VIDEO: Q&A with Remy Roskin
We sat down with Remy Roskin, singer-songwriter based out of Boston, MA, to chat about her EP and its unusual production process during the pandemic. We also discussed the challenges a songwriter faces when writing about trauma, eating disorders, depression, and other forms of darkness that many of us face throughout our lives.
Transcription of Boxcar Collective’s Q&A with Remy Roskin:
Q. Give us your elevator pitch: Who are you?
Hi! My name is Remy Roskin. I'm 22 years old, and I'm a recent graduate from the Berklee College of music. My band's name is REMY, and we write original rock music that is a blend of modern rock, prog rock and classic rock to create our own unique sound.
Q. How did you get into music?
I got into music like a lot of kids. I started in orchestra in the third grade, with violin. Then I got into band, with flute, and then choir (of course). But what really got me into playing guitar and singing was the first Taylor Swift concert I ever went to — the first concert I ever went to, period. It was Taylor Swift, the Fearless Tour, and she had this sparkly, acoustic guitar that just blew me away. It took my breath away, and I went home thinking that I wanted to be her; I wanted to do exactly that. After that, I still kept up with violin, flute, and choir, but I started playing guitar. I did my fifth grade talent show singing a Taylor Swift song, of course, and then a few years later, I joined School of Rock and did that all throughout middle and high school. I loved it. I created a band also at School of Rock with some other kids; It's called Elastic Blur, if you want to check it out. And ever since then, I knew that I wanted to do music.
Q. Have you always wanted to be a professional musician, or were there other career possibilities along the way?
I think I always wanted to be a musician, ever since that Taylor Swift concert. But of course, when I was very little, I wanted to be an Olympic figure skater; I wanted to be a ballerina; I wanted to be president, an astronaut, and just all the big things you can dream of. Realistically, I was into photography. And so whenever I wasn't playing in a show at School of Rock, I would be taking photos of everyone else who was playing in that show. And I really, really loved doing that. So, I briefly considered art school but quickly moved away from that once I saw that they wanted me to be painting, sketching, and doing sculptures, as well as photography. But I always knew that music was going to be it. And I'm very happy doing music.
Q. Who are your biggest inspirations, musically?
So in terms of musical inspirations, I absolutely adore Taylor Swift and her songwriting. Her lyrics are just incredible, the emotions she's able to capture. And same with Twenty One Pilots. I really loved their songwriting and lyrics, and how much they spoke about mental health, and in such an eloquent way that I hadn't really seen in music before. I also really, really love Paramore and Radiohead. They're some of my favorite bands, and School of Rock also gave me a really good classic rock foundation.
Q. What was the transition like from high school and School of Rock to college in a new city?
So the transition from School of Rock to Berklee wasn't exactly what I imagined. I loved it, but I was on stage every week at School of Rock rehearsing, and I'd be playing shows all the time, and I had my own band, and we were playing shows all the time. We were rehearsing all the time and I thought that that would be kind of the same deal at Berklee. I thought, you know, I would get into a band and we'd be playing all the time, and that Berklee would have so many stages, and I'd always be on stage, just like School of Rock.
And it was a lot of just being in my classes and working on the things that I wasn't super great at. Coming to Berklee, I didn't really have much songwriting or production experience. So in my classes, I didn't give up on finding a band immediately, but I put it on the back-burner and was like, you know what? I really need to work on songwriting; I need to focus on production. And so I spent a lot of my early time at Berklee just doing that.
Q. What was the most significant turning point for you in your musical career thus far?
The pandemic was certainly a huge negative turning point in my music career. I had just started forming a band in late February, early March, and so we had, I think, two rehearsals and then everything shut down, so it fizzled very fast. On top of that, the pandemic was so hard on everyone. We got stuck at home and we couldn't really finish our class. That spring I had a lot of performance classes, but we ended up just kind of sitting around talking about it on Zoom. It was very demoralizing and I didn't really have a lot of creativity. I wasn't feeling like myself. Singing was hard, and just everything was kind of a struggle. But once that cooled down, you know, things started to get a little better. School came back, we were able to play music together again. I formed another band and then released an EP, and I think so far that's been the biggest positive turning point.
Q. Talk us through your EP release, In The Shadows. How did it go from idea to reality?
I started out just writing a bunch of songs. I was in a bunch of different songwriting classes at Berklee, and, you know, the more songs you write, the more you start to like them. I was getting a bunch of keepers, and I was also nearing the end of my time at Berklee. I was gearing up to graduate, and with that came the graduation project, and I thought, what better time than now to plan to release an EP of original music? And so from there, I developed a marketing plan, a business plan of when I'm going to record the songs, when I'm going to start posting about them on social media, and who I'm going to get to play on the songs. I needed to form a band. I needed to pick a band name. There were just a lot of things that I had to think about going into it. But doing that and having it be the graduation project really helped to keep that momentum going and push it out into the world.
Q. How did you record the EP while also navigating COVID concerns?
So it was a little interesting. I did the production minor at Berklee and then the pandemic hit. It was really tough. The studios were initially just completely closed off to us. We didn't have access, and then once we finally did have access again, it was very limited. We didn't have as much time in the studio and we could only have a certain amount of people with us in studios at one time. We couldn't record vocals or anything else you had to take your mask off for, so we ended up doing a lot of the EP remote. I did a lot of stuff in my bedroom with a blanket over my head to try to make it as soundproof as possible and not get any random echoes or overtones in the recording. I would get car sirens going by and I would have to redo the take, or I'd be standing in my closet, as far in my closet as I could get, trying to make things muted. So it was very fun. It was interesting. And for guitar and bass and drums — with drums, we were lucky. We were able to get into the studio most times to do that. But for bass and guitar, I would either have my musicians come to my apartment and be recorded in my bedroom again, or I would just send them tracks that I had and they would record their parts, send it back to me, and we'd go from there.
