Today we’d like to introduce you to Alex Stills and Jill Parker.
Alex and Jill, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
We have been close friends for a long time – we went to the same high school in the south bay and have known about each other’s musicianship peripherally, but never played together until about a year-and-a-half ago.
Jill backstory: I started playing drums when I was 12 years old. It took years of bugging my parents to finally get to that first lesson. I was immediately hooked. Something about the physicality and math of it all just really speaks to me. Throughout high school, I spent a lot of time in my parents’ back garage behind my drum set. I was working out my skills alongside my emotions, and there drumming took a new form of expression for me.
I began to convey my emotions through my instrument and started to carefully craft my style and process. I learned to lock in and connect with the what I perceived was the essence of a song, I learned how to make my beats dance with the music. My first major influences were John Bonham and Travis Barker. However, I have not spent a great deal of time in my drumming career following the processes of great drummers before me.
I would rather spend time learning different musical styles, and learning how to connect my own artistry with another’s. I was more interested in developing my own style than learning someone else’s. Through my college years, I became wrapped up in the pains and pleasures of the stuff of growing up. I spent years away from actively drumming. It wasn’t until my first jam with Alex that I was officially back.
We had immediate, undeniable chemistry, and a deep mutual musical understanding. I connected so strongly with her songs that I was able to effortlessly support her musical stories while bringing my own take to the song as well. Writing and playing together is like butter. I hope we never stop.
Alex backstory: I started playing guitar when I was 12 or 13. The first song I learned was New Slang by The Shins. Although Youtube was new at the time, there were still enough videos of dudes with beards giving guitar lessons to teach everything you needed to know. From there, I looked up the chords of my favorite songs and learned them one by one until I felt confident enough to write one of my own.
The first was a silly song about the nursing staff at my middle school, and then I soon after wrote a more serious one about my grandmother’s passing. I remember it was so therapeutic to play, and as a pre-teen picking up that healing quality of songwriting – I knew I had to stick with it and that it would serve me no matter what I did with it. I played guitar and wrote songs ever since, exploring tunings and octaves and pedals, and especially falling in love with the warmth and resonance of open “C.”
In 2013, I joined a band in the Allston neighborhood of Boston Mass while I was still in college. It was my first real band, and with all that excitement of playing shows, is also when I realized some frustrating patriarchal qualities about the world of music, and how as a female guitar player, there were just some unfortunate masculine tropes that had yet to be buried.
The amount of times I had to say to guys at shows, “No actually I am not the singer, I am the guitar player,” felt countless, and aggravating – and so were the amount of times those same dudes told me how “surprising it was to hear a girl riff.” It never felt complimentary, more like it was all feeding a vicious cycle that kept women having to explain their way through certain nuances of rock music.
From there, I kept writing – trying to channel this anger at such systems in place, and blend it with all the complexity and beauty of femininity, and all that is related to it.
When I connected with my old friend Jill a few years later, it was time to finally put it into practice.
The forming of StillJill:
In 2017, we started working at the same restaurant in and grew close to a co-worker, Lauren Lakis, who was forming a band at the time to play live for her released record.
There, emerged such specific chemistry between us that was unprecedented in previous musical settings. It was as if we gained access to another place that we had always been trying to reach.
From there, we booked more and more rehearsal time and increasingly developed the point we wanted to make as a band on our own. It was so cool how our visions aligned. It wasn’t too long after that we started dating as well – we recently celebrated our one year anniversary.
Now, we’ve practically finished our first EP: titled Waterslides which stays close to our two-piece band feel. Through our combo of reverby open-tunings and dynamic and often syncopated drums, we strive to blend vibey pop with psych-rock – making it sound vast and atmospheric throughout.
We have been recording at Seahorse Sound studio with Producer and Sound Engineer, Billy Burke, and have also been playing around LA for the past year – The Silverlake Lounge, Non-Plus Ultra, The Three Clubs in Hollywood, Harvard and Stone, The Viper Room, and more.
Has it been a smooth road?
