Though Belong marks Jay Som’s first new album in six years, Melina Duterte has had a hand in some of the best music to come out of each of those years. In addition to releasing a record with Palehound’s Ellen Kempner in as Bachelor in 2021, she worked on records that led several bands to be featured in our Artist Spotlight series: Tenci and Living Hour in 2022, Fenne Lily and Chris Farren in 2023. Just in the past couple of years, she helped produce boygenius’ the record and Lucy Dacus’ Forever Is a Feeling. When the time came to revisit her solo project, Duterte felt the urge to open up her sound to outside collaborators, enlisting contributions from Joao Gonzalez (of Soft Glas), Mk.gee/illuminati hotties collaborator Mal Hauser, Steph Marziano, and Kyle Pulley, as well as guest vocals from some of her biggest heroes, including Paramore’s Hayley Williams, Jimmy Eat World’s Jim Adkins, and Mini Trees’ Lexi Vega. Belong is expansive and exciting at every turn, clearly energized as much by Duterte’s experimental impulses as her nostalgic love for classic alternative rock. Even when they lean into moodier, more subdued territory, these songs aren’t meant for sulking, but as Duterte puts it on ‘Past Lives’, spiraling up. It’s good company to feel a part of.
We caught up with Jay Som to talk about Jimmy Eat World’s Bleed American, the O.C. soundtrack, Atwater Village, and other inspirations behind her new album Belong.
Bleed American by Jimmy Eat World
Was the record a reference point before Jim Adkins entered the picture as a collaborator on Belong?
Yeah, that was an easy choice. I think that album and just the Jimmy Eat World alternative rock world was the catalyst for doing something different in this new record. Leaning heavily towards alternative rock versus doing what I did before, which is just shoegaze, dream pop, indie, bedroom-ish music. And it’s an album that means a lot to me. My brother and I really love this album. We bought it at a Barnes & Noble, and it was when Barnes & Noble had CD sections and a Starbucks, so we would hang out all day on Saturdays or Sundays and just peruse the CDs. They also had headphones, so you could listen to samples of the CDs, which was my favorite thing to do. I’d just stand there listening to all these artists, and Bleed American was one of them.
It did change my life and still holds up to this day. It sounds like it could have come out yesterday. The songwriting is just expert-level songwriting, and the way that they’re performing is as if it’s the end of the world and they need to record this right now and show it to you. It’s very immediate. Jim’s vocals are really incredible, and a big reason why I had him on ‘Float’. ‘Float’ was the first song that I wrote and recorded for the record, so to have that Jimmy Eat World spirit and be the stamp of the initial song for the record, was really important moving forward throughout the process.
Did you ask him questions about Bleed American, or did you shy away from really getting into it?
I kept it pretty professional. Until the very end, when we were texting, and I just got to be like, “Hey, thank you so much,” and I got to tell him the story about the Bleed American CD stuff. There was a second where we were texting back and forth, and he’s a huge gearhead. He has a studio, and he loves recording music, so we bonded for a second that way. I still haven’t met him in person, so I’m hoping that’ll happen soon one day.
Atwater Village, CA
I’ve lived here since June 2020, so right in the middle of the pandemic. My partner and I and our friend found this home that I’m in right now, and our former roommate used to live in this room, and she lived here for a couple years. I feel like I had my second puberty here – I don’t know how to say it – in a musical sense. I had a studio up in the attic, and I was recording a bunch of friends, I was mixing, I learned how to become even more of a gear nerd. I spent so much time in this house just creating and learning, and I’ve had so many friends and bands and artists come through to record or mix. By the time I started making my own record, I felt like a completely different person, and I kind of didn’t recognize my recording skills, techniques, or even my taste.
I think when you work with people for so long, you do start to lose a kind of sense of your identity if you’re doing the same job as them – music. Working with a lot of solo artists, I’m in a place of supporting them and helping them realize their vision. So by the time I had all my gear set up and everything’s fully realized, I got better at engineering, I remember thinking, “I need help.”
I think being able to live a domestic lifestyle in Atwater was really important. I have a dog, she’s right there behind me – she’s always right there. I get to go outside for walks, and there’s a coffee shop 10 minutes away. We would go to the farmer’s market all the time. Just to clear my head, I’d walk around here. This neighborhood’s full of really beautiful creatives. There’s a guy that teaches ukulele classes every Tuesday. There’s a guy across the street that plays a tuba with his door open. When you walk down the street, you hear him playing the tuba, and it’s very goofy, but it’s really cool. There’s three drummers around the blocks. And then there’s me, a very loud person. There’s just something about the community and the energy here that I really like and sets it apart from certain places that I’ve been in in LA.
Was it a strange feeling, then, to take these songs to different studios and be removed from the place where they were maybe conceived?
Yeah, it felt different. To leave Atwater for a second was a little hard, because you get used to your routine. But to leave to go to Nashville or Philly was actually really fun and honestly necessary, because I felt less distracted when I was not in LA. And I did that with my last record, too. I went to Joshua Tree for a week, and that helped me write even more. To be in Philly helped a lot with just inspiration and not feeling like I needed to get an errand done, or I needed to see this friend that I haven’t seen in a while, and just focus on the job.
