Sea Lemon is the project of singer-songwriter Natalie Lew, who was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest and currently lives in Seattle. Though she grew up playing the piano, it wasn’t until she moved to New York, where she picked up a roommate’s guitars, that she started playing rhythm guitar in a band. After returning to the PNW in the early days of the pandemic, she honed her songwriting and experimented with Logic, resulting in her first EPs, Close Up and Stop at Nothing. Now, she’s come through with her debut full-length, Diving for a Prize, which she worked on primarily with Death Cab for Cutie collaborator Andy Park in his home studio. Death Cab for Cutie’s own Ben Gibbard joins Lew on the standout single ‘Crystals’, which sublimates in glimmering, fuzzy production; elsewhere on the record, the textures become weightier, icier, or even sunnier, but remain carefully balanced. Though gauzy by nature, Lew’s music is more than a vehicle for insular or abstract lyrics, instead encapsulating short stories that match her tight melodicism. “When we’re sinking deeper,” she sings on the closing track, “In the flowers we’re together now.” Who would ask for a better prize?
We caught up with Sea Lemon for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about growing up in Seattle, the process behind her debut album, malaise, and more.
How did moving away from Seattle for a while make you understand what it was like growing up there?
Growing up in Seattle, I always felt like music was just so much a part of my everyday. I was really involved as a kid in some of the music programming in the city; I was involved in a battle of the bands when I was in high school, and I always thought I was gonna be in A&R as a kid. I think that for me, Seattle as a place to write music was something that was really new to me when I moved back here, and I was actually actively writing music. I think that the space of being somewhere where, one, it’s a little bit drearier, and two, it’s more open and green, especially in comparison to living in New York – I felt like I just had more physical room to make music. There’s something to me about being creative in a place that’s kind of tight and cramped and claustrophobic that is almost impossible. I need desk space to be creative, or a bigger room rather than singing on top of my neighbors who I can hear talking, or my friends are in the other room. I have a way easier time if I’m by myself writing music. So that was really nice when I moved back, being able to have the space to physically write music.
Is that when you started seeing yourself more as a songwriter?
A hundred percent. I’ve always been under an impression that’s like, “How hard is anything? Maybe I can just try it.” I think music writing for me was one of those things where I was like, “Well, I’m by myself. My band is gone. I live in Seattle now. Maybe I should just try writing music.” And I had so much fun doing it. I think that is what my project has been all the way up until writing this album and releasing it: what sounds like fun. I want to pursue the things that sound like a good time, and I love writing music. They say that there’s Type A fun and Type B fun. Type A fun is fun that you have while you’re doing the thing and afterwards, and Type B fun is not fun in the moment, but when you look back, you’re like, “That actually was a good time.” I feel quite lucky because I feel like music and writing and playing is always Type A fun: it’s something that I enjoy in the moment.
Even when it’s digging into something vulnerable?
I’m really not a person who writes music when it’s like, “I had a fight with my friend, so I’m going to write a song.” I’m way more of a person who’s like, “I have an idea for a riff. What does that riff remind me of from a story perspective? Let me craft a story around that melody or riff.” I’ve never been a person who’s carried around a journal, writing lots of lyrics. I’m quite melody first. Of course, making music is inherently vulnerable because you’re putting yourself out there in some way. But I’m rarely telling intimate, personal, detailed stories. I’m telling stories that I’m imagining or are parts of my life, but I rarely feel like I can’t release something because I’m exposing too much because so much of my music is so melody-forward.
Were you interested in other kinds of writing before songwriting?
When I started playing music with my band in New York, a band led by somebody who picked a couple people basically off the street to play music with her, we were all super amateur, wanting to just get started. I had never really played the guitar; I’d grown up playing piano. I had really honestly never even heard myself sing out loud. Five years ago, I was like, “Oh, maybe I should try singing out loud. If I’m in this band, if I’m playing the guitar, I should just try singing.” Ever since then, writing is just something that I do all the time. But I also have always loved fiction writing and actual story writing, and I feel like that has really played into the way that I write lyrics and I think about themes and songs and telling a story. I’ve always loved writing in some capacity, but I think songwriting is something that only within the past five years I’ve really started.
What are some of your earliest memories of realizing someone wrote a part of a song in a way that connected with you?
One of my earliest memories of loving a song was probably four or five, being in the back seat, my mom playing ‘Drive My Car’ by the Beatles, and me being like, “This song slaps.” I was like, “This is the best song I’ve ever freaking heard in my life.” And I remember thinking to myself, “How did this come to be?” I remember even at a really early age being like, “That’s so crazy.” As I got older, I would listen to music like The Cure or Cocteau Twins or The Radio Dept., and I feel like I ended up listening to music where I didn’t know how to play it. The sounds they were making, I was like, “I don’t know how the hell they’re putting that together. It’s completely foreign to me.”
