Q&A: Belle Shea Talks Musical Influences, Collective Community and New Single “Leah”
FINDING OPTIMISM IN THE WAKE OF HEARTBREAK — If you were to ask alternative singer-songwriter Belle Shea if she remembers the classic rock station she listened to when growing up, she’ll tell you it in a heartbeat.
“Yes, 98.7 The Gator,” Belle Shea laughs. “Absolutely!”
It’s that little detail that creates a familiarity. Then again, maybe it’s the fact that we’re both from South Florida, or that we both lovingly call Taylor Swift’s albums folklore and evermore our children. Either way, when I speak with her, right off the bat I can tell that the relationship she has with music is alive and runs deep — it always has.
With her new single, “Leah,” Belle Shea takes a more optimistic approach. It isn’t your typical breakup song. Instead it highlights the importance of remaining joyful in the wake of devastation. It also happens to utilize a DIY theremin, a fun little detail that we spend some time talking about and geeking over.
Read below to learn more about Belle Shea and her new single, “Leah.”
LUNA: For a lot of people who don’t know who you are or your music, how would you describe your sound and style?
BELLE: First and foremost, I always feel like it’s singer-songwriter because even though that’s kind of become its own sound, I do feel like that’s the main genre I’m operating in. At the moment, I think the stuff, myself as a whole, is kind of like alternative folk. “Leah” is definitely leaning more as a rock song or indie-rock. I definitely think I’ve kind of jumped around in genres, and I’m trying to find one that feels a little bit more like a home base. Some of my earlier stuff is definitely more folk-pop or kind of like true pop, and this is much more rock and I feel like I’m looking for “How do I want to play it live?” I kind of try to base my genre off of that. Yeah, so probably alternative singer-songwriter.
LUNA: And for influences, who would you say you’re heavily influenced by?
BELLE: Overall, I really love… I feel like as an artist, I’m really influenced by songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Taylor Swift, people who wrote really successfully in different genres and who are like real songwriters… Writers [first]. [For this release,] we listened to a lot of Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski, Lucy Dacus, Blondshell, Samia, people who were kind of like “girl with a guitar” and building off of that energy.
LUNA: In an interview with American Songwriter, you talked about how you played guitar on and off since you were six, but it wasn’t until you were in high school that you started writing your own songs. Do you remember the first song you wrote?
BELLE: Yeah, actually, I do. I have a very intense memory of it. It was called “Daddy’s Little Girl” and it was about… I grew up without my dad. It was a very early proto rock song. I wasn’t very open about any of this in high school. I went to a very conservative school, a very conservative South Florida area, and for some reason there was a school talent show and I was like, “Oh, I’m gonna play this very vulnerable song, like this will be my debut performance,” which was kind of crazy. But it was very meaningful to me to do, and I remember it so clearly because the people who were running this [talent show] were really great. They gave me this live recording and I ended up submitting it as part of my college application packet. I think that song was helpful [in] steering me towards, “Oh, I want to be writing stuff and working on stuff.” But yeah, I remember it very clearly because it wasn’t just like I wrote it and I kept writing. I wrote it and was like, “Okay, now I’m going to present this very vulnerable piece of my soul to this like very unfriendly school population.” So yeah, I absolutely remember it.
LUNA: In the same interview, you mentioned that you love how artists like Taylor Swift, Tom Petty, and the Goo Goo Dolls tell stories through their music. Were there specific songs from these artists that sparked that love for incorporating storytelling in your music?
BELLE: Yeah, I love “Mary Jane’s Last Dance.” That’s the old Tom Petty song. I love all the classic rock songs like “The Devil Went Down To Georgia,” all those ones that are really like, you’re sitting in the whole story of the song. A lot of Rolling Stones songs like “Dead Flowers,” “Wild Horses.” We always had classic rock on the radio. I grew up with my mom who has horses, and we kept the radio on for the horses because the sound of music, hypothetically, the 1234 beat, is kind of like a soothing factor for them. So we’ve just kind of always had classic rock playing. My mom is very into music, particularly that style of music, so I think something about the constant presence of it… It was just kind of always like an alternate story you could tune into. I love all those songs for that reason. Before I wrote my own songs, I mostly played guitar, playing old Don Henley songs (“The Heart of the Matter”), a bunch of old Tom Petty songs like “Square One,” stuff my mom loves. We would just sit down and play those, it was just something we’d do. And I was really into early Taylor Swift. You know, like, “White Horse,” “Fifteen.” Early Taylor, you’re like, “Oh my god, I’m, like, in this song. I’m in the world of Abigail, I’m not in my world.”
