Spotlight: Closing a Chapter in Life, LAYNE Creates Music as a Funeral for Feelings
MAKING MUSIC HER WHOLE LIFE — singer-songwriter and producer Layne Putnam, better known as LAYNE, recalls how music has always been a part of her life. She is recognized for her melancholy and tough, experimental sounds. Never shying away from her emotions, Layne writes music as an outlet for her experiences. Usually, she will start with a drum loop or on a guitar to get the skeleton of the song, and then proceed into the studio to mix and cut vocals, layering up production for a final product. Completely enveloped in her art, she explains that “the most special time in any song is when you are in the middle of making it.”
The catharsis of creating music is her funeral for her feelings, as LAYNE admits, “Once it is out, I will never listen to it again.” Through her craft of songwriting and the art of producing, she sings adieu to the painful chapters in her life. With every ending comes a new beginning, and Layne’s music is “the in-between.”
When asked about the sound of her music, she expresses that she has always been able to pull from her experiences and emotions, which is certainly tangible in the authentic and raw lyrics accompanied by her unique sounds. Lately, the singer-songwriter has been gaining some of her inspirations from her surroundings, pushing her to make new and sonically exciting music. Fascinated with anything new and mentally stimulating, at the moment, her favorite thing is to write through different perspectives, exploring differences and similarities of emotions through these characters created in her music. With her aesthetics being so distinctive, she allows her music to explore exciting grounds as she experiments with new concepts.
Growing pains of rebirth demand the question of a beginning. Layne reminisces her childhood as one long jam session in her living room growing up in a musical household with her dad, Kenny Putnam. Layne’s childhood home had instruments everywhere, allowing her to experiment with anything from a guitar to a cello to drums. Growing up in the woods of Black Hills, South Dakota, Layne knew she wanted to become a musician. After graduating from high school, she started a new life in LA, where she has been based for eight years.
The growing pains of pursuing her dreams has come with many upheavals. “A lot of my career has been very up and down,” Layne says as she reflects on her difficult fallouts with band managers and bandmates.
Being backstage and wiping tears, she felt that her life was crumbling around her. Layne reveals her traumatic stages of rebirth that took a lot of internal work and therapy to let go of some of these hardships. These difficult moments were accompanied by a period of a new outlook, focusing on her music instead of external influences. She now looks back on the million things that have happened to her over the years and feels more excited than ever to make music.
Over time and over the years that Layne spent producing music, she reflects to be slowly going back to more organic sounds from her roots and retaining her core aesthetics. Growing up listening to indie alternative and emo music, she does not believe artists should be limited by a particular genre. Layne explores the depths of emotion in a fresh and original way, making her music all the more distinctive.
At the moment, she is in the process of producing more songs and anticipates a new single release in the upcoming months. Layne shows her heart in her music, producing everything from the start to finish.
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