interview with bella rosenblatt
interview by celeste moses and alexis gildore, edited by izzy pendego
Bella Rosenblatt is a seventeen-year-old songwriter and vocalist who released her first Extended Play (EP) Unwind after COVID-19 hit the United States.
“It was a really reflective, crazy, and amazing process, and I’m so happy that Unwind is finally out there,” Rosenblatt, a senior vocal major at Laguardia High School in New York City, said. “I love to write music and sing and have been doing so for as long as I can remember.”
Rosenblatt’s music is very reminiscent of New York City’s sultry underground speakeasy history, likely because of her education in jazz music.
“Honestly, I get asked this question about the ‘genre’ of my music a lot, and I never really know how to answer it. When I was around ten years old, I started taking jazz vocal classes at the Manhattan School of Music, and ever since then jazz has been the genre that I most love to sing and learn about. It wasn’t until I started to learn about jazz and how it is essentially a genre of interpretation and putting your own unique voice into songs that have been around for decades that I really started to appreciate how I can use my voice to make music that hasn’t been made before. Jazz helped me find that out about myself. I wouldn’t say that the music that I write is jazz, but my influences and musical roots definitely come from learning about and listening to jazz.”
Quarantine has been an interesting social experiment for a lot of creatives, and Rosenblatt is no exception.
“Quarantine has definitely been a learning experience for me creatively. I never expected to really find the motivation to record my music, probably out of sheer fear of failure, and suddenly I found myself starting to work with instrumentalists and record vocal tracks within the first week of lockdown. Something about being unable to be around others made it easier for me to access my creative thoughts and instincts. There was nothing to focus on but this project, and it gave me a purpose during quarantine that I honestly don’t know what I would have done without.”
In our typical Fever Dreams fashion, we dove under the surface to find out more about Bella’s dream world. “During quarantine, I’ve found myself having a lot of super vivid dreams about people that are no longer a part of my life, often about people that were once important to me who I am just not close with anymore. A lot of people have been saying that this global crisis is enabling them to reach out to people who they haven’t spoken to in a while. Maybe my dreams are telling me to reach out to those people. I have also definitely had some anxiety [or] fear dreams about my music. I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that releasing my music was terrifying… It is all super personal, and before it was out in the world, I would find myself asking the question What if people just don’t like it? all the time. Those fear dreams were scary, but I would always wake up from them knowing that it is all in my head, and people will think whatever they will think about my music.”
Rosenblatt’s family, particularly her father, have had a huge impact on her musicianship.
“My dad majored in music in college, and he plays jazz and classical guitar. He definitely pushed me to start to sing and learn about jazz at such a young age, and my music taste was influenced so much by his. When I was younger, I would come home from learning a new jazz standard, and he would play through the changes with me so I could better understand the song. When I told my dad that I wanted to record my own music, he was all in. He helped me so much with learning the ins and outs of Logic Pro, arranging my songs for different instruments, and he played guitar on three of the songs.”
Artists like Amy Winehouse and groups like Crosby, Stills, and Nash and Simon & Garfunkel have helped Rosenblatt build her own sound.
“In my eyes, [Winehouse] embodies musical and vocal power, and I find her lyrics, melodies, and performances all so moving… I’ve always loved strong, beautiful harmonies, which is something that I didn’t really include in my EP, but I would love to experiment more with in the future.”
The first song she wrote for Unwind is the last song on the tracklist, Last Stop.
“I wrote it almost two years ago at a time when writing music was something that I loved, but sharing said music scared me absolutely shitless. It’s crazy to think about how far I’ve come since then, and how much that song means to me now that it represents my own growth.”
The process behind building the EP was a long one, requiring many musicians and various others to bring the project to life.
“The crazy thing about my EP is that it was all done completely remotely. I had a handful of different people play their instruments on each song, yet I never actually got to play the songs live with them. Everyone just recorded their own tracks from their own quarantine bubbles and sent them over to me, and I laid them together to make the complete song. I’m honestly still shocked at how much you would really never be able to pick out the remoteness of it all without previously knowing it.”
Quarantine and the forced remoteness took a toll on the speed of the recording process, but the end result was definitely worth the prolonged development stages.
“It definitely took a longer time because it was during quarantine. Everyone was moving at a whole new speed and developing a whole new concept of time. Deadlines for a lot of people were essentially non-existent. They definitely were for me. It was a very, very slow process, but getting it finally done was the most gratifying thing. I felt so accomplished, and I’m so grateful to all of the people who worked with me on it and helped me finally feel that gratification.”
Rosenblatt’s music is inspired in part by the fears that go hand-in-hand with anxiety.
“I wrote Only Fear during the height of quarantine, which was a time when my anxiety was running amok and was hard to get a handle on. Everything was uncertain. Relationships were falling through the cracks if they were not strong enough to survive virtually, and all of our eyes were endlessly screen-fatigued. I wanted to write a song that captured that sort of restlessness—that unexplainable anxiety. That’s where the lines, “These sleepless nights are catching up to me. The world’s awake, and I am finally free,” and, “These days go slow, but my brain still moves fast. Starting to think I’m running out of gas,” come from. I think the line, “My only fear is mediocrity,” represents that fear and anxiety I was talking about. I am scared of failure, and I am scared of… well, mediocrity. But I guess that fear, in the end, is motivational. It’s what keeps me going, keeps me doing, keeps me creating.”
Not all of Rosenblatt’s creative process is stunted by anxiety, however. She takes pride in the elements of her music that bring her personal joy.
“One lyric I’m really proud of is from Last Stop. It goes, “Sometimes I think about flying. Will you catch me when I land? My feet leave the ground. I’m the front man in an invisible band.” Whenever I sing those lyrics, I visualize myself flying while being the ring-leader of my own personal one-woman band. It’s a ridiculous thought, but it always makes me smile.”
Rosenblatt’s music taste expands far beyond the field of jazz. The artists she’d collaborate with if given her choice of anybody, dead or alive, are an interesting blend of Lauryn Hill, Elliot Smith, and Cécile McLorin Salvant!
“I respect and love [Hill’s] music crazy amounts and honestly just want to learn from her. I saw her in concert a few years ago, and it was an insane experience. Definitely one of the best concerts I’ve ever attended. Another artist is Elliot Smith, whose music style is also quite different from mine. But I love his music so much, and I want him to impart his musical wisdom upon me. [Salvant] is my ultimate modern jazz inspiration, and even getting to have a conversation with her about music would mean the world. Getting to collaborate with her would be crazy.”
Unwind is available on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, and YouTube.
“All I can hope for my future as a musician is that I get to continue to collaborate with amazing and talented musicians, and that I continue to see and experience the world through music. Music is how I express myself and make sense of things, and I can’t wait to continue making music and learning from other musicians. I have so much more to learn, but I am excited to do so.”