At only 24 years old, Salem Ilese has had a viral hit (2020’s TikTok song hall of famer Mad At Disney), penned songs for artists such as Demi Lovato and Bella Poarch, and has created a name for herself with her witty songwriting. Adding a debut album to her ever growing list of accomplishments, High Concept was released on September 15th.
Consisting of 12 tracks, High Concept encompasses the last 4 years of Ilese’s career, taking you through moments of lighthearted romance (Spaghetti), the bittersweet realization of growing up (Ketchup), and everything in between. Her signature wordplay is present in both the titles and lyrics throughout the record. Ilese delves more into a rock influenced sound on this album, straying a bit from the pristine pop she was releasing at the start of her career. It’s a well executed sonic shift, exploring new territory while remaining authentically Salem.
Following the album release, I got a chance to catch up with Salem via Zoom to chat about the record, and the exciting projects she has in store.
Brigid: Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on here! I have to congratulate you on the release of your debut album, which was released in mid September. How are you feeling about the response to it so far?
Salem: Thank you so much! It feels so surreal that it’s actually been released into the world. I’ve been working on this on and off for 4 years. I think the oldest song on it is 4 years old. It just feels so wild that people can hear all the songs now, and they aren’t just sitting in Dropbox. People have sent some really sweet messages about it, and it seems like they’re really connecting with the music. That’s all I could hope for.
B: That’s so special, absolutely. I wanted to ask you a bit about your songwriting process, and specifically about the wordplay aspect. I love how you take a word or phrase and flip it somehow, like 2much2drink. Where do you find your inspiration for your songs?
S: Thank you, yeah, that’s kind of my whole thing as a songwriter. I live for those moments where a lightbulb goes off, when I find that spin off of a phrase. That’s why the album is called High Concept, it’s because I always start off with a concept when I’m writing a song. That’s kind of my favorite part of the process, finding that concept to start with. I find inspiration everywhere. I get inspired a lot by social media. That’s where I got PainHub, I think I saw it as a hashtag on someone’s TikTok video. I think a lot of times, people will say something really clever and not know they did, or they’ll say it as a joke. But, my songwriting brain is always taking notes! I’ll think, ‘wow, that would be an amazing chorus!’ I really do live for those moments. I’m also inspired by my friends, they say really clever things and they don’t realize it, but I do. I’ll take out my phone and quickly jot something down in my notes app.
B: Love it. I wanted to ask you specifically about the song Ketchup, because I feel like that was a stand out on the album for me. It’s a little more stripped back, a little more outwardly vulnerable. It’s such a bittersweet reflection on adulthood and growing up, was it hard to release a track like that?
S: Thank you so much, I love the description of “outwardly vulnerable.” I really appreciate that. That’s cool. That one is definitely the ballad of the album, I had to throw one of them in there. That one is really special to me, I wrote it with my friends David Arkwright and Justin Gamella. Ironically enough, that’s also the crew I wrote Team Sport and Build a Bitch with. 3 songs that are so wildly different, genre wise. That one was probably the most honest of all the songs. Everything I write is always rooted in my life, and it all has details from reality in it. But this one is definitely specific, anyone who knows me in person or knew me in high school will know exactly what situation that song was about, just because the details are so specific. That song came from a conversation I had the night before writing it, it was my old high school best friend’s birthday. I texted him ‘happy birthday,’ and he called me. We hadn’t spoken in years, and we had a proper catch up. It was really nice. It left me with a weird feeling of nostalgia. It was so bittersweet because I realized that we were complete strangers at that point. The next day, I had that session, and I was telling David and Justin about it, and how it just felt so bizarre. It was also a gloomy day, kind of foggy and rainy. It was also during quarantine, so everyone was in their respective houses, stuck inside. I wrote and recorded it all on my couch. I had my microphone set up right there, and I was curled up in blankets. I feel like the song really reflects the place that I was in at that moment.
B: Definitely, and I feel like it’s one that a lot of people can relate to. Especially young adults, navigating growing up and growing apart.
S: Yeah, and it’s not a bad thing either. I feel like most of the time, when people drift apart, nobody did anything wrong. It’s just that people live life, and you go in different directions naturally. It’s such an odd thing.
B: Yeah, it’s not bad. Just different. As you mentioned, this album encapsulates the past 4 years that you’ve been working on it. Do you have a favorite memory from the album creation process, or a particular session that stood out to you?
