JLS: Between your multiple projects like Yellowjackets and upcoming films, when did you know it was time to focus on music?
ST: I was putting out music on Bandcamp and it was super DIY. It started at the end of high school when I was in my mom’s basement, isolating myself. It started with an Omnichord and I got a MIDI synth. I started to learn more about plugins and Ableton, and my boyfriend’s a musician so we would improvise together. I had all these demos and I sent them around because I’m not precious about my demos. I think they’re so informative and sometimes I feel like I have demoitis – I prefer the demo and get obsessed with how it was in that first take because I love the mistakes and I don’t like it when it’s too clean. I was sending those out and met my friend Maral [DJ and producer], who’s been the most supportive person. She makes insane music. I met her at an Avey Tare show. We started talking, and hanging out. We were working on a Sparklehorse cover, Sad and Beautiful World, with this producer, Adam McDaniel, who works at Drop of Sun and does a lot of Avey Tare’s stuff, so we connected through that. I sent Adam my demos and he was like, “We should make this work.”

JLS: How was it working with Adam?
ST: He’s the most adventurous musician and so down to try anything. I found us looking at each other at the right moments when something sounded good. It was this instant connection, there’s that trust. It was kind of a match made in heaven.

JLS: You’ve created a gorgeous world, with intertwined chaos.
ST: I love it noisy.

JLS: There’s a real rawness to each track. What was going on in your life when writing the EP?
ST: I was going through a lot of personal troubles and insecurities. I was having vivid nightmares and a lot of it starts from that and those anxieties, and then just writing it down. A lot of it plays as a movie in my head. There was this reoccurring nightmare of me throwing glass and hurting myself, but then Pivot & Scrape is like dancing forward through it. It was a lot of creating imagery in my head and then trying to build a song around it. For some of the songs, it would just be improvising and then finding what comes out naturally. I find myself in a very meditative state when I’m making music, and it feels almost like I can’t be too aware of what I’m saying. That’s when the most interesting stuff comes out. That’s where Pivot & Scrape came out. The imagery for Black and Blue was also based on nightmares, but I don’t mean that in a dark, unsettling way. That was my way of coping with all of my anxieties at the time. I had a lot of tooth trauma – this tooth is fake because I got in an accident. There’s a lot of seeing gruesome images and then turning them into this beautiful melody – I like how that plays out against each other. So, yeah, there was just a lot going on in my life at that time. I mean, there always is [laughs] and that’s why it’s easy to write music.

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