WZLY Interviews: Silvie’s Okay

By Lucy Humphrey ‘24

WZLY: So to start out, do you want to give a little introduction as to who you are?

Vince: Yeah! My name's Vince Thompson, and my project is called "Silvie’s Okay." I feel like it's the amalgamation of years and years of writing music and finding my sound. Silvie’s Okay has become this project that is really leaning into that devastating kind of country music.

How did Silvie’s Okay come to be? And then how does it differ from your solo work?

Yeah! I think that this is my solo work, but just more. I’ve grown up a lot over the past couple of years. I had a band in Boston that I used to play with, just under my name Vince when I was doing that project. The songs sound completely different now with this band. I think my songs have found a home with this project more as I figured out who I am and what my sound is. 

Yes for sure. I know you reached out because we added ‘Marrow’ to one of our playlists. It was our January, depressing, soul-sucking playlist, because that's what January is for. And ‘Marrow’ absolutely fits the bill for that one. 

[laughs] Yeah!

I know you've done some work as a solo artist before, and then Silvie’s Okay is a recent development. And you have an EP that’s out on April 25, Grit and Bare It. I was listening to your song ‘Butch Believer’ on BandCamp from that EP, and I think it sounds different, even from when you played it like a year ago.

Yeah, I think it's all shifting and just maturing a lot. And at a fast rate! I've been writing music that aligns with who I am since I came out as trans when I was like 19. That's when I started writing music, but I was like, okay, I think this is cool. That was like 2016.

And so I feel like I sat on all of this music for a really long time. And then I had like a bunch of really big life changes happen in 2023 and I just realized like, I need to do this. I really need to do it and stop wasting time wishing that I was and being scared of sending the big emails. I think I have a lot of anxiety around it, but I just reached this point where I realized that to stay alive, I need to follow this passion that I have and really make something of it and put my time into it.

I had stopped playing shows for a couple years, so the first show I had played in a while was April 29th last year, before I had even changed the name of the project. So it's kind of really, really exciting to think about how much has happened and how much I made happen for this project in just one year. I’m really proud. So the timing of the release of my EP with this anniversary of me starting to play again is really exciting. 

Yeah, that's very poetic and it definitely, I mean, what I've listened to shows that you've put a lot of work into it. It’s been a big year for sure. And you talked about how you need to do this, like it's like a need. I guess I'm just wondering, when did you start making music, what compelled you to make music?

Yeah! Music has been a part of my life since I was a little kid. I was really fortunate that my parents thought that music was really important. I grew up in like extremely, extremely rural Oregon on a cattle ranch. I went to a one room schoolhouse and there was one music teacher and she went around to each of the one room schoolhouses, like one day a week and everything. And there definitely wasn't a lot of emphasis on music being important for a lot of people, but my parents thought it was. I started playing fiddle first, and when I was like six years old, I got my first half- sized fiddle. I really focused on that for a long time and did a like Christian Celtic family music camp kind of thing every year and I was part of the old time fiddlers so it was like a lot of fiddle music. 

I was seventeen, eighteen and it was time to start getting ready to go to college and all I wanted to do was go to Berklee College of Music and pursue music. There was no other option for me. Which, you know, looking back, I maybe could have figured something else out to do, but it was what eighteen year old me wanted. And my parents wanted me to do violin for my audition, but I actually switched right before my audition to doing voice. And so I got into Berkeley for voice and…I hated Berkeley. I hated it so much [laughs], but I'm really glad that I ended up in Boston and it was really important that music was such a big part of my life and I ended up in the Boston DIY scene, which was a really big part of my life. I met a lot of really incredible people who had really big influences on the music I was writing and, I don't know that I met many queer people before I moved to Boston. I had no idea who I was and so I was fortunate in the scenes I was in to figure out who the hell I am. And through that start making music, but I was excited to be making.

That's an incredible story, I'm really glad you shared it. Okay. So, your EP is coming out tomorrow and you're doing a concert on Friday night, do you want to just talk about your EP a little bit?

Yeah. The EP is really exciting! So I've been working with this band, and truly the music wouldn’t be what it is without the people I've been working with. I feel like I can bring 

so much confidence to the work I'm doing, and then their ideas and everything they have is so wonderful. So I have Mo Schweiger on violin, Alex Santiago on backing vocals and bass, and also sometimes violin. Then Liam Cregan on drums. So the EP we recorded was done basically live, so this is what our live sound is. And that's really exciting, because I'm always wanting to go, like, “oh I want it to be bigger! I want it to be…!” and I think that it was like a really great practice in discipline for myself to record this EP basically live and to have it sound like what we sounded like as a live band in January when we recorded it. And then just be like, “all right, there it is, put it out.” Yeah, I think it was a really special experience to record it together. 

And we're so much more confident now four months later as a band than when we recorded it. It was exciting to get something that we can put out that's a representation of what our sound is like. And also, it's a capturing of a very early stage of this project. 