LUNA: When you look back on that time, what are some of your fondest memories of listening to the radio and discovering the music that would then shape your music career today?
BELLE: I think some of the fondest memories I have are with the songs that I would then play. I think there’s something so magical about a song coming on a random radio station in a car or a barn and it’s like your song. I have a lot of memories of being on horseback or being in summer heat and you’re like, “Wow, I’m doing my own thing in this moment” and then your life suddenly feels like it’s soundtracked by “Learning to Fly” coming on in the background and you’re like, “Oh my god, I am doing that!” It’s this real main character feeling. I think those are the moments that I remember most, when you’re not putting on a song yourself, you’re not seeking to underscore the moment, and then something like that happens and usually for me that was like an old Tom Petty song, a Rolling Stones song. I don’t know if there’s one specific but I feel like every time that happened, it became a moment that was like a little bit more than just the moment in your own life. It’s like, “What a story moment for me,” you know?
LUNA: In terms of the songwriting process, could you walk me through yours? Are you someone that’s lyrics first or melody first?
BELLE: I am little pieces of the song, completely, all at once. A thing comes as a melody with a sense of lyrics to it, with maybe like another counter melody idea happening, and I can sit down and play it for you but it stops after, like, two seconds. So it always feels like I have more of the song done to me than I actually do, but I usually write kind of the whole thing together as I go. Sometimes I feel it’d be really useful to be like, “Here’s the melody for the song” or, “Here’s the full lyrical scope.” But it tends to come when it’s my own song and when it’s at its most organic, it kind of comes fully formed or not at all.
LUNA: Breakup songs are often known to sound sad and heartbreaking, but your new single, “Leah,” is the opposite of that. It’s optimistic and packed with such high energy. Was this the initial direction for the song, or did you plan something different?
BELLE: No, this was always the plan. Very intentionally. I really love the song “Kyoto” by Phoebe Bridgers, and I saw this interview a while ago with her where she talked about touring on her first album and how it was really hard to — I’m sure I’m paraphrasing this badly — but … it’s kind of hard to play sad songs about sad material often and offer up that part of you in a very raw state without a bunch of musical backing. She had this idea with her producer: if you’re going to say these difficult things, it will maybe feel easier or better or more joyful to say them with the full backing of the band behind you. I’m sure I’m not doing the interview justice but I really took that away from it and I kind of thought like, “This was from such a difficult experience, I really want to say something joyful from it…” There was an original verse in “Leah” that was about the Mitski album, Laurel Hell. Because it was an album I really loved, that really influenced me and that really spoke to that time — it felt like it was an album that was so intensely about the duality of joy and terror. So from the start, I was like, “This is going to be like a big, joyous song.” No matter what it’s talking about, it’s very important to me that it’s very full and optimistic.
LUNA: Aside from your vocals, the guitars, the drums (which all shine on their own and dance perfectly together), talk to me about the DIY theremin you use. The way you introduce it in the song is cheeky, and then it becomes this clever musical element that drives the song to the end.
