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Meet SYNJ

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Today we’d like to introduce you to SYNJ.

SYNJ, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
When I was younger, I always surrounded myself with music. My dad was a huge influence in my early musical upbringing, teaching me how to play guitar from a young age by watching concert videos of my favorite artists and showing me the chords to play along. My mom’s side wasn’t very musical, but my cousin and I were put in the children’s choir at our church, which is where I really started to develop a love for singing.

I went to a small Christian school for most of my life, but I still took advantage of every musical opportunity that was presented to me, whether it was a talent show or just singing on the worship team. I started taking voice lessons around age ten, but after a while my family couldn’t really afford them, so I stopped. However, when I entered high school, I decided to audition for the choral program there and continued to grow and develop my voice for four years. I was presented with incredible opportunities that some might say only come once in a lifetime, which really sparked my interest in pursuing music as a career, such as performing in Carnegie Hall, recording in Studio B, and even singing “Seasons of Love” with Jason Mraz in my school’s gym. A few of my friends and I started an a cappella group at our high school in 2015, and thus the passion that would send my life into a complete whirlwind of opportunities had just been planted.

In 2016, I was admitted to Chapman University as a double major in Vocal Performance and Music Education, where I began studying voice professionally. When I arrived, I was placed into a voice studio with a group of students who were all older than myself, under the instruction of operatic soprano Carol Neblett, who unfortunately passed a few months into my sophomore year. It is safe to say that I felt completely out of place, wondering what the faculty saw in me to put me as the youngest student in a studio of huge voices I was constantly comparing myself to. However, she pushed me to new limits and helped my voice grow immensely.

I spent my first two years of college living at home and commuting, which made networking and forming new friendships much more difficult. However, only about two weeks into college, I was admitted to Chapman SoundCheck, which was one of the a cappella groups on campus. It was a way for me to keep my love for performing non-classical music and help form new connections, but it was also the only thing keeping me at Chapman. I loved performing, but I lost all interest in studying music professionally, as it was a strictly classical music program. I ended up dropping both of my majors by the second half of my sophomore year, which made me feel like I had just wasted a year and a half of my life and thousands of dollars neither I nor my family had.

I thought about dropping out completely and just giving up too many times to count, and I’m still surprised that I pushed myself to disprove my own doubts. I worked four different jobs within those first two years while going to school full time, trying to somehow manage my time between school and work, but failing to also make time for myself. My mental health really suffered during this time, and I was diagnosed with severe anxiety that I still struggle with to this day. I realized that I basically had to start over with an entirely new major and somehow make it out in 2.5 years (because that’s all my financial aid would cover), which only made me more anxious. I saw my relationships with my family and friends begin to suffer as well, including within the group that I called home, and I wondered if staying was worth the struggles I was battling.

In the fall of 2018, my friend Avo invited me to join a small seven-person a cappella group she was creating that would be separate from the collegiate groups on our school’s campus. It wasn’t until around May 2019 that this group, now known as Aperture, decided that we would enter The Open, which is an international a cappella competition meant for singers of any age, as opposed to the collegiate competitions we had all previously participated in. In July 2019, we won our semi-final, making us one of ten groups that would compete in Carnegie Hall in the fall. The last time I had seen this stage was almost seven years prior, and it felt like my life was finally starting to pick up again. To see our name outside Carnegie was surreal, and at that point just being there again was a win for me. We went in expecting nothing much but a larger platform to showcase our art, and ended up with so many unbelievable opportunities for us as a group that I would have never imagined.

Aperture has absolutely helped me find and establish the healthy relationships I was missing, as well as develop new skills and passions for things such as recording, audio engineering, and social media management. This group has also helped me think more critically about what it means to work as a team as we manage all of our own stuff including gigs and social media content. We want to bring more to the table than just another pretty song. Our goal is to create a visual experience for our audience as well, incorporating our members’ other strengths within the arts to present a final product that engages and intrigues the listener to pay close attention to the intricacies of our art, both visually and audibly.