It was exciting to be able to unpack how a song would be made. Even if I can’t get the exact plug-in or guitar sound or whatever, you can start to craft like, “Oh, they’re using a shaker here” or “There’s two guitars here, one’s playing this riff and one’s doing something else.” Learning how to listen really demystified making music for me because I was like, “Every song is just a bunch of parts, and if you come up with parts, you make a song.” That’s something I really did when I started making music, just add a bunch of stuff in a Logic file and then listen to it all together, listen to some of the parts singled out. Being able to listen and think about all the parts and then replicate that process for myself really helped.
Do you tend to practice that kind of attentive listening when you are also in the process of making your own music?
I think there’s there’s a phase before sitting down to be like, “I’m writing music,” where I listen to a lot of stuff that gives me inspiration. I was listening to a lot of Air before I made this album. I think, “These are really cool synth sounds and guitar sounds and interesting ways to write riffs and add your voice.” I make almost an inspirational mood board for myself, and sometimes, I’ll make a mood board with photos and images to evoke how I want somebody to feel and what I imagine when I hear the songs. And then when I go into writing, no listening to music. If I listen to music and I’m writing music all at the same time, it’s really easy to be really hard on yourself and be like, “This sounds so much better. Why can’t I make something as good as this?” I had to tell myself it’s not a competition. All of the songs out there are just songs, and this will just also be a song. It’s okay. Nothing has to be perfect or beat each other. I kind of need quiet to make something myself and not feel like I need to compare it to anything else.
The song ‘Silver’ seems to identify a very formative memory of storytelling for you. What made you go back to that?
That’s one of my personal favorite songs on the album. There’s a couple of songs on this album that I wrote melodically when I was suffering from tonsillitis. I used to get horrible, horrible tonsillitis. And when I would have tonsillitis, I couldn’t sing at all. When I was writing this album, I would be like, “What am I what am I supposed to do? I can’t sing. I need to be putting together demos.” I started doing this thing where I would open up a Logic file, and I would write a MIDI line as what I should sing as the lead vocal line. And then in my head, I would imagine, “Now I’m adding words here.” And then weeks later, I would add on my vocals where the MIDI line would be. ‘Silver’ is one of those songs, and I think that’s why in some ways it sounds kind of different.
From a conceptual standpoint, ‘Silver’ is about being a little kid and having all these memories of being with your family and your parents and your friends and feeling like the world is your oyster. You can do anything, you can be anyone. And then getting older – when I moved to New York, I worked a corporate job, which was lovely, but we would go on these business trips sometimes where you’re out in the middle of nowhere with some folks that you don’t really know that well, and it can be kind of an isolating experience. I remember thinking it’s so crazy – your parents tell you you can be anything, and ten you’re in this hotel room by yourself, eating room service. ‘Silver’ is about that realization, as an adult, that things that were sold to you as a kid are not quite as beautiful and incredible as you would have imagined as a little kid.
Even being a musician, something you might have dreamt about as a child – once it’s demystified, there are also parts of it that can also be isolating and arduous.
Totally. I mean, I remember as a little kid getting a room service and staying at a hotel and being, like, “This is the peak of luxury. Life could not be better than this.” [laughs] Then I remember being on a business trip in my early twenties, getting served moldy fruit on a cart, and being like, “What the hell is going on? This is not what I thought it was gonna be.”
After releasing a couple of EPs, how did you feel about the prospect of making a full-length album?
It was definitely daunting, in that you want to write an album that feels representative of you, something that feels recognizable, but also maybe new. Navigating what story I wanted to tell with this record and how I wanted it to feel overall was the most daunting part. But once I got into the actual, “I’m writing the songs, we’ve got demos,” it felt less and less daunting because what I realized in writing an album is that you can just take it places that you wouldn’t on an EP or in singles. You can get weirder with it. It’s okay to have album tracks that don’t sound like something you’ve released before because it’s a body of work, it’s not just a few songs that are mostly singles. I think that’s why I enjoyed the process so much – I allowed myself to push it and be weirder with it. Like, I historically have written songs at a really fast BPM, and I was like, “I wanna write slower songs.”
How else did that weirdness manifest itself?
I’m definitely quite a guitar-driven writer. It’s definitely my primary instrument. But when I was writing the album, I was like, “Why don’t we just have songs that are a lot synthier?” I think I allowed myself to get weirder with synths and some of the drumming styles on the album. We had a live drummer do all of the tracks this time rather than using samples, and that also pushed me out of my comfort zone to be like, “What does this sound like when it gets bigger?” Historically, I’ve always had and wanted my songs to feel lower-fi, something that’s more bedroom pop, because that kind of music is really lovely and accessible and possible to make, and sounds great. But with this album, I was like, “It’s okay if we use live instruments and make the whole thing sound bigger.” I think that was a real push in a new direction.