The O.C. soundtrack
You’ve talked about it opening your eyes in terms of music, as it did for a lot of people, especially indie rock music. Do you tend to go back to it often, or is it something that just sits in your mind?
Yeah, it’s always in my mind. I feel like I was introduced to Pinback through it, and I already loved Death Cub for Cutie, but they were big at the time, and they were in an episode, too. I just feel like whoever was the music supervisor for that show did an amazing job in introducing me to so many artists on that roster. One of my favorite things about music supervisors, especially when they’re good, is that they know how to control a scene. They make you feel something, not just with the emotions from the actors, but from the music – when it plays, which section of the song it plays, how long the song plays for, whether it’s an instrumental or if it’s a lyrically driven portion of the song for a scene. I feel like they got that. There’s a scene with some of the main characters and ‘Hallelujah’, the cover by Jeff Buckley plays – amazing choice, I still think of that.
My co-producer, Joao Gonzalez, who basically co-produced the whole record with me, is also a gigantic OC fan, and we mention it a lot. We were obsessed with Seth Cohen, and we really wanted to be just like him. He’s kind of this nerdy, know-it-all music dude, a lovable, affable character. But it’s also because I live in California, too, and there’s the nostalgic element of all the alternative rock that comes out of here.
When I think of great modern indie rock soundtracks, my mind goes to I Saw the TV Glow, which you of course contributed to. What was that experience like? Do you wish that kind of compilation happened more often for TV and movies?
Yeah, I thought that was an incredible thing to be a part of. Jane [Schoenbrun] was amazing, and they came to me with a vision, along with the other artists on the soundtrack. They said, “Here’s this prompt for you, can you just do it?” They gave me a Spotify playlist, and I thought it was just the coolest thing. There was no controlling element. It was very much like, “I came to you for a reason, can you do your thing, but with the lens of making a Teenage Fanclub song?” And yeah, I don’t see that often with films. Maybe there are more examples, but what? The Minions soundtrack with Tame Impala? Not to compare it to the Minions soundtrack, but that’s the only thing I can think of.
Phoebe Bridgers is on both of those soundtracks, so she’s kind of the connecting link.
Yeah, Phoebe’s on there. Love her.
trip9love…??? by Tirzah
This one stands out as a unique reference point, but it makes sense through the lens of songs like ‘Meander/Sprouting Wings’ or even ‘A Million Reasons Why’. Is that where it fits in?
100%. I’ve been taking in and processing reviews from people and comments from some people, and many people are not into the second half of the record. And I understand why. It’s because it’s the weirder side of my music taste, which is something that I love. Me and Joao constructed the sequencing for the record so fast, and it just made sense to us. It made sense to put ‘Meander/Sprouting Wings’, ‘A Million Reasons Why’, and ‘Want It All’ all together, because it just was something that I loved
There’s something about trip9love…??? that is so bizarre, but I love it. It sounds like one song throughout the entire album. It uses the same drum loop, same piano loops here and there, and the melodies are kind of off. But to me, it feels so free. There’s no reason why they did this or that – maybe the intention is just because they liked it, and it sounded cool, and there’s no deep artistic reason why everything’s so repetitive and so bizarre. But to me, as a listener, I can get really lost in this record. There’s the droney element of it all, and I just am a fan of bizarre choices in records. It keeps me on my toes. I also love pop music, too, I love standard formulas and keeping people excited. But it’s just a weird little guy.
What did you enjoy about dipping into that hazier, otherworldly place for that section of Belong?
I think what appealed to me is that it felt like a comedown from the top of the record. I really love science fiction, and that also relates to the next inspiration, but just otherworldly fantasy, fictional-type stories, and the visual representations of that. I think ‘Meander/Sprouting Wings’ was my chance to experiment with that world, because it’s something I’ve always wanted to do, and those songs came the most natural to me. The headspace that I was in was basically just thinking, these two songs live in this world together, I can’t separate them. They complement each other in some way, and I don’t know why, but I don’t want to separate them, so it became this two-song, one-song thing.
‘A Million Reasons Why’ as the penultimate song just sounded like a sample, but without a full song in it. I was just imagining taking out a sample for a song – how French House was always taking songs from the ‘70s or disco tracks, making full songs out of them. I just remember thinking, what if I just did a sample song, and it kind of sounded like a voicemail. It gets pretty moody towards the end, but it felt fun.
The German Netflix show Dark
I love this TV show. It’s really amazing, and I watched it twice. The first time, I watched it in German with subtitles, and the second time, I watched it in English dub. There’s something very inspirational about the the craft of it all – the actors, the script, the music, everything was so intentional. They just went for it. There’s twists and turns, there’s some weirdness, there’s beautiful romance. I would pause scenes sometimes to just jam or write music, because sometimes when I watch something that affects me really deeply, I need to pause it for a second, and then continue. That was one of those really inspiring TV shows to watch. It was always in the back of my head throughout the record-making process this year.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Jay Som’s Belong is out now via Lucky Number.
