Talking songwriting with Raye Zaragoza

Photo by Cultivate Consulting

Hello Raye! Right, let’s jump right in and start with the new album. One thing I'm interested in is when do you know you're making an album? How does it start for you? Are you writing songs all of the time or do you think I'm going to make an album now?

I think it's a little bit of both. Woman In Color is only my second album, so I think I'm still figuring out my process. But for this record, it was very intentional. I came up with the concept for this record and all of the songs were written in a six-month period. But the record before that, Fight For You, was basically the highlights of all the songs I had written over the past five years. This record was very intentional though. And I think my next record will also be a very intentional thing because I am always writing.

For me an album is like a novel, it's a cohesive thing. And I think that having it all be this snapshot of a time in my life, whether it's six months or a year, I like feeling like it's a moment in time and it's captured. So the answer to your question is that I prefer to make things in a very intentional way.

And what was the first song that you wrote that made it onto the final record?

That's a great question. The first song I wrote that made it onto the record would probably be ‘Warrior’. ‘Warrior’, ‘Fight Like A Girl’ and ‘Change Your Name’ were the three first songs I wrote for the album, all of which were written in a one-week period. I decided that week I'm going to write a record and this is what it's really about and I'm going to put my head down and do it.

And so I had this burst of energy and I ended up writing those three songs right then and there. So I think it’d have to be ‘Warrior’ because I started actually writing that even before I thought of the concept of the record. I didn't finish writing it, but I wrote the chorus, [Raye sings] “Burn me in the desert / Drown me in the rain” before I was about to go on tour with Dispatch and play amphitheaters all over the country.

I was super, super nervous and I wrote that chorus as a way of talking myself down and being nervous, but also “I'm a warrior and I can do this”

What is the writing process look like? Is it different for each song? How did ‘Warrior’, for example, come about for example?

Yeah, that song was very different from how any other song came to be, because I wrote to the chorus to that song five months before I even wrote the verses. It was just bizarre. I wrote that chorus and I just really liked it. So I held on to it and didn't do anything with it. Then when I was deciding on writing the record, I was like, you know what, I should bring this chorus back. 

Then I wrote the verses and the rest of it. And that's really not normal for me. Usually if I'm writing a song, I will finish it in one sitting, because I feel like if I don't finish it, I'm going to lose that idea. Like it's a fleeting inspiration. So usually I write all in one sitting. I start with words or an idea, so ‘Fight Like A Girl’ I wanted to write a song called ‘Fight Like A Girl’.

I had this poem called The Girl, and I read it to my co-writer and he was like, “Let's write a song called The It Girl”. So I feel like titles and ideas are my greatest inspiration. I like to start big and work into the details, paint with broad strokes first. I generally don't start with music, it’s the story or the lyric.

Obviously you're saying a lot in your lyrics and alongside that the music is really accessible. How do you fit the music around your lyrics?

It definitely depends. I think that for me, melody is emotion and the melody gets more intense because the emotion is getting more intense. What I love about folk music, is that the melodies are pretty simple, the chords are pretty simple. The storytelling and the lyrics are King, you know, and for me, when I’m writing melodies, oftentimes, the words will carry the melody and the words will take me to where it's supposed to go.

I've always considered myself more of a lyricist, but I think that being simple with melody has served my purpose. And if I do ever have a more intricate melody, like on ‘Red’, it's usually with one word and a sustained word or a sustained note because I want to bring attention to the melody in that time and so on. So, yeah, I think that it really is the words that carry the melody, it's the emotion in the words that carry it. It's very rare that I'm like; “oh that's a hot melody, turn that into a song”.

I'm endlessly fascinated by how people write songs because everybody approaches it really differently. How does it work when you write with a co-writer?

You know, I never co-wrote before this record. I was terrified of co-writing. I hated it. I felt like writing was something that was a very personal, very reclusive thing that I did alone. And I didn't want to include anyone. I felt like I was very vulnerable and it was just weird to include someone else in that experience. My managers really pushed me to give it a shot and I'm like, ugh, and then I ended up meeting some of like the right co-writers.  

And so I met Johnny Black in Nashville, and it was just so instant and we just completely understood each other's writing process and his strengths are my weaknesses, and it was just so symbiotic. The first time we met up we wrote ‘Ghosts Of Houston Street’, which is the last song on the album. We had only talked for two hours, then we wrote that song.

