So, I understand what a Sea Lemon is, but why did you choose that as the moniker to release music under?

A Sea Lemon is a type of sea slug that's native to the Pacific Northwest. I grew up over here  and I grew up going to the beach a lot. My mom loves to go to the beach and she works for, like she volunteers at an aquarium and has for like 10 years. At the aquarium, she helps go to the beach and tells little kids what they're seeing. A Sea Lemon is like a rare find at the beach, so it's kind of like a tribute to my mom and my relationship with her and my relationship with being in Seattle.

Have you been able to see one in person before?

Yes! A couple of times. Especially if you go tidepooling on the coast.

Your move to New York and the pandemic seemed to really push Sea Lemon into existence. Do you think without the pandemic you would’ve still found yourself making music?

I had been living in New York and then I moved back to Seattle during the pandemic. I moved to New York right after college for a couple of years to see what it was like. Then during the pandemic, I was like, “I want to go back home and just be closer to my family”. In the pandemic, it was okay to just kind of hunker down and do your thing. Finally, when I moved to Seattle, I had a physical space where I could keep instruments and have my own space. That just kind of helped push me into making my own music. I think that maybe if I had stayed in New York, I would have made my own music a little bit here and there. I think I would have been more likely to help out in somebody else's projects. That's what I had been doing in New York for and I love playing in other people's bands. But you know, when I moved to Seattle, and it was pandemic, it was locked down.

It’s mentioned that your previous EP, Close Up, is a “grab bag” of tracks to figure out your sound. With Stop At Nothing, do you think you’ve found it? 

Yeah, I think I've found a state of my sound that I'm excited about right now. It's hard to ever say that's definitely where I'm going and I'm stopped there. I think that it's exciting for me to feel like I have this first EP to kind of build off of the sound and, you know, have my second EP be delving into some things that maybe I wouldn't have for our first EP. Just weird synth sound and the overall vibe, it's exciting to feel like that first thing is kind of out of the way so that you can start to explore more once you've got that very first piece.

So if you had to put into words or maybe like, summarize your music into a genre, like what do you think it would be?

I always say it's like dream pop. Some of my stuff gets closer to shoegaze. For the most part it's kind of dream pop adjacent. 

Congrats on the announcement of your Stop At Nothing EP! This is the second EP you’ll release. Tell me a little bit more about this project.

My second EP comes out August 25.  So far, it really is like the two songs off of it, but the whole EP is darker. It's kind of weirder, it plays on almost funnier concepts. I wrote a lot of the songs myself, and I wrote two of them with my producer, Jackson, who goes by Day Wave in his music, and went to LA, and we had some sessions. We just wrote a bunch, produced a bunch, and made a bunch of music. It was fun, working with somebody quite closely to write a few of the songs. One of the songs that's going to be coming out is a feature with him. Just the two of us singing and it's just fun to work more closely with others, because during the pandemic on my EP, it was just me really and a producer remotely. It was fun to go somewhere and record musically in this way. 

So you really got the whole experience!

Yeah! I'm really excited about the direction that the music went in. It went into a darker place that I think is fun. While it is kind of heavier, I don't feel like it takes itself super seriously. I just like music that feels kind of heavy and light at the same. That’s kind of what I'm excited about.

I love how you describe the two lead singles - “Cellar” and “Vaporized” off of your upcoming EP as “a couple who live together in the same house”, yet they project conflicting themes. Why did you choose these two as a first look into the EP?

Yeah, I think “Cellar” is one of my favorite songs off of the EP. It was the song that when I played for my team, and people around me and my friends, everyone was like, “that is the single” and so I was just really excited to release “Cellar”, period. “Cellar” is about my love of horror movies and “Vaporized” is a much lighter, with a sonic palette and song, but it's also about being afraid of dying and being obsessed with looking up ways of how people die in the middle of the night and being like, “I know, this is really unhealthy”. I feel that obsession, you know? The theme is really tied between those two songs. That's kind of why I say they live in the same house together. I think it's fun to really sell it and have a song where people realize this is very different from the rest of my discography. “Vaporized” to me feels truer to some of my older stuff like “Sunday” and “Turn Away”. It's fun to give people a bite of two things that sound a little bit different. I feel like I love doing that and exploring different sounds so that no one ever feels like, if I release a song, everyone would think it sounds the exact same as all ten other songs, I want to keep people on their toes.

