Today we’d like to introduce you to Michelle Buzz.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I was just always writing songs. It’s how my subconscious talked to me. I would sit down at the piano, start making sounds, wait to fall in love with them, and then they would reach out to one another and keep falling in love until it was a full song. That’s how it started; when I was five – rushing home from school to play the piano and sing my secrets, pushing ideas out until I felt an instant connection to something and then repeating it over and over so I wouldn’t forget. I was always singing the missing harmonies in pop songs, obsessing over the lesser-known tracks on albums, listening to the only non-christian CD in the house… SPA MUSIC and writing songs over the instrumental soundscapes. I was always signing up for battle of the bands, talent shows, playing coffee shops, outdoor malls, refusing to sing cover songs, only originals. Secretly this expectation formed that one of these gigs was going to lead to some kind of break… and when no one “discovered” me all those times playing as a kid… I decided I must not be good enough.
By the time I went to college the songwriting department rejected me so I settled for audio engineering so I could at least help other artists make music, understand how to record, that kind of thing. Nashville is such a song town… every bar, every night has some amazing singer singing an amazing song they wrote. I was intimidated by everyone’s fearlessness and it kind of shut me down. It was the only period of writer’s block in my life.
By senior year I was finishing up my shifts at a Mexican restaurant in midtown and crying in my car… wondering if I was going to end up like my co-workers – college grads ten years down the road still serving beans and rice. I think that panic just pushed me into wanting to do something dramatic. I wanted to follow the advice this A&R in Nashville told me… “go where the music you want to make is being made”. I wanted to go to LA. I wanted to stop being scared, I wanted to stop saying no to myself.
I moved to LA on new years day. I met a few good people quickly and just started navigating this crazy world of the music business. I was too terrified of being an artist at the time, but I wanted to write so I kept saying “I’m just a songwriter.” I remember being in my first apartment in Toluca Lake and reading Billboard’s 40 under 40 and realizing I didn’t know any of these people that could “make things happen”. I felt like a speck getting swallowed by my closet-sized studio apartment. I drove up the road to a cemetery, something I used to do in Nashville when I was spiraling. I found a headstone with a really old year and sat next to it and felt the grass in between my fingers. I remember thinking, “I’d rather die than not make it in music.”
I signed a songwriting deal with Warner/Chappell two years later off the back of working with everyone I could seven days a week, going to parties, going to camps, and then proceeded to keep doing all that for another two years. More sessions, more meetings, more parties, more studios, more coffees. “Must write a hit, must write a hit.” And I did. I got the platinum-selling song, I had the global top 10, I got the plaques on the wall. I executive produced, I wrote with my heroes, I wrote in the same studios as legends. But each year I craved less “pop” and more “avant-garde”. I was growing inspired by things my collaborators found too obscure. I wanted unpredictability in songs, I wanted some kind of spiritual-like awakening to transpire, I wanted to come from a more raw place instead of planning out the concept and pulling from the same references over and over.
So I started envisioning I would connect with these kinds of artists, you know, will it into my life. I started dreaming of developing this artist that had these crazy amazing ideas and I would produce and co-write them, and it would launch both of us and it would be a lighthouse to other weirdos like me that we could create together and I could sail away from planet pop.
I think that’s about the time I made “FTN”, I was at this big label camp writing for all these artists and I ran up to my room to explode from all the ass kissing I and my colleges were engaging in and “FTN” came out in a matter of minutes into a voice memo. The feeling of such inner peace when I expelled that song was the beginning of the epiphany that I was the artist I was dreaming of meeting and working with, I was the person with crazy ideas that could write and produce them, I was the one who wanted to explore obscure, deep, ideas… I was finally ready to stop being a chicken about it like I had been so many times in life for no reason except my own mind. Up until that moment in the Vegas hotel room at The Palms, I hadn’t allowed myself to create alone without thinking about what others would think in four years. It was the start of a now never ending purge. And it led to me working with more artists who felt just like me. I began to meet people who wanted to take risks and be unconventional.
I put out my first single “FTN” in the fall of 2021, and for the first time in a while, I felt at home in my skin. I met this amazing director who had been making music videos for a few of the artists I was working with and we absolutely clicked so we started building this visual world and pulling from all the things I loved – sci-fi, mysticism, horror. I released “Misfit” and then I was playing shows in LA… I knew I wanted to make things happen on stage and not just perform to tracks… I wanted to play instruments, toggle my fx, and be able to make spontaneous decisions. It was around that time I was scavenging vintage music shops around town for synths and I stumbled on the vintage keytar… I had had it in my mind to have a keytar live since I only play keys and not too many people do it, but I hated how the new ones looked all glam rock… when I saw the vintage one with its square profile like an old 70s muscle car, I knew it would be something special. It was winter 2021 when I wrote this song off of a spiral I had a feeling once again like a speck with a dream… I wrote this poem to try and calm down:
“I want to give my life a gift
The gift of me
Me unabashed
My freak expression
My call of I don’t care
My cry of celestial void
I want to give my existence a gift
To free myself at every possible turn to express what’s swirling inside
What’s been brewing since the partials first formed that found their way into my tissue
The gift of bravery
My flesh dissolved
Nothing there but a force
Take it or leave it
Like it or hate it or never even know it is not the point
The inverse is the point
To do it with everything in my soul even if for an empty auditorium
A barren stadium
A silent theater
A grave yard
A dark encompassing void
To reveal every corner of my humanity to a world full of distracted bodies who might never turn an ear…
And still do it with the loudest expression.”
