We recently connected with Straats and have shared our conversation below.

Straats, appreciate you joining us today. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?

I think starting young can be a beautiful thing. When we look back on the songs that we wrote when we were 15 and 16, the creation process is something that definitely stands out. It was purely just exploring sounds and trying to recreate things that we liked listening to. I think we took ourselves a bit too seriously, but that’s just part of creative growth and being young. Not to say that starting later is a bad thing, but starting so young gives you more time to develop and refine your tastes. I would’ve loved to have started even younger.

Straats, 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?

Joel and I (Adrian) met all the way back in elementary school, around grade 3 or 4 and have been friends since then. Joel started to make music on his phone early on in high school, but always sang and played guitar from when he was pretty young. I started to mess around with sample based music back in the summer of grade 9, before eventually just trying to relearn the piano and make music that way. We started making stuff together in grade 10 in my parents basement with a pretty limited set up, consisting of only one speaker and a decade old iMac that was on its last legs. Back in 2019, we released our first album with all original tunes that we wrote from the ages of 15-17. We met Annie in high school, where we both were the TA’s for her gym class. She had sung Riptide by Vance Joy in an assembly earlier in the year, so we decided to approach her after a dodgeball game and ask if she’d like to sing for us. It then all kind of progressed from there.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

When people really connect with our music and the feelings we’re trying to convey, that’s something really special. I know that I have so much music that I feel I connect to on a deeper level, so when someone says that they really connect with our stuff, it’s so rewarding to hear. If people can listen to our music and feel something, we’ve accomplished what we set out to do. That’s why we’re so excited to share our new album with people, since we feel really connected to the themes and feelings we’re bringing forward with the music.

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

Back when we released our tune ‘In Your Mind’, it managed to get a pretty decent amount of plays on Spotify. All of a sudden, we had people reaching out to us asking about what we’ve been working on and if we had any more songs that had a similar feel. With all this attention surrounding this particular song, I felt that this sound was all the people wanted to hear. It kind of put us into a box, with the only goal being to make a new tune that felt like a sequel to one that did well. Having that mindset is so damaging to creativity I feel. It really sucks the fun out of the process and makes you feel like you’re just creating a product that has no value to you, only to the people on the other end. In a way that’s fine, but I think creating art should be something that is authentic and true to the person making it. We would eventually realize that we should be making the music we want to make and not trying to make something that would just perform well online. It’s definitely tricky to keep that in mind.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/straats_/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCirG-pfredyhPP2v5zuAddA

Image Credits
Jacob Lea Ife Adenuga