Q&A: MIA GLADSTONE Talks Spirituality, the Importance of Community Art, and New Album ‘LOOPY

Q&AMusic

Oct 28

☆ By KATE CHASE ☆

COSMIC, EXPERIMENTAL, AND FUNKY — genre-bending artist MIA GLADSTONE wants her music to be listened to intentionally. Gladstone is a songwriter, artist, and producer, and she recently released her collaborative album, LOOPY. The LP feels like a vibrant collage, an ethereal neon hodgepodge of sound and rhythm, and is unlike any other album you’ve encountered.

Gladstone places a heavy emphasis on community art, and LOOPY is her love letter to her creative community. Genreless and thought provoking, each track provides its own distinct mood while still staying true to her electronic, funky, lo-fi persuasions.

Open about her spirituality, Gladstone delves into how she uses manifestations and affirmations to raise her energy and create her reality as an artist. She shared that she wants music to be a sonic vehicle for healing, and often brings aspects of her spiritual practices into live performances.

Honest, thoughtful, and quirky, we delved into an in-depth conversation about community, genre, spirituality, and the complexity of how emotions play into her life and art. Read on to hear about her process for LOOPY and her experiences as an artist.

LUNA: Starting off, tell me a little bit about your newest song, “SOCIAL MEDIA,” and your inspiration for that. What was the process like?

GLADSTONE: Yes, so, it's about social media, and I'm singing to it basically as this entity, and I'm confronting it. I have an interesting view of social media because I see a lot of benefits to it but I also have very much seen the negative effects of it on a mass level and on a personal level. I find that when I get fixated on it, I drown out my inner voice and I just don't feel as connected to myself or connected to other people. It's weird navigating this virtual world, and also the real world. I feel like the two can get kind of morphed together. It's very strange, it does strange things to your self-worth. And you just start to degrade yourself to a number and give too much power to the reactions of people online. I think about social media all the time, so it's natural that I started writing songs about it. Because I feel like it's such a big part of my life and a big part of so many of our lives at this point. And in a lot of ways, I'm concerned because I don't think it's good.

LUNA: Tell me just a little bit about your musical background and how you got into the industry.

GLADSTONE: Well, I've been making music pretty much my whole life, and I always had this inner knowing that I would pursue it. I graduated high school early and I didn't go to college. But I did do this five-week program in Ohio — it was super random. I had heard about it from this producer I was working with who was from Ohio. He did it, and he suggested [I do it to] be more self-sufficient and be able to produce and record myself. It was really valuable. So I did that for five weeks, and that was really my first journey into doing music full-time. When I was there, this producer that I had worked with online dropped a song with me, and it was the first song of mine that was on streaming platforms. It got playlisted [by Spotify] on Fresh Finds. And this was like back in 2017, when playlists had so much power, but no one was really, like, pitching to playlists yet. So I had no idea what that even meant; I didn't even have Spotify. Then my friend sent me a screenshot and was like, “Your song got 50k plays yesterday.” After that, it was great because I came back and had like all these studio sessions lined up and industry people reaching out to me. I just kind of took it day by day, and here I am.

LUNA: Would you describe your music within a certain genre? Do you think that you have a specific sound, or do you like to be more experimental with your music?

GLADSTONE: I feel very fluid overall, and it definitely carries into my music. I kind of stray from categorizing myself in any way, and musically I just make whatever I feel like making in a particular moment. So I don't go for a particular sound. There's definitely sounds that I fall into, but I have trouble articulating what they are. My friends talk about this a lot, because all of us fall into this, like, genreless category. So I've started to [say] alternative. But I don't know, it's really hard to put sound to words.

LUNA: Your album LOOPY is dropping soon — tell me more about that. What's on the album, and what was the process like for making it?

GLADSTONE: I don't know if it's an EP or an album, I've just been calling it a project. It has 11 songs, and it's all produced by me. I've been working on it for, like, two or three years kind of loosely. It's the culmination of songs that I made in this little studio I had in my house in Jersey, that I painted the walls pink and the ceiling pink and the floor — it was basically this little pink box I existed in. And I would just freely make stuff whenever I wanted. So all the songs come from a low-pressure place of experimentation and solitude; I never had anyone there with me. So it's just like this very honest project that's very vulnerable. And fun — I just had so much fun with it.