You recently released “Vaporized” and an accompanying visual. There’s so much to unpack here! It starts off with Sea Lemon’s dive into books that pushes the appearance of the mysterious masked figure. Who is this character meant to represent?

I worked on the music video with a director and producer who makes music videos, named Alex who goes by Otium and he just has a big brain. He's just so incredible at making videos and he came up with some of those like shot by shot concepts. I really had I come in knowing I wanted to do something that felt like a play on horror movie tropes, where there's some discovery in a basement, someone, you know, reading something late at night, someone like doing something they shouldn't but knowing someone's around the corner. Just very classic, what you would see in a scary movie. That character in the “Vaporized” music video is wearing this mask, and the outfit that's a night gown and red gloves. That's a look that I have had for a couple of months. I knew it was gonna be a core look for me, and I also am a designer. It's fun for me to create visual continuity between songs and between pieces and have it be recognizable to those things. If you watch the whole video, at the end the point where I unmask myself and that’s the symbol of that video. Having scary dark thoughts and realizing that those things sometimes come from within more than they're being shown to you. So, that character is kind of a metaphor for that. I also just think that when I collected those pieces, the nightgown and the gloves, I knew that I was going to do something with them, because it's just so wacky.

While we see Sea Lemon sort of embodying this character throughout the music video, it’s fully revealed at the end that it was Sea Lemon all along. Why did you choose to reveal their identity rather than continue the suspense?

I think we chose to because you could watch the whole musical part of the video, and go, “Okay, song’s over. That was scary”. Then it goes into “Cellar” just for a moment. It's like playing this recall moment where you hear “Cellar” in the basement wanting to hear what's going on, I want to see what happens. It's kind of an opportunity to recall those moments from a sound perspective. It's fun to couple that with  a recall moment when I'm realizing that this creature was myself all along. It was kind of fun to put those together. In my head I thought of “Vaporized” and “Cellar” as two friends. I wanted to establish a little story between those two songs. The rest of the EP has that theme of obsession and curiosity, but I wouldn't say that story feels very “Vaporized” and “Cellar” focused.

Will we be seeing more of this alter ego in future visuals? Or is this the end of their story?

I think I have thought of that story as the ending. But who knows. I just played a festival over the weekend and my band, and I were talking and I was like, “Okay, I'm not sure what I'm gonna wear”. I ended up wearing part of the school outfit. It's another opportunity to throwback to that character moment. Maybe, I guess, something that I wanted to do was make that a big visual moment. That video is the big visual moment for this EP. It's possible to throw in little hints of that throughout, but I think that’s the big place, you're gonna see that caveat. 

It's cool to hear how much planning really goes into every piece of who Sea Lemon is and how an audience would view Sea Lemon’s music. Tell me a little bit more about the festival. You were at the Capitol Hill Block Party, right? That's something that you grew up going to and we're raised on. What was it like just being like on the other side of things? 

I played Capitol Hill Block Party last year on a much smaller stage, so this year was fun. We played on the main stage and we played outside. It was just great. I'm friendly with the people who put on the festival. They are so wonderful. It's been awesome because I grew up in the Seattle area going to Bumbershoot, and Capitol Hill Block Party and its just classic Seattle institutions. It's really fun to go to festivals and shows and attend those things that as a kid, I would watch in awe.

In just a few weeks, you’ll be going on tour! How are you feeling about that?

I'm feeling excited, I'm feeling really excited. I’ll be opening for an artist called Hatchie, who I'm a huge fan of and I just love their music. It's so funny. You know, when you're gonna make songs I usually like to have some type of Spotify playlist that isn't even just one song that is the inspiration for my music. I may really like the drum sound in this or really like how long the chorus or pre chorus is. I have taken so much inspiration from Hatchie. I'll always have a couple of her songs be  inspirational threads of ideas for my songs. It's really cool to have the opportunity to open for her. I live in Seattle and the tour’s on the West Coast, so it's nice to just do something that's close to home.

Congrats on that! How are you planning for the tour to keep the continuity going with everything? Are you planning to wear a different outfit every night? Or is it going to be like a set outfit and keep up the characters?

