by Jase Falk
We caught up with local lo-fi bedroom popper Charlie Baby to talk about expressing vulnerability through music, DIY, the future, and existing.
Stylus: What do you find important about expressing vulnerability through music?
Charlie: Every so often there will be a random burst of something and I’ll just feel so many things. I’m often very closed off with people. I like being close with people, but I’m very shielded and uncomfortable talking about my myself and feelings, but I find when I just play them, or find music to put to something that I’m feeling it’s a lot easier to share that. Even if you’re not sitting down with someone and opening up and directly being vulnerable, you can share music and know that maybe people are getting something out of it.
Every so often I’ll just feel so much of something and I won’t be able to do anything but write like seven songs and then not be able to write for months. There will be buildup of feeling and I’ll write everything in a short burst of time which is nice for that month where I feel super motivated, but then for the rest of the time I feel like a fraud and like I don’t know what I’m doing. Then I question myself and think if I should even be doing this if I’m not fully committed 100% of the time. But I feel like you don’t have to be doing something every day for it to be meaningful to you.
S: Do you find it’s hard to be recognized for your music when doing a lot of it DIY?
C: I feel like no one takes me seriously. I feel like I don’t separate myself from music and making music. It all blends into one and doesn’t feel like a ‘serious’ thing, it just feels like me. Like, I’m not actually a musician and don’t have a band, I just play music sometimes which I guess is nice, but I don’t know how people create a social media account for their band and have all this stuff specific to their music and create a space for that. I created an Instagram page for my music, but then within 2 seconds I was like “Ahhh, emotions and everything” I don’t know how people can keep themselves apart from what they put out into the world and on social media.
Seeing so many people with their Instagram accounts and having a certain brand connected with their music I just think “ah! how do you just decide on one thing and are able to stay with that” because I feel like I change so much and everything I do changes so much and some days I want to move and live in a forest for the rest of my life and not talk to anyone, and then the next day I want to be a serious music and the next day it changes again and I can’t stay in one state of mind and that leaks into what I do online so I feel like I seem not very stable and secure in what I do now.
S: Where do you see the future of your music going?
C: Well, a week ago I wanted to go to BC and become a journalist and now I want to be a nurse. It’s like every two seconds I invest myself fully in something and then drop everything else so I don’t really know what is going to happen because I am such a Gemini, constantly being impulsive. I always go back to music and it is something I really want to do. I really, really like Frankie Cosmos and Greta Kline. Just knowing that Frankie wrote all this stuff and has a
Bandcamp full of one minute recordings of something on a phone and its super DIY and all in a bedroom and some songs are on a bus, or just when she got home from wherever and just sang and put it on bandcamp—I really like that.
Existing is so bizarre and it’s weird to think that everything is going to disappear and all people will have is what you left behind and once you’re not a living person anymore, there will just be your artifacts or whatever you left behind that remains and it feels less terrifying if there’s still a part of me that exists in the world after I’m dead. I don’t know. I find that comforting.