BELLE: It was kind of a thing when we were in the early drafts. I was dead set on this theremin. When I wrote it, the song goes, “You go play me like a theremin…” [Mimics theremin sound] That’s how I wrote it, and we were listening to early drafts and were like, “Do we keep this? I don’t know if that’s a good idea.” But, yeah, I really loved it. It was really important to me because it’s an instrument that you play without touching it, so it had so much meaning to me as an instrument, like what it means to try and talk about that concept. I was like, “It has to be that sound!” We obviously couldn’t get a real theremin because I have never seen one and we didn't know anyone who plays it, but I work with this really awesome violinist, her name is Laura, and we were playing “Leah” live a lot. I run this local songwriter series in the park. We have very little sound equipment and it’s not a great space for organic sound production, and we’re playing this song there. I had this phone recording of how we did it… and she [Laura] improvised this part that was so intensely moving to me and really spoke out, and I was like, “Wow! That’s what the solo should be, it should be that!” And we got to the studio and she kept doing it. I was like, “It sounds like a violin now. It doesn't sound like a theremin; I don’t know what we lost.” There was something missing here, and my producer, Jason, was playing with it. But then she [Laura] had this brainwave after I asked her to do it, like, 40 times. She was like, “When we were in the Park House, I was struggling to be heard over the rest of the instruments and I felt my pickup was kind of maxed out. I was playing it really hard. I’m all on one finger, all up and down the string just to get the most sound out of it.” So she did it and she played it that way and I was like, “That’s it!” That’s the quality of like someone or something that’s desperate to be heard speaking out above the noise. And that was the one that Jason took and played around with to make it what it is now. I don’t know if you know Jay Som who mixed “Leah,” this amazing artist — she was just on tour with boygenius, she’s incredible. It was a huge honor that she took it on to mix it, she made it sound extra cool as well. And so we got this theremin sound; it does like this thing that is getting affected by the sense of touch, that’s this shrieky background noise that’s so desperate to speak up and not quite sure it’s gonna be heard. It was just the quality of Laura’s playing that came from a very DIY space, so I think that made the theremin as magical as I feel like it was in the early live shows.
LUNA: It’s a super underrated instrument.
BELLE: Thank you for letting me tell you the long-form version of it because I’ve been so excited about it. It’s got that weirdness factor of a lot of Mitski songs that I love. That’s … what a kind of unforgettable little sound that we made of someone shredding on the violin on one finger and then being processed all these different ways.
LUNA: Speaking of DIY, I think you just touched a little bit on this. You co-run a series of environmental benefit concerts, am I right? In New York?
BELLE: I did that for the last two summers and now I run this ongoing show at the Park House. It’s just local songwriters and we have a really nice space that I can bring them into. We’ve had some people come in on tour and make it a tour stop, which has been fun, but for the past two summers beforehand, every local DIY show we did was on rooftops, in backyards, a local record shop, my rooftop once. It’s been really fun, and we set aside a split between all the artists and then an extra share goes to different local organizations in the city. Obviously, we’re not raising a lot of money, but we’re raising awareness. It’s something very important to me, to speak up within art as well as direct a little bit of attention and a little bit of money, as much as we could to the world around us. So that was a really cool thing and I think it was fun because it made it a little bit like a party as well to have it on a rooftop.
LUNA: I was asking that because I wondered what it means to you to give that platform to emerging artists while also touching on important issues? It's a very collective community. You’re looking out for each other in the music space but you’re also looking out for those who are outside of the music space so it’s very communal.
BELLE: That’s exactly how I feel about it. I think what it feels like is recognizing the sense of collective, a rising tide for all boats, you know? I have some really wonderful collaborators — I’m going on tour with some of them, but I just wanted to create the kind of performance space that’s really non-competitive and really outside of, like, a bar scene, where it’s about who brought the most amount of tickets or who did whatever and have it be this thing instead [where] we’re all in this together, and you just bring some friends and some fans. The theory of those shows as well as the Park House is [to] stay for the whole set and find something you like. I think that was why it was important, too, for these past two summers to have there be an element that was really directed back towards local organizations combating climate change. The Park House shows don’t have that fundraising element, but that’s where they came from. And that’s the way I feel about it, and I think the way that music and these performances can teach us, it really is collective, it’s collaborative. We all rise or we all kind of sink.
LUNA: Apart from the release of “Leah,” what can we expect next? Another single before the year ends?
BELLE: Thank you so much for asking. Ideally, “Leah” is the first single off an EP. It’s like, “Surprise! There’s more.” There is more songwriting that’s been done, there’s more recording that’s in process, and I’m really hopeful to get the songs out there before the end of the year.
