Catching Up With DIY Musician I've Never Been Here Before

I caught up with September a.k.a I’ve Never Been Here Before after her recent long winter and beginning of spring spent touring. We first caught up in mid April, and then chatted again in early May.

First, she talked to me a bit about her upcoming album.

Onyx: So, what do you want to talk to me about today?

September: Well, I’m taking time to work on perfecting the lyrics for my new album. The album will be coming out fully in July - it will probably be done by the end of May - ideally I’ll have some tapes made for summer touring but have six instrumentals to make first… full instrumentals, but I’m using more guitar lately, recording better quality guitar samples and having the guitar in the sampler and building tracks around it. I’m kind of wanting to do a more guitar focused album with more noise type music. The title, I think, is going to be ‘I wish I never wrote these songs,’ which relates to iwinwt, an unintentionally prophetic song where the title is based on how things happened, which seems to be a recurring theme in my life… This album has more sad songs than other albums, with only like 2 or 3 happier songs. I’m actually feeling like the two singles are a little misleading because they’re more like what I normally write.

Onyx: What makes you want to release a single?

September: Honestly, motivation to finish the release…these two had been written last summer and played live a lot in autumn, I ended up releasing iwinwt for people to have that moment of jumping that they were getting on tour. It’s also a thing of just wanting it out in the world, for example, with shly shlys come home, it’s because I love Placebo so much. Those two singles are like bookends of the album, representing the start and end of it, and the full extremes of the emotional spectrum, so there is a dichotomy of those two songs coming out. In the past I’ve had this tendency to minimize sad writing, and I don’t want to just share the hard shit, I want to share the stuff that was good or joyful or whatever. This album is ‘it’s been a rough one, I’m tired, here’s what’s going on, but I’m gonna keep fucking shit up, they can’t keep us down (but oh my god they’re trying)’ and this album is picking up from the second year and half of my transition (grl was the first year of my transition) - starting end of 2023 / early 2024, so there’s a lot of looking back, reminiscing, remembering, wishing you wouldn’t …wishing generally…. wanting for what isn’t. Something I don’t want to do that feels like a waste, which is a big point of the album - turning that wasted energy into this instead of just wasting it. There’s a song on there called i’ve wasted so much time… The album is pretty chronological - as was grl, it was like, discover you’re a girl, discover you’re a lesbian, lose family, find community, reconnect with sibling…

Onyx: But there was stuff in between wasn’t there?

September: Yeah, so cyberfae princess came out with grl… c u never then suckers is still going to come out later this year, it’s a collab album of like 15 songs… then it became an acoustic/collab/cybergrind album, and then I wanted to do some banjo and it didn’t make sense anymore…. there’s like 7 acoustic songs, 7 synth songs…so then I released cyberfae princess.

cherarys songs was weird… I don’t even really think of that as an album, it’s more like a compilation almost of new versions of old songs, covers, demos, and a few new songs. The only new ones were vandalize ur grave, alamantiz, and i am just a grl … it’s raining again was the centrepiece of it all, the starting point of I've Never Been Here Before, it was the first one I finished back in the day, so it felt like a send off to old songs, especially since shly shly was on there, which I made when I was like 15, as well as manalia, the song I got my name from, the synth version was on there. It was to kind of stamp out all those remaining threads of songs that I wanted to put somewhere. This next one is like I’m sitting and planning it and it’s a careful statement as a whole piece, it’s not just like here are some songs. I feel like the last two since grl were like music but not really… I’ve deeply considered this.

Onyx: So what else have you got coming up and what have you just been up to?

September: Well, I’ve got at least three splits coming up this year, one with Half Calf who booked my first ever show, one with Ten Dirty Fingers (who I toured with for the South Will Always Be Gay tour and we made a couple of songs together), and the last one is not fully fleshed out yet so I’m not going to say. I’ve also got an acoustic album really soon, like this month, with like 25 songs of stuff I did while I was on tour for 8 weeks, just all these voice memos I took along the way with live performances and demos of new songs…one old house had a weird drone accordion box so I played it’s raining again on that…just lots of random little things, nothing focusedly recorded - it’s going to be called pure.

I was just on two tours - I’ve Never Been Pure was 6 weeks and then I had the tour with Half Calf.

