Wisp on Melanie Martinez, Smosh, Brazilian Fans, and Navigating the Music Industry

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it.

Natalie Yu has had an impressive and very quick ascent as Wisp; in just two or three years, she's gone from being a viral sensation to releasing her debut LP on real-deal major Interscope, If Not Winter, which just dropped last week. One major reason why I was so interested in talking to Natalie for the newsletter (beyond the fact that I find her music enjoyable to listen to in general) is that I'm always really interested to hear from much younger artists (according to Wikipedia, she turns 21 tomorrow) about their experiences living online as music fans, as well as how it's felt for them to become public figures in the musical sphere so quickly. We had a great convo a few weeks ago about all this and more, check it out:

This record came about pretty soon after your debut EP.
I started writing the album after I got back from my headline tour last year. I didn't really know what I wanted the album to be about—I feel like I was trying to create blueprints and write a story about the album before I was even making songs. The more songs that I made, the more I put the pieces together and it naturally fell into place. I found meaning in the way that the songs are intertwined with each other.

Getting to work with different producers and artists also helped me exercise my creativity a lot more, because a lot of these people don't make shoegaze or alt-rock music. Getting fresh perspectives on the way that I produce and write made the album feel a lot more mature, and I was able to find the sound that I wanted to convey for the album.

Talk to me more about bringing other people into your process. Your music started out as a bit of a solitary practice.
I started writing music from my bedroom, but because I was only doing vocals and mixing on my own, it wasn't the full experience of playing with a band or getting to write with other musicians. But when I went to LA for the first time and I met [songwriter Max Epstein], it felt so natural. Our chemistry was just there, and being able to write with and be encouraged by him and the other musicians in the room made me feel really good. That confidence was what was needed for me to continue making music.

Being able to go to the studio all the time to make music—it's what I've gotten used to, and there are so many ways to go about it, because you can work with the producer one-on-one. My favorite way to write music is to have my friends come, because so many of my friends do music as well. It's like getting to collaborate with
with your dream artist, and it's so fun being able to you learn from them and bounce back ideas with each other.

Do you have any kind of rules or routines when it comes to studio time?
My biggest rule is that I'll never take more than 20 minutes to write lyrics, and I won't write lyrics before I get into the session unless i have something really good in my mind. Flow of consciousness is really important. I journal a lot, and the best way to get your best ideas is to let your mind flow and not overthink it—to not perform. When you're writing in your journal, you don't always have to sound super profound or write the most artistic thing. If it's coming from a place in your heart and your mind doesn't have to second-guess anything, that's the most raw and the most meaningful way to write lyrics.

In terms of what you write about lyrically, how personal do you feel like you're getting? Do you prefer to be a little cryptic?
I try to find a good balance between the two. I always write based off of personal life experiences, or things that people around me have experienced. There's always going to be a very direct connection to my life, and people can interpret my music however they want. When I write, I like leaving room for people to connect their own experience to my music, because that's what makes music enjoyable—and healing, too.

Do you feel like there's moments where you're pulling back or worried about revealing too much of yourself?
Oftentimes, no—and I think it's just because I feel like I don't really have anything to hide. Some of the tracks on the album show that I'm writing from a place of guilt and reflecting on my character. I've made bad decisions and bad mistakes, and I'm writing about my bad character. People will be able to decipher what I'm writing about, and I think that kind of accountability is really important when you are writing from a place of personal experience—because you're not always in the right, and not every single song is going to be about how someone wronged you. It could be about how you handled a personal experience or a relationship. Being vulnerable with that side of myself is very healing, and it also helps me reflect on my life. I just hope that when people listen to it, they can relate to it—because we're not all perfect, and finding that feeling in music is a really special thing.

