All photos by @Amelia.vitale
Meredith Fay is a budding star who turned her heartbreak into art. A senior at Montclair State University, she turned her turmoil into a triumph, writing an honest EP about what it’s like to find yourself again after losing your first love.
Let’s start with a little bit of background. How did you get started with music? I remember freshman year of college you used to post a lot of covers.
I had been writing music for the last six years. I first started by playing guitar and then I learned how to play piano. All of my first music was written on the guitar, but the entire EP was written from piano base, so I’ve been writing music for a really long time. In High School I used to post my stuff to SoundCloud and get together with kids in High School that were engineers at the time and that’s when I initially released stuff. Thinking about me releasing that stuff is just crazy because I didn’t even know who I was. The last time I had ever released anything was Junior year of High School, which was 2014. So it’s not that I fell out of love with music, for some reason I just didn’t have an essence to release anything. It’s not that I stopped writing, it’s just that nothing provoked me enough where I thought ‘yo, let’s sit down and make something of this’. I have a tendency to write songs more on the sadder songs of life more than the happier side of life. I’ve tried writing happy songs and it sounds so corny and I just can’t do it. I went through a breakup in March and it was a really tumultuous event in my life, and I started writing right after that. I think the EP is probably the most raw music that I’ve ever written because the stuff I wrote in High School has no weight at all compared to when you’re in a real relationship and you love someone. The EP, to me is the most real and raw piece that I’ve ever written because it was my first heartbreak, it was the first person that I loved. So basically the inspiration for it came from my breakup; I just started writing music and all summer I contemplated making music with the girl I made music with my whole high school career and I kinda kept pushing it off. I forget when we decided ‘okay, I wanna put this out there, fuck it, let’s just do this’. And that’s how the EP came to be.
Do you have any musical inspirations?
There’s nobody that I sat down and thought ‘yo, I wanna be like you’, but Taylor Swift is my homegirl, as corny as it may sound, she’s the reason that I first picked up a guitar when I was twelve. King Princess, I adore her, I love everything about her. But then on the other side of it, I’m a big fan of rap, I love rap, I don’t know what it is. It goes from I can listen to instrumental depressing shit but then I can listen to hardcore rap and pump up. My inspirations are very wide, I wouldn’t say that there’s one strict thing. When I made the EP, me and the producer that I worked with, we just listened to sounds together, and whatever I liked, I just put in it. It was more what I felt fit the song and what I felt fit the sound.
The EP is all about finding yourself and learning from your mistakes, as well as showing girls that it’s okay to be independent. How do you feel that you want to empower women through your music?
I feel like women aren’t taken as seriously. I don’t know why. It’s so odd how sex is such a divider in the music industry. I think that to empower woman, be who you are and don’t shine away from that, whether it’s music or your career path because you’ll always come across people who don’t accept it or they think you’re a freak or they’ll think you’re weird. And that’s a big fear of mine when releasing music is that I just put a few layers of my heart out on the world wide web. I finally had nerves about it the night that it came out thinking ‘oh I can’t go back now’ because everything that I said is so factual. I’m not making shit up, I’m speaking from experience, and I’m talking about a specific person; it’s not hard to tell who I’m talking about. People can take that in various different ways, but I think when a women does that it’s looked at as weird. If you do anything out of the ordinary, you’re instantly labeled as a freak or weird or different or people ask ‘why are you doing that’? So when people shy away from the day to day 9-5 program, people think it’s weird. When I decided to convert my Instagram into a private music page, people unfollowed me, people that I know; they just wouldn’t take me seriously. So I think when it comes to being a woman in the music industry, you need to stick to who you are, you cannot shy away from who you are, and you cannot stop writing about factual things that happen in your life because you’re scared about what people are gonna think or what people are gonna say. People who are gonna be so eager to be critical of your work, they’re pretty small minded. We all have our idols, I love Post Malone and Chance the Rapper, but they were looked at as freaks for doing something different, and I feel like I’m getting a little bit of that at school. I would just say at the end of the day, be who you are and don’t shy away from telling the truth or talking from the heart because that’s ultimately what’s going to lead you to happier times.
