Beat of the Bay: Julia Easterlin

“Damn it, I’m screwed! People are picking up on my shit,” says Julia Easterlin as she sits in a cafe on Newbury Street, gingerly spreading cream cheese on a bagel. Her sarcastic cause of concern is other musicians using vocal looping—a musical technique that Easterlin has explored and mastered over the past few years. Easterlin sounds conflicted when talking about artists like Andrew Bird or tUnE-yArDs who have recently used the technique. “There’s a pathetic part of me that’s threatened by it, but at the same time I have to keep reminding myself, ‘No, this is good.’”

Easterlin, a graduate from the Berklee College of Music, has had a lot of good things going for her recently. The Boston-based 23-year-old singer-songwriter has received prominent attention due to her innovative, loop-driven compositions and exuberant voice. In the past year she’s performed at large-scale music festivals including SXSW, CMJ Music Marathon, and Lollapalooza. She will release a new EP soon, and a full length album is in the works. These two projects will only contribute to what Easterlin has called a “crazy year.”

However experimental and technologydriven Easterlin may be now, her musical beginnings were in traditional folk and jazz. “I found my mom’s acoustic guitar under her bed. I was thirteen,” she said nostalgically. “My mom listened to a lot of Joni Mitchell and Indigo Girls, so I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s what I’m going to do!’” She performed mainly as a jazz vocalist in high school, traveling around the country for competitions. “Once I got to Berklee I had some realization that that just wasn’t what I wanted to do,” Easterlin said. “I really started finding my own voice.”

Easterlin’s musical style is driven by loops. During a live show, she will sing a vocal pattern into the microphone that will be looped through a speaker and then overlays a harmony or rhythmic complement on top. She employs traditionally sung melodies along with percussive sounds ranging from beatboxing to beating on her chest as she exhales. Easterlin then coalesces all of these parts into layered soundscapes. On her rendition of “There There,” a Radiohead cover that appeared on Berklee’s Heavy Rotation Records album, she recreates the gloomy atmosphere of the original by using different intonations of her voice; blunt “doos” form the bassline, and shimmering “oo-wee-oos” fill out a droning backdrop. Above all of her percussive experimentation, Easterlin sings the melody with an expressive yearning.

Her inclusion in the Heavy Rotation Records show came at a particularly trying time, and her rendition of the Pixies’ “Break My Body” resulted out of, in her words, “emotional necessity.” Her original plans to sing in the project’s showcase last February were jeopardized by the sudden death of her band mate. However, she decided to perform at the last minute, arranging the song backstage and writing the lyrics on the back of her hand. “It was the first time where I felt like I performed really honestly because I was so tired from my own grief and my own illness,” she said. The raw performance was a turning point in her career. “After that was when I got the offer to play at Lolla, and along with that came a whole slew of experiences.”

As a result, Easterlin has transitioned from mostly performing solo to playing with a full band in order to flesh out her live shows at outdoor music festivals. “I called up my friend who played bass, I called up my friend who played drums, and he called up his friend who played percussion, and we all got into a room and rehearsed for six months until we played Lolla,” Easterlin said. This change was initially difficult. “It was more emotionally challenging for me than musically, because I was so used to being not just the driver in charge but the only driver,” she said. However, the decision has paid off and pushed her as a musician. “I think it enriches the end product to have input from various folks whose input I trust.”

Easterlin is now focusing on recording and writing more music. “The EP I’m about to release...I’m revisiting older things and making them more current, and I’m releasing two new tracks,” she said. She also spoke excitedly of her upcoming full-length album. “I’m writing completely new material right now, and I feel like that’s going to be a segue into the next phase of creative evolution.”