time’ and being talked down to in this way made me feel ashamed that I couldn’t just ‘get with the program’ and be a person like everybody else. This led to me writing the lines: “I’m left behind ‘cause I’m too depressed to be somebody / When they don’t call me Ginger they call me Melancholy,” which is what began the idea for the song and the rest of the album.
What advice do you have for aspiring singers?
My advice to anyone aspiring to be a singer, or to be in any profession really, is to learn from failure. I think it’s really easy for people, myself included, to get stuck on what didn’t go right, and think that failure is a reflection of who you are, but I think it’s so important to use failure as a chance to grow and learn something. If anything, failure is a part of the process of success, so when life just doesn’t seem to go right, or you find yourself making mistakes or doing things wrong, use those opportunities to learn. All of the successful people you admire have all failed over and over again, so don’t let it get you down too hard. It’s okay to grieve for yourself and give yourself grace, but I think that if you want to keep moving forward, you should use failure as a way to learn, instead of using it as a way to keep you stuck.