Onyx: So tell me about september thru may?

September: Okay, so on the third or so day of tour we had a last minute replacement show booked, we were staying at a place called the Nunnery that I’d played in October with June Henry and there were multiple pianos out. My tourmate May makes screamy dance music but she’d been talking about how Ruper and other acoustic ambient type artists are like her favourite shit and she wanted to make stuff like that so I said let’s play piano. We did a cover of Elliot Smith’s 2:45AM, and then we stayed up for like 3 hours and she was just pulling up lyrics on her phone and I’d ask if she could picture a tempo and she’d tap a tempo and I’d write a piano bit for it, and usually we’d go for the first melody I played and then put chords to it. Almost all of the songs were recorded in one take, two or three got two takes nothing got more than two takes, we recorded it and put it on Bandcamp like two days later. I wrote like three songs on it or something but I think her lyrics worked better for the vibe so in future we’ll probably just go with her lyrics. We also recorded a little acoustic album together and I recorded a bunch of our live sets and we did a little bit of acoustic stuff live, so there might be some guitar stuff but then nothing for a while. We’ve talked about doing something where I do ambient and we both sing on it, but in due time.

But I’m really trying to finish I’ve Never Been Here Before stuff before summer and I’m really looking for a drummer so I can have a screamo band, I really want to not do I’ve Never Been Here Before stuff for like six months and scream in a band. Of course I won’t stop producing, but I’ve been doing solo shows for like two years now. I also just need an excuse to get better at screaming so I can make I’ve Never Been Here Before more screamy but then another part of me is like the mixture of the singing and the screaming is the vibe.

Onyx: So tell me more about the album progress?

September: I still need to do ketamine plug, that’s the song people are getting the most mad at me for not doing a synth version of yet, and I keep umming and ahhing about how I want to do it. That’s how I was with i am just a grl… What you’re supposed to do is just make it… Because it’s me solo I always want to be experimenting and pushing it forwards and there’s a very deliberate thought in terms of creation of the song - how am I doing this, what are my goals for this song, what are my restraints for this song... I used to write lots of folk guitar and synth those up and that was the basis of the song structures. Turns out when you do that it kinda sounds like pop music, but this current album…I was working on a song for it yesterday, there’s a lot of time signatures, vocal melodies are weirder… hearing all of that synthed up has a different result to what I did with grl. grl was like I want to make something dancey please let us dance, but this album is like I still want to make stuff that we can dance to but I’m still sad. I’ve been writing stuff that feels like it gives room for experimentation rather than writing stuff that feels like I know how to make it. I think the next single might be floor… I’ve been playing it live lately, it’s one of my favourite songs in a while. I like the structure and the sectioning of it, it feels like falling down a staircase, there’s no repeated sounds… it’s just going forward. I’ve been swapping the roles of the two instruments I use (sampler and synth) and there’s something about the intentional fucking with how you make something so the end result is less coming from muscle memory and more coming from experimentation. I keep asking myself where can I fit in room for me to fuck around and find something I wouldn’t intentionally create? I’ve got also a lot of samples in… There are some BdoubleO100 Limited Life Super Fan Episode YouTube video samples which are just so funny, and some True Detective season 1 samples. I’ve also got a few good silly song titles like za got me feelin like rust coal (a character in True Detective) , robat batinbat (what me and an ex called Robert Pattinson after he starred in Batman).

Onyx: What else can you say about the album?

September: I keep asking myself, ‘what are the defining feelings that I want to work through or explore with this?’ I feel like I’ve only locked in on what this album is about in like March, even when iwinwt came out, I was only just starting to get it, it always means something different once it’s done. For now we have our direction. I write lyrics near daily. Oftentimes they’ll just get forgotten and then one day something will happen and then I’ll hunt down a lyric I wrote that feels perfect for it.

There’s a song fuck it I can do it scared - I needed one little quiet ‘I can do this’ song, and that’s what that is.

