FLOOD: The Passion Issue #1

THE PASSION ISSUE Powered By

2 TALK ABOUT THE PASSION 4 SMALL TALK: LIZZO, HEMBREE, QUESTLOVE 8 GROUPLOVE’S HANNAH HOOPER: THE COLORS OF OBLIVION 16 SLEIGH BELLS’ ALEXIS KRAUSS: AIN’T NO MOUNTAIN HIGH ENOUGH 28 SQIRL CHEF/OWNER JESSICA KOSLOW: BLADE RUNNER

PUBLISHER ALAN SARTIRANA PUBLISHER/EDITORIAL DIRECTOR RANDY BOOKASTA EXECUTIVE EDITOR SCOTT T. STERLING MANAGING EDITOR ANYA JAREMKO-GREENWOLD, ASSOCIATE EDITOR MIKE LeSUER ART DIRECTOR MELISSA SIMONIAN WRITERS KATRINA NATTRESS, JOHN OCHOA, ERIN OSMON, TAMARA PALMER PHOTOGRAPHERS KYLE DREW, SYDNEY GAWLIK, KATHERINE LEVIN SHEEHAN, THE1POINT8, CHRIS VULTAGGIO ANTHEMIC AGENCY MICHAEL BAUER, JOAN CORRAGIO, ANA DOS ANJOS, AMBER HOWELL, NOLAN FOSTER, MICA JENKINS, TAYLOR NUÑEZ, KYLE ROGERS

JESSICA KOSLOW AT SQIRL. PHOTO BY THE1POINT8

36 THE MARÍAS: NEVER LOSE THAT FEELING

5 TO 9 > 9 TO 5

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Prototype shown with options. 1Performance tires are expected to experience greater tire wear than conventional tires. Tire life may be less than 24,000 miles, depending upon driving conditions. ©2019 Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc.

TA L K

ABOUT

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PAS S I O N

What is your “passion”? The answer is easy. It’s the one thing that drives you, motivates you, inspires you, and sometimes even breaks your heart—but it’s the thing you return to, despite that.

For this ongoing series that will continue through the summer, FLOOD connects with an inspired cavalcade of artists who are taking the time to talk about what drives them beyond the thing that they’re famous for. From Alexis Krauss of Sleigh Bells scaling mountains and ice walls around the world to Grouplove’s Hannnah Hooper and her paintings, we’ve got an inside look at what brings these vital artists pure joy.

Passion is a place that transcends the traditional signifiers of success. It’s where accomplishment is measured in personal growth and our ability to become the best and most authentic version of ourselves. Let’s talk about it.

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WU-TANG CLAN

25 YEARS AIN’T NUTHING TA F’ WIT

AND THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST

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FLOOD #8 COURTNEY BARNETT

FLOOD #8: KATE BERLANT AND JOHN EARLY

FLOOD #8: ROY CHOI

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FLOOD #8 JACK WHITE

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THE FASHION ISSUE

I AM...

SASHA

Lizzo and her flute are the baddest dynamic duo in music right now.

Lizzo is perhaps best known as an unabashedly body-positive singer and rapper, whose third studio album Cuz I Love You is out in April—but she’s also a classically trained flautist and the proud owner of Sasha Flute, an instrument with its very own Instagram page and over fifty-seven thousand followers. Lizzo began playing flute at the tender age of ten and even attended University of Houston on a flute scholarship; now, she whips her flute out regularly as a comedy prop on social media and also on tour, at festivals like Lollapalooza and Voodoo, on Ellen, and in an Anchorman parody performance, during which she “battled” Will Ferrell in character as Ron Burgundy (and arguably, won). Last November, Lizzo felt compelled to post a video on social media in direct response to haters claiming it was all a gimmick, accompanied by a defiant caption: “PSA for the weirdos that think I have the TIME to fabricate a flute back-story, RENT a flute to tour with and PRETEND to play. I’m a full time artist ... Enjoy this F natural.”

The flute is traditionally a delicate instrument, but Lizzo’s fiery energy and hiphop beats infuses it with new lifeblood.