You mentioned your "bad character." Talk to me more about scrutinizing yourself.
Self-scrutiny is a really difficult thing to comprehend, internally. What you may see as bad character could be seen as something completely different in someone else's eyes. So a lot of the things that I write about are me being hard on myself and wanting to be a better person, and working towards that goal. I always tell people that I think the meaning in life is to become the best version of yourself, and by reflecting on my experiences and the way that I handle my emotions...there's
definitely a level of harshness that that comes with that, and people listening to my music and hearing my lyrics on how I feel about myself, whether it's my own insecurities or the way that I treated other people—or the way I treat myself, even—to be seen as almost in a pitiful light, or with sympathy or empathy, I think that is really cool and special, because they may feel the same things about themselves too. But to me, and to other people, we don't see it that way.

As an internet-native artist, I'm curious to hear about your earliest memories of being online.
I had an iPad when I was in elementary school, and I'd just watch a bunch of YouTube. Smosh was a really big channel for me. [Laughs] Getting involved in social media wasn't super prevalent in my life. I didn't really use Instagram, Snapchat, or Twitter when I was in middle school.

But the time I was using the internet the most was during COVID, because I was 16 and 17 years old when COVID happened. You're left with your devices, there's not much you could do indoors. So I was playing a lot of games and meeting a lot of people online, and that was the first time that I'd built some sense of community outside of meeting people in real life.

Are you still a gamer?
No, not anymore. I don't have the time or patience for games anymore. The only time I'll play is if people want me to stream it.

I'm realizing as we're talking that I haven't really spoken to anybody around your age about COVID. Talk to me about what it was like to be 16 when the pandemic began.
It was definitely difficult for a lot of people my age—at least, from what I've heard from my friends, and how isolating it could be. But I'm definitely a homebody, and I actually liked being indoors and being able to wake up and just roll out of bed and join my Zoom class right away. That aspect of it was very calming and pleasant to me.

But it was definitely difficult not being able to go out and get that high school experience. It was difficult to make friends, find community, and join clubs, which is why I started writing music and songwriting in my bedroom during COVID as well. My mom had given me her hand-me-down guitar and I was taking classical guitar lessons before COVID hit for about two years. I started playing during COVID—just writing lyrics and humming a tune. That was one of my favorite things to do while we were in lockdown.

What was the first song you learned to play on guitar?
It might've been a Black Sabbath song, or Oasis.

Tell me about your early memories as a music listener and how you've consumed music over the years.
I grew up with my taste changing all the time. When I was in school, I was really into pop music. Ariana Grande was my favorite person ever. When I entered middle school, I got really into alternative artists, so I was going through my emo phase listening to Panic! at the Disco, twenty one pilots, My Chemical Romance, Melanie Martinez, and Halsey. That was a gateway for me trying to find more niche music and just scrolling on YouTube for hours on end—discovering indie music, and then Gorillaz, Beach House, Cocteau Twins, Slowdive. I was around 14 at the time when I started listening to all this music, and it developed from there ever since. I didn't really know what shoegaze was, but I was actively listening to shoegaze without knowing what the genre was.

You mentioned Melanie Martinez, whose work is something which I—and, to be honest, a lot of other music writers—have never really quite fully engaged with. But there is a phenomenon of her being fairly popular with younger listeners. Tell me about what her music meant to you.
It's super random, but I was eating with my family at some Chinese restaurant—I think it was a hot pot restaurant—and I was about 12 years old. The TV in the restaurant was playing her "Dollhouse" music video, and I was mesmerized by the way she looked—the visuals, and how elusive and creepy but still very strikingly pleasant and beautiful the video was. Of course, the music was amazing as well. I'd never really heard anything like it before.

I loved the look that she had for herself, because it felt so unique and fresh. I loved the split hair, the vintage aesthetic, the dolls that she'd have. I put my friends on in middle school as well, and during lunch we'd have competitions to see who could name a Melanie song the fastest. We'd have one of my friends like play a song on Spotify for 0.1 seconds and see if we could guess it—and I always won. I could like sing every single song by heart. I knew the b-sides, the deluxe versions. I made fan edits, I ran fan pages. I was super crazy about it.

I think the main reason why she was so special to me was because I felt like an outcast in middle school. A lot of people made fun of me for for even liking her music or being into that kind of stuff, and it was really comforting knowing that there was a community online that loved her just as much as I did. That's why I ran all those fan accounts.

