Samira Winter Interviewed By Beach Fossils’ Dustin Payseur
Photos shot by Samira Winter and Dustin Payseur.
Adult Romantix, the new album by Winter, released a couple of days ago.
As the title might suggest, it is an album by Samira Winter with an enormous amount of heart, sensuality, grace, and hopefulness, and with just enough sludge and moody layers that you can feel the sharp and unexpected edges of romance as you listen along. It’s an album that you should spend time with alone, reclined in your bed staring up at the ceiling and taking in a couple of times; an album to take into your most intimate and personal proximity. It’s an album worth talking about, so we got someone else to talk to Samira Winter about it: Dustin Payseur of Beach Fossils. Together they went for a walk around Brooklyn, visited Dustin’s studio, shot a couple of disposable cameras, and talked about everything that made Adult Romantix; as Samira described, ‘…that feeling of seeing a disco ball refracting, or a car passing by and the music doing a doppler effect. I’m looking for the feeling of that swaying emotion - the beautiful and the sad - that language.’
Dustin Payseur: Where should we chill? Right here?
Samira Winter: I don’t know… Hmm.
DP: The couch is pretty chill, let’s chill on the couch. It’s really comfortable.
SW: Sick. Okay cool. Yeah, for me, I will write songs and make my demos really demo-ey. I love writing, taking off the pressure, and just being like, alright I’m going to write a lot of songs and demo a lot, and in my head I’m trying to trick myself into believing that I’m not even going to show anyone.
DP: I used to think I’m only going to record when I’m feeling really inspired, and then you're limiting yourself when you're going to record. Once I make a routine, I’m just showing up and I’m just going to write and record shit even if I’m not inspired at all. Sometimes I write my favorite songs that way. I think it’s just a matter of showing up and definitely feeling like everything's a sketch book and knowing that no one is going to see this if I don’t want to show it to them. You can feel free to work on stuff, and that's when you explore and experiment or make happy mistakes and that becomes one of your favorite things.
W: What Kind Of Blue Are You? and Adult Romantix were kind of a similar process. It’s really nice, I kind of prefer doing it like that where you’re gradually writing and recording over the span of a couple of years instead of being like, I wrote all these songs and scheduling time. Nothing against that, but I like recording in different moments within the span because it captures different things. If you just record everything in these two weeks, it’s not as fun.
DP: I take years to write an album and I used to hate myself for it but now I’m like, this is covering a span of my existence where I am changing and morphing, and you’re getting to go back through a diary almost of the past few years. You go through so many different experiences that can shape what you’re working on. Even what you're listening to at the time changes. I get really obsessed with one thing at a time and only listen to a certain thing and think I’m only going to make this kind of music, and I make a bunch of demos of that, and then I move on from it. And I only get one song from it, but that’s cool that it took that long because this was the one song that was the objective or whatever, and it found its way out. Being rushed can also be good, you get different things out of either one.
SW: Because we are talking about ‘showing up’, if you’re showing up in your life, trying to have that artistic lens with you so that at any moment you could jot something down or be inspired, having that happen over time and showing up for the work, it turns out a lot of the best quality stuff. Listening to your records, I’m glad you take the time that you need because by the time it comes out, it feels like such a pure vision.
DP: It’s weird how it can turn into that. I don't know other peoples experience or process, but when im working on an album, I have no idea what it's going to be. Even when I’m at the point where I'm mixing, sometimes I mix a bunch of songs that don’t end up on the album and I’m still writing lyrics in between the mixing sessions. Usually the mixing process is such a blur, and that’s when I’m writing lyrics which is weird. I just turn it in to get mastered, and then I’ll get the masters back and think, oh, this is the album. Usually the songs don’t even have names when I’m mixing them and don’t have a sequence.
SW: I do that too, the sequencing, it is a whirlwind.
DP: It can be an obsessive thing - it’s weird because you’re fitting this puzzle together and only you know where it goes. But with streaming and shit, most people aren’t even listening to it that way anyway. The sequencing is such a sacred thing to the artist -
SW: There are so many sacred things to us, that for other people, it doesn’t even translate.
DP: They’re just shuffling a playlist and there's no context for where it is in the album, which is weird because it’s like watching a movie but it was broken down by scenes, and it was a movie streaming platform where it’s just three minute scenes.
SW: I’m surprised that doesn’t exist already. Eternal Sunshine, Kill Bill, into Eraserhead. That would make its own little art piece.
DP: But you need the context of the whole picture. I like to believe that when I put out an album, someone lays on their bed and listens to it end to end, because that’s how I listen to it. Sometimes people will be like, ‘have you heard that new album by whoever?’ And I’m like, no, because that’s my favorite band and I haven’t found the time to listen to it three times in a row by myself.
SW: I totally feel that. It’s so important to be present. The way that you experience music really changes… I think also how it sounds and discovering music- a lot of the time I love discovering music by being in an environment where someone else is showing it to me. It’s being played and I get to discover it. Context is important.
DP: I was at some restaurant and the people that were there were so normie and it was a really normie environment, and I heard a song and I really like it so I Shazamed it, and when I went home I was like, this is actually not that cool. But the environment was so normie that it made the song feel cool.
