Jay Som Is Taking Control by Letting Go

Melina Duterte is living three hours in the future. It’s not as fun as it sounds. “I just feel so messed up!” she says, powering through some major cross-country jet lag when we meet in Brooklyn for breakfast one August morning. Even on West Coast time, the 25-year-old multi-instrumentalist songwriter, better known as Jay Som, isn’t a morning person. Still, Duterte’s struggles with the space-time continuum aren’t anything a little caffeine can’t cure. “It’s crazy how much better I feel with coffee,” Duterte sighs a few minutes later, taking a nourishing sip from the Central Perk–sized bowl a waitress has just placed before her. “I just smelled it and was like”—she dons her best Folgers commercial smile—“Ahhhhhhhhhhh.”

Duterte’s look this morning is somewhere between athleisure and grunge: Adidas track pants, hair pulled back in a low ponytail, and an oversize violet-colored flannel button-down she recently picked up overseas when she was touring with Mitski. (“I got this in Japan,” Duterte says of the shirt, in a tone faintly mocking her own jet-setting worldliness.) This Friday, as Jay Som—a moniker she cribbed randomly from an online baby-name generator—Duterte will release her excellent new album Anak Ko, a breezy but formidable collection of glimmering guitar-pop gems. The title is a reference to her Filipino heritage and to her mom’s favorite pet name for her: Anak ko is a Tagalog phrase that translates to “my child.”

“I feel like a lot of Filipino parents say that to their children—‘Anak ko, I love you!’” Duterte says. “It’s very endearing, a comfy kind of phrase. It’s such a sweet name to have as the title of the record. But there’s also the metaphorical meaning.” She chuckles, rolling her eyes behind the lenses of her round, silver glasses. “My child. I’ve talked to musicians that view releasing a record kind of like you’re birthing a child out into the world.”

Duterte’s first record had a relatively painless labor. “I was at home, and I was drinking a litt—a lot,” she recalled to Spin several years ago. “I was really relaxed. I was on my computer, and I was reading these messages from people who were saying, ‘Oh, when are you going to release an EP? When are you going to release an album?’” Emboldened by liquid courage and the exhortations of her modest fan base, Duterte figured there was no better moment than right then, Thanksgiving 2015. “I had a list of 20 tracks, and I chose nine that I thought were all right to put out online,” she says. “I didn’t really think about the track listing, I didn’t think about the album artwork or anything. I just put it out online, and people started listening to it!”

Cut to the following summer: Duterte’s haphazardly uploaded record Turn Into had landed her a record deal with indie label Polyvinyl and a spot on a tour opening for Mitski, one of her musical heroes. “I was already like, ‘Oh my God, I’m so inspired by her, she means so much to me!’” Duterte tells me. “And after that [tour] I was like, ‘I respect you even more now.’” It was an auspicious experience: The dream-pop act Japanese Breakfast rounded out the bill, meaning that every artist on the (often sold-out) marquee was fronted by an Asian American woman. That was Duterte’s first national tour, and by the end of it Jay Som had secured a visible spot within a new wave of women of color making the sort of guitar-driven indie rock that used to be, almost exclusively, seen as the province of white men.

Jay Som’s music embraces a sonic eclecticism that considers nothing off limits. She loves Avril Lavigne and Steely Dan (she seems especially pleased when I tell her that the groovy Anak Ko single “Tenderness” sounds like a lost cut from Can’t Buy a Thrill). She mentions the cult ’80s pop band Prefab Sprout in the same breath as Third Eye Blind. (She claims that the chugging intro to her new song “Superbike” is a nod to the intro of “Semi-Charmed Life” and you know what? I hear it.) Her voice can be breathy, like a whispered secret, but she also deploys it as a percussion instrument every so often. There are always sly surprises around the corners of her songs: key changes, blurted-out backing vocals, out-of-nowhere pedal steel solos. “I don’t like playing the same music. I don’t want to play the same song over and over again,” Duterte says. “I think that’s just a culmination of the music that I listen to and what I was raised on, too.”

Duterte is the daughter of Filipino immigrants; her father moved to the States when he was 7, and her mother came over when she was around the age Duterte is now. For a time, while she was growing up in the Bay Area, Duterte’s father was a DJ, and the records he had lying around the house shaped her palette. “He had a lot of ’70s funk records around all the time,” she tells me. “So I’d just borrow those records from him and listen to them and study them all the time. I feel like that’s where I got a lot of my guitar style from, funk guitarists.”

It was her mother, though, who gifted Duterte her first guitar, on her eighth birthday. Back then, her tastes—not to mention her songwriting perspective—were a little bit simpler. “I started to teach myself how to play guitar, and I was learning a lot of Blink-182 and Green Day songs,” she says. “It’s really easy music to play along to. Then I started writing songs myself. I don’t know what I wrote about, because I was in elementary school. Taco Bell? Crushes? I don’t know. Going to Hot Topic?”

At first, and especially for a child of first-generation immigrants, Duterte wasn’t sure being a musician was a viable career choice. “It’s definitely commonplace in immigrant families to follow in the footsteps of the first generation family and do the medical field thing, do a care-taking [job]. Because a lot of it is, you’re supporting your parents’ family back at home, because it’s all about family. It’s not about yourself. Americans don’t have that, in a sense. Everyone’s very focused on self. Not to say that no one cares about family here, but it’s different in Asia and places like that.”

Eventually, though, she convinced her parents she was serious about this music thing. “They were like, ‘You need to learn this yourself. Teach yourself how to play, teach yourself how to do the business side, how to do the technical side, how to get the right tools,’” Duterte recalls. “They were like, ‘If you wanna do music, you’ve gotta work hard.’ And I was like, ‘All right.’”

