Briana Marela is an ambient pop/experimental singer/songwriter from Seattle. I don’t know anything about her and had never heard of her until I got an email promoting the new album, which came out this year on Jagjaguwar Records.
She self-released a cassette-only album called Water Ocean Lake in 2010, followed by the Speak From Your Heart album in 2012. She immediately got to work on the new album, writing the songs in 2012/2013. Through a series of circumstances, her new songs found their way into the hands of Sigur Rós producer Alex Somers, and they started working together in Iceland to get All Around Us made. At some point in the process, she joined the roster at Jagjaguwar. While this is her third album, it’s the first with label support and the first that will have a significant tour to back it. Her tour, by the way, is a run through North America as the opening act for ambient/electro songstress Jenny Hval.
”I started out that song with just the chorus, ‘you take care of me like I’m the only one’. I had written the first verse for it, then I felt that I wanted a song with a beat and I had a little Casio keyboard with beats on it. I’d recorded different beats and put them in a computer, then I panned one left and the other right before I put them together and slowed it down a bit. There was something with the beat that I liked. From there I just recorded the vocals I had over it and then started writing chords. There was an earlier demo version that was on a cassette compilation in a magazine called The Believer, a very early version of the song when I just had recorded it. This guy Calvin Johnson from K Records had asked me to put it on the compilation, and I was like ‘okay, it’s not really done yet but I’ll put it out”.
I wrote it about the person I was dating at the time. I’ve really only had two big relationships in my life, I’m kind of flick, I don’t really date people that much. I’m kind of shy and weird. So it was my second big relationship and it was a lot different than my first where I felt like I was the one nurturing the other person a lot, trying to help take care of him. Making sure things were okay for him, he was an artist and kind of unstable. Then the second was almost the opposite, I was the unstable one, frantic and weird and he was always helping me. I felt it was so nice to be helped and have someone who made things right when you were just feeling helpless and distraught.”
– Briana Marela
The Fat Angel Sings 