Daily Inspiration: Meet Sara Coda

Today we’d like to introduce you to Sara Coda.

Hi Sara, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I learned to sing before I learned to talk- maybe it was because my mom is still, currently to this day, always singing. After enduring the boredom of the burbs I moved to Los Angeles, just an hour north of my hometown. Shortly after, I met my bandmate, Joz. That’s when everything changed. Joz and I have complimentary gifts. Though we complete each other artistically in a lot of ways, galvanizing was a practice. It was only after many years, and many songs that we have figured out how to incorporate 100% of ourselves while compromising nothing. It has given our music a fingerprint that tells you everything you need to know about us. We have toured the US several times, toured the UK, and our journey has even taken us to Canada and, most recently, Japan.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Is the road ever smooth for anyone? I don’t think you can find a smooth road even if you avoid the road altogether! I think the biggest challenge for us, as smaller artists, has been getting our songs heard! When they’re heard, they speak for themselves, but cutting through the noise is the struggle. “How do we do it” is the million dollar question. We do whatever we can, and in the meantime prioritize the music itself. There is a lot more to any success than just the product itself, but as artists, the product is our heart and soul. Creating music that we love is the most important goal and marker of success for us. It fulfills us in a way that we would never achieve if we succeeded wildly with work we didn’t love.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
We are a tri-cultural, female-fronted, alternative-pop-rock band. Can you name another band with a Japanese bass-player, Mexican guitarist, and Persian singer? We specialize in making music that is energetic, fun to dance to, and singable. It’s important for me to be very hands-on and involved, so I’m most proud of the songs we’ve released over the past year since we have been self-producing. Also, since we’ve self-produced music, we started self-producing music videos too, and the ones I’m most proud of are our lyric videos for Fantasma and Sick in the Head. I had no knowledge of cameras and editing software last year, but I picked up enough to make these lyric videos. I don’t know how to digitally animate text, and learning how to film and edit were already big strides for me. I decided to take an analog approach to animating the text and I think it makes these two videos stand out from the usual type of lyric videos you’ll see online. Sick in the Head is a “love song” at its core, but since it’s an obsessive kind of love, I used letters cut out from magazines and animated the words by hand like you’re looking over the shoulder of someone writing a ransom note. Our other song, Fantasma, is musically kind of 80s. I thought if I could defy the laws of physics and have any kind of lyric video possible for this, what would it be? I really wanted to use the 80s toy, LiteBrite, to somehow spell out the words and animate images. I had no idea how it could be done, or how long it would take but I just dove in before the logistics had a chance to discourage me. I ordered 60 LiteBrite minis before I even knew how I was going to execute this idea. But after 210 hours over the course of 6 weeks, we had the world’s first LiteBrite lyric video! It’s one of the things I am most proud of because I feel like I used a lack of knowledge around digital animation as an opportunity to innovate. Plus it just looks cool!

Do you any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
My family and I had gone to see The Phantom of the Opera, and shortly after that, my old sister got the sheet music from the musical and was learning it on the piano. One day she was practicing and and I was listening and observing and I started to sing along in full voice. She stopped playing, turned and looked at me with her jaw on the floor. I thought she was going to tell me to stop distracting her. But she shouted to my mom, who was in the other room, “Mom?! She can sing!” It was a big deal to me because my family members aren’t very easy to impress. I think it was a defining moment for me.

Contact Info:

• Website: silentrival.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/silentrival
• Facebook: facebook.com/silentrival
• Twitter: twitter.com/silentrival
• Youtube: youtube.com/silentrival
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4Pv8lfZ3p5FvxpFTwtWzow?si=SQYIbfpQSSCLmeNeqBvWSA

Image Credits
Jedediah Johnson