FLUTE

BY ANYA JAREMKO-GREENWOLD PHOTO BY SYDNEY GAWLIK

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Unravelling the Magic of Galaxy Quest with Hembree Brothers Alex and Austin Ward host what is quite likely the only podcast entirely devoted to the 1999 sci-fi comedy.

BY MIKE LeSEUR LOTS OF PEOPLE ARE PASSIONATE ABOUT MOVIES, but few people are as passionate about a single film as Kansas City’s alt-pop group Hembree, whose guitarist and drummer host a podcast entirely about the 1999 sci-fi action comedy Galaxy Quest. Since 2015, Alex Ward and his brother Austin have recorded over twenty episodes devoted to the burgeoning cult hit about the rabid fandom that tends to surround sci-fi series, which deserves a little rabid fandom of its own.

“As far as we know, By Grabthar’s Hammer… What a Podcast is the only podcast dedicated to the 1999 Tim Allen–starring epic space-adventure comedy Galaxy Quest,” Alex Ward says. “Hard to believe, I know. Galaxy Quest was the first movie that Austin and I bonded over with our friend RJ Schillaci, drummer for Chicago rock group Archie Powell & the Exports. Galaxy Quest is one of those crowd pleasers that a lot of people tend to forget about. We’ve been talking about Galaxy Quest for years, and are still unraveling its magic in every new episode.”

Ranging in topic from speculations about the forthcoming GQ TV series for Amazon Prime to Justin Long’s recent ad campaign for Huawei, By Grabthar’s Hammer… What a Podcast raises the tough questions no one else is asking: Do Galaxy Quest and The Fifth Element exist in the same universe? Can a human and a squid find true love?

Why wont Tim Allen make surprise appearances at their public screenings?

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BY SCOTT T. STERLING

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hmir “Questlove” Thompson, drummer for legendary Philadelphia hip-hop outfit The Roots, is a notorious savant who can recall historical dates and obscure facts from his encyclopedic wealth of musical knowledge. He applies that same degree of dedication and care to his growing status as a renowned foodie, building his reputation among the world’s progressive food community through a series of savvy business and personal moves.

In Thompson’s 2016 book, something to food about: Exploring Creativity with Innovative Chefs, he connected with a cross-section of cooks to tap into the myriad ways they dream up flavor combinations and learn how they see the world through good food. It was an experience that allowed the author to witness first-hand the importance of diversity and representation at every level of food service.

“Sometimes I would visit restaurants and see pretty quickly that I was the only black person in the room,” he writes in the book. “There aren’t large numbers of black or Hispanic chefs in charge of the country’s best restaurants. The same low-representation problem affects female chefs as well. ” By 2017, Thompson was hosting high-profile food salons with exclusive guest lists including the likes of Pharrell Williams, Olivia Wilde, and Rosario Dawson alongside such A-list food-makers as Kwame Onwuachi, Amanda Cohen, and Bryce Shulman. “He makes it easier for me to get on the radar. He’s saying: ‘Where

are the African-American chefs out there?’”

Onwuachi told Vogue. “He can identify with me, and that helps.”

Thompson’s most recent food move is a very modern meat alternative for the fans of his hometown Philadelphia Phillies: a plant-based Philly cheesesteak sandwich. “We first tested this product at our annual Roots Picnic music festival in Philly in 2018,” he said of the sandwich, which boasts a “melted cheese blend,” peppers, and onions, all stuffed into an Amoroso roll. The sandwich is currently available at all Phillies home games, and will be rolled out to forty Live Nation music venues across the country this summer.

Questlove Wants You to Eat Better The drummer for The Roots knows food.

“Without any forewarning we offered the cheesesteak in our VIP area, which was mainly populated with friends and family, and no one believed me when I told them the ‘meat’ was not beef, but plantbased,” he detailed.

“My team and I saw an opportunity to roll out the product on a much larger level. To have the Phillies and Live Nation as our initial partners is great, as it speaks to my love for my hometown of Philadelphia combined with my love of music.”

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HANNAH HOOPER THE COLORS OF OBLIVION The Grouplove frontwoman is experimenting with color for Oblivion, her upcoming solo art exhibition in LA.

