We Need To Talk About SALO

There are artists who dabble in different genres, going off-piste with different vibes and flavours every once in a blue moon, and then there is SALO: a singer, songwriter, pianist and producer living in multi-genre, crème de la crème, sweet-spot world of drum & bass, soul and jazz. And yes, it is as delicious as it sounds, but wait, there’s more…

The mancunian vocalist and resident Bloc2Bloc DJ – known for her work with the likes of Chimpo, GLXY and Sustance – is creating interchangeable drum & bass/soul tracks that when flipped, work seamlessly in both worlds. Her latest release ‘Give Me Time’ is the perfect example of this. Simultaneously, it is a record that encapsulates SALO entirely as an artist. With a sweet melody, buckets of depth and a catchy chorus, she showcases a performance of absolute certainty. This is SALO as her raw and unadulterated self and she’s here to stay.

With the pending release of ‘Set Me Free’ – a track that fuses jungle choruses with soul verses – and her live session of ‘Give Me Time’ finally dropping on YouTube, it was time to bring her in for a natter.

SALO! Talk to us about your new, jazzy number ‘Give Me Time’

I’ve always loved jazz but it’s hard getting band members in when you don’t have a band, so I composed the track on Ableton originally, with the aim of bringing it to people to play it live. That was my intention when making it. The tune is about me being in a relationship. You know when you realise you’ve got a few things to work on within yourself and it’s causing stress on the relationship? You love the person you’re with so you’re willing to work on the red flags within yourself to be with them. That’s what it’s about. I actually sent it to the person it’s about and he replied saying ‘This is sick. Definitely one of the best tunes you’ve written so far!’ He was proper buzzing over it and so was my team, so I thought, I need to release this. I need it to play it live. So I self-released it, sent it to BBC Introducing, filmed a live session too, which was sick. It was insane hearing the track come to life as I produced it in my bedroom.

The live session looked amazing!

That was a proper big production and I funded it all myself. I got a recording engineer called Jonny Opo and these sick videographers called Dan Hyde and Dave Lawson from Hyde Productions in.The band was sick too. Such talented musicians. We had George Wright on trumpet, Mike Baines on guitar, Lewis Kennedy on drums and Arik Ross on bass. I was singing and playing piano. I actually took inspo from the Pa Salieu video when he filmed ‘Allergy’, it inspired me. I wanted it to be similar but in my style. I just think people haven’t seen me with a band yet. I want people to see that side of me.

Sounds like everything came together really nicely for this one. That’s the dream situation, right? How does it feel when that happens for you?

I always describe it as a jigsaw puzzle in my brain, and when I figure out the right melody or I hear a sound, it’s like another jigsaw piece fitting together. The tunes that I write in a day are the best. It feels like I’m channeling something, it comes out really naturally. I’m not forcing anything. That’s how I know a track is good.

Have there been any projects you’ve worked on that perhaps haven’t clicked at the start, that ended up being something you really loved?

This tune I’m making with 4AM KRU at the moment, they sent it to me a few weeks ago and I was like, it needs to be better than the last one I did. I put a lot of pressure on myself. I was trying different things every other day, trying to put a melody on it and I was like ‘It’s not sounding right! What’s going on?’ I tried everything to get the creativity back. I had 30 audio tracks of different ideas, but then I sat down and came up with a verse, a bridge and a hook. It worked, but then I listened to another tune I made – a soul tune – and someone very close to me was like ‘Why don’t you use some of the ideas from the soul tune for this tune?’ and it fit perfectly! That’s the first time a tune has taken that long to make. I always thought that with every tune I make, it has to be on the spot. That’s the only way it can be great, but that one showed me you can actually work on a tune over a few weeks and it still be good. I think I was struggling so much coming up with an idea for it because the idea had already been written but on another project.

You’re so versatile with your music, and yet you’re so aligned as an artist. Across everything you do, what’s the common thread for you?