I love to do a fun dress up moment on stage. But the other thing, too, is I love to dress up for a show. I also like to gauge the venue because I think it's just one of those things. You know when you're in high school and you go to class and somebody's in a ballgown, and you're like, “Hmm, that seems weird”. Making sure that [the outfit] works in that setting is what I would do. I like to incorporate small moments of those looks, like I really liked wearing the ribbon when wearing the shirt. Maybe I would bring that pinafore uniform on stage, but I don't really know … I'm still figuring out what that's gonna look like.

That'll be something to look forward to. Backtracking just a little bit, you had mentioned that you created playlists that you really drew inspiration from when you are creating your music. It's nice to hear an artist be transparent in saying that they take inspiration from others. I feel like a lot of times people try to portray this idea that every idea they've ever had is totally original and as an artist, you know that that's not true. Who else do you take inspiration from or what other creative processes go into creating Sea Lemon’s music?

Well, for one, it's so hard to establish originality in anything and seeking that out as a means to an end to me … You feel that it’s almost impossible. To me it's more fun to know that there are incredible artists who inspire me and be able to pay tribute to them in some way. Rather than feeling like everything I have to do I have to be like creating something entirely new. That just seems so hard. There's just like so much music out there anyway. Big influences and inspiration to me … I always love listening to the Cocteau  Twins and Slowdive, classic dream pop shoegaze 90s bands. My producer, Jackson, who goes by Day Wave in his music, he did production for Hazel English who is more of a contemporary inspiration for me. Then there are some artists that I love who I'm friendly with, like an artist named Goon who I also take inspiration from and it's fun to be friends with people you know personally. I want to infiltrate some of this work in my own. There are some more modern examples of influences. When I go into making songs, I have a couple playlists for songs I've been writing, maybe this is kind of some inspiration for those songs in terms of how they sound. At the very beginning, I like to make a Pinterest board with visual ideas. Just really early on, even before all of the songs were written at all, I had a big Pinterest board of how I want the songs to look like. I think that ended up really influencing the way that it sounds and looks just based off of like this scary board that I made. It was really fun to have both of those things and then be able to kind of craft that vision.

It'd be really interesting to see the Pinterest boards and listen to the song along with it! I just love that you pull inspiration from people that you look up to, I think sometimes originality can be so forced, and that's when artists start to hate the things that they've created. I think sometimes that inspiration and originality comes at moments when we aren't even trying.

I never really grew up a big singer, like at all. So for me, what I love is putting music together. I love writing music. I love composing songs. The act of singing is something that is still pretty unfamiliar to me still. It's funny when I talk about my songs, and I was like, “Oh, my voice sounds okay, but I guess it's something that makes my songs original”. I kind of have a different voice than other people and that's not something that I have to be like, “Oh, my voice sounds bad”. I can just be like, “my voice just makes my music original to myself”. I think things that can feel initially like insecurities can almost be reframed into being what makes my music my own.

There’s three unreleased tracks off Stop At Nothing that we haven’t heard yet. You have mentioned one of those has a feature, anything you can share? 

There’s the other two songs I'm really excited about. One of them is a little bit poppier and closer to some of the songs I have on Close Up. Then one of them is, I would say, my furthest departure from something I have out so far. It's gonna be fun to show all three of those songs and have one one of them be a classic indie pop song and really make sense. Then one of them is a little weird. So, I'm really excited about that. I've been sitting on the songs for a while at this point. It's just really exciting to get them out there and have other people listen to them and not feel like you are sitting on so much material.

What do you hope the future of Sea Lemon looks like?

I just want to keep writing music. I want to keep recording music. I want to just keep playing with different instruments and sounds and loving when inspiration strikes. Also, getting into the craft of trying to write every day is something that I've been doing more recently. I'm just really excited to work on new material after this and see where I'm feeling and ask if the inspiration from the second EP still lands. Do I still want to do some stuff in more of a “Cellar” direction or a “Vaporized” direction? Like, where do I want to go? So? Yeah, that's what I'm excited about. Also, to keep recording. I'm excited to keep playing live and just seeing what happens after this tour. In general, I feel like it's been a really exciting time. This EP is my first release with my new label, which is Luminelle Records. They've been so wonderful and gracious, and have helped me so much. I’m excited to keep working with them and seeing what can happen after this EP.