Duterte’s earliest training for a career in music didn’t exactly scream “rock star.” “I played trumpet for a decade,” she says. “I was so geeky! But that was my passion. I thought I was going to, like, become a trumpet player. It’s so funny to think about now.” She threw herself into her instrument with characteristic zeal: She was a first-chair leader, played in a jazz band and a concert ensemble, and even gave lessons on the side.

Writing songs with confessional lyrics (much easier to do when accompanying oneself on a guitar rather than a trumpet) allowed Duterte to explore her own identity and admit she often felt stuck between the cultures of her family and her American peers. When you have immigrant parents, Duterte says, “You grow up as an American and you’re stuck in between. You’re just like, ‘Which one do I be?’”

As she’s found underground success, though (one of her best singles, the slinky “Baybee,” is nearing 10 million plays on Spotify), she’s found a way to bridge those two worlds. “I feel like as I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten more in touch with my roots, and I understand why my parents are who they are and why they work so hard,” she says. “I want to be more in touch with my culture, especially with all the things that are happening right now.”

At the same time, her parents have fully embraced their daughter’s scrappy rock star aspirations. “My mom is so happy for me. She stopped asking me to be a nurse,” Duterte laughs. “And my dad is obsessed with Jay Som. He’s constantly showing his coworkers my music. He’s always buying merch, and his Instagram is dedicated to me. It’s really cute. He’s always posting my tour dates. He does more social media for Jay Som than I do.”

In our conversation, Duterte is refreshingly candid about the economic realities of being a working musician today—and, with any luck, tomorrow. When she was living in San Francisco a few years ago, she had to sell her “good” trumpet to pay rent one month. (She still has her beginner’s one, though living with roommates, she doesn’t have a lot of opportunities to practice: “It’s really loud and annoying.”) Because neither she nor her parents could afford a four-year degree, she did a two-year audio production program at a community college to save money, all the while thinking of it as a future investment. Maybe she’d become an engineer one day or perhaps open her own recording studio. But even the most secure plans can’t account for the happy accidents that so often alter our paths. Little did Duterte know how things would snowball after she spontaneously uploaded Turn Into.

“I feel like my entire life shifted completely, more than I ever thought it would,” she says, spooning a bite of her breakfast acai bowl. “I got picked up by a label right away. After that it was constant touring, and I was always saying yes to other things. It was really fun, but kind of overwhelming.”

She gave a voice to her exhaustion on her great second album, 2017’s Everybody Works, which struck a balance between daydreamy atmosphere and kick-the-door-down defiance. “Try to make ends meet,” she sang on the title track, “Penny-pinch till I’m dying.” “When I say ‘everybody works,’ it’s kind of this mantra,” she said in an interview around the time that record came out. “It’s a ‘note to self’ saying everybody works, everybody’s working on their own set of problems and goals. It’s not just financially, it can be mentally and other things like that. [It’s] kind of saying to myself, ‘You’re not the only person in the world that’s having problems.’ It gives me this comfort knowing that I’m not alone.”

She found clarity, too, in the advice of her former mentor Mitski, who’s now become a friend and peer. “Maybe last year, we got lunch,” Duterte says. “And I was like, ‘I’m so burnt out, I feel so jaded, I keep saying yes.’ And she’s like, ‘You need to do things for yourself. You need to step back. You need to have boundaries.’ She’s [like a therapist] for a lot of people! She’s such a warm person that’s always willing to give you advice. She’s always a text away.”

Duterte knew she needed to remove herself from the distractions of her new home in Los Angeles to approach Anak Ko with a clear head, so she decamped to Joshua Tree to spend some time alone and write. “It was super quiet, no one was there, and the house I was staying at had huge windows,” she recalls. “I was just like, ‘Who’s watching me?!’ When you can hear yourself … it’s scary.”

Still, none of that paranoia permeates the finished record. Anak Ko glides from track to track with an elegant confidence, its clean guitar sound making the contours of Duterte’s vision crystal clear. “I feel like I ended up stripping a lot of pedals and effects from my guitars,” she says, which marks a departure from her layered, distortion-heavy Everybody Works. “This time I really felt like I kept the guitars bare, and I didn’t use a lot of pedals at all. I wanted to be more straightforward.”

Anak Ko marks another evolution for Duterte: It’s the first Jay Som record on which she doesn’t play every instrument. (Don’t worry, though; she still plays most of them.) “It was a relief for sure,” she says of letting other people into her solitary process. “I feel like when I’m by myself, writing and recording myself, I’m such a perfectionist and I feel like it’s hard to step out of that zone.” It was easy finding collaborators, though: She lives with three other musicians, and mutual friends are always dropping by. “It’s much easier when you have extremely talented music friends that you can text and just be like, ‘Hey, can you play on this song, please?’ It’s so much easier. I don’t have to hear myself drumming anymore.”

Maybe that’s Mitski’s advice seeping through—Duterte seems to be going easier on herself all around. Between the album’s release and the beginning of her tour, she’s going on a leisurely vacation with her girlfriend in Washington state, where she hopes to catch up on The Bachelorette. Duterte’s most reliable cure for when she gets too lost in her own head, though, is working on other people’s music. “I feel like basically what I want to do is help people,” she says. “I just wanna keep working with people, producing and recording and mixing.” She’d love to open that studio one day, but it’s not an investment she feels ready to splurge on just yet. “It’s usually really expensive. So right now, I’m just gonna stick to my house.” She smiles contentedly, sipping the last of her coffee. “No complaints.”