Interview: Chatting with Columbus Based artist athena

Over the last few weeks whilst scrolling through my Twitter feed, I kept coming across screenshots from someone’s SoundCloud, and it turned out to be Columbus Based artist athena! She is in the process of working on a new album, so I decided to catch up with her and talk about her music and what drives her!

Listen to some of her tracks below and scroll a little further to read our exclusive interview!

 

Hey athena! Can you tell me a little more on who you are and how you first got into making music?

i’ve always been really musical. there’s a story of me interrupting a church sermon to sing the abc’s for everyone when i was a toddler, and i used to learn songs to sing for my friends at lunch in elementary school. i did talent shows and singing contests and anything i could convince my parents to let me do. i carried around my ukulele for the better part of my sophomore year of high school. i think i started writing when i was around eleven, which means i’ve been writing for around eight years now (i turn nineteen next week). a lot of my early writing were inspired by Taylor Swift (i’m like, a huge super fan of her, i always have been. ask literally anybody) and so i’d write a lot of stuff to try and mimic her sound, but it was more of a coping mechanism. i’ve dealt with a lot of mental health disorders and traumas here and there, and music was always what got me through it. i wrote a lot about my mom being so far away, and the kids at school that bullied me and how i wished i was anybody else, the people i fell in love with and how cruel the game of love is. i started playing guitar in seventh grade and i didn’t put it down for probably three years straight. i absolutely love playing. i play piano and ukuelele also, but guitar is my main instrument. i was a vocalist long before i was an instrumentalist. i lost that for a while, especially in my freshman year of college. i got so caught up in the parties and my friends and the relationship i was in at the time, and as soon as i moved back home music started being the first thing in my life again.

What’s your songwriting process like? Who are some of your biggest influences? I know you said Taylor Swift, but do you have any other influences?

songwriting for me is like.. super emotional. i write the most when i’m feeling something. like, there’s been a lot of times i’ve felt something so strongly i pick up my guitar and by the time i’m done writing i’ve either cried my makeup off or smiled so big that my cheeks hurt. i usually start with chords and just play until i like how something sounds, and then i sing a bunch of “uh oh uh uh oh”s until i have a melody i like, and then i just sing words until they work. there’s a lot of moment where i’m like “oh my god i have to write that down before i lose it”, and there’s a lot of moments where i lose it before i write it down. with ‘baby,’ (her new album) i played around a lot with how i write songs. i started hearing melody’s in my head or writing poems that i knew had to be made into a song. there’s a lot of really weird voice memos on my phone from like, two in the morning where i’m whisper screaming guitar chords and lyrics into mic. a lot of my major influence comes from taylor swift, but i also love ed sheeran. i adore how he writes the rhythm into his lyrics, rather than having the rhythm dictate how the lyrics are written. i don’t know if that makes sense, i hope it does, but the point is i try to mimic that whole “my words provide a natural rhythm, so there’s not that much needs for percussion” since i don’t have a band to back me up. it’s all me. the album i have coming out in september is just me and my guitar. i also love a bunch of little pop artists here and there, like phoebe ryan. she has a cute little way of making the songs sound on her ep, “mine” that i keep in the back of my head when i’m writing, because someday (hopefully, assuming all goes well!!) when i have an actual band and people helping me write the music, i want that fun pop sound to come through!

You mentioned your album coming in September, can you tell me some more about that? Like what are some of the larger themes at play on it?

yes! it has twelve tracks, most of them are very.. largely hinting at various things that happened in a previous relationship that went down in flames. there’s a couple that are just very obvious, i didn’t rewrite them to be subtle. i was hurting and i wrote what i wrote and i stand by it, because they’re solid songs and speak to what i was going through at the time, my friends that have heard some of the songs say they’re relatable too. none of them are meant to attack or come at anybody, they were just my way of healing. a lot of the themes are very personal to what i was going through, like rubies and roses (those will make more sense when you hear the songs), and 3 in the morning. there’s repeated lines and subject matter in the album that suggest the more important moments to me. the album itself is very cool to me, because it opens with a song i wrote when i was deeply in love and happy, and then you hear the progression of me hurting and feeling betrayed, you hear the heartbreak and the times where i think i’m better, only to go back to square one. there’s a shift in the blame from other people to me, and the end track of the album is me kind of accepting the situation and learning that i can move on, no matter how much i thought i couldn’t while going through it.

Any new artists/venues/purveyors of the arts you could turn our readers onto?

i went and saw a really cool artist i’ve been following for a while at Rumba Cafe last week- anthony amorim. parrotfish & callaway martin opened for him and they were all absolutely incredible, i definitely recommend checking them out

Where can our followers find you?

ig: athenarex

twitter: whorieos

soundcloud: whorieos

facebook: athena gabrielle rex

snapchat: athenarex

Any parting thoughts you have or want our followers to know?

not really anything specific!! just that i’m really, really excited for the album & it’ll be released september 22nd on itunes & spotify!! oh, also that i’m always up for any sort of music conversation & that my dm’s are literally always open!

 

athena will be dropping a new album on September 22! baby, will be premiered exclusively on www.groundsounds.com