Section 36 Music: 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!

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:

Thanks again Belen, and good luck reaching your goals!