WZLY Interviews: ADDIE
Berklee College of Music student and musician ADDIE, pictured on the cover of her single “invisible ink” (image courtesy of ADDIE)
by Bella Perreira ‘24
In May, local musician and Berklee student ADDIE sat down with WZLY to talk about her recent and upcoming work. ADDIE’s work as a queer woman of color is a breath of fresh air for queer youth; her catchy indie-pop anthems and lovesick lyrics are a perfect soundtrack for the WLW yearning many of us know so well. Read on for more about how her inspirations, identity, and creative process play a role in making her music.
WZLY: Okay. So do you want to introduce yourself and just kind of talk about where you're from, what you do, identities that are important to you?
ADDIE: Yeah, I'm ADDIE, stylized in all caps—that's the name I go by for releasing music. My name is Adeline, but people call me Addie and that's like, what my artist name is, I guess. I'm from Westwood, Mass, just like 25 minutes outside of Boston.
I've been writing songs since I was 14, and I got into producing and recording in high school just by recording my own songs. And I've just continued to do that, and I have a band that I play with; we’ve played tons of shows around Boston and western Mass. And I am a third semester, just finishing my third semester at Berklee.
So it’s my band. It's an all female band of queer, mostly women of color, and that's something that's very important to me. Uplifting other women in those musical spaces. And so yeah, we’ve played a ton of shows. I'm working on an album. I have a single coming out tomorrow, and I'm going to be on tour this summer in July.
The cover for ADDIE’s album “Crater Lake,” now available on Bandcamp and streaming services (cover courtesy ADDIE)
WZLY: Thank you. So yeah, you've been doing this for a long time. Did you have anything that kind of spurred your getting into making music when you were younger?
ADDIE: Yeah, well, I've always loved music. My dad played piano and guitar and sang, so I was always around that in the house ever since I was little. And I started performing in theater when I was six, so I've always really loved singing and being on stage. And I was super into theater up until middle school, when I kind of shifted from theater to—I started playing bass, and I wanted to be in bands, and I really wanted to do that because I went to this camp called the Charles River Creative Arts Program in Dover. I went there for theater originally, but they also have all sorts of different art and all sorts of classes that you can take. And I was really interested in being in a band and I wanted to play an instrument. So that's kind of how I started.
WZLY: Theater kid to band kid pipeline. Classic.
ADDIE: Yeah, exactly.
WZLY: Awesome. So, do you want to tell us a bit about the current project that you're working on? I know it's a solo project, but maybe talk about your collaboration process or how it's kind of changed over the last year or so.
ADDIE: Yeah, totally. So previously, everything that's on my Spotify, except for one of the songs, was recorded entirely in my basement at home with a one mic setup, just me. And then occasionally I would have my friend play drums. So really everything in the past and most of the stuff that you hear on my Spotify right now is very… there’s not a ton of collaboration. It's very... I'm very independent, just because that's just really what I did all through high school. I would just go home, be in my basement, right, and record and produce my songs.
But since I've been at Berklee, I've met such amazing instrumentalists that really have added to my songs. And I've really tried to take advantage of that, because I sing and my principal instrument is bass at Berklee. I'm not the best guitarist or drummer. So on this album, I have three of my friends in my band play guitar. And then also my drummer. So it's been fun to really share the process with other people.
And previously I've produced everything and recorded everything myself, but just with the amount of work that I have to do for school, and the amount of time I have for everything, and that I don't have a drum kit in my apartment. I'm partnering with my friend, who actually worked at the summer camp that we went to together, and he has a bigger home studio setup. So he's helped me record and he's helping me produce a little bit, just to make it more manageable for me to finish this album, which has been cool.
I’ve never had someone so involved in my project, so it's been a lot of me learning to step back and trust someone else. Because previously, and I mean, I'm still like this. I really have this thing where I need to be independent. I need to have my name on every part of it. I really think that comes from not wanting to have success where all these people are like, “oh, well, it's just because there's this man behind her. He's producing it. He's making it great.” That happens with people like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo all the time. And I absolutely hate that.
But I think I've found a good balance because I am still producing and engineering the album too. I do have someone helping me, which has been great as I learn. Because I am a music production and engineering major at Berklee, so I am still learning how to do everything.
WZLY: Awesome. In that similar vein, kind of, I know you and the band have been pretty open about being queer women of color, if that's a label you're cool with. How does that play a role in your music or in your creative process?
ADDIE: I've always known I've wanted to have an all-female band. I really wanted to create a space that was really respectful and like it feels safe to create. I feel like a lot of times working with male musicians, you get talked over a lot, or explained to, and I just did not want that vibe.