As an individual artist, I had a long break from creating my own art. I had a lot of growing up to do, things to experience, and other things to focus on and learn from so that I could become the artist that I am now. The last time I had really sat down and wrote any music of my own before this year was probably when I was 16 years old. Now I’m almost 23, but the last six months have been filled with creative bursts of energy and hundreds of voice memos of melodies I need to record so I don’t forget. However, I can definitely say I’m writing music that has more depth and connection to it now than anything I wrote when I was 16. I think I really needed that time to realize that I can’t force the artistic process. I needed to figure out what I wanted to get out of music and how I wanted to use music to portray myself, and to me, music is healing. So my hope for whenever I release my music is that people will hear my stories and be able to feel a sense of comfort and healing from them as well.

Has it been a smooth road?
As I mentioned before, I’ve struggled a lot with mental health issues ever since I was ten years old. Mental illness is very stigmatized and I think it’s important that people talk about it and realize that a lot of people struggle with various mental illnesses everyday. I personally suffer from anxiety, depression, and ADHD, which all were very detrimental to my creative process and caused me to constantly doubt myself and my talents. Thankfully, I was eventually able to get help and resources through my university, but it is something that forced me to take a break to focus on my own health and well-being before I could focus on my music.

Another thing I struggled with, which I think a lot of people do as well, was finding people to work with that had similar visions and musical goals to my own. I spent almost four years in SoundCheck, and despite the amount of talent that each member had, I felt myself going in a different direction. I have so much love for that group and how it helped me grow in my abilities, and I definitely would not be where I am without the opportunities I had because of them. However, I had a lot of self-doubt stem from my anxiety, thinking no one cared about me or my ideas because of the differences in our goals, but I realized it’s still possible to remain friends with and respect one another yet still have creative differences. Ultimately, I spent the last semester of my senior year with the ChapTones, another incredible Chapman a cappella group who I found I vibed with more, and was able to feel more connected to the music I was making because of that. It’s critical that you find people to work with who share your same goals and ideas so that everyone involved feels represented and entirely proud of the final product that you collectively contributed to, and it also makes creating so much easier when you have similar visions.

We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
As a member of Aperture (@aperturevocal on social media), I work as the Social Media Manager alongside Avo, our Artistic Director, and Marshall Scott, who is our Administrative Director. I mainly run all of our social media platforms, coming up with new ideas for content and creative ways to enhance our presence online, although a lot of our ideas have been put on hold during the pandemic for safety reasons.

However, I also am an independent musician and am currently working on my own EP to release soon. I write all of my own music, which is heavily influenced by R&B artists such as SZA, H.E.R., Kiana Lede, JoJo, Yebba, etc., and I have been working on recording and producing as much as possible by myself. I think being self-sufficient is beneficial in this case because I know exactly what I want my music to sound like and what my vision for it is, and I am able to create that on my own. Sometimes creating is really difficult, particularly when you’re stuck with writer’s block, but seeing all of your own hard work come to life is incredibly rewarding especially knowing that you did that all yourself. I do have a few friends that I go to if I am stuck, but they are people who I trust that understand me and my vision and keep me motivated to continue creating.

My music is very personal to me, and my lyrics are a personal diary of my own thoughts and emotions. Of course, I want to make music that people enjoy and listen to, but I don’t make music specifically for other people. As I said before, music is healing for me and a way to help manage my mental health better, but if someone resonates with something I’ve created, then I do feel more inspired and motivated to continue to share my stories knowing that they might help someone else as well.

Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
I was born and raised in Orange County, and it’s definitely one of the most beautiful places to live. Since I also went to college in Orange, it’s nice to still be in the area with a lot of my friends that I’ve met along the way as well. One major thing that I dislike and is a huge issue is the fact that Orange County is very much indeed a bubble, and many people are not properly educated on many issues facing our country and our world right now. This is especially true for the Black Lives Matter movement, as police brutality is still an issue in our cities, and BIPOC voices are continually silenced and overlooked because of the systemic racism that is engrained in our society. So many people in Orange County, especially the predominantly white conservative areas which I was raised in, need to realize that human rights are not political. Black Lives Matter, and they deserve the same rights and freedoms as anyone else.

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Image Credit:
Steven Lee, Jaden Adamson, Joe Martinez, Jonas Suwandi

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