Artist To Watch: Jay Som
“Jay Som has always been based around the comfort of solitude,” Melina Duterte tells me over the phone from the Bay Area, where she grew up and currently lives. The Oakland resident has been making music for over 10 years — at 22 years old, essentially half her life — and her project reflects self-taught and hard-earned experience, largely learned alone. “Being by myself and making music all the time… That’s where the art is. That’s where I’m the most creative, and that’s where my cathartic process for everything is. It’s what makes me feel 100%.”
As an artist, the natural course of progression tends to expand outward, but Duterte seems intent on doing everything on her own, at least for the foreseeable future. (“It’s not that I don’t ever want to collaborate with anyone. It’s just that, for now, I really like working by myself,” she says.) After putting out a steady stream of under-the-radar releases, 2015’s Turn Into — an admittedly hastily-assembled collection of demos and incoherent thoughts spontaneously uploaded to Bandcamp — struck a nerve. It was reissued by Topshelf Records and then Polyvinyl Records, the latter of which signed her and are releasing what’s billed as her debut full-length.
That album, Everybody Works, bears the weight of the trial-and-error that came before it. Remarkably, it feels like it comes from a place of insularity while also projecting itself outward. Recorded entirely by herself in her bedroom last fall after returning from tour, Everybody Works is a sparkling testament to Duterte’s skill as both a songwriter and producer. Her self-imposed solitude invites a multiplicity of perspectives — you can sense that in both the variety of sounds explored on the album (no two songs sound alike) and in its lyrics, which focus on the emotional labor that we put into our relationships with others. Jay Som’s music is in constant conversation with itself, playing out imagined situations and precarious interpersonal give-and-takes with the pressure of…