So that was my main reason. I love, like—I always feel like I made the right choice by doing that when we pull up to a gig and there's three other bands that are all men and we're the only women there, or someone will say like…I've had some people even say thank you for being that representation, which makes me feel so good. So yeah, it's just creating a nice space to create.
WZLY: Yeah. As a queer person of color myself, I fuck with it. And since so much of Wellesley is queer, we love a good queer artist that breaks down those barriers. I think I'll just do some casual, quick questions for fun. Do you have any favorite shows that you guys have done?
ADDIE: Yeah. We played one at Clark University recently that was so fun; that was maybe my favorite. We played at the Lilypad [in Cambridge] one night with two other Berklee bands, our friends Cameron Lane and Retrograde 88, that one was just a great vibe.
And then our first gig ever was one that I got—I was planning on going to the Dyke Fest in October with my friends. But I was just like, let's see if I can play. And so I DM’d the account and I was like, “Hey, if you need a band, we would love to play.”
And they were like, “oh, sorry, we already have bands.” And then they got back to me like two hours later saying that one of the bands had COVID. So we just figured it out, within like 12 hours, and we played and it was actually great. And I still meet people at shows that say, “oh yeah, you played at the Dyke Fest.” So that one was a really special one. It was also, I mean, our first one.
So I'd say those are our favorite. We played a really nice show last night. It was super random on a Wednesday, with this touring band Magazine Beach at O'Brien’s in Allston, and that just happened to be a really special night for some reason, on a Wednesday at a bar. So it was cool.
WZLY: Do you think you guys are going to play Dyke Fest again this summer?
ADDIE: No, but it's always been my dream to play at a pride event. I kind of got to, but I want to play in June, you know, when it's really happening.
WZLY: Especially because Pride got canceled in Boston. Dyke March, that's all we have now.
ADDIE: Yeah, maybe next year. Hopefully, yeah. I was trying to play New York Pride, but I don't know who to contact for that.
WZLY: That'd be so awesome. Do you have a favorite song that you've written or released, or not released, maybe on the new album?
ADDIE: Yeah, it changes all the time, but it was actually the most recent one. It took me over a year to write and I still even changed it yesterday, but it will be the first one on the album. The song and the album are both called “Crater Lake.” So that's currently my favorite, it's my favorite to perform and yeah.
WZLY: Who are some of your inspirations? It can be in music, or just like generally in life.
ADDIE: Definitely Mitski. I started listening to her right around when I started making music, so for the entirety of me writing and playing bass, pretty much, I've been following her. Yeah, just her way of writing and her whole stage presence is just so powerful. She really just, she plays with so much abandon, like she's on stage and she's so unapologetic. Her lyrics are so raw, which I love. So she's definitely number one.
This is hard. I mean, okay, well, Taylor Swift, obviously the blueprint. I don't feel like I really need to say why; I feel like whenever I'm writing a song, I'm trying to channel her.
Um, what else? I love Bleachers, Haim, Snail Mail. Oh, I've been really into Big Thief recently, so while I've been producing this—I feel like my music is very different from Big Thief’s music, but I've had some moments where I'm like, “oh, I'm taking this from Big Thief.” So that's been cool. Yeah. Big Thief and Adrianne Lenker. Totally. Oh, and Indigo De Souza. She's been a huge writing inspiration for the tracks I've written more recently.
WZLY: That's going to be a very popular answer for all of our Mitski fans, and Swifties specifically. Oh yeah. Who was your first concert that you ever went to?
ADDIE: I think it was Taylor Swift. Yeah, my mom took me, I think it was the tour before Red. Was that Speak Now? I think it was Speak Now. Yeah.
WZLY: If you could go on tour with anybody, who would you go with? Top 3, if you can’t decide.
ADDIE: Yeah, I would love to go on tour with Indigo, or Mitski, I think. Wait, let me look at my Spotify real quick.
Yeah, Indigo or Mitski. Oh, you know, I would love to open for MUNA. That is maybe the big one. That'd be sick.
WZLY: Good answer. And finally, not to be a music interviewer cliche, and you touched on it earlier, but what's coming up next for ADDIE?
ADDIE: So yeah, I have this single coming out. It should come out at midnight, hopefully. And then I'm planning on a music video coming out. I don't know when, because it's just my friends from Emerson editing it and they're probably doing finals or something. So sometime within May, hopefully. And then I think in June, I'll do another single. And then in late June or July, the album will come out and then we'll go on tour.
One gig I'm very excited for is, I'm opening for this really cool Singaporean noise rock band called Subsonic Eye at the Red Room at Cafe 939, which is a Berklee venue. So, yeah, that's June 21st, and I'm excited for that.
We're also playing this small festival in Somerville in late July called NICE.
ADDIE’s tour dates, courtesy of ADDIE. Check out a show this summer!