S: Ooh, great question. Team Sport was a very special one, I did it with Justin and David. That song just kind of came out. I love those sessions where you just start writing and don’t stop until the song is done. It’s really rare, a lot of my daily life is scrolling through Rhyme Zone. Or Rhyme Wave. Or Rhyme Brain. I have an arsenal of different rhyming websites, I sit there and I sculpt. I’m on the Word doc rearranging things. It’s very meticulous, it’s almost like solving a puzzle. Team Sport was more intuitive. I had the line, “There’s no ‘i’ in love,” that’s where the concept started. I brought that in, and they asked if I heard it as the chorus or verse. I was like, maybe it’s the opening line? I kind of just sang it. We were like, wait a minute. There’s something there. That’s how it’s going to start. We kept writing it from there. Every idea that we had, stuck. That’s super rare. Usually you say a hundred bad ideas, the hundred and first is the one that you keep. But, that one was a really cool session. I feel like it was a very inspiring one for me because the production was a departure from anything I had done in the past. It felt like I was really pulling from what I listen to on a daily basis, which is more rock music like The Killers, The 1975, The Strokes, David Bowie. Lots of guitar heavy, live drum sounds. I didn’t make that as much in the past, and I feel like Team Sport was me unlocking that sound.
B: Yeah, for my next question I was actually going to ask you about that. This is your first full length project, but you’ve been putting out music for a few years now. How do you feel that your sound has evolved over that time?
S: I feel like it’s evolved so much. I’ve definitely been leaning more into the darker alternative rock space, or that’s where I hope to be leaning. I feel like everything has changed about me so much within the past few years, and my music has reflected that. I’ve done a lot of self reflecting in the past 12 months, I’ve started to feel like me again. Been on my mental health journey, all of that. I feel like that has seeped into, or informed, how I present to the world both aesthetically and musically. I’ve really been trying to honor my own taste, and let my music grow with what I listen to personally. I feel like everything has gotten a bit more raw, and slightly edgier. I hate the term edgy, I feel like that term has gotten a bad look. But, you know what I mean.
B: I get what you mean, leaning into a different sonic space with different instrumentation.
S: Exactly! More exposed, more emotional. Not as polished and perfect. I feel like a lot of my early releases were very grid-like. Everything was an electronic sound, everything was quantized to perfection. Vocals were tuned to perfection. Very pop and polished. I’m now leaning towards things a bit more unpolished, things that are beautifully imperfect. I hand tune everything with my vocals, I play a big part in the vocal production on everything I release. I also record most of my vocals by myself in my studio, and edit it all. On this album, especially on the more rock influenced songs, I really battled with myself when it came to just letting things be. If something was a little off but sounded cool and full of emotion, I would just leave it. There’s live drums on a lot of the songs that were played by my actual drummer, Jacob, who is one of my best friends in the world. We tour together, we’re leaving tomorrow for Asia. But yeah, a lot of it we just left. You can definitely tell that it’s a live drum take, and not processed drums.
B: You can definitely feel that on the album, a bit less polished but still genuine.
S: I appreciate that, that was exactly what I was going for.
B: Shifting gears a bit, I wanted to ask you a bit about the role that social media has played in your career, and how you feel about it. I feel like it can be a bit of a double edged sword, having a song go TikTok viral.
S: My relationship with social media is one that I work on every single day. As most relationships do, we have definitely had our ups and downs. I am so wildly grateful for it, because I feel like I would not be where I am today or even be able to release music full time if it wasn’t for TikTok. I got really really lucky, all the stars aligned for me with Mad at Disney. I feel like I came in at the perfect time, in the golden era of TikTok and music. I’m so grateful for all of the success, and all the connections it has brought me. Every time I’m able to meet someone in person who has followed my journey online, it’s so awesome. It feels like we aren’t strangers, we already know each other in this odd internet way. I have so many internet friends. I love social media for all of those reasons. But, it is definitely easy to get sucked into the toxic wormhole that can be on social media. It breeds things like toxic comparison, and there is so much negativity online. That’s what PainHub is about, it’s about doom scrolling and the odd fascination with tragedy & negativity. It was so easy, especially during the pandemic, to get sucked into doom scrolling. I think that, unfortunately, social media makes that more accessible. It makes good news and bad news more accessible. It’s easy to develop a bad relationship with it, and you really have to check yourself. That’s hard to do. It also makes me sad to think about young kids having to go through that. It takes a lot of self awareness to have a healthy relationship with social media, and it’s a lot easier to have a bad one. I just worry a bit for the younger generation with all that. Very long winded answer, but I have my ups and downs. Overall very grateful for it, but very much trying to work on my personal relationship with it.