I think it’s the melodies and emotion behind the tracks I make. I love writing soul and jazz but I also love writing and making drum & bass. Sometimes if I can’t make a soul tune, I’ll make a drum & bass tune, but the kind of melodies that I use always link the two together. For example, the tune I made with 4AM KRU called ‘So I Stay’, that was initially a recording I made on Instagram. It was originally supposed to be a soul tune, but then 4AM KRU flipped it into a jungle tune. They actually sampled the Instagram video. I re-recorded the vocals after, but the piano was sampled from that. It worked both ways. Because of how I make my music, I can turn drum & bass tunes I’ve made back into soul tunes.

You do so many things musically, you sing, you’re a pianist, producer and DJ… What was your first love? Which one pulled you in?

I’ve been playing the piano since I was 7. I was classically trained so I’ve always played classical music, but I started to not really enjoy it that much anymore. It wasn’t creative enough for me. I used to pour loads of emotion into it and make it my own in that sense, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted to be with people my age. People with similar interests. I didn’t really fit in. So, I went to college and started raving! It was amazing, but I remember one night standing there thinking ‘I know how to make this better.’ That’s when I learnt how to DJ. I actually started off DJing bassline and jump up, which is so far from what I do now. I’d lock myself in a room for 10 hours a day and teach myself how to mix. I loved it. When it came to my singing and songwriting, I was always too shy to sing in front of people. I used to do covers and put them on instagram, that’s it. Even five people in front of me was too much. I think the DJing was me training myself to perform in front of a crowd in that sense. When I turned 21, that was when I started working with Chimpo. He was like ‘You’ve got a sick voice, I think we should make a tune.’ That’s how ‘Keep U Round’ came about. After that, I wanted to go back to piano. I’ve always loved the 60s so I wanted to go back to that sort of time and incorporate the underground into it. I love DJing and going to raves, but jazz is definitely taking the lead now. I get a different feeling when playing live, especially now that I have a live band now. I like intimate vibes. I like feeling like I’m talking to a mate in my room. It’s like people are watching me in my room practicing. They’re the shows I like doing. The hype stuff vocally isn’t me. I’m definitely not much of a drum & bass host.

As a songwriter, drawing from personal experiences is part of the craft. This must be both therapeutic and difficult at times – how does songwriting affect you personally?

That’s all I can write about. I’m always a bit jealous of people who can write stories about other people and make up stories or go into detail about a miniscule thing. I have to properly feel it, understand the feelings and write about it. The way they used to write in the 60s, people like Etta James, it’s like you’re in the moment with them. They’re describing everything bit by bit. Few metaphors sprinkled in there but mostly it’s ‘This is what I’m seeing, this is how I’m feeling.’ I love writing in that way. I’m giving my life a melody. Sometimes it’s been too hard to write about things that have happened. And for some reason, for proper heavy stuff, I don’t like putting words to paper, so I’ll write a piano piece instead. I think that speaks more in my head anyway. It helps me get over things. I’ve written a few piano pieces like that, when things have been really hard.

The beauty is that only you will know how you were feeling or what you were going through when you wrote it. Amazing.

Exactly. Do you know what’s really mad? I wrote a piano piece when I used to live at Bloc2Bloc. I was in a tiny little room and I squeezed this big 88 key keyboard into it, I couldn’t go anywhere without it. The way I’d write, I’d balance my laptop on it, and have my mic just squashed up next to me. One night, I was really going through it and I wrote this piano piece. There was this storm going on outside. I was there with my piano looking out the window. I’m hearing strong, angry wind winds. It was raining proper hard. I showed my mum this piece when I’d finished it and didn’t tell her anything about it. She listened to it and said ‘I feel like it’s like a storm or something.’ She could feel the weather and the rain! I’m making an EP currently that is vocals and piano based, and that’s one of the songs. It’s mad cause I’ve played it out at events and been worried that because I’m not singing, people won’t listen as much, but I think it actually had the biggest applause in the whole show, which has put more confidence in me to release more of this sort of stuff. I’m proper excited about it and some other bits I’ve been working on too. I can’t wait for people to see what’s incoming next.