With the success of Fabriq’s Band song “Get Behind the Felling” released in Billboard in May 2018, Daniel Davila and Cooper Bell released their second single “Serotonin” on November 7, 2018 and they will release an EP on February 2019.

I was invited to their Studio in Los Angeles for an exclusive interview:

“The song was inspired by a girl who had everything, but struggled with depression. She felt reliant on anti-depressants to be emotionally stable, but always stopped taking them because they made her feel incapable of feeling emotion. In other words, the meds kept her from feeling depressed, but she also couldn't be truly happy while she was taking them, I think the song is like stepping back and trying to find your true happiness,” said Daniel.

Daniel Davila and Cooper Bell at their studio

“I would probably say (the video) is like 60 percent pink, 40 percent blue, and that’s important. This piece of the puzzle, but that also there’s entire scenes in the video that are completely blue, like when she’s walking down the hallway into the other room. It’s very blue and that, of course, like you said, the other parts of it are very bright pink, right? And that distinction is important because basically the crux of the whole story we told visually was that things can be kind of scary in the pink world if you look closely, so in that first shot, you see her sitting in the living room with the dolls around her and it’s kind of creepy if you really look closely, right? But it’s pink. It’s supposed to be happiness, but it’s really not, right? And then in the blue side sort of shows the undercurrent behind that, that in reality, pink is not really pink consistently. Sometimes it’s blue right behind it, so I think that was a really important thing we wanted to tell visually in that story,” Cooper explained about the video.

Seating in their studio filled with guitars hanging on the walls they continued explaining the video to me:

“A lot of the lyrics in the song are specific to this story. But we think this story applies to a lot of anxiety in our society right now. So many people feel reliant on things like social media, unhealthy relationships, or even prescription drugs in order to feel emotionally stable. This is why we thought it was an important song to release as the single off our upcoming EP.” The eight-track EP will be released in February 2019 they are in between two titles “We tentatively want to call it Serotonin. We think that’s a great word to encompass the feeling of the entire piece of work…” Cooper said.

“But we’re also really interested in potentially doing it as a self-titled debut EP so just an EP called “Fabriq” because it is our…it’s interesting because now that we’re on the next point of where we want to be stylistically, creatively, and what we’re working on to the point where that really…this album that we’re about to come out with is the inception of why. You know, it’s the first songs we wrote together, some of the first things that we created together. One of the first songs that we ever produced by ourselves without any co-production credits, so…” Daniel complemented.

And why did they choose the title Serotonin?

“Well, serotonin’s actually a chemical that gets released in your brain when you feel happiness or so say the scientists, right? I didn’t discover that myself, but it’s associated with the idea of being chemically happy, so just the sense of like when you go to a therapist or something or they’ll prescribe you a drug to increase the serotonin in your brain, right? And we thought that was such an interesting word because we actually not only feel like the idea of being happy can be synthesized right into a single chemical, we think it’s way more spiritual than that. So, the song is sort of about that—that there really is a separation between feeling good and being happy. Right? And serotonin, the chemical, makes you feel really great, but that won’t necessarily mean that you’re happy. So, I think that’s where sort of the driving force behind the song came from,” Said Cooper.

“When we were drafting ideas for the video, we wanted to have a universal prop to represent addiction of all sorts. We chose pills because of the amount of addictions associated with them. The pills act as a doorway between the two worlds in the video our main character in the video is caught between these two worlds.

The first world is addictive because she feels emotionally safe and dull. But she knows, somewhere deep down, that she’s missing her true emotions. She feels stuck in a grey zone, and fights to break free from it… but fears the emotional extremes that come with leaving.

The second world is exciting but also overwhelming and hard for her to maintain. When she's in this world, she feels like she’s lost control because she can suddenly feel these emotional extremes again. This world requires her to take a real look at herself. Sometimes she's in absolute bliss, and sometimes she's horrified with what she finds,” Cooper explained.

“This song is about finding a balance between those two worlds, something that we (and a lot of people) have a hard time negotiating.” Cooper added.

Right now, Daniel and Cooper are busy preparing and practicing for their show at Peppermint Club in West Hollywood on November 14.

Daniel Davila, Selma Fonseca and Cooper Bell at their studio

Daniel ended the interview with this quote: “I always think you hear this, where you hear that phrase it’s like “two halves equal a whole.” You know, when it comes down to a relationship. Relationships with anything, but specifically if you’re a person. It’s like you are my other half, and how it should be working is like we are…you complete me…I’m not going to say that because that would just come off wrong, but we’re both whole in ourselves and happy with who we are and we just happen to go together very well.”