Sound
Check
W
hat’s your sound? It’s the most obvious
question any artist can expect in an
interview. But unlike any other artists who
might give a generic answer or wax poetic
about it, Symon get’s directly to the point.
“I would say it’s Symon. It’s me.”
No long speech about her musical philosophy.
Symon is who she is and that’s the music she makes.
Especially her most recent release.
“I really feel like who I am is really in this current
single, ‘Lonely Girl,’ Symon said. “It’s very authentic and it
feels very me.”
Fine, sure, Symon might be her own sound. But,
where did her unique sound come from? For Symon, it
started while growing up in Los Angeles, when music was
one of the safest places she knew.
“As a kid, my escape from the real world was music, whether
that was being in music class or doing musical theater in school,” Symon
said. “I just knew that’s what made me happy and I knew that escape for
me needed to be my reality.”
Around 14 or 15, Symon said she met someone who owned a
music studio, where her future was even further solidified.
“She took me in and started showing me the ropes around
being in a studio and what it was like to record and the lingo in a studio
and just about the whole process,” Symon said. “I knew that, wow, I want
to write pop songs. I want to be a pop artist.”
Rather than strike out on her own at first, Symon formed a
band, which was fine, but not exactly what she wanted. She wanted to go
solo. But it’s here that Symon really had to take a hard look at what that
aforementioned “Symon sound” was going to be.
“When I became a solo artist it was like who am I alone?”
Symon said. “I had to really do some soul searching so this last year and a
half has been so healing, so great for me to be able to really find out who I
56
am as an artist and who I am as a voice.”
“Lonely Girl” was actually one of the first songs Symon put
together as a solo artist. Maybe that’s why she feels it captures her sound
so well. Although at first, others didn’t see things her way.
“There were other cooks in the kitchen saying, no, you
shouldn’t put a ballad out as your first song,” Symon said. “What’s funny
is, it’s so full circle. I knew that song was the most me, most authentic, and
here we are a year and a half later and it came out and it’s getting the best
reaction I’ve ever had thus far in my career.”
That reaction from people is one of the things that Symon
hopes her music can continue doing.
“It just feels cool to know that being authentic and fearless
and truly yourself definitely resonates with people more than anything,”
Symon said. “I really hope I’m making people feel because at the end of
the day as an artist, as a writer, that’s what you want. You want to move
people.”
With “Lonely Girl” especially, Symon said that the reaction
stems from the universality of loneliness, where everyone has felt it at
some point, and maybe not even in a circumstance that one might think.
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