Q. You were the songwriter, vocalist, and a guitarist on this EP, and you did all the production. Was it overwhelming?
Absolutely. It was so much to do and I would do the same thing again if I had to redo it. It was so much fun. I feel like I learned so much from my time at Berklee, and especially with the Production Minor, and so I felt fully capable of doing everything myself. It was definitely a challenge at times. And if I had still been doing classes while I was trying to do all this, I wouldn't have slept, ever. But I had already graduated, so I had all the time in the world to work on it — and I used all of that time to work on it. It was also very helpful that I had a few good friends who were MP&E (Music Production and Engineering) majors, who would consult with me. They would listen to my mix and give feedback. So I definitely used my community to help me along the way.
Q. How do you handle the logistical side of a musical career? ie. Booking gigs, marketing, branding, etc.
It was super fun. So there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes. I knew that gearing up for graduation, I also wanted to have a performance to go along with the EP, so I was putting together a band. I was rebranding and really thinking about what colors I wanted to be wearing all the time, thinking about what color my hair was going to be, thinking about accessory things like aesthetic and social media pages. I switched over my Instagram to become a band page rather than a personal page, and I made a band page on Facebook. I've also been thinking about Tik-Tok. It hasn't happened yet, but it's going to happen. We also started a website to prepare for the EP release, as well as just to have. And alongside that, we were looking at booking shows. I was reaching out to different venues and other bands being like, Hey, we want to play a show, do you have any spots on your bill? Or I'm reaching out to venues being like, Hey, we want to play a show, when do you have a date? Here's our music.
Q. Which song off the EP is your favorite?
This is a fun question. Definitely my favorite to listen to off the EP is “Stalking Silhouettes.” It was the first single we released and it's just really fun and powerful and it means a lot to me as a song. But our favorite to play live is definitely “Silence.” It has these pauses in it where the whole band cuts off and we pause for six beats and then we all come back in together. No, like, count off, we're not counting out loud. We've had audiences just go crazy over that. It's so much fun to see and it's so much fun to play.
Q. Is there a general lyrical theme throughout the EP?
A lot of the lyrics on the EP are pretty dark. They have a lot to do with trauma and mental health issues. Like “Black Nail Polish,” for example, is about dissociation and feeling sad, but also just feeling bored and kind of apathetic. “Stalking Silhouettes” is about dealing with an eating disorder. “Inside the Sun” is about someone who hurt you really, really badly, and then trying to learn to move past that. And so the EP is called In the Shadows because everything felt kind of like it was coming from darkness. The songs are currently in the shadows, but they don't have to stay there.
Q. “Stalking Silhouettes” is a song about the struggles of living with an eating disorder — can you talk a little about the process of writing this song?
I knew that I'd wanted to write a song about an eating disorder, or specifically my experience with an eating disorder, for a while, and it had just been too hard for so long. It was too raw, too recent; it still hurt too much. When “Stalking Silhouettes” happened about a year ago, a little over a year ago, it finally felt OK and it didn't hurt so much anymore. And I have noticed that, you know, there are a lot of songs that talk about mental health, that talk about depression and suicide, but I haven't found that many that talk about eating disorders. And it's really important for people to have art that they can relate to when they're going through really hard things. I wanted to write the song to fill that void, and it finally didn't hurt to write.
Q. How do you, as a songwriter, weigh the pros and cons of potentially triggering content in your lyrics?
This is a really difficult [question] and one that I have pondered a lot. Some of the very early versions of “Inside the Sun” were, I think, a little leaning too into the cons, so I rewrote it a few times. And one of the ways I found to balance talking about really difficult emotions, without encouraging harmful behavior, is to add some sort of hope — some hopeful element to it. At the end of [“Inside the Sun”], it turns around a little bit, you know, and it's like, ‘I'm going to pick myself up off the ground and I'm going to become brand new.’ And so you still feel the pain, and you still get the pain of that experience, but you know that you're going to move past it and that you CAN move past it. I think as long as the art is relatable but isn't encouraging you to get worse or to stop trying to get better, it's OK.
People need things to relate to. And even when songs get ugly and topics get dark, people feel those ugly emotions and they feel that darkness. Having the knowledge that someone else also feels bad is really important. It makes you feel like you're not alone in your struggles.
Q. What are your plans for becoming “brand new”? What does the future hold?
I'm not totally sure what the future holds. I don't think we can ever know for sure, you know? But I know that I want to stick with my band. I have an amazing band backing me. They're incredible and I have so much fun playing shows with them. And, you know, I want to keep writing more music. I want to keep releasing more music, playing more shows, connecting with more fans and other bands. We love playing with other bands at Berklee; it's just such a great time. And now, I think in the future, we just want to keep expanding and keep growing and get our music out to people all over the world and to anyone who may need to hear it.
Thank you, Remy, for chatting with us here at Boxcar Collective!
Thank you guys so much for having me, this has been so much fun! I've loved talking with you. I could talk about music all day long. If any of your viewers are interested in hearing my music, you can follow my band REMY on social media — we’re on Instagram and Facebook at @remyofficialband. We've also got a website, REMYofficialband.com.