Name 3 Songs: You released your first EP Just My Nature last month – congrats! You’ve released a few singles since 2022, but you’ve also been songwriting since you were a teenager. What was it about this group of songs that felt like it was right to be your introduction into the world?

Isabel Dumaa: I honestly I’ve been working towards creating an EP for years. I think the second that I was like, great, we’re making songs together. Let’s make a project. What do we want this project to look like? And I think it took a while just because it was a lot of troubleshooting and throwing stuff at the wall and a lot of me just figuring out what do I want to say? What do I want my music to sound like? What feels real to me? 

Cause you can write a song, and it’s not your song. So it took a couple years trying a bunch of things and playing around and making a whole lot of music until finally the project slowly started to take shape with “Quarter Life Crisis.”

And then keeping that in mind as somewhat of a North star as I continued to write and make more music. And then it was honestly a lot of just writing songs and being like, I love this song. I want to put this song out. This song has a place on the project. Great. Now we’re at two. Now we’re at three, et cetera, et cetera. And continuing to figure out how I want to tell that story and what I want that to look like. Finally, the last song that we added to it was “The End.” And so that kind of tied a pretty little bow on it. And now it is what it is.

Yeah, yeah. mean, I think it’s really interesting that, you’ve said you’ve hundreds of songs over the years, like, and kind of as a teenager figuring out this is the craft and this is the thing that you want to be doing, because I think a lot of people, when they start writing music, sometimes they feel like there’s a rush to release things like really early on or feel like really excited to put things out in the world. So like, what was that process like for you of being like, no, like, I want to figure it out, like I want to hone in my sound and then be ready for this.

I like I have a little bit of both of the, this song is so great, I wanna put it out right now. And then I also think I fall a little too far to the side of I’m so perfectionistic. I’m like, well, this is quite right. And this isn’t exactly what I want this to be. And I think also not having a lot of music out, I felt very precious about what I wanted people to hear of my music as it was the early days. And so I felt like it was a little harder to experiment with some stuff just because if I only have two songs out.

That’s kind of the whole picture that people have of me as a musician. And so I think I definitely, I’m trying to get better at, I think it takes a long time for me to put music out just because I’m so precious with it and learning to be a little less precious with it. Cause at the end of the day, I think it’s music and if it feels right, it feels right. But also being meticulous and I think choosing how I want to present myself and what I want my sound to be.

A little bit of the both of that, I definitely think this EP took a little longer than I would have wanted it to take. But I also am so unbelievably happy with where it’s landed that I don’t know if I would go and change anything. Yeah.

You said something before that stuck out to me – saying that you’d write songs you knew weren’t yours. And so I’m curious, what that experience must be like, because obviously it’s coming from you. Obviously people write songs for other people, but I’ve never heard anybody say it as if it’s coming out of you and you’re just like, that’s not me, but like that makes sense for somebody else. So what is that like?

I think literally that the words just come out, I’m like, yeah, this sounds right, but doesn’t feel like me as an artist. You can identify something as being good and feeling like, okay, like this song is a very kind of cool, funky pop song, or this is a little bit more singer songwriter, and being able to play around with that. 

But then also identifying – it’s just a gut feeling of like, this is it, this is me. This is what I want to say versus I can objectively identify whether this is a good song or a bad song. 

I’ve written for other people and you kind of have that little bit of tailoring it to specific things of what you’re writing to, but sometimes lyrics come out and they flow and it is. You’re right, it’s still coming from me. So it is me, but it might not necessarily be tailored to the art that I am trying to do at that point in time.

It’s so interesting because I feel like it’s that thing where you’re doing an artist project, it’s only encapsulating a part of you in a sense. In making the EP, how did you feel knowing this is the part of me that I do want to share with everyone?

I think I’ve never really shied away from sharing myself in my songs. And so I think it was more so searching towards these are the parts that I want to show. How do we show that versus do I feel comfortable showing X, Y, and Z? 

And so it was more like, I really love to just sit in my room and write with my guitar. Let’s find a song that encapsulates that. I am a very nostalgic person. Let’s find a song that kind of will work towards that. It was more so having the building blocks in place and then finding ways to demonstrate that. It’s funny making a project because there’s somewhat of a, all right, we’ve got a whole bunch of sad songs. Should we throw a faster one out? There’s the baseline of looking objectively at it and thinking what order does this need to be in? But also letting the music be what the music wants to be and letting that tell the story in its own way.