Charlie Yaris - PMRG Room 10/4/14
From: Maplewood, NJ
Age: 21
Website: charlieyaris.bandcamp.com
Contact: charlieyaris@gmail.com

Q+A with the Artist–

–How would you describe your sound?
In terms of meaning, I’d describe it as peering into the mind of someone who is incredibly overwhelmed by his emotions and is just trying to find a way to understand them. For me, music is an outlet in which I characterize these emotions and try to accept them. I believe that songwriters have an incredible ability to express anything that they can’t speak out loud by merely singing. With this belief, I strive to articulate my most private thoughts into lyrics.

–Is that a character? Or is that how you approach the world as yourself?
Oh it’s me, it’s definitely me (laughs).

–Which artists would you say also think that way? How have they influenced you?
When I first began writing songs, I think lyrically I was most influenced by Joe Purdy, a folk guitarist/songwriter, who writes very private lyrics as sort of a stream of consciousness. His lyrics are incredibly honest and very forward. I was particularly influenced by the way he narrates his songs and puts the listener in the middle of really complex stories. I wanted my own lyrics to create an intimate relationship with the listener in a similar manner, though mine tend to be written in the first person and his vary.

–So, when and how did you first begin writing music?
Well, it’s kind of a long history. The first song I ever wrote was when I was around 4 years old. It was called “Big Guy,” and it was written for my cousin Jeff who’s 7 or 8 years older than I am and more than double my size. I was really tiny. The lyrics were: “Big guy, I love you. Big guy, I wanna hold you, but if I do you will break my bones…cause you’re a big guy.” I somehow made that up on the spot and sang it to my family over and over again, making everybody laugh. So that was the real beginning but I didn’t start writing full songs until 2 and a half years ago, the summer after Freshman year of college. That’s the first time I finished pieces that I felt effectively achieved what I wanted as an artist.

–What inspires you to write music?
I find writing music to be very therapeutic. It helps me understand and make sense of the world around me, and I think it also allows me to create an illustration of my life in a way that I wouldn’t be able to if I just spoke with words.

–What’s the backstory behind Prone? I understand it was written over a year ago. Does the song hold a different meaning for you today?
So when I first started writing songs, I deemed the overall concept of what songwriting meant to me as “lyrics can’t be spoken.” That would later become the title of one of my songs, but when I first started to say that to myself, it was just this overall idea that you can say anything in a song, especially things that you are afraid to speak out loud. I decided that music and lyrics can capture any emotion that you can’t otherwise articulate in normal conversation. That was what really drove me to start creating an outlet for these feelings that I found to be very confusing in my own head to characterize, interpret, and especially convey. In the context of “Prone,” the song documents one of the most vulnerable moments of my life as it actually unfolds. I realized that everything I wanted to say to this girl I could never say directly to her because I knew she didn’t feel the same way. And the second verse ties this realization into “lyrics can’t be spoken” when I sing, “but then I wrote a song, and suddenly I wasn’t so frightened by the path that my lyrics were set on.” The song itself was my way of experiencing “lyrics can’t be spoken.” Today, I think I sing it as sort of a triumph over my previous inability to express very strong and overwhelming feelings, feelings that I’m now able to express through music. So in that sense, it’s much more than a backstory to me today.