I’m expecting mixed feedback for this one person to person. I think it’s a lot less musically one note than grl. grl was so hyperfocused on not having noise shit or scary songs, this album was pretty and sass, it sounds like just the colour pink, and this current album is a lot more like I want to explore different ways of production with deliberate experimentation and doing stuff I don’t really know how to do and sharing myself trying to get to the vision but possibly not getting there yet just showcasing starts of ideas that I have. idea 30 from i am a body was really the blueprint for grl, all of the songs on grl were made in the footprint of that song. I was still trying to experiment on top of what I know. I released a tape grl+ that was like an alternate version, I’m redoing songs with different people on them.

I’m really excited to release scary, it’s the sister song to i am not scary. They share a project file, they’re played live together a lot… The 'am I scary do I scare you' chorus has been done since October.

I want to make the album art for this album, I have to keep working on it. I have mutual benefit art friends who do my album covers and then one friend who is doing a movie that I’m doing music for. So that means the spring projects are splits, acoustic album, solo album, movie.

The next solo album is basically written in a baby stage, it’s at least 11 songs. Everything is at risk of being synthed.

I spent a lot of tour thinking about this album because I didn’t have a lot of stuff to make music with, but I had time where I was able to write out a bunch of songs and rewrite songs. I usually write all the lyrics before I even touch it with instruments, and it’s like, this song represents this moment happening, these characters on the stage, each role only needs to occur once. I’m not trying to make an entire album about the same feeling or moment, I’m capturing through these moments the overall experience and headspace of a period of time in life the way things looked, how it felt (the best I can), without needing it to be an exact retelling of how it happened. So this album is less literal lyrically than grl.

For example, i am not scary is about a specific conversation, and my lyricism is often moment specific, not in the way of telling a friend the story of what happened but more in the way that you’re remembering the parts that are most inflated in your memory. This album is more like that. The feelings that aren’t that new, but the way I'm feeling it is unique, and that’s what I want to focus on. There’s a lot of literal chorus and lot of abstracted verses. I’m trying to say the feelings we all experience in a way that isn’t boring and describes the unique way of feeling it.

This album is weirder than grl with less of a predictable structure. It’s darker and noisier at times, but still really pretty and sweet, I think there’s gonna be a lot more screaming, I think it’s gonna be pretty rippin’. I listened to all the new songs in a row for the first time and I kinda feel like I’m onto something. There’s seasonal chunks with different sounds and consistent sounds, the spring ones are a little prettier and bouncier, they remind me of teeth - they sound very clicky and noises… The winter songs have weird blast beats and weird sections and harsh noise and they’re messier. The last summer ones are more like pop - the two singles that came out are from the summer time. I didn’t plan for seasonal chunks but that's kinda how it shook out, they definitely have a cohesion in that way, you can kinda tell what I was thinking when the instrumental was made, what tricks and production methods were on my mind, and they shift over the course of the album from using one synth to build smaller loops, to going bonkers on guitar parts as far as I could, to guitar recordings and stripped back synth parts to build tracks, and then to lots of sampling and stretching and weirdness caused by that that I love, which is why I think they sound kinda toothy… It sounds a little ‘fucked up old cassette that you found’ the more it goes on.

Onyx: Tell me more about how you choose your song titles?

September: Yeah, so, I prefer look of lowercase letters, you can see that around grl… I like that the song titles look like if I was texting a friend the set list if we were gonna play a set rather than an official song title, that’s why I abbreviated iwinwt - there was no easy letter to drop and I didn’t want it to be a fully written out thing, but also if I make multiple versions of a song then DistroKid gets mad if it has the same name, so I might rename it, which I like because it makes it so you don’t necessarily know which ones are the same song, and if people figure it out that’s cool.

Onyx: Is that a big reason why you’ve got multiple versions of the same songs?

September: Yeah that’s a lot of it, some songs feel easy to make, sometimes I write songs on guitar but don’t finish them on guitar - the guitar is just a writing tool for me. I also listen to other musicians who put out songs that they do lots of versions of. And sometimes I need a different version of a song to play it live.

Onyx: What have you got coming up for summer?

September: I’ve got three ish months of unannounced touring, I need to get the album done before it…

It could be a complete statement if I recorded it all, but I feel like I have more to say so that’s why I’m sitting on it, it’s in a good place though where it could be released as it is. Sometimes I get ahead of myself and have the idea and then think it will be out in two months… It’s taken a while to plan. When I was working on cherarys songs, I was still working on c u never then suckers, then I realised I had enough collab tracks for that to branch off into its own thing and then there was an odd 25ish songs that had guitar demos with previously released songs that I wanted to make new versions of and unwritten songs that I wanted to play with the lyrics.