B: Totally, it’s a great tool for connecting with others but it can go south so fast.
S: Yeah, it can be both isolating and community building at the same time. Which is odd.
B: Exactly. Shifting gears again, in addition to being an artist yourself, you have also penned a lot of songs for other artists. How does being in writing sessions for other artists compare to writing for yourself?
S: Good question! I love doing both equally, but it is definitely putting on different hats. When I write for myself with other writers and producers, I feel that they take more of a therapist role, trying to pull from my experience. Then, I do that for other artists when I’m the writer in the room. When I write for myself, I always come in with ideas and concepts, and a pretty clear vision of what I want to talk about, maybe even a chorus already written. I’m pretty confident with steering the ship when it’s my own project, and dictating the overall vibe of how I want everything to sound like. I am very meticulous with word choice too, so if I’m writing for myself I am more open to keep trudging along until we find the perfect puzzle piece moment. When I’m writing with another artist for their project, I try to take the back seat a bit. I’ll dictate things when needed, but I want to make sure the artist is the person taking charge, so that it’s as authentic for them as possible. I’ll still come in with concepts and ideas, all the wordplay, I love it so much. I’m always happy to lend that to other people, when it applies. I definitely try to wait to see the artist’s reaction first and foremost every time I suggest something. I try to make sure they are in love with the art more than anything else.
B: That’s cool that you get to be on both sides of things, in different ways.
S: It’s really fun. Writing with other writers for my projects helps me become a better songwriter for other artists. When I find a collaborator I love, I can do a self check in and evaluate why I love working with them. I can try and do that for someone else. Both sessions inform each other a lot.
B: That’s awesome, it’s a learning experience. Do you feel that your relationship with songwriting has changed over the years?
S: Great question, I definitely do. I also feel that the way people songwrite in general has changed a lot over the past few years. I feel like lately it’s been focused on quantity, and maybe has sacrificed quality a bit. Just in general, industry wide. The trend has been to do as many sessions as possible, hustle culture. You need to be writing 24/7, and throw as much stuff at the wall until something sticks. Opposed to 5 years ago, when it felt a bit more thought through. People would be doing less sessions, but spending time to hone certain songs. Now, so much music is being released. Hundreds of thousands of songs are released on Spotify every day. The workflow has been so different. In the past 3 years, I did 5 sessions a week. At least. I wrote 5 songs a week. Sometimes more, sometimes less if I had other things like touring going on. I’ve recently been trying to cut back on that to focus on the quality of things, and only doing sessions that I’m really excited about. Over the past few months I’ve taken a break from writing for myself with others, I’ve written more alone for my projects. It’s been really eye opening, and a very different experience. It forces me to produce, which has been it’s own journey that has been really rewarding. There’s also nobody to bounce ideas off of, so you’re sort of at war with your own brain. I’ve made a point of only doing sessions with people I love to work with, or am excited to meet. Or artists that I’m a fan of. I’ve been able to make so many genuine connections with people. I’ve had so many more learning experiences as opposed to doing 5 sessions a week for the sake of writing or looking busy. Or, doing my part in hustle culture or being a girlboss. Those things can be rewarding, but if you’re being busy for the sake of being busy, it’s not as fulfilling.
B: Absolutely. To wrap up, as you mentioned, you are about to do some shows in Asia. What are you most excited for when it comes to heading over there?
S: Oh my goodness, so much. I can’t wait. I leave tomorrow at 4 AM. I am most excited to meet the people that I’ve been interacting with online, to make new friends and see old ones. I’ve already been DMing people who purchased tickets, I’m like, ‘I can’t wait to hug you and give you a bracelet!’ It’s going to be so fun. I feel like tour is always the reward for so many hours spent in the studio. The payoff at the end of the year. I’m also just so excited to be back in Seoul, Osaka, and Tokyo. Tokyo is probably my favorite place on the planet. I have 4 days there by myself at the end of the trip, which I’m so excited about. I’m going to go to all the animal cafes. I’m going to eat so much food. There is so much I want to do. I really can’t wait!
B: That sounds amazing! That’s all I have for you today in terms of questions, thank you so much again for your time today.
S: Of course, thank you! Really great questions.
Listen to High Concept here!
