Today we’d like to introduce you to Smiling Beth.
Smiling Beth, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
In high school I spent a lot of time waiting to turn old enough to enter Turner Classic Movie’s Young composer contest where they give you an old movie without an original recorded score (a lot of really old movies didn’t have scores pre-recorded cause movie theaters had live musicians playing music for movies for a while) and whoever makes the best new original score for it wins like Logic Pro or something. But ya had to be 18 to qualify! I wrote a lot of composition pieces to prep, even attempting to make my own score to Jan Svankmejer’s “Alice.”
However, by the time I turned 18 I had already wrote my first song with words called “A Love Song for Marilyn Manson” and had forgotten all about the contest. In January 2012, I started anonymously throwing songs into a black hole (Tumblr) to see what would happen. I did this every week for almost a year. I did a lot of covers, including “Believe” by Cher, “Some of them are Old” by Brian Eno, and “Baby” by Justin Bieber. I played my first live show in January 2014 at my friend’s house in Baldwin Park, and there was no going back.
Since then, I’ve played at many more houses in and around Los Angeles, released two ep’s (“Little Woman,” “Tunnel of Love”), toured the west coast, and earlier this year, made my big smashing new york debut. I basically just hand everything to my assistant and fire them if they don’t accomplish all their assigned tasks. I’ve been dying to get on the Grand Theft Auto soundtrack for some time now and will not rest until I’m on it.
I am also finished writing my first full-length record and am looking for someone who wants to record it for free. Then I’ll (probably) self-released, and tour it in Europe.
Has it been a smooth road?
Every day I am learning how to give in to myself. My body and my heart already know exactly what they wanna be doing and what they want to be making. I just have to let them. There are certain things about your personality, your modes of thinking, and your heart that just exist within you always no matter what and the only choice you really have is whether to ignore it or not. When your coworker comes into the bathroom and hears you singing while you’re seeing it’s because your body has been wanting to sing all day, but you didn’t let yourself do that until you thought you were alone in the bathroom.
Sometimes a lack of self-discipline gets confused with self-indulgence. I really want to combine the two. I want to be very self-disciplined about indulging in my innermost desires. I think this is me teaching myself how to be an American.
I think I am a heartbreak to my parents. My mom was born and raised in the Philippines, and my dad was born and raised in Iran. They each had their ideas of the American Dream when they came here and worked really hard to provide me with the resources to have a good and stable life. And I am flushing all of that down the toilet by wanting to do this. Sometimes that causes me a lot of guilt. I know that my parents didn’t move here just to end up raising a queer piano playing daughter, but I also know that this is an American Dream, too and if I don’t pursue this, I’m not truly taking advantage of all this American privilege that they worked so hard for me to receive.
We’d love to hear more about what you do.
I’m really happy how much Smiling Beth has grown over the last five years, and am very excited to see what’s going to happen next. I mean, to an extent, I know what’s going to happen. But I don’t know too many details. I am proud of how malleable this project is. There’s always something different happening for every show, and there’s always something different happening on every song.
I want people to come to a Smiling Beth show or song just wanting to experience something cool and end up finding a personal gift for themselves every time. I also want to give all of my love to Kay Grey (drums), Eddie Ochoa (drums), Art Avila (trumpet/bass), Olivia Breidenthal (violin), and Omar Romero (guitar) and Art Zavala Jr (sound engineer extraordinaire) for making music with me.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
Synth-based stuff has been showing us all it can do over the last few years, and I think people are now wanting to remember what regular ol’ instruments sound like again. So a note to all you orchestra nerds: keep at it cause ya’ll gonna be in high demand over the next few years. If you love your instrument, keep playing it.
Pricing:
- Little Woman EP – $ 5
- Tunnel of Love EP – $5
Contact Info:
- Website: smilingbeth.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @smiling_beth
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hismilingbeth
- Other: https://moonchairrecords.bandcamp.com/album/tunnel-of-love
Image Credit:
Nina Rocio, Frank Mojica, Cedric Vann Galloway
Getting in touch: VoyageLA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