Obviously, you've gone from running fan accounts to being someone who has fans. What has that been like for you?
It's really crazy, but I love it so much. I think that fan accounts are so sweet. It sounds really narcissistic, but I love watching edits that people make with me in them, and the fan art is so sick. I've actually gotten a lot of fan art on tour because people do drawings and print them out and give them to me as posters, which is really cool. I never would've imagined in in my whole teenage years that I'd be the recipient of fan pages, so seeing them is is crazy.

"Your Face" went gold in Brazil, and I feel like whenever I find somebody online that is obsessively and devotedly being a fan of something, more often than not they're from Brazil.
Every time I post on Instagram or TikTok, the very first comments I get are all from Brazilian people. They spam my comments with "I love you" in Portuguese and "Come to Brazil" and the Brazilian flag. I think it's the cutest thing ever. I'd love to play in Brazil one day. The fans there, at least from what I see on social media, are very energetic and diehard. It'd be really interesting to see how that kind of translates into a live setting.

You've got a few tour dates with Deftones coming up, and I definitely hear them in your music. Growing up, I loved Deftones, and seeing younger people constantly discovering their music has been fascinating to me. Talk to me about your relationship with their music.
I discovered Deftones around the same time that I was listening to a lot of older rock bands, like Oasis. This is really embarrassing, but I had a big AC/DC phase too. But Deftones was a really big band for me in high school and college. What's so encapsulating and interesting about their music, and why so many young people love their music now, is because it's so emotional. It caters to a lot of people, which is why I strive to do a similar thing.

A really good telltale way to determine what is good music is if it can reach people from any country or age. No matter what they're into—what their background is or how old they are—they're going to like your music because they resonate with it, and Deftones is a really good example of that because I see newer fans listening to them. I see the older fans stick around, even though they experiment with their sound or are expressing themselves differently. I just think they're awesome, and I draw a lot of inspiration from their soundscape because I love seeing them rock out on stage—and I want to do the same thing.

Going back to online fandom for a bit, have you had any negative experiences interacting with people online?
Definitely. It was really prevalent in the beginning stages of me making music, because "Your Face" was an instrumental and a lot of people latched onto that idea and assumed that the other music I was making after that was very inauthentic, that I was not making my own music—which is completely untrue. I've been going to the studio, creating my own music, and writing my own riffs and my own melodies for almost two years now. But I try not to let it get to my head. These are all assumptions and misconceptions that people have about me, and to be human is is to be misperceived. It's just a natural way of life, whether or not you make music or if you're in any sort of public eye. I take it with a grain of salt.

The main reason why it bothered me so much back then was because I felt like it was an attack on my character, and I didn't want people to think I was doing any producers wrong, or that I was trying to capitalize off of shoegaze being a trending genre. But I know what I seek out to do, and I know my artistry and the way I work the best—and that's what matters the most.

You were signed to Interscope fairly quickly in your career, and it can be a real challenge to dive headfirst into that level of music industry. I've spoken to artists before who are very young and worried about being thrown into a very uncertain environment, which is what the business is. I'm really curious to hear you talk about your experiences navigating the music industry so far.
It's definitely a very daunting experience as a younger artist, and I bet it's even more difficult for people who are younger than me to start working full-time, because signing to a label is making a commitment and saying, "Okay, now I'm going to make the best music that I can and put it out because these people are putting their trust in me."

The most important thing is having a really good support system, and for me, that's my parents being supportive since day one. My manager is the best I could ask for, and my A&Rs are so attentive, caring, and genuine with everything that I do. Them giving me creative freedom over all of my music is really helpful, and it plays into the amount of de-stressing that I get from from creating. I can just be myself and not see it as a job, because at the end of the day this is what I would have wanted to do if I had the choice. If someone asked me like 10 years ago, even when i was super little, what my dream job was, I'd probably say something like "A rock star." So it's great being able to do this, and I feel like it really outweighs the negatives.