The Hoy Polloy Exclusive & In depth Interview

October 21, 2019

Miami-based The Hoy Polloy sound is reminiscent of Childish Gambino, Gym Class Heroes, and The Roots. Over the years they have released seven different albums in various genres from rock to hip hop to Jazz, their latest album Valkyrie is hip hop.

The Hoy Polloy have linked up Grammy-nominated Hip Hop artist, Jadakiss, and daughter of legendary DJ Kid Capri, Vina Love, for their new single, “Dangerous” released in June 2019.

“Dangerous” is the first single off their just-released album “Valkyrie” (September 17), which features Brooklyn rapper AZ, French R&B duo Les Nubians, Atlanta rapper Scotty ATL, Ariel Morer, UZO, Tay Evans, DJ Heron, FlynnFluence, Mustafa Shakir, KD of the NOC, and JO of the NOC. Multi-talented band’s frontman, K Sos sings plays sax, drums, bass, guitar, and piano.

Since 2009 their albums artwork has been designed by artist Nick Beary. Valkyrie cover is designed to embody the whole female-warrior perspective with the eyes closed. They wanted to create something that encompasses the darker side of the female protector.

Known primarily for their rock music, The Hoy Polloy boldly turned a page, venturing into the hip-hop arena in 2018. They debuted their first hip-hop album, No Pressure, and soon after joined the 24-city U.S. & Canada, Trust The Process II: Undefeated Tour, with rapper Ace Hood. Their resume also boasts opening appearances for Talib Kweli, Dead Prez, Project Pat, GZA & KRS-One.

Read my interview with K SOS.

Why did you name your band after a Greek phrase?

So, when I was growing up, the neighborhood next to where I grew up was a very big Greek community. After my mom passed, my Dad and I used to go eat at this Greek restaurant all the time and when I was home one time visiting him, I just started the band and I didn’t want to go under just my solo name. I was brainstorming for titles and my dad said something about, “Oh well let the Hoy Polloy decide”, or something. And I was like Hoy Polloy?! And we had a laugh about it, and I was like that’s a cool name for a band. So, when I started the band, I wanted to not be any genre denomination. I wanted to do a little bit of everything: Rock, Hip-Hop, Jazz, Dance & beyond. So, I figured Hoy Polloy would be a cool name because it means We the People, The Masses. That way I feel like we didn’t leave anybody out by calling the band that. So, it’s kind of encompasses all of those things.

What’s your real name?

My real name is Neil Cantor actually. Which is also my dad’s name. When I started doing music, I decided to go by something different just kind of distinguish myself from my father. Even though he didn’t do music, it’s just something that has always stuck with me. All my friends over the years have converted to calling me K Sos. Even the ones that didn’t originally know me as that starting calling me K Sos and then people just really like the name Hoy Polloy. I was actually at Publix, which is the supermarket here. Like two days ago, some lady randomly walked up to me and she was like, “I love the band. Do you have a business card?” I carry CD’s (and usually business cards) in my pocket everywhere I go. If I leave the house without CD’s, it’s like I feel naked. Like I’m not prepared to talk to people because anybody who talks to me gets a CD, whether I’m at the Post Office or the Grocery Store or you know…if you come across me, you’re getting an album so…

That’s great. So, is that like your business card?

It is and I’ve been doing that now for 50,000 CDs. And I burned the first 20,000 of them myself. Back in the day. I had revolving process of burning, labeling, sleeving and bundling that was down to a science. It really helped.

Which album do you carry with you?

I have 24 albums altogether. So, I have, well, the last eight of them were actually officially pressed... Sometimes I carry like a couple of Rock, a couple of Hip-Hop with me depending on who I run into. Usually like I carry a couple of each genre, but it depends on the album or whatever is hot. Like right now we have one of my solo hip hop records and the band’s rock album that I carry around with me. So, give…people…depending on what vibe I get from you. Sometimes I just ask people, “Hey are you more into Rock or more into Hip-Hop?” So, if they say they’re more into Hip-Hop, I give them the No Pressure or Al Malnik album and if they like rock a Bye Bye Bogota.

So how do you go from Rock to rapper?