After I wrote that poem, I rushed to my studio and wrote what turned into “Liberation”, which became the song that changed my life in a way. I performed it at this secret show my friend at Spotify puts on and I posted the performance on my TikTok and it started blowing up. I had three weeks of overwhelming love and comments on that song of people that spoke the same language as me, that loved the same stuff as me, that got what I was saying… I released that song in January 2022. I’ve gotten messages throughout the year from fans sharing how that song either helped then through the loss of a parent or helped them from committing suicide or helped then pursue their dream… I mean, that’s just everything. That’s what art has done for me, and to now make art that does that for other people that’s all I want to do. I got to tour with Tove Lo this past summer and then Chai in the fall… I never expected this project would be resonating with so many people from the jump, and it literally means the world to me.
This project is just me saying yes to myself… and inviting others to do the same. Yes to my ideas, yes to the way I see the world, yes to what makes me feel like me. Yes to my love of existential questions, yes to my love of darkness, yes to my love for sounds that feel like being suspended in front of a black hole, yes to my fascination with time and death and the unknown, yes to my love of analog synths and distortion, yes to my love of all my influences growing up – Imogen Heap, Shiny Toy Guns, Death Cab For Cutie, The Romantic Period in general, Opera, Orchestral music… yes to my relationship with the past and pain, yes to my feeling about eternity and theories of consciousness, yes to my predisposition for destruction, yes to my quest for emotional breakthroughs.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I would love to meet a creative who has had a smooth road… for me, it’s been an internal epic of hating and loving myself. And I mean the music industry rewards those who can play the game. The game of having it all together, being able to convince people you can give them something no one else can. It takes impeccable confidence… and I didn’t have that when I started. I was sensitive, insecure, and desperate to make it. Finding my true self became harder and harder the more I hid her away. Living in LA, there’s a quest to keep up appearances, afford the dinner, go to the rooftop… it drove me to make money, but it chased away the art.
The biggest thing I had to realize was that my intuition, my gut, my taste, was just as trustworthy as that of the people I was trying to prove myself to… that my instinct was actually the most valuable one because only I had it. My taste leads to a special kind of idea that only I can have, and to hold that back from coming out is a robbery. To filter my own ideas based on an imagined rejection from people… I mean why make art at all?
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I feel this deep connection to a great unknown reality, something my mind can never comprehend fully, but something that is closer to my true self, my energy, my consciousness, and that fuels all my music. I have a playlist on my Spotify of all the songs I’ve written for other incredible artists if anyone wants to know more about my life as a songwriter… and then I have an EP coming in May that feels like the most me I’ve ever been in music. There’s a song off the EP dropping in March called “Universe” and if anyone’s checked out my Tiktok or Instagram then you probably already heard a little bit of it. My incredible community of fans already know that I’m building a very special world for us to exist in… one void of space and time, with byproducts of healing and revelation, one where all the feelings are welcome, all the misfits belong, and all the trauma is loved.
What do you like best about our city? What do you like least?
LA is beautiful and ugly. It has this madness about it where it seems like all your dreams are always perfectly in and out of reach. It’s dirty and pristine, it’s rich and poor, it’s eat AND be eaten. I’ve been in Silverlake for the last two years. The eastside has always been my favorite part of LA. My studio looks out onto a big tree and a backdrop of hills and further still mountains. The winding roads, the eclectic shops, the fashion, the flea markets. I always had my meetings over there even when I was living in the valley my first handful of years in LA. Now I’m going on seven, and it feels like I just got here. It’s equal parts never-ending vacation and fever dream. The nightlife can be electrifying if you know the right spots, the food is a dream, the destruction and devastation next to the outlandish wealth is numbing. It’s a place that confronts you with the good life and the rock bottom and creates a drive in a lot of people to avoid the ladder and shoot for the stars. I think all the rebels find themselves here at one time or another. There’s so many parts of my art that I don’t know if I could do as easily anywhere else because of the access to filming locations, music venues, and such a concentration of good ideas pushing good art forward.
Contact Info:
- Website: thatgirlbuzz.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thatgirlbuzz
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thatgirlbuzz/
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@thatgirlbuzz
Image Credits
OUTDOOR SHOOT PHOTO CREDIT: Milo Lee LIVE PERFORMANCE FEATURE IMAGE PHOTO CREDIT: Victoria Sanders
