Q&A: Belle Shea Dives Into Friendship on New Single “Sundance Kid”

MusicQ&A

Feb 21

INTERVIEW

DON’T CALL HER KID — On its surface, these four words might appear to be a simple instruction, but they carry a deeper significance; they are part of the lyrics sung by singer-songwriter Belle Shea in her new single, “Sundance Kid.”

Drawing inspiration from the classic 1969 American western film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, along with the well-known heartbreak of witnessing a close friend suddenly becoming a stranger, “Sundance Kid” delivers a sweet blend of indie-pop and classic rock. It’s a shining example of how an artist cleverly juxtaposes such poignant lyrics with the most uplifting, sunshine-in-a-bottle sounds.

The last time I spoke with Belle, a good portion of our conversation revolved around musical influences and geeking out over the DIY theremin featured on her song, “Leah.” Fast forward to now, as we catch up and discuss her new song, we find ourselves geeking out once again for similar, and many new reasons.

Read the full interview below to learn more about Belle and her new song, “Sundance Kid.”

LUNA: It’s so great to see and talk to you again! How have things been since we last talked?

BELLE: They have been so hectic, mostly in good ways. I went on my first tour then on a follow-up. I went to the New England Folk Alliance. I went to NAMM. I was a featured band, which was super cool, but that involved going out to Anaheim immediately post-wildfire, so it’s been the kind of thing where I was like, Wow, this is really great. I’m actually traveling consistently for music, which is an awesome feeling and feels like there’s more structure in place of what we’re trying to put out - but also amidst ecological collapse and intense disaster. So, yeah, that’s what I mean when I say, like, “I have no idea.” But, career-wise, pretty good!

LUNA: Yeah, I remember when we last talked, you were about to go on tour. I was wondering how that had been and all. It’s nice to hear that everything went well.

BELLE: Oh my god, that went so well! It was such a good experience. It was a huge deal to go out with friends on tour. I went out with Raising Daughters, who are wonderful, and who are moving to Nashville. Coming up, we’re doing our last big show this weekend. Kind of like a single release show for me and their last show in the city at Union Pool–a cool venue; I’ve always wanted to play there–but we went on tour together last summer, and they were so incredible. We shared so much of the booking. We called it our “Maiden Voyage Tour.” It was the kind of thing where you’re like, Doing this with friends was really fun. You’re not in this vacuum, hoping someone hears. There are other people, and everyone’s so excited about them and then they’re excited about you.

LUNA: So when we last spoke, we talked about “Leah.” Since its release, it opened to a sold-out show at Scooby Doo Mansion in D.C., which I didn’t even know was a place.

BELLE: It’s a huge, historic old house that looks like a mansion in the TV series. It’s got the spiral staircase and large portraits on the wall.

LUNA: Minus the meddling kids!

BELLE: It was so much fun, and they were such great hosts. It was like a sold-out show, I think one of our first early big sold-out shows, over 100 people. It was great. For us on tour, that’s a huge deal because that’s not our hometown, so that went really well.

LUNA: And “Leah” sits at around 17,000 listens. I will admit I’m probably a good chunk of that amount. How has your relationship with that song evolved?

BELLE: I think something I feel about it is this continued thread of joy. It’s funny. It was such an intense time and an intense song. We ended up using very early demo vocals as the final take vocals. Because it was such a raw song, I found that I wasn’t really able to re-record the vocals. It was more pent-up emotion than anything else and that was pretty informative. I think it’s really evolved since that first early take, and it’s a much more joyful feeling now than heavy. It becomes something that’s more about how it feels to do it live and having people start to sing along in the crowd than it is about the experiences that inform the writing of it.

LUNA: It’s got a new life.

BELLE: Yeah.

LUNA: This is kind of off-topic, but maybe a little on-topic. When we last spoke, there was a question that I wanted to ask you, but I completely forgot, and it was that when I first heard “Leah” for the first time, I wanted to ask if you had ever seen that movie Begin Again.