I was originally a Hip-hop artist. I worked with a band called No Ordinary Cats back in the day. We were based out of Orlando and after our first record, we did some big shows. We opened for Ludacris, we opened for Redman and Method Man. Toured with Curren$y. But the band, the rest of the band itself, was not about putting in work beyond making the music. They just wanted to create and weren’t interested in managing or promoting our success. Many musicians have trouble balancing both sides and that is understandable. At the end, I found myself kind of just doing everything. So, I decided that if I was going to do it all anyways that I was going to start my own band and so I moved to Miami. Fresh start. I started working in this back apartment in like Hollywood Beach with this guitar player. It was really fun at the time. I really thought at one point that The N.O.C. might get back together so, in the beginning, the Hoy was just a project we were doing for fun and all of a sudden, we had 20 songs and I was like we really should make a record out this.

I found that because I love music so much. We are working hard and continuing to sharpen my skills that I just I've always wanted to add stuff on and learn how to mix and master on my own. I mean all the composition from all the way to completion or at least I do it with somebody else who maybe has another set of ears and they engineer with me. But I’m there for every step of the process now over the years I've learned how to do it all and that way I don't have to relinquish control. And be like, “Oh well mix and master this for me.” Well, no I want to be part of the process. I want to tell you how I want it mixed and how I want it mastered and whom I want to shine-on on certain moments. As I’m sure you know Selma, the music business is fierce competition so I always worked extra hard to always continue to broaden my horizons, create new stuff ideas and learn new stuff. One, you’ll never get bored doing what you love and two it always gives fans something that surprises them.

Then K SOS showed me his awesome studio while we were video-talking via Skype

I’m going to give you a quick scan of my studio. Are you ready?

Selma: Alright. Wow, that’s your studio? Is that at home or somewhere else?

So, I basically gave up the chance of having a living room and created my giant studio here. We use to practice; the band used to practice here. The roof is soundproof. Even the floor is sound-proofed, padded, and multi-colored.

Yeah, color is very important to me. Especially in your work space because it helps stimulate your brain. Color is such a stimulator when you have so much going on and so when I go to sit down and write or whatever looking just even take a quick look around the room, I am poised to so many thoughts. Plus, it’s all full of music memorabilia everything from Barbra Streisand on the wall to ticket stubs from Tribe Called Quest and Van Morrison and tributes to Prince & Bowie. I have a life-size standup cardboard cutout of Michael Jackson. My cousin and I, that’s all we knew the first ten years of our lives. We used to choreograph our own dances and stuff when we were young. We used to do like little shows for my aunt and uncle and my parents and stuff.

Let’s talk about the Album.

The album Valkyrie is packed with so many great features. I mean Les Nubians and AZ are on there, some great local talent is on there, DJ Haron, Scotty, from Atlanta, um I mean we even got Mustafa Shakur, an actor who’s the villain in season 2 of Luke Cage which is a Marvel series on Netflix. He’s also a musician and he did a guest verse so we have such an eclectic lineup of features on this.

Why did you choose the name Valkyrie for your album?

Because Valkyries are the Female Warriors that kind of choose to live and die on the battlefield as kind of symbolically as to what they represent. Valkyrie is actually the first album I've ever done which is all collaborations. I wanted to work with some of my favorite artists. So, the Valkyrie concept, being the most bad-ass female warrior. For me translated to these are the best of the best collaborations and I can put together as an artist and so it kind of parallels that and I wanted to add a little bit of feminity to it because the album mostly except for one of the features is all male. So, I kind of wanted to have uh… you know there's so much misogyny in hip-hop these days and I hate that about hip hop. And so, for me I thought it was kind like celebrating feminism in its own way and hip hop is kind of important because you know it's the genre that doesn't always do such a good job of celebrating the female and so I felt like by putting a bad-ass female warrior on our cover, it’s like us saying we’re embracing you know all that it is awesome about the woman.

Tell me now about your songwriting.