BY ERIN OSMON PHOTOS BY KATHERINE LEVIN SHEEHAN FLOOD

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Walking into Hannah Hooper’s Echo Park studio is like stepping into a kaleidoscope. Beams of light illuminate acrylic colors splayed across large-scale canvases and spattered across the floor. Together, these vibrant streaks and speckles form a choreographed dance, rising and falling based on light, shadow, and perspective.

“I really like moving the paint, and getting my whole body into it,” Hooper says. “I’ll mix the paint, pour it, and then move it around.”

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“A close friend of mine passed away.

I was listening to his album and the song ‘[Self Care Part II:] Oblivion’ came on, and I started painting all of these things.”

There’s an animating force in both the intentional strokes that comprise Hooper’s impressionistic paintings, and the unintentional bits of color left in their wake. Together, they reveal her emotional and physical journey through gesture and movement, a sort of artistic contrail. It’s no surprise that Hooper throws her entire body into her paintings. The Grouplove singer-keyboardist is known for her energetic presence, which manifests in spasmodic dances and full-throated vocals onstage.

Before she was a magnetic frontwoman, Hooper was an art student at Parsons School of Design in New York City. “There’s a [British artist] named Jenny Saville and her scale blew my mind,” Hooper explains. “I saw her show in Chelsea, and was really drawn in by that large scale because I felt really stuck in sketchbooks and little things.” She began to expand the scope of her work by increasing the square footage of her canvases. “The moment I picked up a larger paintbrush and it became a dance I was like, ‘Wow, this is a much more natural way to express myself,’” she says. Soon, her paintings began to sell.

An early customer was Grouplove guitarist Andrew Wessen’s brother, who offered Hooper a spot at an artist’s residency he was putting together in Crete. “I had just met Christian [Zucconi], and had fallen madly in love with him,” she says. “I was like, ‘If I go to Greece and don’t bring him, I’ll never see him again.’” So she convinced him to join her, even though the pair barely knew one another. “It was so crazy. We hadn’t even made out or anything,” she adds. “But it was an intuitive thing. I knew he was my guy.” While immersed in art on the Grecian isle, Hooper and Zucconi met Wessen, former drummer Ryan Rabin, and former bassist Sean Gadd. About two years later the group signed to Atlantic Records subsidiary Canvasback Music, and scored a number one hit on the Billboard Alternative Songs chart with “Tongue Tied.”

Since then, Hooper and Zucconi have given birth to a daughter, Willa, and toured around the world. Today, Hooper’s preparing for a solo exhibition at Shepard Fairey’s gallery Subliminal Projects in Los Angeles, which opens June 8. She calls the series Oblivion, inspired in part by a sustained and mysterious connection felt with friends and family members who’ve died.

“A close friend of mine passed away. I was listening to his album and the song ‘[Self Care Part II:] Oblivion’ came on, and I started painting all of these things,” she says.

The series’ subjects are depicted in water, alternately free floating or claustrophobically clustered. Fire and water energies emanate. In one pair of works, two large-scale abstract bodies are calmly submerged in swaths of blue and green, and red inner tubes and tops of heads form an anxious sea. There’s a seamlessness in each painting, as if they’ve spilled over from Hooper’s subconscious. “These are really experimental,” she admits. “I don’t want to say ‘tie-dye’ because I’m from San Francisco, but there is an element of trusting the bleed and trusting the paint, and that’s very new for me.

Actually letting go can create something much more exciting.”

The same is true of the album Grouplove has written, which will see a 2019 release date. It’s a grunge-inspired record where Hooper, for the first time, howls from an unknown place. “Letting myself scream, not trying to make it pretty or poppy, trusting where that animal inside is coming from—it just felt healing,” she explains. Dave Sitek from TV on the Radio is producing some of the album, additionally described by Hooper as “political, beautiful, and dancey.”

Hooper credits her prolificacy in part to a new way of working among the band. “We’ve been disappearing to write and not being like, ‘What’s up social media, this is what we’re doing,’” she says. Untethering from such distractions has helped incubate revived connections to each other and to the Self, a positive for all aspects of Hooper’s artistry. “Art to me is about understanding your subconscious, and letting it heal,” she concludes. “It’s primal, like childbirth.”