BELLE: Yeah! I love that movie. It’s one of my favorite movies!

LUNA: Okay, it’s one of my favorite movies, too. When I listened to “Leah” for the first time, I was like, This sounds very familiar!

BELLE: Are you thinking of the scene on the rooftop?

LUNA: Yes!

BELLE: Yeah!

LUNA: When I listened to “Leah” the first time, the feeling that it was giving me was one I had felt a long time ago when I watched something, but I couldn’t remember what it was, and when listening to it again, I was like, Oh my god! Wait a minute! This is so reminiscent of the rooftop scene in Begin Again when Hailee Steinfeld is shredding on the guitar!

BELLE: This is an absolutely crazy thing that you’re saying for so many reasons: one, because that specific rooftop song is on the inspo playlist for what I wanted “Leah” to be, but even more so, when we went to record “Sundance Kid,” I worked with a new drummer. Her name is Yuki, and when she came in, tuning up the drums, the first thing she said to me was, she’s like,”I listened to ‘Leah.’ Have you ever seen the movie Begin Again?” I was like, “Oh my god! That’s crazy! Yeah, I love that!” That was a huge, sheer, immediate connection we had, and that’s how I knew that this was the right person to be playing on my song.

LUNA: That movie is about the love of music and the energy and power it strikes through people, but that scene has always been my favorite, and I was so upset that I didn’t get to ask you before, but this time, I had to remember to ask you. I literally have it right here: Ask her!

BELLE: Truly the most perfect question because it’s literally what we talked about…it's what I wanted it to feel like. That scene, the whole movie, I love. It’s a love story but it's really about how your love of music is the number one love of your life and how that connects you to other people around you. I love that scene; it’s a revelation scene.

LUNA: Glad it’s not off-topic then.

BELLE: No, it’s perfectly on-topic.

LUNA: I still geek out over the DIY theremin [on “Leah”]. Do you think you’ll ever experiment again, creating another DIY instrument?

BELLE: That’s such a good question because I’ve been writing so much. So many [songs], including one that I’m thinking specifically, I feel have that kind of warble tone in the back of my mind. I could see it become more of a color throughout a larger album that comes back at times. For my very first album release, The Art of Years, I think my favorite song is “Smoke and Mirrors.” All the drum samples in that are like packs of cards scratching. There’s a water glass in lieu of a synth and some of that was very early in the producing and recording process. My producer Jason and I didn't know how to make everything we wanted to have in it, but that song has a ton of “found sounds” in it that you can’t even tell how much is “found” like the theremin is. I love doing that; it’s cool.

LUNA: I don’t think we talked about this last time either, and it’s that you have a background in writing original music theater. Is that the correct term?

BELLE: I went to Vassar, which is a very liberal arts school. My degree is in drama. I really wanted to be a playwright and I had a partner who I co-wrote stuff with, original musicals, and that was awesome. I feel like that’s a period of my life that I have so much fondness for and, at some point, would probably do again because making an album, it’s such an immersive way. You get inside the music, and you’re inside the characters’ mindsets, and you end up with something that feels so connected to you and so outside of you. It’s such a fun way to make music. I really love doing it. I don’t do it that much right now, but at some point I would like to do that again.

LUNA: So, speaking of writing music— “Sundance Kid.” I’m so excited to talk to you about this song! Story-wise, can you tell me what it’s about?

BELLE: It’s a best friend song. It’s great that you asked about movies because the title and everything pulls from that old movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It feels really reductionist to say it’s a friendship breakup song. That’s the shorthand for it, but I don’t love saying that. I want it to feel more like when you miss a best friend, like, Wow, we’re still friends, but I feel like I used to know who you were, and now I don’t know that I get what’s happening here, and you don’t really get me anymore.

LUNA: I’m curious, is there a connection between “Leah” and “Sundance Kid,” or are they standalone?

