She’s fueled by spite and energy drinks. She gets pumped to “BATSHIT!” by WILLOW when she’s at the gym and is most inspired by Girl in Red’s crowd moshing tactics. She’s SUNBABY, a singer-songwriter hailing from Cleveland who started her music career in Nashville a few years ago. Self-described as the love child of Boygenius and Pearl Jam, her music is undoubtedly gay, grungy and awesome.
Her earliest memories around music involve being grounded. Unable to use her phone for two weeks, she utilized the glorious loophole: falling down a YouTube hole until the wee hours of the morning on her laptop. SUNBABY discovered Pearl Jam, and immediately fell head over heels in love, learning all the songs and catching up on about 20 years of lore. “I just loved the way their music sounded and felt to me … I love lyrics and writing, but the thing that made me fall in love with music was how it feels. You can resonate with something without even knowing what the artist is talking about.” By this she means lead singer Eddie Vedder, who’s not known for being the most articulate.
With a love of raw, emotional music instilled in her, she set out to write songs purely so her sister would ask about them. They were caught in a cycle of one-upping who knew the hottest pop songs first, and SUNBABY got the last laugh when she started making originals. “I started singing [my songs] around the house. And she would be like, ‘what song is that?’ and I would be like ‘you wouldn’t know it, I wrote it.’”
What started as a competition became an “addiction” to her, and writing music had helped her through her early teens as she came to terms with her sexuality. Fast forward a few years and she was in Nashville writing rooms making real, coherent, big girl music. Her latest single, “Almost Yours,” is part of this phase of her journey.
“Almost Yours” is rock and roll brought to a hush, with SUNBABY’s raw, powerful voice on a backdrop of soft guitar. The effect is like lyrics of black paint on a canvas of blush pinks and romantic reds: stark realness against the sweetness of hope that love will finally be reciprocated.
She admits the powerlessness that comes from being the one at a disadvantage in the relationship, singing “I don’t get you all the time / only the moments you decide / But I could love you and I just might / I wonder what love’s like / when you say it back.”
It’s not without its true rock moments either, with SUNBABY hitting the gas in the last thirty seconds of the song, lamenting the death of her hope to wailing guitars.
“Almost Yours” explores the “what if” feeling SUNBABY had about a girl that had reentered her life repeatedly. Led on and always left wanting more, she was convinced that one day they would end up together. Their tumultuous, somewhat cyclical relationship was what led to the development of the song over several years. After three turns, SUNBABY wrote half of “Almost Yours” and put it in a drawer, but it wasn’t until this year when the aforementioned ex returned two more times that SUNBABY finished the song and released it — five times is a charm?
SUNBABY describes the song as “haunting” her, but hopes that its release will act as a ward of protection against this person and discourage them from coming back again. “I call it the ‘Almost Yours’ curse because that’s what it felt like when I was writing it. Now that it’s out in the open, hopefully she never comes back.” She has, for the record, admitted that she’s learned her lesson there. “We were never fully together, that ‘if’ kept me wondering every time. I found out the hard way.”
When you discover your prime influence by falling down a YouTube hole and start writing music solely to annoy your sister, you’re going to have quite a unique creation process. “Almost Yours” is an example of how SUNBABY approaches her work, funneling her life experiences into a song, but only after she’s let it marinate for some time. She lets it build up until she’s ready to let it out, laying the foundations of her songs quite quickly and is rewarded with a sense of relief. “It’s like taking a really good piss,” she jokes. “I tell my team my best songs are when I’ve been going through something and I’m quiet, and then all of a sudden you get a voice memo from me.”
The “Almost Yours” visualizer is a literal representation of this process. We find SUNBABY sitting crisscrossed on a deconstructed version of her bedroom floor, mic tilted into her face, surrounded by scattered diary pages filled with her lyrics. She wrote the song on a floor much like this one, which was why she chose this concept for the video. She’s not just performing the song, it feels like she’s creating it in real time.
Another key part of SUNBABY is the larger message behind her music. Subtle themes of empowerment and acceptance have pervaded her work. “I hope that if there is any queer child in the world that is listening to my music, they can see past what they’re going through … when I was 16 and in the heat of everything, there were only so many things that could pull me out of it, and all of those things were related to music. If my music can remind someone that the world goes on and they’re not the only one, that’s the most wonderful thing for me truly.”
She’s also passionate about performing her music live. Her latest performances opening for ok, tyler’s “God of the Gaps” tour was “magical.” “There’s nothing like it. That’s also the theater kid in me who loves to be the center spotlight … as a theater kid I stepped on stage as someone else, but now I’m stepping out as myself, and it’s a lot scarier but it adds so much more to my connection to the audience.”
Unable to not insert my own thoughts on this, being who I am, the conversation veered toward the importance of live music as catharsis, as a way to truly discover artists and as an effective third space outside of work or school and home. As much as the industry may focus on the viral elements of music that can shoot artists to stardom, the skill of being able to entertain live is often taken for granted, and not everyone can do it effectively. “[Performing is] not something tangible you can grab onto or something that you can get over TikTok or Spotify.” Live music is alive and well, but it’s important not to take the experience for granted.
That being said, SUNBABY’s focus for this year is shows, shows, shows. The next year for SUNBABY will have her booked and busy. She’s releasing a host of new singles, as well as aiming to play live shows outside of Nashville as much as possible, especially in her hometown of Cleveland. You can listen to “Almost Yours” on Spotify as well as keep up with SUNBABY on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.