My original idea for it was, like… I guess it kind of stemmed from this egotistical place of [feeling like] no one gives me the credit that I deserve as a producer. I need to prove myself and make a project and then people will finally believe that I produce. So for a long time I didn't involve anybody else in it at all — it was just my little secret baby that I was creating. And then I had this very deep reflection, where I was just in over my head and I committed to making this project, and then I was like, “Oh my god, I'm never gonna finish this.” And I was listening to it and I was like, “How do I make this as good as my last project or better?” And I realized that so much of what I love about my music is the aspect of community in it. I have such an amazing community of artists that I work with and I was like, why would I deprive myself of that for this project just for the sake of saying that I did it 100% myself? So then I had this kind of pivot, and it became more of a collective effort and not just a solo project. And now it's this thing, and it's called LOOPY! It's featuring some of my favorite artists. I've been so blessed because everybody has experimented in such a big way on every song. I chose all these artists that you don't listen to passively. I feel like everybody who listens to them is just, like, waiting to hear what these people are gonna say. I'm just really excited for everybody's effort on it, and it's very gratifying. It feels really crazy to be done with it. Because it was just such a long time coming… art is so much rooted in community, just inherently, so it's only right to keep doing that.

LUNA: Do you have any big inspirations, either musical or otherwise, in your life that you really take inspiration from?

GLADSTONE: I feel like I take inspiration from a lot of things, but it's less of a conscious thing. It really depends on where I'm at. An artist that I take after a lot is definitely Amy Winehouse. I'm just super inspired by her, I love her. I've always had this huge infatuation with her. So she definitely influenced me in terms of my style of writing and singing. She was just so honest, you know, like she had such a way of [making] people feel like they knew her because of the way she wrote so personally. So I've definitely been inspired by that and tried to emulate that in my writing as well. And then MF DOOM I've always loved lyrically. His beats… just overall, I love him as well.

LUNA: Is there any certain feeling that you want your audience to feel when they listen to your music or any emotions or visuals you want to evoke?

GLADSTONE: I feel like the biggest thing for me is just healing. But again, I don't have an intention for other people when they listen to the music at all. My only intention when I make music is to express and to heal and have fun. So I guess I hope that people take away that energy as well. But really, however people want to listen to it, I invite it. People listen to music for different purposes, which I think is so cool. Like, two people can hear the same song and take something completely different away from it.

LUNA: I noticed you talk a lot about spirituality and I was wondering if you could talk more about your journey with that and how it connects to your music?

GLADSTONE: Definitely. Well, it's interesting, I didn't have a word for manifestation growing up; I didn't really know anything about it. But I do firmly believe that I've manifested my reality, as we all manifest our realities. Words are so powerful, and as a songwriter I'd written so much about my future [when I was] growing up. Because I just knew in my soul I had to pursue music. But I do feel like I manifested this abundant reality as a musician. And then I became more mindful of what that is in the last couple of years and I started just doing different experiments with it.

Affirmations are really important to me. I started doing them at all of my shows because I noticed how much it shifted the whole environment when everybody got on the same frequency and started saying the same things out loud and singing together. So I've started doing that just in my own time — it kind of just comes naturally I guess. I write in my notebook all the time, and I just end up writing many manifestations and affirmations. Sometimes it's hard for me to be vulnerable; like, I never really show anyone around me sadness or emotions that aren't overtly positive. I think part of that might be because maybe it's not the best that I'm always affirming things. Like, I think it's good to speak in affirmations, but when I'm sad, I'll literally just write positive affirmations, and sometimes I don't allow myself to feel the full scope of what I'm going through because I can always just shift my energy to something else. So I've been trying to deal with that lately and find the balance between saying affirmations all the time but also allowing myself to process things. It's been quite a journey.

LUNA: Do you have any upcoming projects or goals for the next year or so?
GLADSTONE: Not really, I'm just taking it day by day. I put so much energy into this project in particular and I'm always working on a ton of things, but I want to give it time to breathe and give myself time to breathe. I think I'm gonna go to Vietnam in January and just spend a month there and kind of just go live a different life. Because I don't know, I don't want to get too sucked into my career and let it define me, which I think a lot of us do naturally because I guess anywhere you put your energy it's gonna become very prominent in your life. So I'm like, okay, I gotta shift because I don't want to get lost in the sauce, you know?

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