Artistically speaking, our road has been relatively smooth. Our music flows freely and comes out defined, knowing what it is and what it is saying. We are lucky to rarely have creative differences and to share the same vision. Of course, there is more to work than just the creative process. As we look to expand, logistical challenges arise.
In this first year as a band, we have been cutting our teeth on the business end of the deal. Recording our EP marks both of our first time laying down our work in a studio. We have learned a lot in this first year about everything that goes into recording. By trial and error, We have learned about the structural nuances of tracking.
Of course, it’s hard because it’s new, and coordination and scheduling add their own challenge as well. In this way, you could say the biggest challenge thus far has been learning how to navigate and balance all that is still brand new to us in the music industry.
We’d love to hear more about what you do.
From the get-go, we are already a bit set apart from others since a two-piece female band is a little bit of a rarity. We are a psych-indie-rock duo with Alex Stills on lead vocals and guitar, and Jill Parker on the drums. Our sound is expansive, feminine, primal, and percussive, which also presents a unique outcome. The vocals, drums, and guitar all work in concert to create a pleasantly full sound for such a minimal lineup.
The songs rise and fall, opening gently and building to catchy riffs and breaks that are sure to have you rocking. The drums provide support and perspective for a dynamic, flowing and reverb, open-guitar-tuning – while the vocals lift the music and tie everything together to take the listeners out to the desert or the sea. Our natural chemistry makes it easy to land in an arrangement where we both love every note.
We are very excited to soon be releasing our EP: Waterslides. This project is what we are most proud of as a band thus far. Waterslides is a representation of femininity in both direct and abstract ways. Throughout the EP, we use the motif of water in a variety of states to illustrate the realities of the feminine experience.
The EP is about women, but it’s also about fluidity, adaptation, anger, love, and acceptance that encapsulates the human experience in general. It traverses between stories in our personal lives blended with the grander narrative of today’s reality for women, the climate, cultural and political issues, heartbreak, vulnerability and more.
Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
Jill: I love Los Angeles because I love the variety here. Every neighborhood is a different vibe. This city is too often perceived as monotone. When you dig deeper, you can find just about anything you’re looking for here. I’ve lived here my whole life, and I’m still discovering the city.
Obviously, the music scene is great here. I love the opportunities available as well as the culture available. My least favorite thing about Los Angeles is the artificial attitude that sits over so much of the town. The entertainment industry is a wonderful world of expression and creativity, that has a dark side we all know too well. The empty promises, the cutthroat nature, the people doing the wrong things for empty reasons, the media telling women that they are not enough… that can all get pretty bleak.
Alex: Los Angeles has always been home, and I always return to it no matter what. I have lived elsewhere like Boston and New York, and though they had their own magic there, it wasn’t my kind of magic. I love the desert and the sea – which both coexist here. I love being hugged by mountains. I love that this city is vast and wild and sort of untamed because of its vastness. I love the way it never changes – it will always have culture, good food, good music, and good art.
It’s not like a pop-up city that blows up and fades away – It stays pretty steady in its focus on the arts. I love all the enclaves and neighborhoods that twist and weave along the hills. I love the energy overall – but I am not sure if I love it because I have always known it, or if it’s something that I would have felt no matter where I am from.
Regardless, I love it here. I don’t love how classism is so obvious here – and it all lays in how we transport. In other cities, most have to depend on public transportation; therefore there is less judgment. But here it’s like – if you have money, you drive, if don’t you take the bus or the subway.
I think that naturally perpetuates a social divide and makes it harder for people to see some of our cities issues. Our homelessness crisis is endlessly harrowing, and so is the apathy around it. Our pollution crisis feels the same (although I feel like there have been more strides in that category in recent years). And to echo thousands and thousands of voices – traffic sucks!
Though these are things I dislike, I feel like there are more and more organizations popping up every day, designed to take on these issues. This gives me hope for a brighter future for this crazy huge county. A goal of mine is to become more integrated into them as this career kicks off – hoping to be apart of future benefit shows, fundraisers, and projects in general where music can play a role.
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @stilljill_la
Image Credit:
Lauren Lakis – [email protected]
Allison Walton – [email protected]
Dana Pleasant – [email protected]
Nadia Bent – Instagram: @nawwd
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