Alli's Articles
INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS, CULTURE PIECES, MUSICAL RAMBLINGS.
My first semester at SUNY New Paltz has been a very enlightening experience when it comes to music. Not only have I met people that have the same exact tastes as me, but I've come across so many new bands and artists. I've also discovered that the best part about going to a smaller (and artsier) college is the connections you have. Songwriters can be anywhere, like the classmate that sits next to you in your psych class or your friend's friend that's sitting at your usual spot at the dining hall one day. One up-and-coming artist I've had the pleasure of befriending this semester is Anika Leetmaa, also known as 3crulee. In the few songs she has released, she shows her skills as a bedroom pop artist and also as a linguist. In the comfort of Bouton Hall on a crisp but chilly fall afternoon, I talked to Anika about her history as a songwriter and her career, one that's just taking off now. Alli: Alright, my first question for you is, what is your earliest memory of making music? Anika: It was probably my sophomore year, well, that was writing my own music. I've been playing piano, guitar, and viola since I was probably 6 years old. That was just sheet music and covers, but sophomore year is when I started messing around on guitar trying to make my own chord progressions. For the longest time I was having trouble coming up with lyrics and stuff. I'm not really a poet, and at that point I wasn't very experienced in love or anything, so I had no idea what to write about. Junior year I had a little relationship that didn't go too well *laughs* so I finally had that content. That's when I wrote my first song, probably the spring of junior year. Alli: I know you're very excited about this question, where does the name 3crulee come from? Anika: This is my favorite part! It all starts with Twitter. I wanted to make an indie parody account that poked fun at the more pretentious users on there who really like to analyze music, poems, all of that stuff. I needed a username for this account, so I was thinking, "What goes into an indie Twitter handle?" I looked into it and I saw that colors were a big thing, but I could really only think of "blue" and "yellow," which were kind of boring. I went onto Wikipedia, and I scrolled through the list of colors until I found one which was kind of cool, and I saw "ecru," which, I think, translates from French into "raw." It's a beige-ish color, and I'm a big fan of the color beige, so I was like, "Okay, this is gonna work." I needed a second part, and I noticed that sometimes indie usernames will be a keyboard-smash, which is just random letters, so I thought it would be kind of funny to add a keysmash at the end, like "ecru_keysmash." The Twitter account never actually took off, but I was making a Neopets account with my sister last summer, and I thought that username would be weird for Neopets. I needed something a little more simple. My last name is Leetmaa, and I didn't want to use my full last name. My mom uses the "lee" from our name for things, so I just took that. It looks really pretty together! Eventually the Neopets username moved on to Soundcloud. Alli: Wow, I guess Neopets really started your career. My next question is what are some of your biggest musical influences? Anika: That is a very hard question! I grew up listening to a lot of indie music, and my family always listened to alternative stuff. I think I did go through a very big bedroom pop phase. I try to distance myself from it now, but I do have a lot of respect for bedroom pop artists, because a lot of the time they make their own stuff, and a lot of higher name artists can't do that. When someone can make their own music, I have a lot of respect for that. I can't really name anybody specifically. I listen to so much music that it would be hard to just pick one, so I guess just alternative in general. Alli: I know that your music sometimes has elements from different languages in the titles and the lyrics, so why does language fascinate you so much? Anika: Oh! This is such a good question! Alli: I know, I was excited about this one. Anika: Probably the biggest part of it starts with my name in general. My grandparents are from Estonia, so that culture is very much alive in my family. My name, Anika Leetmaa, obviously is not the most American name, so it's very recognizable. I've had a lot of people ask me "What's your nationality?" when they hear my name, so I constantly found myself saying "I'm Estonian." The more I said that, the more I started to identify with that nationality. So I include stuff kind of as a flex, but also because it sounds pretty. Alli: What is your songwriting process like? Anika: It's very interesting. Like I said, I'm not the best writer, so I tried writing off of my life experiences, but I just didn't like it. I didn't really like the style of it, because it wasn't very beautiful to me; It was just me saying my thoughts. It wasn't anything special. When I was writing my first EP, I was under a bit of a time crunch, so I was like "I cannot think of these bad lyrics in time." So, I went to this little thing called GoogleTranslateGate, where you go onto Google and type random gibberish into the Somalian section and produce the english translation. It's very cool. Sometimes, like, serious prophecies come up. There's a lot of articles about it. They did some updates and now you actually can't do English words as much to produce these things, but I found that if I break up Estonian words, it was a lot easier. So breaking up Estonian words and putting them into Somali will produce very English results in Google Translate, so I did that for a couple songs. I only used the lyrics that I actually liked, because some weird results came up also. My favorite line that I got was "I have a tattoo," probably. For one of my songs, I only used the word Mustikakissell, which means blueberry soup in Estonian, and one of my favorite Estonian foods. Alli: That's really cool. I love that. How are you enjoying the New Paltz music scene so far? Anika: It's very fun! I haven't met a crazy amount of musicians, but more than I expected. I was lucky enough to get to talk to some of them and see their stuff. Some of them are more...um...they come in different tiers, um, of quality. Some people do just download beats off of Youtube and rap over it, but some of them actually do use real instruments, and maybe they'll use digital beats, which is similar to me. Like yeah, I'm not gonna buy a whole drum set. So yeah, I have different levels of respect, but for all of them, hey, you're making something. I've been to some music shows, and those have been awesome. I'm always so impressed by all of the effect pedals. I still don't know how to use those. I wanna get some. Just playing guitar gets boring after a while. More psychedelic influences is where I'd like to go in the future, I think. Alli: What are your favorite instruments/effects to use in your songs? Anika: Let's see...I use a lot of synth sounds. This is just me messing around, but you can download synth plugins online. Also, Garageband already comes with a bunch. I want to invest in a better digital audio workshop in the future, but right now, I do not have any money, so...*laughs.* But yeah, mostly, I use so many synths, but I don't know how to do bass. That is something to work on, so none of my songs really have bass. One synth I use a lot, I'm not really a huge fan of it, but it is free and it comes with a bunch of presets, is called Helm, and you can download that. You will not get a virus. It's very useful. I've made a lot with it, but nothing that I have released yet. ~~ You can listen to Anika's music on Soundcloud. You can also go through her liked tracks if you want to find some cool Estonian rap. I hope you all support her in some way, because she has such a unique sound and she's just getting started. This is the first article of a new series I've started called "New Scene, New Paltz." I'm planning to interview musicians and people heavily involved in the scene here and, hopefully, have a new interview every week! I would appreciate feedback, and, if you are or know of any New Paltz musicians that would be interested, send a message to our "Contact' section. I hope you all are as excited for this as I am!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |