Opal Gibbons Visits Section 36 Music!

Photo: Grace Abdayem 

Section 36 Music had another visitor! Opal Gibbons has an upcoming EP, "Pilot", that you won't want to miss. I was so flattered that she wanted to visit with us to discuss the song, her future goals, and more! I'm sure you'll love what she had to say.

So, let's see what happens when Opal Gibbons visits Section 36 Music! 

I am incredibly excited about your upcoming EP, “Pilot”. What can you tell me about it?

Hehe thank you for the compliments!!! The EP is 4 songs and I like to describe it as dark wave & synth pop. The single off the EP, GiRL WiTH NO ONE comes out Sept 18, and the EP comes out the 22nd! Two of the songs were actually products of my required music technology 101 class at Berklee (which sparked my love for production)! The song “Adrifting” was written on piano during quarantine (sooo long ago!!!), and then produced by my dad. When people say their albums have taken a long time to release I chuckle a little because sitting on this song for 6 years has genuinely been torture. I feel incredibly lucky to have my best buds feature on this project. My amazing friend (and guitar teacher!) Ryker Savage plays guitar for the single “GiRL WiTH NO ONE”, I have my friend Lincoln Rasmussen playing guitar on “Adrifting”, and my dad is actually the one who finished all the mixing and mastering for me! I also have the anarchist-run electronic/indie label eMERGENCY heARTS helping me with this release. I highly recommend everyone checking out their website, it’s just a hub of outlier and underdog music for all the weirdos in the world.

Do you have any favorite memories from the recording process?

Photo: Liliana Watkins

GiRL WiTH NO ONE was definitely a fun one. I produced it entirely with Logic Pro presets that I opened and mindlessly fiddled with. I probably spent weeks staring at my computer screen cluelessly turning knobs in bewilderment. I asked a classmate from my music tech class to come record a guitar solo for it, and then spent the following 4 days chopping his takes up and placing the notes where I wanted them to be. That classmate ended up becoming one of my closest friends, and I hold those early memories with him very close to my heart. Shoutout Ryker! 

I also had the idea of placing whispering/crying/gossiping in the background of the song which lead to some fun memories. My dad engineered the whole vocal recording session, and had to pull some real mean tricks to get my BGVs to sound.. not cringe? I am not an actor… It all sounded pretty awkward before my dad stepped in. If you listen closely you can hear us talking about my cat, Sita, pooping during the laugh tracks, as well as her meowing later in the crying tracks. My crying tracks sounded especially fake and embarrassing!!! My childhood cat, Tink, had died just a month or so before this recording session. My dad pulled out the memorial we had made from her ashes for the first time in our session to get some real cries from me. I love my dad, he’s so cruel to me. But damn it got the job done.

Is there a favorite song of yours on the EP?

“Hostility” has been the crowd favorite so far. The production is definitely the most advanced, given it was the last song I wrote for the EP. I think the selling point for that one is the vocal layers. I suffered a vocal injury before doing all the vox recordings and it makes me joyful as hell that I sound so good despite the obstacle. I personally am a big fan of “Afterwards”. I produced it as my final project for the music tech 101 class, and my professor approached me after presenting and told me I HAD to apply for the sound design major (EPD) at Berklee. I was prepared to be a vocal performance major prior to this interaction, but he genuinely changed the course of my life with that statement. Every time I listen to that song I feel insane that my beginner level skills were able to output such an awesome product. 

Who or what would you consider your biggest musical inspiration?

Oh my goodness I am going to name one bajillion artists. The artists I listen to tend to rotate as time goes on. I really deep dived into goth culture and music during the time I was working on this EP. My main rotation was Skinny Puppy, Depeche Mode, Cabaret Voltaire, Bjork, and Goldfrapp. The music I’m creating now is heavily influenced by Scott Walker, New Order, Yaz(oo), and Gary Numan. The only constants in my music rotation are Elliott Smith, Fiona Apple, and David Bowie. I will never stop listening to them no matter how depressed it makes me. Y’all will have to cut my ears off before I go cold turkey on my boy Elliott. 

What is the biggest challenge with your musical career?

Honestly, the biggest challenge has just been myself. Not to get all emotional, but after almost a decade of misdiagnoses and years of unnecessary antipsychotics and useless mood stabilizers, I finally got my freaking ADHD diagnosis!! I spent years thinking my lack of motivation and intense exhaustion and outbursts were just a broken factor of what makes me Opal. I finally found a psychiatrist that was willing to meet with me for more than 15 minutes and he saw through the 21 years of professional masking. That diagnosis absolutely changed my life, and I think this album would’ve come out MUCH sooner if I had been properly diagnosed all those years ago. This is a PSA to all mental health professionals to treat your women differently! Our symptoms are not the same as men and we deserve better than years of carelessness and ignorance to our issues.

What are your immediate musical goals?

As of lately, I’ve been focusing a lot of my DJ career! I started DJing like 8? months ago. I decided to post some of my mixes on instagram and they blew up pretty fast- I went from 1.5k followers to over 10k in less than 2 weeks! Fame is incredibly scary and intimidating to me, being a “pop star” is definitely not a goal I have. I think all the attention would make me go actually insane. And that bar is pretty high for the life I’ve lived. My ultimate dream is to get hired by a game animation studio and write music for video games. All of the music I’ve written with code is very game reminiscent, and I hope I get to use it in that context soon! As for the school year, my goal is to just write and release as much music as possible, play as many gigs as possible, and enjoy the remaining time I have with my friends and professors. I’ve been treated with so much love and compassion at this school, and I’m really going to miss all my buddies. 

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I'm so excited to hear all this new music!

As always, I want to thank Opal for visiting with us, and for sending along the pictures to accompany the interview. 

I'm sure you’ll all want to follow her and see what she has going on. Here are the best places to find her:

Instagram

YoutTube

Website

Thanks again Opal, and good luck reaching your goals!

Belen Visits Section 36 Music!

Section 36 Music had another visitor! Belen has a recent single, "Child", that is one you'll want to add to your playlist immediately. I was absolutely thrilled that she wanted to visit with us to discuss the song, her future goals, and more! I'm sure you'll love what she had to say.

So, let's see what happens when Belen visits Section 36 Music! 

I absolutely love your recent single, “Child”. What can you tell  me about it? 

I’m so glad you’ve been enjoying it! Hmm, where to start. 

This song is actually 4 years old. I wrote it the week before I was about  to move out of my home and home country (Germany) to study music in  Paris.  

I was sitting on the couch at my grandparent’s old house and I just felt  sort of uneasy and small. I had like a weird dissociative moment where it felt like I was seeing myself from a 3rd person view. It was like seeing  a tiny bud of a flower in a huge field while zooming out, or like seeing myself sitting on that couch alone and seeing my exact position from a world-wide overhead view with houses, streets, cities and whole  countries and continents around me. I felt hyper-aware of how little I was in ratio to the whole literal world with all its ecosystems. That’s what it felt like. 

With that feeling I jotted down the lyrics to the full song in my notes app in one typing rush. I added a melody and chords to it later that night when I went to bed.  

It took 4 years of patience and trust until I had worked my way up to creating a release-ready version of the song. To be fully honest, I had  been very nervous about collaborating with a producer for a long time. However I knew that producing the song all by myself was not going to be the right move either.  

I had a decent amount of my musical trust ruptured from some negative experiences during my time studying music in Paris. Not to get too deep, but it really took a full year of re-wiring my brain and heart to begin reconstructing that trust. Meeting and working with my co producer Jackson Perry was the finishing touch of that process. He has such a pleasant light-hearted-ness that helped me shed off any nerves or discomfort within a couple sessions, and it wasn’t until this year that I met him. We worked on the song in between classes for about 6 months and a beautiful friendship blossomed during that production process. I decided for us to take on a handful more songs that’ll you’ll hear more of in the coming weeks :). 

Releasing this song is a true personal milestone. It marks letting go of years old perfectionism and fear of being perceived, replaced with a readiness to offer my music to the world. 

 

The lyric video for “Child” is just incredible. What was it like  putting that together? 

Honestly a lot less magical than it might seem! I think I was on my way home from work when I came across this couch standing outside my apartment. It’s pretty common in my neighborhood that people chuck unwanted furniture. I thought it looked vibey to have a couch outside on the street, so I set up my phone across the sidewalk, laid down and pulled out my laptop and just started typing away the lyrics to ‘Child’. It was a pain to edit because obviously I couldn’t type fast enough to fully match the lyric pacing and I had to make sure everything matched.  

The art video I made was sort of an homage to the French comic culture I grew up with. For context, I spent three significant years of my  childhood in rural France. I grew up reading a lot of comics and took up drawing a few years later. The illustration is a handful of scenes from  my childhood summers. 

I used to want to pursue a career in 2d/3d animation and almost decided to attend RUBIKA upon acceptance, an animation school in France. Posting my visual art in relation to my music is a nice way to  keep that part of my artistry alive. 

You are attending Berklee College of Music. What made Berklee  the right choice for you? 

I am! I’m in my third year, and I’ll be graduating in 2027. I’ve had my eye on Berklee for a while. Since I was 16. I think I was first made aware of Berklee when one of my favorite artists, MARO, would post videos of herself doing covers with Berklee added as the location. That’s when I first took notice of the school. I did a little research and for some reason from that moment on my brain/body decided that that was where I was meant to go eventually. It was like a stubborn reality that I had to make happen somehow. It sounds corny, but I knew it was just supposed to happen. There seemed to be so many people like me there: people from everywhere around the world with the same calling  and dedication to their craft. I didn’t have many creative peers in my  home-life, which made this school all the more attractive.

I auditioned once I was out of high school, but didn’t receive enough funding to be able to attend. So I took an academic detour and decided to enroll in the American School of Modern Music in Paris, because I had seen some students go on to get good scholarships from Berklee afterwards. I went there for 2 years and re-auditioned for Berklee about 1 year and a half in and got a full ride, and that was that! 

So far I’ve used attending music school as a means to move across countries/continents and acclimatize. Moving for school is what got me out of my smaller German hometown, to Paris, and now to the US  (Boston). Since the start I’ve viewed Berklee as the launching pad for me  to find my way to LA. 

Who, or what, would you say are your biggest musical  influences? 

Loved the way you phrased that question. In the most recent years, I’d  say my biggest influences were musicians like MARO, Olivia Barton, Jeff Buckley and Jacob Collier. But it’s tough to say. I’ve been actively listening to music since I was a kid, and I think everything I’ve listened to somehow influences my writing and singing in some way. I listened to so much 70s soul music, 90s-2000s r&b, 2010s pop (almost all female  singers of color) and a variety of jazz growing up. I had an intense K pop phase when I was a young teenager, and then somehow found my way to folk music in my later teens.  

I found a lot of inspiration in classical music as well, conceptually speaking. I thoroughly studied works of Bach and Bartók in my final  years of high school in Germany, analyzing and writing long essays and stuff about how they’d represent concepts or parts of nature through music. That gave me exposure to rhetorical figures in music, which has  really influenced my writing.  

I’ve been a part of vocal groups for a significant part of my life, which  has really influenced my tone and choices in vocal production. I was in a classical avant-garde octet as a teenager in Germany. We learned incredible vocal pieces by Claude Debussy and other composers, I really learned so much of my sense of harmony from singing with them. I was a part of Berklee’s PitchSlapped for 2 full years. They really are the most bad-ass a capella group in the game and singing with them has further pushed my vocal agility and detail-oriented-ness. Most importantly, the group has become like a family to me.

Music aside, I’ve always been very inspired by visual art. Painting,  drawing, visual storytelling. And nature! 

This might sound corny but life itself is probably most inspiring to my  writing. All the music influences just help shape the vessel (my voice  and pen) that carries the message. But the actually message behind my  music has always come from lived experiences. For the longest time I was a very hyper-attuned emotional person, and I think that gave me a very deep access to feelings I could write about. Feelings we all feel at one point but don’t always know how to articulate. I feel like that’s the whole point of songwriting. 

If you could cover any Disney Song, which would you choose? Why? 

I really love Tangled. I think I’d have to go with the Healing Incantation, the song Rapunzel sings to get her hair to glow and heal. It’s so simple and beautiful, and Many Moore does such a magical job at an  emotional delivery. 

Second place would probably go to Reflection from Mulan. The scene where she fully accepts that she just isn’t who she’s expected to be, but still hasn’t found who she’s really meant to be is just so relatable and  impactful. 

The moment where she wipes off her makeup in two wipes at the  climax of the song - UGH. And the arrangement is so beautiful. 

What are your immediate musical goals? 

To release the music I made with Jackson over the Spring and Summer this year. I have a debut EP incoming very very soon. 

