Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Andee Glass. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Andee thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I’ve know I’ve wanted to do music since I was a small child. I feel like most little girls dream of being pop stars when they’re older and I was definitely one of those girls. Difference is most little kids grow out of that and become more realist as they get older and go through school but that spark never went out for me. There were times where I didn’t feel it as strong but someone would always come along and encourage & inspire me back where I needed to be.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’ve wanted to be in the creative arts since I was a kid. Music was always my favorite but as I got older, I honed in more skills. Drawing was always my second favorite and now I crochet as well which I really enjoy doing and have many money from it as well.

Music has always been at the center of my life since I was just learning to speak. I always loved to sing and I eventually started making up my own little songs. My family had a piano that was never used in our house; it was used more as decoration, and one day I decided I wanted to learn how to play it so I did. I pulled up YouTube and began teaching myself until I started to figure out the sounds and placement and before you know, I was writing music on the piano just by using my ears.

I took writing classes as I got into Jr. High to help me work on my lyrics, I wrote poetry daily ( whether good or bad, practice is practice ). And by the time I had gotten into high school, I had written a whole album of songs that I didn’t know what to do with. I had recorded some of them and put them on YouTube for my family and anyone else who wanted to see them.

By the time I got to high school, I was pretty set that music was what I wanted to do most. I had had some pretty rough times in Jr high and I can safely say that music was there for me and saved me many times. To a certain extent, I felt it was the least I could do to continue to peruse it.

When I was in high school, I decided I wanted to learn a new instrument so my parents got me a ukulele for Christmas and when I learned that, I got a guitar the next year. I loved my guitar, and still do. When I got my guitar, it opened a whole new world of possibilities for what I could write and a whole new genre I wasn’t able to tap into on a piano. I began to really find my sound and before you know, I had a solid EP that melded together so well. Never released but I think of my written music as collections and this was my second collection. I made a cover art for it and everything. I called it Complementary.

By the time I’d graduated high school, I knew how to play piano, ukulele, and guitar. Though most, if not all self taught, I felt I knew a lot for being on my own. This is when I met a new person in my life who would soon introduce me further into music … if you notice, I haven’t mentioned bass at all. That’s because I really hadn’t been interested in the instrument at all until I was 18 and asked for cover for someone for a battle of the bands performance. I was given 4 days notice, given a bass guitar to practice on and the song without tabs. I had to learn it by ear and it was not an easy song for a beginner ( in my opinion ). The song was California Uber Alles by Dead Kennedys, and I dedicated myself to learning the song in its entirety. I’ll admit, I was not the best for only been given 4 days notice but I did my absolute best and from then on, I fell in love with bass guitar.

The funny thing is each instrument I play has it’s own genre of music that comes along with it, what I know how to play and prefer to play and it all has to do with what I learned to play on each of them. On piano I play more somber, Twenty One Pilots-esque music where as my guitar is more punk pop, emo music like Green Day & Blink-182. My bass guitar I started with that punk / heavy sound such as AFI and Ghost. I love playing Ghost on my bass.

I’d never played with a full band before and that was my first time was with this high school battle of the bands band. I really tried to do something with a band, recruiting the person who introduced me to bass but it fell apart. This is when I got my bass guitar, Bluey. She’s a mini, baby blue bass that I absolutely adore with my life. She didn’t originally have the arch painted on her, that didn’t come around for about a year …. At which point I’d also been introduced to drumming and got myself my own kit which I like playing the punk and heavier genres.

It’s all a mystery to me how I got to where I am now playing with Sunset Station. It’s a dream come true that I didn’t even realize would become such a dream come true. When Jéan ( the lead singer for Sunset Station ) reached out to me, I was pretty distant to the idea of joining, mostly because I’d been reached out to by so many other bands that needed someone but all fell through, plus he was asking me to play bass for them and at this point, bass was still fairly new to me. I’d only been playing for a little over a year and even that was pretty limited as to my knowledge on the instrument but … here we are, here I am.

Music has always been always been at the center of my life from concerts, to writing my own, to learning & covering my favorite songs to drawing cover arts. I love music and it’s changed me as a person and saved me in many times of weakness and brought me up in my strongest.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I think one of the hardest thing I’ve hard to “unlearn” is the concept that in creative passions / careers, it isn’t a competition so don’t treat people like they are your enemies / competition.

For a long time, I never had the perspective that “everyone is working for the same thing”. It took me reading something once where they said “just because someone is ahead of me doesn’t discount what I’ve done. Just because someone is better in one area than I am doesn’t mean I am not good at what I do. It’s okay to compare but don’t put yourself down because of someone else’s success. Learn from them and appreciate what it is that makes them unique.” More or less a verbatim of what I remember. This really changed everything for me because up until this point, I had a really hard time seeing others do the thing that was so dear to my heart by pursuing music.

This simple lesson taught me to be less hateful, to be more caring and admire those around me who followed the same road as me. Before I would feel jealous, angry, and less than but after learning this valuable lesson and unlearning that competitive spirit, I became a happier person in my craft.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

I think the thing I used to hear the most, and still hear to this day from family, friends and even strangers is “how do you come up with that?”

How do I come up with it? Well … I think I speak for a lot of creatives when I say, sometimes the best fuel for creativity ( at least in music & song writing ) is sadness, pain & darkness. For a long time I didn’t know how to write anything but sad songs, or songs about “love”. I think for some who don’t understand the creative process, they may think it’s fun and easy and sure, at times it is really fun, and sometimes it is really easy to come up with some of the stuff I do but it’s mostly just a way of communicating. I think that growing up, I didn’t feel I had the best open communication so when I found that music was saying when I couldn’t comprehend to say music, the songs I was listening to spoke to me in a way that I wasn’t able to, it really hit me and I learned to communicate my feelings through my music.

Music became and still is a way that I channel my complex feelings through. When I don’t know how to say how I’m feeling, I grab my guitar, start a voice memo on my phone and start recording. I play some generic chords and begin singing a melody to talk it through. Sometimes it turns into nothing, just some recording on my phone I may revisit once or twice but sometimes it turns into something really cool, something really catchy and something I can be proud of.

I think something that non creatives may not realize it how much goes into music, for me at least. My phone has ran out of storage so many times due to the amount of voice memos and notes I have in my phone from lyric ideas, song workshops and covers. I never want to miss something that could turn into a magical piece, a magical moment so I save everything even if only 20%-30% of the material is actually used. I’m a hoarder when it comes to my music. I have so many forgotten, unused and unimportant projects just lying around that I may or may not come back to someday. It isn’t something that is a hit the second I write a song. What you don’t see if the hours it took to come up with the lyrics, the pain I had to be in to put myself in a place to communicate my feelings. It’s not always pain, I have written many love songs but I’ve found the best songs I’ve written come from extreme emotions, pleasant or unpleasant.

If you were to go through a creatives phone, I’m sure you would see exactly what I’m talking about.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://on.soundcloud.com/bsYgD
• Instagram: Andeew.eaykm
• Other: @_.bored.yarn._ ~ instagram @_.bored.art._ ~ instagram

Image Credits
Kilby Court photo : https://www.imnotbenadamsphoto.com/ Instagram : imnotbenadamsphoto