How much of that experimentation rose out of your dynamic with Andy Park?
In general, he was a serious co-partner on this album. We wrote some of the songs together in the studio, and then some of the songs I brought to him, and he really helped flesh out a vision for the One of my personal favorites, ‘Give In’, I sat down and wrote in the studio just by myself with a guitar. We talked about what general vibe we wanted it to be lik, we added parts, and the next day when I came to the studio, Andy had started a soundscape around the song. He already had a vision for how the song could atmospherically be, using some weirder synths. It felt like he was in my brain putting together the things that I had started on the song and finishing them exactly how I had imagined, if not so much better. That was really fun as we got into a groove of knowing what we wanted the record to sound like together.
On that song, you sing about not being “scared to toe the line of bleaker endings/ So go ahead/ And be obsessed.” I’m curious if that’s an impulse you try to embrace creatively in any way.
That whole track is about seeing an abandoned house and being like, “Maybe I should just go in just for a little bit, just for fun.” That’s always been an impulse that I’ve had. That last line is like, I’m gonna toe the line – maybe I should stay back, maybe I shouldn’t do something that could be potentially harmful or bad or get me in trouble. And then it’s like, or maybe I can just be obsessed and go for it. When I write music and when I think about this album, there was a big part of me that was like, “I wanna make sure that there are songs that people recognize in terms of, ‘That is a Sea Lemon song.’” Then I was like, “But also, this is a better time than any to just write whatever I want and have fun with it.” It’s funny you mentioned that – I’ve never thought of that line as representative of how I thought about writing this album. But I do actually think that that idea of, “Just be obsessed with whatever you’re doing, that’s really what matters,” is really apt.
There are at least a couple of songs that revolve around that feeling of obsession, like ‘Sweet Anecdote’, while also poking fun at it.
I think songs like ‘Sweet Anecdote’ and ‘Sunken Cost’ and ‘Give In’ are all meant to be stories about situations that are real, but also playing fun at being obsessed with something and not being able to let it go. And acknowledging to yourself, “There’s something wrong in my brain, and that’s okay.” What was so fun about writing those songs was being able to tell a story from, not the point of view of exactly me, but instead a heightened character where I’m not worried about, like, “Do I sound like a villain in my songwriting? Or do I sound like me exactly?” I can tell a fictional story in my songwriting, and that’s something I think expands the universe you write about.
I love the parallel between Ben Gibbard’s line in ‘Crystals’ – “It seems that all I wanna do is sleep these days” – and your “All I want is to live in a warm cocoon” in ‘Sunken Cost’. Is there something about making this kind of gauzy music that helps fuel this need to drift off?
Oh, definitely. I like a real hint of darkness in my music. I like telling stories that edge towards darker, and I think shoegaze music and people who listen to shoegaze music, they’re not looking for the peppiest stuff. When you write melodies that feel darker, there’s a part of you that always wants to tell the story lyrically that you’re telling melodically. And I do think that this type of music lends itself really well to stories about periods of darkness or isolation or feeling weird. I’ve actually never thought about the similarity between those lines, but I think that they’re they’re really capturing a similar energy, even though they were written by myself and then Ben separately – the feeling of kind of malaise, a comfort in malaise, and also a hatred of it at the same time.
Are you wary of that darkness or malaise when you’re in the process of making music?
For me, the actual process of, “Time to go to the studio, time to write music, time do all the things that I need to do in order to make this happen,” can sometimes feel like a daunting task. There was a period where I really wanted to have been recording, and I just wasn’t ready yet. I had to start from a perspective of, “Let’s just start with one track, and let’s get that track in a good spot. And then let’s talk about the rest of the record.” I can go into a real isolated, insular, malaise kind of place if I don’t have guardrails and goals of: here’s what I need to do next.
Have you discovered any tools for getting unstuck?
I have a synth at my house that a friend of ours gave us, which is a kid’s toy from the eighties from Yamaha. I find that playing that, or getting on Logic and just starting to mess around with stuff in an unserious way, really helps me get unstuck. Sometimes I find that I will get stuck if I try to just write stuff on an acoustic guitar or start more serious because I’ll be like, “This song has to be good. Why is it not good yet?” And if I just start on what feel like sillier instruments – I also have an omnichord – I’m often like, “This is for fun, and it’s silly,” and then it can start a cool idea. That helps me get outside of my comfort zone.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Sea Lemon’s Diving for a Prize is out now via Luminelle.
