Not only does she have brains and beauty, Beca is a Juilliard graduate who oozes talent. Her vision matches her style and tone, and these attributes are definitely featured on her latest EP and single “In Deep Love.” Having grown up in New York, Beca made her way to Los Angeles following a traumatic heartbreak, and has made a new and successful life for herself. With “In Deep Love,” she’s got an 80s dance-club vibe that one can’t help to sing and dance along with.
Beca has worked with some of the most prominent names in the industry including Findlay Brown and producer Morgan Wiley, among others. She has released her debut full-length album Ecliptic with her recently released EP, In Deep Love. We chatted with Beca about her early career into performing music, why she’s drawn to dance music and her latest music video for her single “In Deep Love.”
Guitar Girl Magazine: You attended the Juilliard School in New York, which is very prestigious, and while there when did you discover that you wanted to pursue performing music?Â
Beca: I went to Juilliard for music composition and the idea was to get the largest sound palette I possibly could to go in whatever direction I wanted to go in. I thought that, for a time, I would go into film scoring and I think that might be something down the line that I pursue. But yeah, when I went to school I had grown up being a singer-songwriter and I’ve always known that I wanted to be a performer, and then going to Juilliard was kind of just like okay let me get all the tools I can and gain all the knowledge I can to be the best composer and artist I can be. And then it wasn’t until after I graduated that I realized, “Hey, I’m not really good at being isolated in a room, writing by myself, I really love to be in front of people, interacting with them and collaborating with people and the studio.” So, that sort of put me on that path of being more of an artist performer.
Guitar Girl Magazine: You have a deep passion for electronic dance music, why are you drawn to this genre specifically?
B: I think it’s because I love to dance so much. One of my big parts of my Juilliard experience and being in New York City in general was the nightlife scene, and I was really drawn to the clubs and all the music and just getting lost in that. I really enjoyed being able to dance through whatever was going on, whatever emotions I was feeling, being able to sweat it out on the dance floor. I think that really informed my music style, cause I was like, “Oh, I feel so good doing this, I want to do this for other people.” And of course because my background and just really liking traditional song structure, it kind of made me go into more melodic pop music rather than EDM or similar.
Guitar Girl Magazine: What led you to release your music independently, instead of continuing releasing it on a label?Â
B: I think it’s just the freedom of being an independent artist that is really attractive to me right now. I really like driving my own ship, where I like to steer the direction. Working with This is Music was awesome and they were really super helpful and they’ve become friends of mine, and I still keep in touch with them, and it’s been a great experience. But yeah, I think for everyone involved it made the most sense for me to go independent and it’s really amazing what you can do as an independent artist these days…We have the technology, so I was like, “Okay.” At the end of the day I just wanna make the art that’s purest to my soul and be able to share that with people.
Guitar Girl Magazine: How did you connect with director, Jayson Martinovich for Deep Love, and more specifically did you have a vision for the video? Or did he have a vision that led you to the overall vision?
B: I met him through one of my producers, Fabian Ordorica, who is one of the co-producers on the In Deep Love EP. And yeah, it’s such a funny story of this whole EP because basically I started writing it. My friend from This is Music connected me with Blake Robin, the producer who goes under the name Luxxury. I started writing with Luxxury remotely while I was still living in New York, and then when I moved out to L.A. I worked with Luxxury and then we also brought in Fabian to work on the EP so all three of us worked on that together.
Once the EP was finished, Fabian introduced me to Jayson to work on the video because Jayson’s also an artist in his own right. He’s a really talented writer, artist and performer. He also does this side gig with visuals and he does amazing visuals for his own projects too; it’s awesome. So, I was like “Oh I really liked what he was doing.” And he already has seen me perform and was like, “Yeah, let’s work together.” So it just all kinda fell into place, and it was all just very collaborative, which I love about the community in L.A. here. When I started talking to Jayson about the video it was really clear that we wanted to kinda keep it in the monochromatic red tones.
We just thought that really popped it and also made a lot of sense for the song and what we were thinking for the song. I also knew I wanted to have a dancer of some sort, and then I was introduced to Kyle Thomas Shea, who’s just uber-talented. And he just came in and free-styled. So it was really cool, the whole video- The video came together more seamlessly than almost any of my videos. It was a total pleasure to be on the set with everyone. Also, my make-up artist, is a long-time friend of mine and collaborator Josiah Perkraft worked his magic. His boyfriend was also the costume designer, so it was just all awesome.
Guitar Girl Magazine: What’s next for 2018?
B: I’ll have a remix EP coming out in March with some really great producers. A lot of them are friends of mine I’ve been working with for a while who all just jumped on board and were like, “Hey, I wanna do this.” So, that should be fun. Beyond that I have at least three more singles pretty much ready to go, so not quite ready to talk about that yet but I’m very excited about those collaborations, that’ll be really cool.
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