I have a very strict process I go by. 90% of the time I work anywhere from about 9 or 10 a.m. to about 4 or 5 p.m. I work really good during the day time. I'm not as creative at night unfortunately but what I like to do is I roll up a joint. I set up whatever gear or instruments I inten to use. I sit down and I say to myself you know what am I feeling today? Do I want to compose music or do I want to make a beat or do I want to work with another producer and just right lyrics or whatever so I try to figure out what my body is trying to tell me to do and I call it kind of just submitting to the process but when I'm sitting down on my desk , trying my best to shut everything that I possibly can out of my mind or my phone away put everything away so that I just…And like I said with the studio, I have all my instruments and stuff set up so I can pick up my guitar if I’m feeling the guitar or the bass or my pianos right next to me. So, a lot of times I just start creating and I don't always worried about what it's going to become. I just do it and then when the session is over I look back and I'm like wow I just laid down all these parts or whatever and then so one day I may do all the music and then the next day I’m like, “Oh that was a great instrumental” and ill just write some lyrics or I might reach out to one of my producers or so then say do you guys have some new beats but I'm just trying to do just do lyrics today!

K Sos last words:

“You know I've been in a band a long time since I was 9 years old man, I'm 33 now. My only wish in this life is to be able to do it until the end.”

Hoy Polloy actually have two records been released in 2019, Valkyrie and then a Rock album which comes out on Valentine’s Day called Kiss the Princess.

Check out their website: http://www.thehoypolloy.com/bio.html

And YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC43kAAW9aWXRqXoDpWiNh-g

Anitta talks about Mariah Carey at Ipanema Footwear Launch Party in LA

April 8, 2019

Brazilian singer-songwriter Anitta released her fourth multi-lingual Album “Kisses” - she sings in Portuguese, Spanish and English - on Friday, April 5 and she is gaining even more International recognition.

The record features Brazilian superstars Caetano Veloso, Ludmilla, and Papatinho, as well as American artists Snoop Dogg, Becky G, Alesso and Prince Royce.

On Saturday, April 6, the popstar celebrated her sandal collaboration with Ipanema, the Brazilian footwear brand, alongside the launch of the album at Skybar in Los Angeles.

The event featured a panel of style mavens Alyssa Coscarelli, Ayydé Vargas, Hanna Montazami, and Delaney Glazer who discussed the latest trends of fashion and music, followed by an exclusive performance by Anitta and a guitar player with some of her newest music “Get to know Me”, “Voce Mentiu”. She wore a short tight leopard print dress and her hair pulled back.

Together, Anitta and Ipanema are heading out on a global tour to introduce the album and collection to the world, making stops in Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles and Madrid.

After the live concert Anitta and I talked backstage, she told me how she found the confidence to sing in three different languages, “Yeah, it’s really hard. Pretty much because you listen to so many people say that it’s not gonna work, it’s not gonna work, it’s not gonna work that you say like I need to make it work so I worked really hard to be really good in English and I’m a believer and had good faith in English that people could miss on like the literal song. “

“I’m just confident for anything. I just have this need inside me when I was four. I don’t know,” she continues.

She also told us the “real” meaning of her album title “Kisses”, “I’ve always wanted to show this person, because I’m a really complex person, you know? My personality is really complex. I have a lot of person that is inside me myself, so I wanted to show this in the sad songs which kind of person can I be sometimes, and we were thinking about…but it was too obvious to put the name of the album “Anittas”. So, we were thinking about things that could be like me, a lot of different ways, but being also the same thing always, so the kiss is something like this—you can find a different kind of kisses like family kiss or sexy kiss, whatever, friend, family, whatever—but it’s also still being a kiss. That’s why we chose this name “Kisses”—the different types of being kissed.”

She explained to me why she picked Caetano Veloso to collaborate on the song “Voce Mentiu,” “He helped me a lot in my life, so I really love him and appreciate everything he does, and he’s a friend of me, I am friends of his family and because when I wrote that song with my partners, when I listened to it the first time, it was like, this is so Caetano. I need to have him with me, and then he said yes right away.”

And when she has the opportunity to collaborate with one of her idols singer Mariah Carey, the song will be about dreams, she said, “About going for your dreams because since I was zero years old, I was listening to her, and I mean, if I met her, I could not imagine it would be happening, so if I sing with her, it would definitely need to talk about dreams, about realizing…about getting something done in your life that you could never imagine that could happen,” she said.

