Mei Semones is a Brooklyn-based artist making jazz-influenced indie pop. Her latest record, Animaru, is out now.
Spencer Peppet is a singer-songwriter who fronts the band The Ophelias; Mei Semones is a Brooklyn-based artist making jazz-influenced indie pop. They both just put out records — The Ophelias’ Spring Grove and Mei’s Animaru — so to celebrate, the two of them got together to catch up about it all.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Spencer Peppet: Hi there.
Mei Semones: Hello.
Spencer: We’ve already said hi, but we’re saying hi again, on the record. Congratulations on your new songs and the new record. I got to listen to it, and it’s so good.
Mei: Thank you so much.
Spencer: I love it. So I’m very excited to get to chat about music and all that stuff.
Mei: Congratulations to you, too.
Spencer: Thank you. It’s crazy. We’ve been sitting on this record for, like, three years. So the joke I’ve been making is that it feels like I’m pregnant and we’re midway through labor. [Laughs.]
Mei: [Laughs.] It’s great.
Spencer: So, I have a question. I would love to know how you got into guitar to begin with, because your music is so specific and pulls from so many different types of music.
Mei: I started playing guitar when I was 11. I played piano first, then I switched to guitar when I was 11-ish. My parents actually got me a nylon string classical guitar, and they were like, “You’re gonna take Suzuki guitar lessons.” And I was like, “Mm, that’s not exactly what I had in mind.” Because what inspired me to play guitar was — have you seen the movie Back to the Future?
Spencer: I actually have not seen the movie, but I need to.
Mei: There’s a scene where he’s playing guitar, this Chuck Berry tune, “Johnny B. Goode.” And I was like, Wow, this guy playing guitar looks so cool. So I wanted to do that. And then my parents got me classical guitar lessons, and I was like, “No, this is not what I had in mind.” So I switched to electric guitar a little bit after that, and just started playing mostly rock music. I feel like when everyone starts to learn guitar, it’s a lot of Beatles and Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, stuff like that. And then when I was in high school, I started playing a little bit of jazz, because my high school had a really great jazz program. I just fell in love with that type of music, and was introduced to bossa nova around the same time too, because that was part of the repertoire. Like, “The Girl from Ipanema,” those first songs that everyone learns. Then I went to Berklee College of Music and continued studying jazz guitar. And that’s kind of the whole arc of my relationship with the instrument.
What about you? When did you start playing an instrument, and what was your first inspiration for it?
Spencer: I took piano lessons as a kid, but I can’t read music, so I would do a lot of just mimicking my piano teacher. I would be like, “You play it first and then I’ll just play it back.” Which in retrospect, that’s kind of cool for a child. But definitely, my brain does not read music. For some reason, it just never stuck.
Mei: It’s hard. I’m not good at reading music at all.
Spencer: It’s like learning another language. But, yeah, I started a band in early high school where I played ukulele — classic — and had the full, straight across bangs and the Zooey Deschanel polka dots.
Mei: Wait, that’s amazing.
Spencer: [Laughs.] And then I realized that I wanted to be a little bit louder. So I took my dad’s electric guitar and was like, “I can do this.” I’ve never taken guitar lessons, so I’m self-taught. It was a lot of just experimentation and figuring out what I thought sounded cool. And it’s interesting — I think now as a guitar player, I definitely have patterns that I fall into, where I know I like this kind of structure. But when I listened back to the first songs I wrote on guitar, which is the very first Ophelias record when we had just graduated high school, some of the songs I’m like, “I would not write that now, and it’s cooler than what I [would have done now].” Just because it’s so raw and untouched, and it’s a lot of experimenting in ways that I think you only can when you’re brand new to something.
Mei: Yeah, that’s what I was about to say: I feel like there’s something really special about someone playing an instrument that they don’t know how to play, because then you come up with stuff that maybe someone who knows how to play the instrument wouldn’t necessarily go to. I feel that way about guitar, too. I definitely have my habits and what I’m comfortable playing, and I feel like the whole thing is just trying to expand and find other stuff so that you’re not always doing the same thing.