After that I’d like to get started on the next project. I’m not sure yet if it’ll be an EP or an Album, but I have a working tracklist of 8 songs. I wrote my entire catalog over the past 4-5 years: during my final years in Germany and most of all my studies in Paris. This upcoming EP is the essence of my writing around the time I left Germany, really rounding off my childhood. It’s light, acoustic and nostalgic, and contains a bunch of bits from my life back then. Often straight from voice memos or messages.

I know that my next body of work will be a bit angstier, with songs from my time in Paris. But more about that later!

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I definitely need to hear all that new music!

As always, I want to thank Belen for visiting with us, and for sending along the pictures to accompany the interview. 

I'm sure you’ll all want to follow her and see what she has going on. Here are the best places to find her:

Instagram

TikTok

Spotify

Website

Thanks again Belen, and good luck reaching your goals!

Brianna Luise Visits Section 36!

Section 36 Music had another visitor! Brianna Luise has an incredible single, "Stretcher", that you will want to stream as soon as you're done here. I was absolutely thrilled that he wanted to visit with us to discuss the song, her future goals, and more! I'm sure you'll love what she had to say.

So, let's see what happens when Brianna Luise visits Section 36 Music! 

I really enjoyed your single, “Stretcher”. What can you tell me about it?

Thank you so much! :) Stretcher is a song that is pretty special to me. I write music when I have something to say. The timeline may shift from when I was feeling what I was to release, but I always have a purpose behind it all. I remember writing down "collateral damage" one day and that's how this song was born. I remember writing this song at a time when I was being told "I had to fit into a box genre wise", and life was beyond overwhelming personally. There is a process to figuring out who you are as an artist and I felt I was losing that. So I got really honest and laid it out. This song also was the first song post "I've got time" (one of my biggest songs yet), so for me it was the scariest to post because of that pressure to do better than the last. But, this song I feel was a turning point for me -- releasing my emotions and experimentation as I navigate as an artist. I felt in this song I took back some power in my purpose when I was losing grip on why I started doing all this. I couldn't be more proud of it even if it's not the most successful song. It was healing, and I hope it can do the same for others.

Do you have any favorite memories from the recording process?

Oh gosh this is a tough one. I think my favorite memories of this recording process had to be the vulnerability I felt in this one. I had my moments of crying, anger, confusion, happiness...I had it all with this one. Writing lyrics is one of the most special moments to me and being able to say what I needed to and sing it how I hoped...it really just is a beautiful feeling overall. It's a labor of love. I remember sitting in the recording booth after the final take was done and looking at the recording engineer through the glass -- we just smiled at each other and knew what just happened was needed. 

You are a graduate of Berklee College of Music. What is the biggest thing Berklee did for your musical career?

Berklee is something I still am in awe about, that it was part of my reality. Berklee was always a "dream school" for me so to say I got to graduate from Berklee is wild haha. The biggest thing Berklee gave me for my musical career was resilience I'd have to say. And trust me, I needed that haha. I can't lie and say going to Berklee on my resume hasn't helped as well, but it goes deeper than that. Berklee days held a lot of my greatest moments and difficult moments. I had a hard time, and when I was there the world was shut down almost the whole time. Online community became normal during that time. And in such unpredictable moments of the world and life at the same time I needed a good foundation. Berklee gave me the opportunity to believe in myself way more and venture into so many different avenues. Even when I get knocked down, I am capable of getting up. The stress doesn't cripple me like it used to. Today I still sing, I still songwrite, I produce a bit and work with people everyday -- network everyday -- it's so exciting. I believe a lot of my resilience came from Berklee. 

Who or what would you consider your biggest musical inspiration?

My biggest musical inspiration -- wow. So many people come to mind. I could talk about some top artists of mine like Kelly Clarkson, Lewis Capaldi, Alec Benjamin and Twenty One Pilots. My huge love for Broadway, which includes many shows, like "The Outsiders" and "Lost Boys" being my favorites right now. But, I'd have to say the most important ones are my mom and my granny. They brought music to my life in the biggest and most fantastic way. Consistently. Passionately. I'd forever be grateful for their inspiration, and the many past and future artists to come.

What is the biggest challenge with your musical career?

The biggest challenge with my musical career -- I can't lie and say being an independent artist is easy. You're wearing beyond multiple hats. Constantly networking. Trying new things. While trying to be yourself. Staying true to myself while supporting a career as ambitious as this is hard. Financially it gets hard. But, you have to remain positive. Work Hard. Manifest. And I really recommend working to get a manager, I'm finally getting proper help and it's a game changer.

