We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Rebecca Karpen a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Rebecca, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?
I’ve been writing songs since I was about 5 years old, but I really only began doing it seriously in high school. I used to just hide in the practice rooms in the music department for hours at a time, obsessively writing. I taught myself ukulele so I could share my work with people and would basically isolate myself in those rooms so I would improve. I spent years taking songwriting classes, going to open mics, sharing my songs with my very patient friends and family. I’m incredibly proud of myself as a lyricist and I credit much of the skill I have there to the fact I still do all of those things. I still take songwriting classes and do deep-dives into the stories behind other people’s lyrics. I still ask for help from other musicians, especially from my friends Brea Fournier and Emily Sara. The three of us have a group chat where we basically just send drafts of songs to each other.
The best way to learn how to write a song is to learn from other people. I think a lot of musicians, especially when they’re first starting out, view their peers as competition. I think when we shake off that perception, we open ourselves up to a lot of growth and a wellspring of inspiration.
Rebecca, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I am a New York-born and bred singer-songwriter. I’ve been writing music since I was about 5 years old and have been playing shows since my sophomore year of high school, so I’ve really been working at this for about a decade. When I was little, I was incredibly shy, like hiding under my mother’s skirt in elevators- type shy. I had horrible social anxiety and really struggled making friends. I felt every word I said was ignored. The one thing I was great at as a kid was singing. The second I began singing a song, people paid attention to me and I realized that if I just sang about what I was feeling, then people would listen and have to respond. Songwriting gave me this great outlet for my feelings and made it easier for me to communicate with people. I credit the confidence that songwriting gave me for the outspoken and extroverted person I am today. This might sound corny, but my singing voice gave me a real voice. Does that make sense? Gosh, that was corny.
I’m a classically trained vocalist and did a lot of choir singing growing up. Although I take a lot of pride in my voice and all the work I’ve put into growing as vocalist, I think the thing that sets me apart is my lyrics. I don’t have a great grasp on music theory and consider myself a relatively mediocre guitarist, but I consider my melodies and instrumental backing more in service to my words than anything else. I’m pretty neurotic when it comes to writing and have a notes app filled with thousands of songs I’ve created, and I sort of just do it when I get antsy. I think emotions can be confusing sometimes and I have this great outlet to figure out how I feel by translating it out of my head and into words. Oftentimes, the stuff I come up with is weird and freaky, but sometimes the strangest way to express something can be the most apt. One of my songwriting heroes is Jill Sobule, who is the master of wedding the absurd and the genuine in her lyrics. I try to be as honest as I can in my work for both myself and the quality of what I’m creating.
I’m proud of all of my work but “Kosmonaut” is incredibly special to me. It is a weird song, I recorded it drunk with my best friend Natty Korb a few years back after making an awful discovery about someone I had been close to in the past. I spent three months or so writing and rewriting and picking at those lyrics and filling it with references to this person. I wrote this song not for the person I addressed it to, which is confusing, but rather their partner whom I had googled found I shared a lot of similarities with. I wrote this as almost a prayer of strength for the next girl and a condemnation of their partner’s cruelty. It was really emotional to create and Natty build this bizarre estranged instrumental around my voice. It was one take and I was a total wreck. Someone told me once it sounded like it was recorded through a tin can which thrilled me, because that was exactly what I was going for. I might do an acoustic version at some point or something, but I really loved that effect. I felt it really communicated the distance between me and this girl and the weird Twilight Zone being involved with this person had put us both in. It was a song for someone I had never, and will likely never meet. It was this gesture of camaraderie between two strangers who, despite their myriad similarities, had kind of been encouraged to resent each other for no real purpose. It was a really difficult concept for me to figure out how to express and it felt super rewarding that I succeeded in communicating this idea.
I’m also incredibly proud of the album I’m working on right now, “Edelweiss, Or Soundtrack to a Nervous Breakdown.” I’ve been working on this body of songs since 2018, well the oldest is technically from 2016 but I digress. It is about a really difficult period of my life and I knew that I wanted to keep these songs together and release them as the first album I put out. It’s deeply personal and I talk about parts of myself I don’t talk about ever and releasing these songs, while admittedly terrifying, has provided me with a lot of freedom and closure. I am in the middle of recording vocals right now, but the album should be finished in a few months and be released next year. I couldn’t be more excited to share it!
I also am releasing my song “23” on April 23rd. It’s a standalone single, but I think it is a good way to introduce this next era of my work. The song took about a year to write and is deeply personal, but I honestly think it might be the best song I’ve ever written. Because it is so personal, it was really important to me that the recording felt intimate, so it’s just me singing and playing guitar. I have a lot of anxiety when it comes to playing instruments as I’m not terrific at keeping rhythm or general theory and was worried I would mess it up, but was determined to be the only person in the recording, so I practiced until my fingers were raw and went into the studio and busted the song out over the course of a few hours. I love it so much and I’m really proud of the sound quality as well as the quality of my guitar playing in it.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
In my opinion, the most rewarding aspect of being an artist is the opportunity to connect with others so intimately. Songwriting is a pretty solitary activity for me, I will lock myself in a room or just block out everyone around me and just hyperfixate on my notes app for X amount of time. When I show my work to other people, I’ve never quite sure how they’re going to react, but when I perform somewhere and someone comes up to me and says “oh, that line reminded me of my ex. I was having a pretty lousy day but I heard that and it made me laugh.” I can’t put into words how meaningful that is. I will have people text me sometimes and just say “that line you wrote made me feel better” without any sort of prompting on my part and I begin crying. Music gave me the ability to feel confident in my emotions and I credit a lot of that to the songs that made me feel seen, written by perfect strangers. To be someone’s song they cry to on the car ride home, or that they blast when they’ve been rejected, I don’t think anything could ever be more meaningful than that.
Can you share your view on NFTs? (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)
I love that this is a question. I thought they were a scam at the beginning. Looks like I was right. The only cryptocurrency adjacent news cycle I am interested in is Akon’s cryptocurrency, “Akoin” which will be the official currency of the cities he is trying to build in Africa. I am incredibly invested. Invested as in interested in this story, not financially-speaking, I am not invested in crypto or NFTs or whatever.
Contact Info:
- Website: rebeccakarpenexists.bandcamp.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rebeccakarpenexists/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/spacetimekarpenuum/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/RebeccaKarpen
- Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/167W3igsMMFzVrtWlPA5Qb https://music.apple.com/us/artist/rebecca-karpen/1446877722 https://amazon.com/music/player/artists/B08734MWRG/rebecca-karpen?marketplaceId=ATVPDKIKX0DER&musicTerritory=US&ref=dm_sh_wpN4Aek4uX5hv1n7LG7NBfI7G https://tidal.com/browse/artist/10743666 I’m available on all streaming services under “Rebecca Karpen”
Image Credits
Brea Fournier Natty Korb Uncredited JT Cieciorka