Q&A: ratvibes.only Releases Second Single “Moongaze”
“LOVE LIVES IN A ROOM” WAS OUR INTRODUCTION TO — ratvibes.only and the tranquil environment she creates through her music. With “Moongaze,” Sarah Perez adds a romantic ballad to her growing body of work, this second single just as soothing as the first.
A lulling and consistent guitar strum shapes “Moongaze,” mimicking the hushed atmosphere of night. Accompanying are ratvibes.only’s vocals, which stand out as the most addicting part of the track with smooth runs. Her voice is warm, ranging from low to high as the song progresses. Toward the end, ratvibes.only repeats, “I adore your gaze,” which summarizes the key image of the song: falling in love with a lover’s gaze.
Read our conversation with ratvibes.only below about “Moongaze,” the value of journaling, and how she balances music with her career as a nurse.
LUNA: Your debut single was “love lives in a room.” Similar to the new single, your debut is atmospheric, which I feel comes from your layered harmonies and unrushed vocals. How would you describe the style you are cultivating as a new artist?
RATVIBES.ONLY: My style in creating art is done with the intention of trying to cultivate a sound that mimics exactly how I feel. My main objective is, “How can I build a sound that expresses how I perceive the world and how it feels like for me to experience the world?” With that, I write my harmonies, lyrics, and vocals in a duality. Meaning my sound can be perceived or interpreted by the listener as either freeing (happy), melancholy (sad), or both at the same time.
As an artist, my work reflects the layered pieces of my identity that I don’t always have the words to express. As a person, I am constantly feeling in complex gradients. Translating who I am into my artistry, my goal is, “How can I get my listeners to feel fully immersed in understanding how I feel? How can I submerge my listeners into the multifaceted feelings I’m trying to express?”
For example, depending on the perspective that you listen to “love lives in a room” with, you can feel different things. On one end, I’ve had listeners say they feel soothed, calmed, and at peace. On the opposite end, I’ve had listeners say they feel this song aches, it’s melancholy, and reaching. Not only was “Moongaze” made with the same effect, it was done so under the particular scope of the cinematic and consuming feelings of falling in love.
LUNA: I know that you love journaling — do you feel there’s a connection between consistently journaling and your creativity?
RATVIBES.ONLY: Absolutely! I’ve always journaled. In fact, I’m constantly writing down how I feel. Even if I don’t have the convenience of being in the environment to sit down with myself, my pen, and paper, I immediately type down my thoughts onto my phone and save them for me to write about later. With this, consistently journaling from a young age has allowed me to develop an honest relationship with myself.
I never had the luxury of being able to trust and depend on people to support me through my experiences. For many years in my childhood, I only had myself to rely on for emotional support. Because of this, I quickly learned at a young age that journaling was my only safety. It was my only form of an escape for me to meet myself at a place of honesty, reflection, understanding, and healing. Journaling was the place I created for me to comfort myself in ways that I never received from the people who surrounded me. With this, I have never been afraid to confront my feelings because I know I have the safety of being able to express, revisit, and reflect on my emotions from the safety of my own writing.
This being the foundation of my songwriting, there is a huge correlation between my journaling and my creativity. When I give myself the space to write, I take the time to pick words that express exactly how I’m feeling. When I write about an idea that resonates so strongly within myself, I then get inspired to translate that feeling from a two-dimensional page into a three-dimensional sonic experience.
LUNA: In addition to your music, you are a nurse. How do you balance the stress of nursing with your art?
RATVIBES.ONLY: Art is my escape from the stressors of working in healthcare. Being a nurse can be an incredibly demanding, stressful, and both physically and emotionally taxing profession. With that, I don’t always feel like I fit into the stereotypical mold of a “woman in STEM.” For years, the creativity in me was suffocating from my inability to breathe due to the rigorous demands of nursing.
However, once I was able to step into the dual role of being both an artist and a nurse, I allowed myself to harness the healing properties of one to fuel my passion for the other. I allowed myself to use music to rejuvenate me in times where nursing was so stressful. With that, I also draw from many of my experiences as a nurse and implement that into my writing. Nurses are bred to holistically care for the whole being. That isn’t a skill that can always be taught, rather it’s an innate quality to many nurses I’ve encountered. With this, the escape of my artistry allows me to be a good nurse, equally as much as my nursing experiences allow me to be a vulnerable artist.
LUNA: You often discuss nursing on your Instagram page. In a recent post, you mentioned the superpower of empathy that the job brings you. Do you ever find yourself applying skills like this from nursing to your music?
RATVIBES.ONLY: Absolutely! There are many nurses who I’ve encountered that have permanently shaped my own practice. What people don’t understand is that nursing is so much more complex than just providing the ordered pharmacological interventions and physiological treatments. Nursing is all of the following: a profession, a scientific practice, and a way of interacting with the world. The most impactful characteristic I’ve witnessed in all the nurses that have changed my life is their compassion (and how they fuse this with their clinical expertise).
In the book Taking Care by Sarah Digregorio, she writes, “Nurses manage patient’s physiologies just as physicians do… But physicians’ practice generally goes deeper on the physiology (the intricate mechanisms of the body’s biology), while the nurses’ practice is broader, including patient advocacy, preventative care, education, and the duty to assess and care for each patient holistically, as an individual in a given context — that is, within a family, a community, and an environment. In short, nurses integrate different kinds of information to understand the whole person.”
I wouldn’t be the person I am today had I never pursued nursing. It’s given me a perspective that no other artist truly possesses. With this, I fully believe that nursing not only sets me apart in my artistry, but it also fuels so much of my creativity in the perspective that it has bestowed upon me.
LUNA: What can listeners expect from you in 2024?
RATVIBES.ONLY: My listeners can expect several new releases throughout the duration of this new year. For all that I went through, 2023 was one of the most difficult and chaotic years of my life. With that, I’m stepping into 2024 under the oath to share some of those experiences through my art.