BELLE: Well, sonically, there’s a very clear thread. A lot of the sounds are the same. The centered electric guitar is, I think, the same guitar. Same amp, the same setup. The vocals have the same vocal chain processing on them. There’s definitely a sonic throughline. I wanted them to feel like they’re companion pieces. They’re off of what’s hopefully a larger upcoming project. I don't think they're all going to sound like that, but these two have a similar feeling.

There’s a jubilance to “Leah” that I want to put in “Sundance Kid” as well. This is a song about a hard topic that feels defiantly buoyant, a joyfulness to something tough. I wanted them to be the singles because I wanted them to be the songs that give you so much musical cushion to experience something difficult. I think also from my own storyline, there’s such a throughline. I love the opening line: Now there’s no one here to talk to. I feel like “Sundance Kid” takes place in the post “Leah” landscape. It’s like, okay, in the fallout, now, how does it feel?

LUNA: Last time we spoke, you mentioned that when it comes to the songwriting process, you’re “little pieces of the song, completely, all at once.” That said— can you talk to me about the little pieces that came together when crafting “Sundance Kid.” I’m interested to learn what came first and how you pieced all those elements together, especially considering where the lyrics are pulled from.

BELLE: I have to say, I feel like you have been sitting on my shoulder throughout this process! I think I’m going to start to insist that basically everything I release, we have to talk about.

Genuinely, I feel like that is the most apt question for this because this song was the opening two lines and nothing else for almost a year. I was like, This is the piece that’s in place: “Now there’s no one here to talk to at my best friend’s party; I don’t even know why I keep saying sorry.” The entire song is in that [lyric], and I can’t get it all out yet, but that’s it, and I’m just gonna keep excavating.

It was a little piecemeal thing. I think I kept humming, Don’t call me kid… and then eventually filled in the gaps. It wasn’t like a planned Kid/Cassidy thing. I think that I needed somewhere to grow from, and that movie gave me scaffolding.

LUNA: In terms of sound, the song definitely has a pop flair but it’s also got that classic rock you grew up with. Can you talk to me about the production side of things? What was the journey in finding the sound for this song?

BELLE: Same producer, same guitarist, which I think is crucial for the crossover. I get asked a lot about the sound of the bass. The hook, the riff in it is actually a detuned–tune to half or a whole step down–acoustic guitar. So that’s not part of the production; that’s part of the original songwriting that had to make it in from the start. This one was extremely fun to make because we recorded [the base skeleton] in one day in my producer’s home studio. We all crammed into the room. Guitars, everyone in headphones, and all of us mouthing the words to stay on track.

I think [another] big reason why I was ready to move on with the songwriting and to fill in the gaps is because the production started before the songwriting was totally finished, and I kept hearing it, and I was like, This sounds just so good. It sounds like a song I want to have. I felt like we had to find that third verse because I was ready. The production was so powerful to me. It was so exciting to be sitting on. It felt so alive from the start as opposed to that agonizing process of making bedroom pop where you’re like, Here’s one synth layer, and I don’t know what else happens. This one was more like the band played the song and there was a lot of specificity that we honed down after we got the live takes. Just a good way to do it, I think.

LUNA: So, with that, can we please talk about the outro because it sounds like you and everyone are just having so much fun. That last remaining minute or however many seconds left…

BELLE: [laughs] It’s almost a full minute!

LUNA: But it’s so good! It literally feels like what sunshine would sound like, and I was like, I don’t know if this is what she’s intentionally doing, but this is a Florida song!

BELLE: It is! It’s like all of the sunshine in summer. It’s all of the love that I have for this person. It’s all of those great experiences just in this one kind of last gift. The reason why it’s so long…It wasn’t intentionally like eight repeats or whatever it is. It really was the band in the room really getting into it, and everyone just kept looking around. No one was ready for it to be done yet, and so, in the end, we were like, We could shrink it down…but, eventually, we left it, and it felt so good to do.

I kept walking around with the bounce from the session. It felt good to let it ride as long as it did. I kept thinking about when you’re listening to classic rock songs, and they’re like five minutes, but they’re usually one riff, and you can chill out. You don’t always need to have something else to say.