We also talked about where she finds inspiration for her songs, “My inspirations is things that I live, an experience that I had in my life. I always talk about real things. Or somebody or some story of another third person—another person. I like to talk about real stuff and also things that I believe that happened with me.”

The album 10-track Album took almost one year to complete, she said, “Just the part that depends on me. The parts that depend on other people, it was like two months, and that’s it, and we were like, come on! Come on! It was crazy.”

H.E.R. talks Grammy Nominations & her Vision Board

December 15, 2018

Gabrielle “Gabi” Wilson, who likes to the called by her artist name “H.E.R.” gave me an exclusive interview right after learning she had been nominated for five 2019 Grammy awards, “It was early in the morning when they announced everything, but I was woken up out of my sleep. I had a show the night before. My manager woke everybody up. We didn’t know what was going on. He was like, “We’re going to have to cancel the tour.” He called everybody to my room and said, “Oh, my gosh, you’re nominated for five Grammys,” and I just remember crying and everybody just going crazy. We were…and then I started seeing the reaction on social media and yeah, it was a crazy moment. I immediately called my parents and all my friends and family and it was crazy. It was a moment,” she described how she learned about the nominations for her self-titled album HER, including album of the year, best new artist and best R&B album.

Also her song “Focus” is nominated for best R&B song and her song “Best Part” featuring Daniel Caesar is nominated for best R&B performance.

She explained to us how she came up with the acronym H.E.R. which stands for “Having Everything Revealed”, “Well, it kind of was a process. I was making these songs that were very honest and very specific to this time in my life while I was transitioning from being a young girl to becoming a young woman. You know, in high school, being 16, 17, 18 years old, and going through emotions and all the stuff that a girl goes through in high school—first heart break, and emotions that you haven’t felt and being jaded, like it’s the end of the world, you know. I’ll never be loved again. All these things that we feel. The music that I was making was a collection of stories based on that time period, kind of a very dark time, you know. Teenage hormonal era. But what I always said was like, “Oh, I’ll never be that girl,” when I was 15, 14, looking at other women like, “I’ll never be that girl that falls for the wrong guy,” and “I’m never going to make this mistake and that mistake,” and then I ended up being that girl. I ended up being HER. And the easiest way for me to be honest was to really be anonymous and just, you know, I wanted to release the music and see what happened and I wanted people to love the music for what it was, so I just decided to release an EP with just my silhouette in the front—no name, no face, nothing attached but music and my stories.”

I asked her what does it mean to her “having everything revealed”?

“Really that means that you really know who I am. You really see how vulnerable I am and how personal my music is. In my music, you hear it in my music. It’s not about what I look like or how I dress or the people I’m associated with or if I belong to a clique. It’s just about the raw message and the emotions in my songs, my real stories, and that’s having everything revealed to me more than anything,” She said.

We also talked about her writing process, “It really depends. I’m bouncing off the walls all the time. Sometimes I’ll come up with a melody and then I’ll write words to it or sometimes I’ll be laying in bed and just write down my thoughts and the song kind of writes itself, but it depends on who I’m working with. I love to talk in the studio when I collaborate with people. When I write by myself, I’m usually at an instrument, a guitar or piano or bass, and coming up with words that way, but it just depends. For me, it starts with thoughts and where it takes me. I don’t like to force anything.”

On December 10, 2018, she launched a new series “Road to GRAMMYs” on her YouTube music channel, in the introduction she says, “I have goals, I have ambitions, and I have dreams,” so I asked her about that, “Yeah. I mean, honestly, I was just talking to my team, my manager and people, and two years ago, I wrote…I made a vision board. I made a vision board, like a physical white board. I went to whatever store and I bought a white board and I wrote down a bunch of little goals and some of it was like, “I want to headline my own tour,” and now I’m doing that. So two and an half years ago, I want to get at least 100 million streams, you know, and now we’re like at a billion streams. And on there was a Grammy nomination. That was one of the biggest goals that I had on the vision board. It was just part of like my career goals that I had on that board, and for that to manifest and now become reality is so crazy. So those were some of the goals I was talking about, and now I’m working on a new vision board, and now I’m thinking of how to take my goals to the next level. My goals are changing. My dreams are getting even bigger. Because I had one nomination on that board, and now it’s five. You know, this is my second headlining tour. And I headlined in Europe and now I’m doing a second headline tour in Europe, and it’s like all these levels that I’m passing through, that I’m achieving. And it doesn’t stop, you know. I’m excited because this is not even my potential. This isn’t even my prime. It’s literally just the beginning and all these great things are happening, so yeah, that’s really what I was talking about. I have personal goals. One goal I had on my vision board was to buy my mom a house, and I was able to do that this year.”