You’ve had a drastic transformation in the past four years of college. I remember you were very active on campus, joined a sorority, and then your socials changed. You stopped posting covers and sharing your personal life online. How do you feel like the drastic changes you’ve gone through have led to your improvement in your music/ who you are as a person?
That’s so interesting and you bring up such a good point where on social media you live up to an expectation that you show as a person. I left my sorority. I wasn’t a part of the fake shit. I couldn’t keep up with a persona of fakeness all the time, I wasn’t about it. I lost a lot of friends, we went on different paths. Freshman year, everyone’s constantly going out and that’s cool, that’s the energy. But as I get older, I don’t want to constantly go out Wednesday- Sunday. I dropped a lot of people because I wasn’t fucking with their vibe. This past semester has by far been the hardest one that I’ve ever encountered. I’ve gone through the past three and a half years of school no issues. I’ve gone through a lot so I think when it came down to my songwriting now, I feel like I’m coming into who I am a little bit more. We all struggle with who we are and all these insecurities that we have, and little by little I’ve noticed those things start to float away. I’m not as concerned with those materialistic things anymore.
When it comes to my songwriting I kinda take over a persona when I write in the fact that I don’t leave anything out; I’m true to what I’m talking about. In the end, I don’t wanna be a liar, I don’t want to be fake, that’s not my M.O. So I think I’ve always been honest with my songs, I’ve always told a story, I’m not leaving out details. But then when you get older, you realize things. This semester was my revelation semester. Everyone goes through rough times in college and I never really understood that, I sailed for three years of college and then it hit me; I went through a breakup and struggled with depression and that was a tough thing that I had to experience. You start to realize after you go through difficult things that the little things don’t really matter anymore. Like for my birthday, I didn’t want gifts, I just wanted my family with me. When it came to my songwriting I guess, I’ve never been a angsty writer, but I like to eloquently get my point across so with the songs that I just released I think I eloquently got my point across.
I’ve grown up a lot, and with growing up, you lose a lot of people. It scares me a bit because a lot of people are superficial going through life, so a lot of people that are not in my life, there’s a reason why they’re not there. If you’re starting to grow into who you are as a person, sometimes people aren’t growing with you. People sometimes like to stay where they are for an eternity in their hole of insecurity, and there are a lot of things that we struggle so much over. Becoming more in tune with who I am as a person has helped me become more open with my writing.
What would be your defining moment of college/life that made you realize that you needed to release this EP out to the world?
I was with somebody for three years and I thought they were the love of my life. I was heartbroken; when you have someone there, no matter how bad your days are, and then they’re gone, shit fell apart. I’ve never been this distraught in my whole entire life. It still hurts and that’s crazy to think about, but I didn’t start writing right away because it was so sore. I’d pick up the piano and literally tears would fall on it, it was so dramatic. I started writing all of these songs in May, so I banged the whole EP out in May, and then Elena (my producer) did all of the Logic Pro and creating sounds. So basically I’d record my vocals with her, send her the piano, and then from there we’d talk about all the sounds that we wanted to incorporate. I don’t know what the defining moment was where I thought ‘hey, let’s release this’ but I remember being in her bedroom and I asked ‘how much would it be if we streamed this somewhere?’. I don’t know what it was that made me go ‘oh fuck it, let release this’. It initially was gonna be released at the end of November and then I moved it to December fourth, which was a good decision because December’s my favorite month. Those songs came from such a tumultuous time in my life and I try to look at it like a storyline: The Prelude and The Postlude are the same song, they’re just split up. It’s a circle; the EP comes from start to finish. It’s all about empowerment and being okay and showing that I’m better off without you. Can I say that I’m fully healed and fully okay and fully empowered? No. But I think that is something that only time will heal.
There’s a song on the EP called Take Your Time, it’s probably one of my favorites, but they’re all my favorite. But Take Your Time, the versus are me talking to that past person, but the chorus is me talking to whoever I love next. That’s probably the closest that I’ve gotten to a happy song. The line “take your time on me, I’m not broken I’m just bruised a little”, that’s me trying to get where I’m going.
What are some of your other favorite lyrics and a story behind them, if you’re willing to share any?
