Formula Indie Sessions – Interview with Virgo Rising
What is your earliest memory connected to music?
Jenna: When I was about 4 years old, I started begging my parents to let me play violin every time I heard it on the radio. After a few months, they got me a starter violin and enrolled me in lessons, which I then took for 14 years.
Emily: There was never a moment that I wasn’t singing or humming. It was almost self soothing to hum and have that vibration in your throat and heart; it feels like a hug, and like the song from your heart is taking care of you.
Lauren: Running around in a circle as fast as I can to Slow Burning Fire by the Skydiggers. The sudden tempo change was exciting to me and I remember wanting to run around to it all the time.
How did your passion for creating music begin?
We all grew up with musical childhoods. We started music lessons when we were young, and began writing our own songs independently as teenagers. Near the end of high school, we formed the band and really started to get serious about making music.
What’s the story behind your current music project?
We formed the band near the end of high school. Lauren and Jenna are sisters and grew up playing music together, and met Emily through a mutual friend. We stayed in touch with Emily over social media, where she’d often post videos of herself singing and playing cover songs. We reached out to her to see if she’d be interested in forming a band and we all hit it off. After about a year of making music together just the three of us, we had our friend Isaac join the band as our drummer.
How would you describe your sound to someone who has never heard your music before?
We like to make indie rock music. There’s often a mix of distorted guitars, intimate vocals, and lo-fi samples and textures, sometimes layered with acoustic elements like violin and acoustic guitar. We play with dynamics a lot, and often build to big tension breaks in our songs.
What is one thing you’ve learned that completely changed the way you make music? Something we’re still learning is finding the balance between inspiration and dedication.
It can be hard to write music when you’re always waiting for the next wave of inspiration to hit, but it can also be exhausting to try to push through blocks. Finding a way to strike that balance and keep up with songwriting without having to rely on an ‘outer force’ of inspiration that you can’t control would help take some pressures off of us.
What tools, instruments, or software are essential in your creative process? Mostly just a guitar and the GarageBand app on our phones! We’ve never been too big
into elaborate home recording set ups and prefer to get a general idea of a song and work through things together in person before taking it to the studio to record.
Which indie artist or song are you loving right now?
Miracles by Alex G.
How have your personal experiences influenced your music and artistic vision? Everything that has shaped us and that we’ve experienced has influenced our artistic
output. Our writing comes from a very personal place, we mostly draw on our own experiences with life and growing up.
What emotions or messages do you hope listeners take from your work? Time is fleeting, love it all!
What’s the most important lesson music has taught you so far?
Look outward and be open to new connections. Sometimes with music, especially your own music, things can feel so personal and isolating. It’s easy to get caught up self obsessing, but it’s important to remember that the world is so big and music connects people in so many different ways.
What is a dream venue or festival you would love to perform at?
We’d love the chance to perform at First Avenue in Minneapolis. About a year after we formed the band, we took a road trip down to Minneapolis, about a 7 hour drive from our hometown Winnipeg, to see Whitney perform. We really enjoyed the venue as an audience member, and now almost 7 years later, it’s a sweet and special memory to us. We would love to experience it from the stage next time!
If you could collaborate with any artist, past or present, who would it be and why? It’d be a dream to collaborate with Adrianne Lenker / Big Thief. We’ve been big fans of
her and Big Thief for a long time, and from what we’ve read and seen online it seems like their songwriting and recording process is very deliberate and intuitive. I think we would learn a lot from collaborating with them.
Where can our listeners follow and support your music? (Website,Spotify, IG, links) Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/virgorisingmusic/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4mGuBsyykVd7HxpBZH6zyf?
si=iJpQ7FhkR4uowXFge5G1BA
Website: https://www.virgorisingmusic.com/
Looking toward the future, what’s your dream for the next chapter of your musical journey?
We’re about to release our first full-length album, Wishbone, and we hope it goes over well! We’re really excited to get it out into the world, and hope it finds people who resonate with it.
What do you hope listeners will discover about you along the way? We feel like we’ve really stepped into our own on Wishbone, and we hope listeners can
see the progress we’ve made and how much passion and care we’ve put into the record.