Spencer: Yeah. What are some of your influences? Who do you pull from or look to as a big inspiration?
Mei: I listen to a lot of jazz, and a lot of my songs are inspired by either some sort of chord progression that I’ve heard, or even just a specific chord or a specific voicing that I like, that I would learn from something. Or it’ll be a solo. There’s a Bill Evans solo where there was this lick that I really liked, and so I took just that one lick — one measure, basically, or less than a measure — and then built off of that to make the melody for a whole song.
Spencer: That’s so cool.
Mei: It’s like tiny little pieces of solos or tunes, and then I take that and I try to expand it into a whole song.
Spencer: That feels like actual composition, in a really cool way. I feel like a lot of songwriters, myself included, it’s a lot of just, “Oh, I’ll find some chords I like that,” but that feels so purposeful.
Mei: I do that too, for sure. It’s a combination. Sometimes it’s that, sometimes it’s something that I’m just hearing. But even that, I know I might feel like I’m coming up with it, but I’m sure that it’s from some sort of inspiration, some song that I’ve listened to in the past.
Spencer: Totally. Do you also write all of the violin parts, or is that more your band comes in them?
Mei: That’s my band. I write the guitar and the vocals, the lyrics and melody. And then once that core of the song is done, I bring it to my band and we arrange the strings and bass and drums and everything, usually as a group. Which is a fun vibe.
Spencer: I mean, your band is insane.
Mei: They’re so good. I’m so lucky.
Spencer: How long have you all been playing together?
Mei: Noah [Leong], who plays viola in my band, we’ve been playing together since freshman year of college, which was 2018. But as a group, we’ve been playing together since my senior year, which was 2022. So it’s been a few years. I’m really grateful that we’ve been able to stick together even through moving from Boston to New York. We only had one member change, which is our bass player. Our previous bass player now lives in Toronto. Now we have a different bass player named Noam [Tanzer] who also went to Berklee, but we actually didn’t know him while we were there. We met him after we moved here.
Spencer: That’s awesome.
Mei: What is your process like with the band? Do you normally have a core of a song and then bring it to them, or is it more collaborative from the beginning?
Spencer: Honestly, it’s very similar. I feel like I come in with a guitar part, lyrics, melody, and then I kind of just give them free rein. Because we’ve been playing together since high school. It’s been a long time now, and I feel like the trust has just expanded and deepened to the point where now I feel like I can bring them anything. It’s a really nice feeling. I don’t know about you, but I feel like as a songwriter, as I’ve gotten older, the permission has expanded a little bit where I’m writing songs about things that I would have been too nervous to write about in the past. And I think you do need a band that can be like, “Yes, I got you.”
Mei: Right.
Spencer: So I’m really lucky that my bandmates are there, and also that they’re so tuned in to what each song needs. I feel like they’re really good at plucking that out of the ether and being like, “Ta-da! Here it is.”
Mei: That’s really amazing.
Spencer: I have a question about one of the lyrics on “Animaru.” I love the line, “I am not a resource. I am not a ribbon.” And then followed up with, “Sorry, I don’t care enough to make myself a criminal.” I thought all of those were so potent and lovely lines. I’m really curious about your lyricism, what inspires it, when do you decide to flip between Japanese and English, and who are some of your favorite lyricists?
Mei: My lyrics are usually very much just inspired by whatever pops into my head in the moment. I don’t consider myself to be a writer or a poet in any way, you know? I’m literally just sitting there like, Ugh, what do I say? And then I just come up with something. But it’s normally just inspired by everyday life, I think, and how I feel and things that I see.
I guess in terms of my favorite lyricists… I actually listen to mostly instrumental music, but I love Nirvana, I love Kurt Cobain, so if I were to pick one, it’d probably be him. I also really like Smashing Pumpkins. Those are the two bands that I listened to the most when I was younger, and I feel like have probably had a lasting influence on me.