There’s a line in Playground it says “Cheat. What’d you do? Your mama’s got a lot of praying to do”, which I think is self explanatory, and then an organ comes in. I love that line.
I also love “take your time with me, I’m not broken, I’m just bruised a little” because I think that everyone can relate to the fact that we’ve been through some shit but we’ve just got a few little bruises, we’re not just mangled on the floor.
I like how in Better Off Now “thought I was nothing without you, found out I’m everything without you” because I think that it speaks volumes in terms of growing more as a person and growing into who I am. When you’re in a relationship, you rely so heavily on that other person, especially when you’re young. I think that going through something like this at a young age, it could either make you or break you. You need to be okay alone and you need to be able to be successful on your own. I stretched myself so thin this semester, I didn’t have any time to breathe. I thought about the fact that when I was applying to internships this semester, I wouldn’t have done it if I was still in the relationship because I would have dedicated all that free time to be with that person. So I thought ‘wow look at all those things that I’m striving to do for myself because I don’t have that person anymore’. When you are finally okay with yourself and successful within yourself, that’s when things will fall into place in your world.
In The Prelude I say “you’ve got me thinking I’m the inconsistent one, baby look into the mirror, I’m not the one”. That starts the whole EP and I think honestly you could look at it in terms of being a fuck you but I didn’t mean it that way. I think I needed to use it to find out that somebody else’s inconsistencies and their flaws are not yours. I sat for months, and thought ‘what if I did this differently or was it my fault?’. But at the end of the day, it’s not your fault. Sometimes we’re left with a trail of those inconsistencies but I think it’s all a learning lesson and that’s why I named the EP Lessons Learned because they are lessons learned and they are not supposed to be repeated or revisited. I learned from them, I’m gonna grow from them and we’re moving on. I’m taking the time to go back, reflect on it, release all this music about how I was feeling and then I’ve gotta go on.
How has the reaction to the EP been?
Everyone’s been really, really receptive. They’ve really enjoyed it, they’ve really loved it. I like seeing how people have a favorite song, it’s really interesting to see which way people go in terms of which songs they like more. Overall, it’s been really positive feedback which I think was really cool. It was really nice for people to reach out and they were so kind and said that they were proud of me. It was interesting because a lot of my ex’s friends also reached out and told me what their favorite song was. This girl I know messaged me and said ‘Meredith, it’s really great to see that you’ve realized your worth’ and that one hit hard. It’s been really great to see those that support you and those that don’t. When I sent out the promo heart on Instagram and I wanted people to repost it to get some traction out, it was interesting to see the people that supported and reposted it and helped out and those who didn’t. But overall, it’s been really, really good. I haven’t really sang or done anything for four years, so people who I was really close with in High School reached out. It honestly could make you cry that people enjoy what you’ve created. I’m literally writing about my real life experiences and people enjoy that.
Since it’s around the holiday season/ the new year, we’re gonna end with a couple of fun questions. To start off, what’s your top song on your Spotify Wrapped Playlist?
Bad At Love the Dylan Francis remix!
Favorite Christmas song?
I love them all but we’ll just say Jingle Bell Rock.
Favorite ornament that you put on your tree?
My aunt used to get us these little snowmen with bells in it every year and they have our (me and my siblings) names on them, so I love picking those out.
Favorite gift you’ve ever received?
This is so corny, but my piano is a Yamaha from probably 2006 and my Grandma got it for me one year. I couldn’t be older than maybe ten, and I didn’t touch that thing until 2015, when I came home from freshman year of college in 2015. By the time I picked it up, she had already passed away, so I have to thank her and say that I love her so much because it has allowed me to create all my music on it. I wish I could buy a real piano but who has the dough for that?
And finally, what are three goals that you have for 2019?
- Become healthier and get in shape.
- Empower myself more and give myself more credit. I am my own worst critic and just giving myself more credit and appreciating myself more.
- Staying mentally healthy.
Meredith hopes to make 2019 the year she focuses on herself and her music, looking into playing live and perfecting her sound as much as she can. She’ll be releasing more music in the next few months, so keep an eye out her on her Instagram and don’t forget to stream Lessons Learned on Spotify!