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“Letting myself scream, not trying to make it pretty or poppy, trusting where that animal inside is coming from—it just felt healing.”

HOW SLEIGH BELLS’ ALEXIS KRAUSS BALANCES A LIFE ON THE ROAD AND A LIFE IN THE WILDERNESS

BY KATRINA NATTRESS PHOTOS BY CHRIS VULTAGGIO

When she’s not making music, Krauss is climbing crags around the world.

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The first time I talked to Alexis Krauss, she had recently conquered a rock climbing route at the Shawangunk Ridge that had shut her down numerous times in the past. When we get back on the phone just days later, overcoming the route—known as the Something Interesting ascent—is old news. She had already beaten her personal best by climbing the harder version— known as Easter Time Too—as an on-sight, which means she’d never attempted it before.

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“I THINK THERE’S AN INTERSECT BETWEEN CLIMBING AND PERFORMING WHERE YOUR BODY IS IN THIS HEIGHTENED STATE. YOU’RE IN THIS DO-OR-DIE MODE.” 20

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This has been the New Yorker’s life since 2013, when her

friend introduced her to climbing on the West Coast—but before becoming an avid rock climber, Krauss was one half of the noise pop duo Sleigh Bells.

Now, she balances a musician’s life with a climber’s life.

“My trajectory as a performer in the band is certainly self-contained. I’ve grown tremendously as a songwriter, as a musician, as a performer, and I can’t say climbing has been responsible for that,” Krauss admits. “[But] I think there’s an intersect between climbing and performing where your body is in this heightened state. You’re in this do-or-die mode.”

The parallels don’t end there. Krauss credits climbing with gifting her grit, resilience, and an insight into her own abilities that translate into all aspects of her life, including music. Her stage presence is fearless and radiant—it always has been—but keeping her body and mind strong allows her to be that much more confident on stage. She also doesn’t think she’d be able to survive touring without going out on excursions.

“I love the experience of touring. But I compare being on a tour bus to sleeping in a coffin that’s on a skateboard being pushed down a hill,” Krauss says with a laugh. “After I spend days on the bus and in a venue, I get to go outside and spread my wings. Take deep breaths of beautiful air. Put my body to work in a different way. Because our shows are so physical, climbing is very complementary to that.”

“I’m not a sex, drugs, and rock and roll type person,” she continues. “People have this idea of me based on our music and based on how I am onstage, but I’m drinking tea after shows and going to bed by 11 p.m. I’d much rather wake up at 7 a.m., drive out to a crag, and climb than party and be hungover.”

Though unfortunately the band can’t route tours based on rock climbing areas, Krauss has recruited several crew members to take out on climbing adventures whenever they have a day off. In fact, while on the road with Weezer and Pixies, she led the route she had top-roped the first time she ever climbed outside.

That first climb was at Mount Diablo in the Bay Area. “It was such an empowering, emotional experience. There’s something about getting to the top of a route that seems completely inconceivable from the ground. It’s this total testament to your willpower, tenacity, perseverance,” Krauss recalls.

“Feeling that connected to Earth—you’re actually touching rock; you’re observing things in a new way; you’re engaging all your senses in a really different way. You just develop this mental dialogue of ‘I can’t do this—no, I can do this.’ Where you take one more step, one more handhold, and then you start surmounting things that felt insurmountable. I got to the top—I didn’t think I was going to make it—and I just cried genuinely happy tears of accomplishment.”

Those emotions haven’t subsided in the years that passed. There are still routes and moves that intimidate the now-experienced climber. She’s been on climbs that have scared her, but when she gets shut down she doesn’t see it as failure. It just wasn’t the right time—but that doesn’t mean she won’t try it again (like Something Interesting). She’s also begun to visualize a quote she read in Robert L. Spencer’s The Craft of the Warrior about letting yourself feel fear.

“I think the idea of letting fear hit you, pass through you, and move out of you is something I’ve started to internalize,” Krauss says. “I think at first I was just expecting I’d reach this point where it just wouldn’t be scary anymore; but it’s like, no it’s always scary. You just have to learn how to feel it and not let it paralyze you.”