Onyx: Talk to me about your favourite tours?

September: The Purity Control tour was the best overall, it was really magical, I’m really proud of myself because in September I was like, ‘what if we played 37 shows and I booked 32 of them and I’m on tour while I’m doing all that booking, we can do that right?’ and Mabel was like, ‘yeah,’ and it just happened. I’m really proud of how the shows went, I really love Mabel, seeing Mabel play was awesome. Some of the best shows I’ve done have been in the Bay Area, Seattle, Denver, Knoxville, Birmingham, Bellingham. Some of my favourite venues have been Bunker Bunker Bunker in Corvallis, there’s a running joke because I’ve been there like seven times, we made one show named like a movie series - Bunker 5 the Rebunkening. There’s also Subrosa, the home venue that I work at, Vera Project in Seattle, and Pilot Light in Knoxville.

Onyx: What makes a great spot, a great venue?

September: I like when a venue is all ages, 21+ shows are not always the best vibe unless it’s a house show. DIY shows … larger theatre type venues are less of a fun experience. If the venue is run by a collective it tends to be a good sign. If it has a good sound system… And I find that sound people who are volunteers tend to be nicer than sound people being paid because they want to know what you want them to do. More often than not I’ve been really happy with the venues I’ve played at on tour.

Onyx: How do you do your networking for booking?

September: Usually by connecting with bands on tour, venue people, bookers, getting recs from other bands.

Onyx: What’s the worst part about tour?

September: The worst part about tour is missing sick local Bay Area gigs.

Onyx: Why is a digital queer archive so important right now? Do you consider how you will archive if the internet disappears or are some of your things ephemeral? Is archiving important to you? Since you do things like make albums that are a chronology of your transition…

September: So this question stemmed a whole song, there’s a spoken word bit - try it motherfucker, that’s all about trans lives not being able to be erased even if you try to erase them. It got me thinking about They Burnt Her Clothes and the person that’s about - she was ‘erased’ but she was still queer when she was alive even though we don’t know her name, and you can’t take away what matters, which is queer life being lived. The documentation is important to say that queer life is here, but if it goes away it’s not like queer life isn’t gonna happen. I feel very special to be able to make music explicitly about queer and trans life, but if none of it survives 50+ years, whatever, it hopefully still helps people now, plus I’ll still probably have a guitar in the apocalypse find some bookstore to be kickin' in.

Onyx: How do you feel about how to be reachable even when you’re on platforms since you say you make more connections in person? For example, the need to up the reel game (even though it’s not the real game because it’s the meta game and it’s all fake).

September: You need a certain number of people to just get what you’re doing who just end up being really supportive, it’s tricky to make people get it. I just gotta say it well enough. So it’s kinda been about asking myself ‘how do I make lyrics that create the feeling without just handing you exactly what it is? How do I say that I wanna hold a girl’s hand in a way that isn’t just as simple as that and paints a picture, a complicated, multifaceted picture?’ It’s not as simple of a message that you’re trying to break down, and then it makes sense in my brain but takes a little longer for everyone else to figure out. I’m gonna get better at it probably… I’m interested to see what people think of the new album like I was for grl. I get feedback at shows, sometimes on reddit, and I send stuff to my music friends.

Onyx: Any closing thoughts or comments?

September: Keep your eyes on socials, I’ve got bigger announcements coming, an acoustic album very soon, some reel promo coming soon. To summarise, there will be a new album with like 12 songs, no acoustic songs, one more single to tease the album, that acoustic album coming as well…And I’ve got two splits that are almost done, so I’m thinking August double split drop.

Post-interview, September let me know that she had decided to drop the two singles from the album because they no longer fit the vibe and could be more of a transition from grl to this new era, and that she had added a new song called forever. She’s created album art and art for the two singles with drawings on a bag full of dirt and flowers scanned in monochrome and edited, and is still deciding which two singles to tease the album with. I can’t wait to hear it, and I hope that if you’ve read this far you can’t wait to hear it too.