It's almost like a dating process, finding the right co-writers, and sometimes you'll go on a date and you're like, this is terrible, and sometimes you'll be like, oh my gosh, that was incredible. This I feel so connected to this person. I feel like I've known them my whole life. And I felt that way about Johnny. I felt that way about my friend Ben Wylen, who co-wrote ‘Run With The Wolves’ and ‘Rebel Soul’ with me.

So once I found the right co-writer, it was just like this multiplication of energy. With Johnny, a lot of the songs that we co-wrote together like ‘Fight Like a Girl’, ‘Red’, ‘He Calls Me River’, were songs that I had already started on my own and reached a kind of a standstill. And I brought them to him and he helped me turn it into the songs that they are now.

And the same with Ben, usually one of us will present an idea, and usually, if it's for my record, I would present an idea and then we'll go from there. Especially with writing this record, I was trying to be very intentional and I wanted all of the songs to be very different.

And did you have any experiences where it just wasn't going to happen?

Oh my gosh. I mean I've had a lot of great experiences where I just want to leave.It kind of feels like a stranger is reading your diaries, you know. It's not that that person's a bad person or not trustworthy, it just feels like; “why am I having this stranger read my diaries? I don't really want to be here. I just want to take my diary and leave”.

Generally, I'll just get through the session and then leave. Because people just have different writing styles. I remember one person I wrote with who is a very accomplished, respected writer and he was transcribing everything we were doing the whole session, in music notes. I play completely by ear. I don't read music. I really hardly read music. And the fact that he was doing that, the whole session was really stressful for me. I just wanted to kind of like explore and play things. I'd never written with someone who was so much into the notation during the session and it just didn't work for me.

I spent three hours giving it a shot but some people are just different. I'm sure other people would think that it’s incredible to work with someone who was so diligently taking notes of all the music notes. But for me, it was incredibly stressful.

I guess if you're writing a big pop song that you're trying to get to, number one or whatever, then it doesn't really matter who you’re writing with,but when they’re songs that are more personal I guess it really is a connection you need.

Yeah, it's a delicate process because my songs are my story and I take a specific kind of connection to fully embody and understand and know how to help me tell my story. So I definitely feel like I'm very, very selective with who I open up to with songwriting. But now that I found so many amazing collaborators I'm more open to collaborating.

And so to take a specific song... ‘Red’… what did writing that look like?

You know with ‘Red’ I started with four chords, and it was just the verse. And maybe half a chorus and it was just an idea, it was like a verse-chorus idea, but it was very flat to me. The way I wrote it, it was very, very simple. And I just always had it in my head and I loved it. I felt like it had something there. I really felt like it was interesting. I just didn't know how to take it on and make it into a song. I just felt like this idea was so rich. So I showed it to Johnny and I played him that little idea and then he was able to take the idea and kind of see the moving parts of it from a musical standpoint. He helped me bring it into like a four-minute piece of work, rather than a 30-second idea.

Are there any songs that you don't really get much of a chance to talk about?

I love these questions. That's a good question. I don't get to talk about ‘Ghosts Of Houston Street’ much, which is the last song on the record. It's interesting because when we demoed all of the songs I had 20 demos and then we cut it down to 11 that we were going to track. And everyone's favorite demo was ‘Ghosts Of Houston Street’, everyone thought it was going to be the single, but it didn’t turn out that way.

I mean, the song is on the record, I love it so much and I love what we did with it. I think Tucker [Martine, the producer] brought to life in the best way possible, but it's a very niche story because it's about the street that I grew up on in New York City. Not many people know what Houston Street is if you're not from New York. So I think that ‘Ghost of Houston Street’ is this really special nugget of a song. 

As I said earlier, I wrote it the first day I met my co-writer, Johnny Black. And we both are New York City kids. We were talking about how much we miss New York and how much we're very sad to see our city being gentrified and how all of the mom and pop shops and like all of the things that we love so much are being closed. And that song also to me was very haunting to listen to because it's actually way more relevant now with COVID and how all these businesses in New York City and all over the world are closing because of COVID-19. And the song is about businesses closing. So listening to it now, it sends a shiver through my spine, you know, to think about how it's more relevant now than it was when we wrote it.

To find out more about Raye you should visit her official website or check her out on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Woman In Color is out now and available to buy from Bandcamp, or stream from Tidal, Spotify or Apple Music.