Another thing that’s on the board that hasn’t happened yet, “One thing is an arena tour. I got to do that next. I think Oracle arena because that’s right by my hometown. I used to go to concerts there all the time. I saw Prince there, and Barclay Center. I live in Brooklyn now,” she told us.

“I’m working on my debut album so there will probably be some really dope surprises on there. Chris Brown is so talented. I’d love to work with him. There’s people like J. Cole and Drake who I really want to work with. There are so many artists out. I don’t know,” she said.

Rihanna, Janet Jackson, Alicia Keys are her fans. In fact, Janet Jackson attended one of her shows in London, “That was crazy. It was unbelievable. Like Janet Jackson is one of my favorites, all time, and the fact that she’s a fan of me and knew all the words to my songs is like confirmation. It’s like, wow, I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. I’m doing something right if Janet Jackson is coming to my show,” she told us about it.

On Friday December 14, the multi-talented artist played the piano, the guitar and sang all her hits “Focus”, “Best Part”, at The Novo Theater by Microsoft, as part of MWP Entertainment Group Presents “WANTED,” a Live Experiential Musical Event Series, attended by her celebrity fans Queen Latifah, Janet Jackson, Ella Mai, Tichina Arnold, Tisha Campbell-Martin, and Phil Ivey.

She told me before the show, “Friday is going to be a really special show on the tour because there’s going to be this crazy technology and you can just experience my music in a different way, like it’s going to be holograms and it’s going to be…it’s going to be something super different from all the other dates.”

At the end of the show she said to the audience on the microphone, “So many amazing things are happening in my life and I really have to thank you for supporting me and loving me and keeping it about the music, thank you so much, and I have been dealing with a lot, it’s just as much as there is good, there is bad, the devil always gonna try you and to take you away from your blessings, you have the opportunity to abuse the blessing and that’s what I am trying not to do, I am on the stage, I am so grateful I am so happy, and that’s all I can be, I am only 21 year old, so thank you so much for making my dreams come true, thank you.”

H.E.R. performing at MWP Entertainment Group Presents “WANTED,” a Live Experiential Musical Event Series

She also told me how she feels in front of an audience, “I definitely get that energy from the audience, like I always feed off the audience’s energy, but I’ve always been a performer. I’ve always loved performing since I was a little girl, and I’ve prepared my whole life to be on tours. It’s just what I love to do. We have a great time on stage, me and my band, every single night, so it’s just fun for me. I never really get nerves unless it’s like a really big stage sometimes I get a little bit nervous, but I just tap into why I love it so much and how much fun I have. People love coming to my shows. They experience my music in a different way. I try to create like a dynamic show.”

Heather LaRose Exclusive Interview & "Kerosene" Video Release

December 14, 2018

Heather LaRose is an American electro-pop singer, songwriter and guitar player from New York City with more than 54K followers. Best known for her song "New Moon," from her EP "Beachside", which was featured on MTV's Teen Wolf. Growing up, listening to classics like Abba, The Beach Boys and The Beatles along with early 2000s pop inspired her to begin singing and writing. Her upbeat blend of electronics and real instruments garnered her sponsorship by Gibson Guitars.

I sat down with Heather for an exclusive interview ahead of the release of her new video “Kerosene” on Friday December 14, 2019.

