Melina Duterte is a 22-year-old, who records her music as Jay Som. She has risen in the past year on the effort of 2015’s Turn Into, a self-released collection of impressively architected dream-pop, as well as the narcotic big-screen-beckoning torch-song “I Think You’re Alright.” But success only came after what Duterte calls a “dark period” of grueling overwork and perilous self-doubt. She funneled her emotions through Turn Into, though, and its title proved prophetic. It was eventually put out on tape via emo-oriented label Topshelf Records before indie stalwart Polyvinyl released it late last year.
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This past summer, a tour opening for kindred spirits Mitski and Japanese Breakfast marked Jay Som’s proper introduction to the music world at large. It was a soul-opening experience. “We’re all Asian-American women in indie music, which is mostly white-male dominated,” Duterte says. “For me, it felt like we had a mission.”
Looking into those crowds, Duterte saw seas of young women, and night after night, sitting at the merch table, she observed how fans of Mitski and Japanese Breakfast connected to the emotionality of their songs—how they would come up to the artists, sometimes crying, to say the music had helped them to cope with anxiety, or depression, or loss. “That showed me this is way beyond just singing and playing music,” Duterte says. “You are doing so much for this person who you don’t know. That was mind-blowing for me to see.” She recorded her new album, Everybody Works, while charged by the tour’s energy.
At times, Duterte’s low, hushed voice and precise arrangements make Everybody Works sound like an alternate-dimension Lorde record. Texturing her songs with keys, trumpet, and even accordion, Duterte collages her interests: vivid guitar rock, spectral 4AD dreamscapes, orchestral confessionals. Most beguilingly, the album is anchored by a wondrous pair of slinky funk jams, “One More Time, Please” and “BayBee.” “All of my songs are so different, but you know it’s me,” she says. “I just don’t like staying in one place at all.”
A bespoke pop sensibility shines, and her sharp lyrics make quotidian moments gleam. “The Bus Song” captures the free sense of anonymity that only cities allow. “I feel like everyone is very self-conscious of their image,” Duterte says. “But in the city you can have your own persona. No one is going to judge you.” As she curls the album’s opening lyric into a poetic phrasing—“I like the way your lipstick stains/The corner of my smile”—it has a subtle power. When I mention these lines, she succinctly says: “I’m not afraid to sing about women.”
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Duterte lives on a residential street in a charming mustard-yellow and mint-green house, in a neighborhood that she says is full of DIY spaces: punk houses, warehouses, “opened abandoned places.” The tragic fire that killed 36 at Oakland’s Ghost Ship warehouse just a few weeks prior is still on the minds of all—one nearby cafe placed a memorial of amethyst and flower petals at its register—but a pluralistic sense of community has persevered. “I’m very, very proud to be a part of the Bay Area music scene right now,” Duterte says.
Like Turn Into, Duterte recorded and produced Everybody Works in her bedroom—but where her first collection bears the unvarnished edges of a home-recording, it’s astonishing to learn the sleek new record was made the same way. It’s patently 3D. In her room, black soundproofing foam covers each wall; Wild Nothing plays from her computer; a poster hangs for a sold out Chicago date of the Mitski tour. The room is strewn with six guitars, endless pedals, and a drum set that consumes most of its space. Outside, there’s a persistently out-of-tune piano. “I kind of like shitty pianos,” she notes.
The Fat Angel Sings 