I really like your music and I'm looking forward to this E.P. Your sound seems to be very based on how you grew up, especially with the fiddle, so I guess I'm just asking you who are your musical inspirations and how did your sound come to be?

It definitely has been, it's gone on a long journey. I think when I was 19, and I started writing a lot of music as Vince, I was really, really influenced by my friends in the Boston DIY scene. And so it was way more punk in a lot of ways, and while I think I'm a singer/songwriter at heart, there was more emphasis on this grungy, heavy kind of thing going on in a lot of ways.

I think as I've gotten older and gone through a lot of side quests in my life, etc., I've gotten to this place where I reconnected with my roots. And the music I'm writing now since the EP came out even, it's like a very country, like, very pop country. And it’s still staying true to the integrity and the indie aspects, but I think I’m leaning into my love of country music. And it was a huge part of my childhood, you know, working in the fields, driving the tractor, breaking hay for eight hours with the 1230 AM radio playing Hank Williams and Luke Bryan, anywhere from the 70s to the early 2000s country music. 

I totally understand, I mean I am a Boston native, but a lot of my family lives in the Midwest, and my grandma lived in Tennessee, so I grew up a huge country music fan. Anytime there’s a banjo, I’m there. 

Exactly! I also feel like I have the influences of contemporary singer/songwriters of varying genres. So Haley Heynderickx had a huge influence on me, the I Need to Start a Garden album. And Adrianne Lenker, Julia Jacklin. 

And these artists that were making music that was really, really impactful to me as a tortured 19 to 22 year old. And then watching them hit their 30s and they're like, ‘you know, I'm actually, like, happy now. I'm not tortured anywhere and my music is shifting a little bit, and I hope that you'll shift with me.’ And I think that's been really beautiful and inspiring to me as an artist, because I grow and change. It used to mean so much to me that my music hurt. Like, it was painful. And I think it's something now where I'm like ‘it's actually okay that I'm changing and maybe my music doesn't hurt in the same ways that it used to. And that actually is maybe a beautiful thing.’

That was so wonderfully said. You do grow and you do change and it's nice to see the people you listen to change with you or you change along with them. .

Aging is a beautiful, wonderful gift, truly.

So I like to ask, especially with smaller, local artists, are there other bands that you want to recommend? Or people that you know in the music scene that you would tell people to check out?

There’s a lot of really cool stuff going on in Western Mass. Someone that I've only seen play a couple of times, and I've never met her or chatted with her, but I think her music is so poignant and really poetic is Hoonah. She opened for Dear Nora and I was really moved. 

And the two artists that we're playing with at our show on Friday are Brennan Wedl, my dear friend who I met in the Boston days, and who I am so inspired by, and Mal Devisa, a local artist with a friggin’ unbelievable voice. She's truly just a delightful, wonderful person.

Another awesome - not a musician - but an awesome place to be connected to the local music scene and be involved in some way is Bookends in Florence, they’re always booking events and supporting artists, or raising money for the Sexual Minorities Archives or Palestine etc. Really important work coming out of there. 

That’s a really good answer, and good advice for anyone looking to find new music in the area. So I usually like to ask, is there anything you wish that I had asked you about, as in is there something you want to talk about that I didn't give you a chance to talk about?

I would love to talk about my life outside music! Since music does take up so much of my life and so much of my brain power, I’ve been thinking about how I often center my life around my music, and so I’ve been diving into, who am I outside of that? What does my life look like? And then how does that influence the art that I make? Because if I'm spending all my time just trying to create the art, I'm not having the life experiences that make the art.

Have you come to any conclusions?  Do you have any answers to that? it's probably an ongoing process.

It is an ongoing process. I am really just leaning into the fact that I really, really love beautiful things. I love creating beautiful spaces, food and food presentation, and just leaning into creativity and beauty and the process of creation outside of just the career aspect of it, and how much joy that can bring. 

Do you have any advice for people who are trying to make music or make it in the music scene?

I think my biggest hurdle for years and years and years was the fear of rejection, and the fear of not being heard when I try to be heard. Overcoming that has been what has made the past year possible, and I'm really, really proud of and impressed by myself and what I have accomplished. I pushed through my fear of rejection and I sent those scary emails.

And I also think something else that has been really, really huge is that if it doesn't feel good, don't do it. Like, if you don't like playing in bars, don't play in bars. You don’t have to do it ‘for the exposure,’ because you want to feel good about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. And that's how you're going to stay authentic to yourself and be doing something that gets you somewhere that feels good and aligns with your values.

And staying true to that has helped me build the community that I have here around my music and helped me find who that community is.

I think that is great advice. To wrap it up, do you have any closing remarks?

Well, thank you so much! It was lovely to hang out with you. And thank you for being down to hang out and hear me just go the heck off!

I think my closing remarks are that I'm just extremely, extremely grateful for my community and my friends and everyone that has been a part of this journey of Silvie’s Okay and of me and my music. Like, my life looks completely different than it did a year ago, and so I'm really excited for what the next year holds.

I'm going to knock on wood for you, but I feel like it's going to be a good year.

I think it's going to be a good year.