She compares the idea of not giving up to recording vocals. Sometimes you’ll record the same thing over and over, but if you’re not in the right headspace it’s not going to come out the way you want it to. You have to know when to step away and trust that when you come back—whether it be in ten minutes or ten months—you’ll get it. “Climbing is the same way,” she explains. “There’s days where you have every reason for everything to be right, but everything’s wrong, and you just have to trust yourself and be kind to yourself.”

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“AT FIRST I WAS JUST EXPECTING I’D REACH THIS POINT WHERE IT JUST WOULDN’T BE SCARY ANYMORE; BUT IT’S LIKE, NO IT’S ALWAYS SCARY. YOU JUST HAVE TO LEARN HOW TO FEEL IT AND NOT LET IT PARALYZE YOU.”

Krauss now shares her insights and experiences with a group of girls called Young Women Who Crush (YWWC). She started the leadership and development program in 2017 with Emily Varisco and Eva Kalea, as a partnership between The Cliffs climbing gym and the Discover Outdoors Foundation, where Krauss works as a licensed hiking and camping guide.

Throughout the course of a school year, a team of hand-selected female high school students from a variety of New York boroughs not only build climbing technique and rope skills, but also learn how to work toward personal goals, use mindfulness and breath while climbing, and overcome fear. In YWWC’s second year, Krauss is in complete awe of her students.

“It’s just climbing, and yet it has such a profound impact on these girls’ lives,” she says. “They’re learning so much more than how to move up a wall. They’re learning how to have faith in themselves; they’re learning how to have selfconfidence; they’re learning how to redefine these societal definitions of what it means to be a woman, and certainly what it means to be an urban woman, or a woman of color, or a Muslim woman, or what it means to wear a hijab, or to live in a homeless shelter, or to have just come here from Ecuador and barely speak English. We have such a diverse group of girls, and climbing is so universal. It has the ability to cut through all the stress and the pressure of being a young woman in New York City. It allows them to just have fun while pushing themselves.”

Though Sleigh Bells is still near and dear to her heart, Krauss is embracing her wild side now more than ever. She moved out of the city and into the Hudson Valley, so she could be closer to the Shawangunk Ridge (which she and other climbers lovingly call “The Gunks”). She’s studying to be a licensed climbing guide and wilderness EMT. She hikes; she camps; she ice climbs (“That’s reserved for the especially insane rock climbers”); she’s outside as much as she can be.

“Nature is my church,” Krauss says simply. “It’s my multivitamin—I don’t do well without it.”

JE SSICA KO SLOW : BLADE RUNNER How figure skating trained Sqirl chef/owner Jessica Koslow to win.

BY TAMARA PALMER PHOTOS BY THE1POINT8 ICE SKATING PHOTOS COURTESY OF JESSICA KOSLOW

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Jessica Koslow is quick to credit the rise of her Los Angeles slow food empire to her past experience as a competitive ice skater. The James Beard Foundation Award– nominated chef and brainchild behind the internationally acclaimed breakfast and lunch restaurant Sqirl has a surprising history as a champion in the field of competitive figure skating known as “figures,” the meticulous, pattern-creating sport that was officially removed from international competitions almost two decades ago. In this competition, skaters made patterns on the ice, and were judged according to how accurate those patterns were.

For those of us who grew up with figures as a compulsory part of competitive skating, it still feels glaring that what was once a fundamental part of being a serious skater is now just a memory.

“With gymnastics, there’s the artistry gymnastics that aren’t the crazy jumping [competitions] and obviously it’s a totally different body type that it’s made for, and there’s a value to that as well,” Koslow explains. “There’s swimming that is jumping, there’s swimming that is swimming across the pool, and then there’s the artistic version of swimming. And with figure skating, it’s just become one type of figure skating or nothing for singles skaters.

“The real reason I believe figures was pushed to the wayside is the economics of it all,” she ventures.