As for switching between English and Japanese — I mean, that too is kind of just whatever feels natural. Maybe I’ll have an idea of a structure, like, I know I want this part to be in Japanese and this part to be in English. But at the end of the day, if that’s not working, I’ll just go with whatever works, whatever is coming to mind. If I’m having writer’s block in one language, then I’ll just try switching, and normally that will fix the issue.
Spencer: That’s so cool.
Mei: And I feel like before, I used to divide it up verse/chorus, but recently it’s been switching mid-sentence even.
Spencer: I was actually going to note that I love when you do it in the middle of a line.
Mei: Because sometimes I’m like, Oh, this word in English does not fit here, let me just do it in Japanese. Like if it’s now the right amount of syllables or whatever, sometimes that just fixes it.
Spencer: It’s like puzzles.
Mei: Yeah. So I guess to other people who don’t speak both English and Japanese, it might not make sense, but in my head it makes sense. What about you, though? I feel like based off of your lyrics, something would make me think that you write poetry.
Spencer: You know, I do like writing. I will say I am a pretty bad poet. I enjoy writing prose and have worked on some prose projects, but I feel like poetry is such a specific art, and the people who are good at it have spent so much time dedicating themselves to it. I do like the idea of lyrics as poetry, but I don’t think I would call myself a poet. I feel like I have not earned that title. I do it for fun.
But, yeah, I really do love writing lyrics. I feel like sometimes a song just starts as a little thing that I write down on my Notes app or in my journal. I’ve been doing this project recently, I’ve been calling it my “transcribing project,” where I have all of my songs, journal entries, and dreams since high school, and they’re scattered all around and I have been trying to put them all into physical journals. I have my journals since, like, first grade. It’s kind of crazy. But then some of my journals are typed out. And so I’m trying to put them all in physical journals. [I’ve written down] my dreams since 2019, because I just got through [transcribing] all of quarantine, and my dreams were going fucking crazy. I’m midway through 2021 right now with the dreams, which is incredibly strange to me.
Mei: Every morning you wake up and you write down your dream? Or just when it is a really insane one, you write it down?
Spencer: I’ve noticed that when I’m in the practice, I can hold on to the dream for a little bit longer, enough to write it down.
Mei: But when you write it down, it helps you remember your dreams more.
Spencer: Totally. But, yeah, I feel like more of an archivist than a poet. As I’ve been doing this transcription project, I’ve been keeping another Google Doc of lines that I find that I like, from dreams or from old journals or old songs that I never used. So I’m just building this document of lines that I’ve never used, but I think are cool. I wrote a song with those recently that I ended up really liking, and I’m hoping we can use for something. But it’s cool because it feels so disparate. But then because it’s all coming from you, you can kind of connect it.
Mei: That’s really cool. I’ve always been interested in dreams. I used to write down my dreams when I was younger, but I haven’t at all in recent years.
Spencer: I love the idea of a window to your subconscious, because there’s so much going on that we don’t have access to until we’re detached from the real world.
Mei: Do you think that your dreams have specific meanings?
Spencer: Yeah. I mean, this record, a lot of it came about because during quarantine especially, I was having these crazy dreams where they’re very mundane, super normal dreams, but I would have conversations with people that I no longer speak to and we would have full conversations. We would resolve all of our issues. Like, I would wake up and I would be like, Wow, I fixed it. And then I would be like, Oh, fuck, I’m the only person that experienced that. So a lot of these songs are trying to parse through that. It left me feeling like I had more to say, so a lot of the songs are trying to say that stuff. But also, I feel like everyone hates when you talk about your dreams. They’re like, “Oh, you had a crazy dream? Cool.” [Laughs.]
Mei: I know what you mean, but I actually like talking about dreams.
Spencer: I do too. I feel like you just have to find the people that like it.
Mei: Yeah, because it’s so interesting. Something that I’ve had a lot in my life — I don’t know if you’ve ever had sleep paralysis.
Spencer: No, I haven’t.