What are your immediate musical goals?

My immediate musical goals are vast. I have plans to release an album next year which has truly been a labor of love. I will probably release a few songs before then, collaborations are on the dock. And if it wasn't enough --I have a few secret projects that are coming together. Brand new chapters incoming, I've been locked in. And I'm excited to talk more about them soon. 

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I know I'm sure excited about an album!

As always, I want to thank Brianna for visiting with us, and for sending along the pictures to accompany the interview. 

I'm sure you’ll all want to follow her and see what she has going on. Here are the best places to find her:

Instagram

TikTok

Spotify

Thanks again Brianna, and good luck reaching your goals!

Going Behind the Scenes with Sarah Sovak

I wrote my first song in high school for my senior-year graduation project. I had always loved journaling, writing out my feelings, and making melodies in my head, but I was nervous to actually start songwriting. After two years of classically focused piano lessons, I didn’t know how to create my own chord progressions, and I felt like my first song had to be perfect. Once I let go of that fear, I realized songwriting was really about trial and error. And, more importantly, it became a form of therapy for me. Coming to Berklee was a turning point for me. Being surrounded by talented, motivated people and processing a breakup, I began channeling my emotions into my songs. What I was once afraid I couldn’t do became one of the most honest ways I knew how to express myself!

I want to dive deeper into the BTS of the two singles from my upcoming EP, Remnants of You, arriving this fall. My debut single, “I Wish You Were a Bad Guy,” is also the opening track of the EP. It was the first song I decided to fully finish at Berklee, and I wrote it late at night in a Berklee practice room on October 29th. The original version actually sounded completely different! The tempo, melody, and rhythm of the chorus all changed through the revision process. I spent time workshopping the song until the production and songwriting captured the exact emotion I wanted to express.

The song is, at its core, raw heartbreak. When I wrote it, I wasn’t thinking about holding anything back because I had no idea an entire EP would eventually grow from it. At the time, it was simply a way to get my emotions out and make sense of what I was feeling. As I continued songwriting and realized how much it helped me process my emotions, I decided I didn’t want to lose that honesty, even when I knew I wanted to share these songs publicly. I realized that if I was feeling these things, someone else probably was too. I want my music to be a source of comfort and connection and remind people that they aren’t alone in whatever they’re feeling!

The second single, “A Good Thing,” was written with my friend and fellow Berklee songwriter Jayda Shaye. We met in Songwriting Foundations and were paired together for our very first assignment, connecting immediately. I really admire Jayda as a songwriter, and we have always had a natural ability to understand each other when we write together. By the time we wrote “A Good Thing,” I had five songs for the EP but felt like something was missing. I wanted one more song that told a different story and had a different sound, and I knew Jayda was the person I wanted to write it with.

The only day our schedules aligned was Marathon Monday, April 20th. After cheering on the marathon with my friends, Jayda and I locked ourselves in a practice room for about an hour and a half and wrote the song. It was completely last minute, but somehow it became the final piece of the puzzle. I’m so glad we made it work because it brought a different energy to the EP that I knew it needed!

With the help of my producer and engineer, Fooey Gomez, who I met in a songwriting class at Berklee, we created distinct moods for each song that reflect how my perspective on the same breakup changed over time. “I Wish You Were a Bad Guy” captures the intensity of the immediate aftermath, so we built it around electric guitars, dynamic shifts, and a more emotional, powerful production. “A Good Thing,” on the other hand, looks back from further in the future, describing the emotions of reconnecting with someone from your past. We made this one more acoustic, conversational, and reflective. Using different instruments and levels of intensity allowed each song to represent a different stage of processing heartbreak, creating an EP that takes the listener through that emotional journey.
We recorded the vocals during finals week, squeezing sessions in wherever we could. I'm endlessly grateful for Fooey and PTK5’s help throughout this recording process, we made it work in a practice room with a very makeshift setup. In a way, that feels fitting, because my songwriting journey started the same way: imperfectly, through trial and error, and by simply taking the leap.

After a summer of revisions, mixing, and mastering, the EP is finally ready! I couldn’t be more excited to share these songs with the world! More than anything, I hope they make someone feel understood. If even one person feels a little less alone because of these songs, it will all have been worth it. 

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Where to Find Sarah Sovak

Instagram

Spotify

Apple Music

Section 36 Music