“You can only have twelve skaters on a rink at a time, and the ice needs to be blue, but if you have hockey skaters the ice needs to be bright white. So it created a conundrum where the economics of having twelve people on a rink for an hour doesn’t really work. The figures times are four and five a.m., maybe, and if you are doing a hockey program it’s really hard for you to do that if you have blue ice. Which is kind of what you need for figures—an ice rink that is darker in color.”

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“All these major chefs are doing dinner. That’s all they’re willing to do. ‘I have to do dinner service, I’m a fine dining dinner chef’ ...

The fact that I am a breakfast and lunch cook, basically getting any respect is super interesting.”

Figures ceased to be a part of the U.S. Figure Skating Championships after 1999; Koslow took home the gold medal in the Junior division (the second-highest level of competition) in Salt Lake City that same year. By then, this type of skating was a tough sell for rink owners and for event organizers alike. Performed sans sequins or other freestyle flair, figures could be less than enthralling for ticket buyers of major competitions, as well.

“So it made me think that there was an economic call on top of the fact that, you know, where’s the fan base for figures versus filling seats for freestyle?” she continues. “People want to see sparkly outfits and they want to watch people fall and succeed. They don’t really care about watching someone go in circles. I understand that there became this thing where it wasn’t viable from that standpoint.”

All the years spent slowly perfecting her figures during practice sessions, tests, and competitions set Koslow up to be a perfectionist in the kitchen—particularly with the jam-making that brought Sqirl from a fledgling food vendor to a perpetually packed restaurant sensation.

“I think jam-making has a similar sensibility,” she says. “It’s slow, it’s secretly hard to do. It’s a slow process in how to do the perfect texture and consistency and all those things.”

Koslow wasn’t really into cooking during her competitive years, but found it became her passion once she stopped skating. And like her interest in figures, she gravitated toward a part of the food industry that wasn’t as celebrated as others.

“I like those things that are less loved, you know?” Koslow says. “I think that’s also genuinely why breakfast and lunch seemed interesting to me. All these major chefs are doing dinner. That’s all they’re willing to do. ‘I have to do dinner service, I’m a fine dining dinner chef.’ No one gets respect doing breakfast and lunch. The fact that I am a breakfast and lunch cook, basically getting any respect is super interesting.”

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Koslow will get a chance to put her mark on dinner service in July when she opens Onda, a collaboration with Mexico City star chef Gabriela Cámara in the new Proper Hotel in Santa Monica. Though she’ll be at the new restaurant a lot in the beginning, she plans to continue spending most of her time at Sqirl; her presence will be felt more than seen at Onda.

Koslow sees many parallels between her athletic years and what she’s doing now at both Sqirl and Onda—the champion mindset is clearly lifelong.

“It was one of those things that seemed more honest, it seemed like the work I wanted to do,” says Koslow of her focus on breakfast and lunch. “Now it’s interesting to see how Sqirl has evolved. Because when major chefs would tell me, ‘Oh girl, good luck doing breakfast and lunch. I’ll never do it because the margins are too slim and there’s no alcohol sales, and it’s just a grind,’ I would think ‘Well, that’s more push for me to do what I want to do and do it well, because no one’s in the lane right now.’ Now there are a lot of people in the lane. I just think about how [skating] prepared me to be a chef. It prepared me to know that someone is always on my tail ready to swoop in!”

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The velvet-voiced lead singer on how her diverse tastes and love of Latin music inspired her path toward becoming the eponymous founder of The MarĂ­as.

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As frontwoman of The Marías, the rising Los Angeles quintet, María pulls cues from a proverbial jukebox that spans multiple genres, decades, and languages. The group’s hazy, loungey sound—part rock, part dream pop, part psychedelic-soul—is an amalgamation of the musical tastes and influences of the band’s founders, and romantic couple, María and producer/drummer Josh Conway. For his part, Conway grew up on a healthy diet of early rock—à la The Beatles and The Beach Boys—and psychedelic rock, among other sounds.

María, on the other hand, brings the international flair: Born in Puerto Rico, reared in Atlanta, and currently based in Los Angeles, the singer first discovered her passion for music in her childhood days. Walkman in hand and lo-fi headphones over her ears, she spent hours getting lost in the music of Latin pop icons like Laura Pausini and Alejandro Sanz.