“The video was shot with some of my closest friends and bandmates James Byrne, David Vogel, Bianca Muniz, Jackie Muniz, Stefano DB, Michael Hojnacki, Takahiro Izumikawa at an awesome studio in Norwalk, Connecticut called Underground Studios. I think the live aspect of a song is important, it's a calumniation of all the words and emotions being brought to life. When you go through a traumatic experience, it's really important to be open with how you're feeling, especially to your friends. This live performance is so important to me because my friends have been such a great support system and you can hear that come through the way they help me bring "Kerosene" to life,” she told me.

She reflected on her writing specially her new single “Kerosene”, “For each song, my process is different. Most of the time I start with the chorus and build the story around my emotions or whatever triggered me to start singing. But for “Kerosene”, I started with the first line as the first thing I wrote and built the song from the ground up. I wrote Kerosene after my ex-boyfriend passed away from Cancer. I got off the phone with the friend that introduced him and I. I just remember going into a state of complete shock. I wanted to cry but I felt paralyzed.”

She continues, “It was a complicated relationship from the moment we met. It was the summer of 2014, I was going to school in New York and he was leaving to go to Tulane. But it was one of those instant attractions. We ended up spending almost every day together until the day him and his dad drove off. Even then we both face-timed each other for over an hour crying while he was in the passenger seat and his dad was driving. That was my first love. We both tried to make the long-distance work, but it was "summer dreams ripped at the seams" (Grease). Distance and priorities pulled us apart. But we seemed to get back together for a couple of weeks for the two following summers. It was never the same as that first summer, though. When he was diagnosed with cancer, it was almost a year since him and I spoke. That moment, I drove to his house and we just hugged each other crying. He and I forgot and forgave each other of all of the things we put each other through. In that moment, it was like the summer we first met. We kept in touch and it seemed like he was really on the mend. But then out of the blue I got the call he passed away.”

“Kerosene” is the day he passed away, but it's also the day I drove to his house, it's the day we first got back together, it's the day we first met.”

And this is what she said about the song, “Kerosene” is a dark electric blue. It's a pop ballad of hope and love burning through doubts and fears. I recorded Kerosene with the DJ duo CRWN, Crane and Charlie Brown (Millie Bobby Brown's brother). A few of the other singles are with some of my really close friends from Berklee: Jack Hoffman, greisun, Joel Ferber, Elliot Sorgen, Alex Venegas and my songs "Rumors" was with Greg Sgar (John Lennon Songwriting Contest) and Matt Pelosi. I love being able to work with friends as much as possible because you can hear the chemistry come through the track.”

In 2018, LaRose hit over a million streams. LaRose also gained recognition as opening act for Rachel Platten summer 2017, Drake Bell fall 2017, and for her performances at several of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign speeches, where Clinton also chose the Beachside EP’s “Run With Me” as her walk up song. Her fresh sound has taken her to the stages of NYFW, LA Fashion Week, Miami Swim Week, NYC’s Bronx Zoo Festival, LA’s legendary Whisky A-GoGo, and a headlining performance at Montauk Music Festival.

“I'm just wrapping up my recordings for an upcoming EP. I've spent the past year writing and reflecting, not just on my growth as a person, but also what it means to be a young woman in this era. My songs are about being bold, embracing who you are and what you've overcame. Since my ex-boyfriend passed away, I've had some extreme emotional highs and lows. I write a new song nearly every day. The EP is scheduled to be released in March 2019 just in time for SXSW. Right now, I have six unreleased songs but I might switch a couple out once I get back to LA in January. I already have some studio time booked. Music has been the best therapy.”

Heather is always perfecting her craft, she told me, “I was always a songwriter but singing was something I had to really train for. I could always connect with the story of a song and know the emotion to sing them with but I worked on a lot my technique by studying with teachers like Darryl Tookes (NYU), Amy Roslyn (Broadway cast Jesus Christ Super Star), while at Lagond Music School in Elmsford, NY, a nonprofit music school where I also worked. Then while I was in LA, I studied with Kira a celebrity vocal coach for the cast of Glee, Disney stars, etc. It wasn't until my second year of college where I really felt comfortable stepping away from my guitar and really calling myself a vocalist.”

Watch “Kerosene” video here:

FABRIQ "SEROTONIN" VIDEO RELEASE - EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH DAVID DAVILA & COOPER BELL

November 7, 2018

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.”