SW: That’s happened to me! There’s this song that I do love. I found it when I was on tour walking around in this empty outdoor mall. It’s this song called ‘4AM’ and it’s really dreamy and electronic and I felt like the melody was so pretty, and then I discovered it’s by Kaskade, it’s not as cool, but the experience and that connection with the song-
DP: Sometimes I’ll Shazam a song and it’s not as cool because now I know what it is and it’s not a mystery. It’s like a unicorn, like a magical thing. Oh! I made some notes while listening to your album which is fucking awesome. I really like it a lot. I’m a hater of most things, not to say that my opinion matters at all, but it’s something so enjoyable all the way through. My favorite music is stuff that can feel romantic and sad at the same time, which I think perfectly encapsulates what you do.
SW: Aw man. Thank you. It’s crazy - I was listening to your first record around the time I was starting Winter in 2012 in Boston. It was that era… just a lot of great dreamy music. It’s a crazy full circle thing. But yeah, I’m always looking for that feeling of seeing a disco ball refracting, or a car passing by and the music doing a doppler effect. I’m looking for the feeling of that swaying emotion - the beautiful and the sad - that language.
DP: I was talking to someone about how there are certain genres that are this one thing, and that one thing is cool because it's a release. I wanna listen to a certain thing because I’m happy or mad or I want to cry or whatever. But shoegaze-y music feels more like the essence of what life is in general - so many different emotions at once. The human experience is happy and sad and romantic and there’s heartbreak and loss - all these things that define the experience. For my own music, I like to say that the genre is ‘coming of age’.
SW: I relate to that! Especially my last two records, it’s very coming of age.
DP: Which doesn’t have to just be a certain time in your life, because you’re constantly coming of age. ‘Existentialism’ is my favorite song on the new album. I like things that have a dark or gritty edge to them, and it has that in a way that feels cool. I like genres like Trip Hop because they sound kind of snakey - sexy but dark, and I think that a lot of these songs have that.
SW: I think that this album has a dark mysterious night time beach kind of element to it. Not the whole album, but there is a world in it that is that vibe.
DP: There’s a part on ‘Without You’ that hits on that.
SW: The bridge?
DP: Yeah!
SW: Yeah, it feels like kind of like you're entering a tunnel in that moment and like you're entering an internal world. Hopefully the listener will be able to kind of go through something themselves and kind of have a moment because there’s no singing, the chords change, you’re just kind of in it.
DP: A good bridge is as important as a chorus or a verse. It’s the most underrated, it’s the place where you can dig into emotion.
SW: I don’t know if you feel this, but I grew up listening to songs that had bridges, I think they used to be way more common. I love a bridge because it’s a place where you can paint a picture of something connected to the story, but then there’s this little rainy day, and then you can go back.
DP: I just saw Oasis in London and one thing that I came away from that show thinking about was how fucking good Noel is at writing pre choruses.
SW: I love pre choruses!
DP: I’ll listen to some people who are not the strongest songwriters where their chorus feels like a good pre chorus.
SW: When I sit down, I really try to go as far as I can instead of getting caught up in arranging or layering things. I think that that’s more of the work part - you have to kind of push yourself. I do believe that every day there are songs in the air.
DP: You’re like a radio antenna. Every day there are songs in the air and if you choose to sit down and write a song, you have your antenna up and you can catch one. And I think about how if I hadn’t sat down at that exact moment in time, I wouldn’t have that song.
SW: I think that there are a lot of those. This song that I put out, ‘Hide-A-Lullaby’ is a chord progression that I always kind of had with me; the melody, I’d sit down and play it on guitar and I was like okay this is a song that keeps wanting to come back into my life. You keep remembering the melody, it’s destined to be written.
DP: There are songs that are that for me that I have demos of that I’ve never released because I’m so tired of them. I should probably just put them out.
SW: For me, there are songs that are really special for me that I wrote around the time of Adult Romantix but they feel more like… they are ideas that I have that I’d like to keep for myself, and I think that they inform me. Like, when you start the process of writing your album, I do think that there are so many things that inform it both consciously and subconsciously, and maybe those songs that are the unreleased canon, maybe it’s kind of good that they are a secret.
DP: My parents are songwriters too and they don’t have anything out, but they told me that it’s good to keep stuff for yourself.
SW: With Beach Fossils, do you feel like there’s something that’s kind of a North Star that guides you or helps you make choices?
DP: I think yes. When I was a late-teen I got really into Taoism and a lot of that is just about modeling yourself after nature and letting things pass through and not trying to possess them. I think that for my first record, that was my biggest inspiration. Whatever comes out, I’m just going to record and not try to edit or arrange it.
SW: That is so cool! And music is just so vulnerable, too. Making your own music, you’re putting something so personal out. Even if the lyrics aren’t like personal personal, it’s still you. That stream of consciousness thing, I really resonate with that. I would say that I have my own spirituality - my own set of beliefs. I think that growing up in Brazil and some of my childhood in Miami, growing up around really beautiful nature, it connects you. Especially the ocean, it is always a source of inspiration. Like our conscious mind is like the wave, the white part of the wave, and our subconscious is everything else, that deep ocean. Improvisation I think is like this very divine thing. Trusting your dreams, trusting your intuition and the things that we don’t see or understand is crucial because there is always going to be that voice. I’m trying to get better about not being like, is this a good song or chord progression, and trying to wonder if it feels good and takes me to a good place.