Her early tastes would eventually evolve to encompass the wider spectrum of Latin and non-Latin pop music. Her older cousins in Puerto Rico schooled her in reggaeton, while her direct family filled the house with everything from hip-hop beats to Mexican ballads, opera, salsa, merengue, and Mariah Carey.

That multicultural, multilingual gumbo is what fuels The Marías’ own wide-spanning, vintage-influenced sound today.

Writing songs in both English and Spanish, their diverse style is a reflection of the vast influences that have come to define their story thus far.

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How did you first discover your passion for music?

My first memory of being passionate about music was actually a Latin artist. I must have been three or four. We were in Spain visiting my dad’s family, and he got me a Laura Pausini tape and a little Walkman. I was watching some home videos yesterday, and almost throughout the entire thing, I had that Walkman on.

When I listened to the music, I would always just feel something, even when I was little. I also remember Alejandro Sanz’s “Corazón Partío”; my dad was obsessed with that song.

I remember really loving it because it made me feel so warm.

I get a really strong feeling in my chest and in the pit of my stomach when there’s a song I really like. I remember having

that feeling when I was little, which is why I really liked Laura Pausini and Alejandro Sanz and other artists that my dad really liked, and not, like, children’s music. I didn’t really feel anything listening to kids’ music. So I embraced all the music that my parents were listening to.

But I never really thought that music could be a career. My mom is a teacher, so she always told my brother and I, “You have to go to school, you have to go to college, you have to graduate.” [We had to be] a little bit more by-the-book, because she is an immigrant parent—both of my parents are—so they really wanted us to graduate and to live what they thought was the American dream.

Music was never something that I thought could be a career, until I started writing my own songs and playing them for my friends and then playing them at venues and sort of getting a good response. And I was like, “You know what? I think this is my calling.” Then I dropped out of college almost into my second year and moved to Los Angeles.

How did you make your love of music a professional reality?

Packing up everything in my car and driving out to LA was when I was like, “Okay, this is what I’m dedicating my life to.” Before that, I was still going to school, I was working a full-time job, and also doing music. But it wasn’t until I left everything that I knew back home and came to LA that I was like, “I really got to work hard and try to make this happen, because I’m moving away from my family and all of my friends and everything that I know for this, so I’m going to give it everything.”

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Some of your first memories were of Latin artists. How did you discover other Latin music growing up and expand that interest over time?

My parents listen to a lot of Latin music, and every time we would visit Puerto Rico, we would always go into the malls where they sold CDs and ask for recommendations. We would go home with, like, fifteen CDs, and that was all we listened to. I also grew up having a lot of Latin friends from all over: Guatemala, Colombia, Mexico, Argentina. We would introduce each other to music that we were into.

Latin music has always been a strong part of who I am—and also non-Latin music. I grew up bicultural and bilingual,

so I listened to both. I grew up in a small town in Georgia.

I remember on one mixtape that we made, there was a reggaeton song, followed by a country song, followed by an Erykah Badu song, or like a Bee Gees song. It was super diverse, all of the influences that I was surrounded by. It was just all sorts of things flying around.

You knew what you wanted to do at a young age—how have you kept that dedication to music and to your art thriving?

I don’t think it’s a conscious thing. I was just always passionate about music and discovering new artists and learning new songs. I think it was always an interest of mine and not something that I proactively tried to find. But it doesn’t take much to continue the passion, because it’s just there.

What are some words of wisdom for young artists who hope to continue to pursue their dreams, especially when things are tough?

Work hard every day, because hard work definitely pays off. Do something every day for your music and for your career. Just do you and do things that inspire you, [whether that’s] going to the movie theater, or going out on a walk, or writing lyrics, or whatever it is. Just continue to do it without worrying about what’s going to happen with it or what it’s going to become or what you want it to become. Just do it for the love of it, without any expectations; I think that’s when the best things happen. Your hard work will pay off.

And stay true to who you are. I think a lot of artists want to do whatever’s working, and that’s not the way to go about doing it. If one day people like it or people gravitate toward it, then great. If not, at least you’ve maintained your integrity.

PHOTO BY DANIELLA FEIJÓO

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