Mei: It’s a form of a dream. You feel like you’re awake, because you can see everything, but you can’t move. There’s usually some sort of hallucination that’s going on. Sometimes it’s only visual, sometimes it’s auditory, sometimes it’s even like I can feel things touching me. So it can be a little scary for sure.
Spencer: Are they typically anxiety inducing?
Mei: I don’t really know what it is. It doesn’t happen to me that much anymore. But when I was 13 or 14, it happened to me all the time. And it’s usually seeing some sort of weird person or creature in my room — someone sitting in the corner, someone standing at the foot of the bed. Or the one that I remember was this person wearing this weird tribal-looking mask that had antlers. It was like a weird animal person that was crawling towards me. So weird. And then there was one that felt like hundreds of hands that were all touching me under the blanket, or hearing footsteps running around my bed over and over again.
Spencer: Oh, my god.
Mei: Yeah, so it’s kind of like a nightmare. But I actually really like scary stuff. I enjoy horror movies. So when it happens to me, there’s a part of me that’s like, Oh, cool. But I’m still trying to get out of it. You gotta get out of the sleep paralysis at some point because you don’t want to be in there forever.
Spencer: How do you wake yourself up?
Mei: Normally if I just try really hard to scream, I’ll just wake up screaming. [Laughs.]
Spencer: [Laughs.] That’s so interesting. I would love to hear a song about sleep paralysis. So many cool, weird, unsettling images.
Mei: Yeah, I should write that.
Spencer: I did want to ask: “Rat With Wings” has one of the few moments where the electric guitar comes in — which I was like, [gasps] “Oh, my god, it’s happening.” It felt so purposeful and so direct. I wanted to know, why that song? And did you know you wanted it to have that moment before you recorded it? Or was that something you found in the room?
Mei: I think having electric guitar on that song was always the plan, because I knew I wanted it to be a little heavier. It just felt like the right thing for the song. I liked that the acoustic guitar is still a main guitar throughout pretty much the whole song, but having those extra layers of electric guitar really helped push it forward and make it feel more full on everything.
Spencer: Nice. And are you writing other songs with electric, or do you find yourself more drawn to acoustic right now?
Mei: For this album, I wrote every song on acoustic guitar, actually. I don’t know, I think I was just going through a phase. But I feel like now, I’m balancing out a little bit more, because before that I only wrote on electric guitar. Now I’m probably gonna go back to a split between the two. I just wrote a song recently that I actually started on a nylon string guitar, and I’m like, “Why am I doing this? This song is so hard to play on nylon string,” because there’s all these arpeggios and it’s fast and going all over the neck and stuff. So I should just play it on electric guitar. I’m like, “Why am I trying to make my life so hard?”
Spencer: The mantra is, “Why am I trying to make my life so hard?”
Mei: [Laughs.] But sometimes it’s worth it for the sound. But in this case, I think it actually makes sense for me to do it on electric because it just fits better. Do you have a preference between the two?
Spencer: I find that I write most songs on acoustic, just because it’s easier. You know, you’re in your apartment, it’s late or whatever. So I feel like I write most things on acoustic. But I typically play electric at shows. Honestly, it’s kind of that same thing where you write something that is difficult on acoustic and you’re like, Ooh, but when I play it on electric, it’ll be so easy and fun. It’s like a reward when you get to play it on the electric.
I’ve been messing with more production stuff on my computer, but I know zero about it. So it’s another thing of teaching myself. I got my one plug-in, the Valhalla Reverb plugin, which is apparently the classic reverb thing, but it’s sick. You can make things sound crazy with it.
Mei: That’s amazing. I actually know nothing about production.
Spencer: Yeah. I’m in GarageBand making demos, I’m like, Ooh, let’s put some reverb on it.
Mei: I have Logic and that’s it.
Spencer: I’m like, “If it’s good enough for Alex G, it’s good enough for me.”
Mei: It’s true.
Spencer: He did a bunch of his records on GarageBand. It’s the DAW of the people.
Alright, I think we did it. This was so much fun. Thanks for chatting with me.
Mei: Yeah, thank you for doing this!
