We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Pink Palace a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Pink thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
Our most meaningful projects happen in collaboration with people who are important in our lives, be that each other as bandmates, our creative colleagues, or conversations with loved ones. The process is easier and more rewarding when we all care about each other as well as the final product. Our upcoming song “one year ago today” was written from a shared sense of stress and discomfort we sometimes feel when looking at memories that social media feeds us each day. The verses reminisce on such moments; simple snapshots of the past, focusing on the peace and ease we felt at the time, while the refrain reacts to seeing our past selves with melancholy, sadness, and even bitterness. After we wrote it, our friend Kuba from the YouTube channel “moved minds” asked if we wanted to create a score for a photography compilation he was working on. We felt like our song paired perfectly with the emotional impact of Kuba’s photography, so we adapted it to fit with the video.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Pink Palace started making music in an unfinished basement in the suburbs of Boston in 2018. The band consists of Jon Walter, Hallie Ivory, and Kaitlyn Ivory, and we have been friends our whole lives. Our friendship has been based on creativity; as kids we made comics starring our pets as superheroes, YouTube-style skits, and trading card games together. Eventually our love of music brought us to create Pink Palace, originally as an outlet for our emotions and as a way to explore their identities. We combine our diverse stylistic interests and perspectives to create dark, dreamy, introspective indie music. We got our name from the apartment complex in the movie Coraline and have been drawing inspiration from it ever since.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
The main through-line of our creative journey is our love of creating art together. Whether we’re working on a song that is deeply meaningful to ourselves, or messing around with a track that is objectively stupid, it’s about the sense of community and purpose we feel while creating. Each of us continues to bring new ideas and influences to the table, keeping us inspired and motivated. Over the years our music has taken on different forms, from lofi to psychedelic rock, and we plan to continue to experiment and develop our sound. We are constantly writing and producing new music, and although much of it may never be released, it’s important to keep the gears turning and continue improving. It is also truly rewarding to watch a project go from concept to a tangible finished result. At the end of the day we create with the people we love, for the people we love, because we love to.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
The whole process of creating is a constant cycle of learning and unlearning. One of our biggest roadblocks, and the toughest to unlearn, has been perfectionism. We’ve had a sort of bell curve-shaped journey: when we started releasing music we were just creating and having fun, but somewhere in the middle we got wrapped up in this fruitless chase for perfection. For a long time we felt as though we weren’t quite finished at each step of the process. We would continue tinkering with lyrics, changing parts, tweaking the mix, and were never satisfied with the results. Compartmentalization has helped a lot, so we start recording at the end of the writing process and do minimal mixing until everything has been recorded. This has cut down on time spent re-recording and re-mixing the same song. Nothing is hard-set though, and the most important task is to listen to our gut instincts. Sometimes that means starting a song over and re-writing the whole thing, re-recording a vocal because we decided to change a lyric later on, or knowing when to abandon a project altogether. It has felt like a natural process. As we improve our abilities and aim for higher quality, it makes sense that a gap would form in the middle where we couldn’t quite reach the quality we desired. We’ve learned a lot so far and are excited to continue to learn and unlearn new techniques and lessons together.
Contact Info:
- Website: linktr.ee/pinkpalace
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/pinkpalacemusic/
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/pinkpalaceband
- Twitter: twitter.com/pinkpalacemusic
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@PinkPalaceMusic
Image Credits
Kaitlyn Ivory