40 days of art

07

Miss Eaves Beginnings

Breaking up with M was hard because I lost both my relationship and my band. I wanted to keep making music, so I created Miss Eaves as a solo project so I could try to do things on my own (even though at the time, I did not believe I had the talent to do things by myself). At the time, Mrs. Eaves was my favorite font (I used it so much that my then boss told me I was banned from using it) and so I thought it would be funny not to do my day job and call my music project Miss Eaves. I am such a font nerd!

I had a pirated copy of Reason and would experiment on making weird beats and chopping up samples. My friend TJ gave me some lessons on beat making, which definitely put me on the path to make something listenable (I rarely make beats anymore, because it really is not my strength). The first beat I made was for a song called Diva Pop — it was really synth heavy and probably broke all of the rules, but I liked the spirit of it. I released an EP called Byte This with some other beats I made, plus some tracks by Lamont Lea and Ingmar Goldson.

My friend Sal (who directed the Team Spandex video for Sugar High Gang) agreed to make a video for Diva Pop. We basically ran around Brooklyn with Jessica and guerilla-style shot me twerking around before I got too embarrassed and wanted to stop. The video culminated in a bike ride from Greenpoint to Rockaway beach for Jessica’s birthday. Sal edited the video and we threw it on Vimeo and somehow it landed on Vimeo’s top page.

This is where things get wild. In Belgium, my now friend Alex was scrolling through Vimeo, saw my video and shared it with Mathieu Fonsy, who then hit me up to ask me to make some tracks with him. We worked on a couple of tracks together and then, after only a few email conversations, we decided it would be a cool idea to tour together, so he booked some dates and I flew out to Europe!

This all felt so surreal to me. I was literally playing around on some software I didn’t know and writing silly songs one day and the next I was playing at one of the hottest clubs in Paris. Me and Mathieu really had a blast and even though I did not speak French at the time, I made so many Belgian friends I still adore to this day!