How Jay Som Became Indie’s Secret Weapon

W
hen Melina Duterte goes out with friends, they play a game. If Duterte, who records as Jay Som, is with company at a coffee shop, bar, or restaurant and they hear a song by a contemporary indie artist (say, Alvvays or Phoebe Bridgers), “They’re always like, ‘All right, who wants to bet when Jay Som is going to come on?’” says Duterte with a laugh at a Brooklyn cafe recently. “It happens every single time.”

But even if the music being played at a coffee shop isn’t Jay Som’s, chances are pretty good she’s had a role in recording it. Over the past half-dozen years, Duterte, 30, has become one of indie rock’s foremost behind-the-scenes record-makers, having been involved in producing, engineering, mixing or simply playing on records by Lucy Dacus, Illuminati Hotties, Vagabon, and Chastity Belt, to name just a few. She spent much of 2023 as the touring bassist for boygenius, whose debut album she also contributed to. The perfectly placed vocals, drums, bass, and guitars on “Lights Light Up,” the 2023 song by buzzy singer-songwriter Fenne Lilly? Duterte mixed them. 

Now, after taking her place as an in-demand producer and go-to collaborator, Duterte is back with Belong, her first album as Jay Som since 2019. It’s an album that took many false starts and failed attempts, and one she says she almost didn’t make. Belong is also a thrilling survey course of Jay Som’s influences, from crunch-guitar emo to delicate folk music, with features from Hayley Williams and Jimmy Eat World’s Jim Adkins. And it’s just the latest in what’s shaping up to be the most fruitful chapter yet in Duterte’s ever-evolving career. The album is due in October, a month before yet another album Duterte produced comes out (this one is by Australian singer-songwriter Hatchie).

“My girl is busy, rightfully so!” Dacus tells Rolling Stone in an email. “I’ve been a fan of Melina’s music for years, so getting to be up close to see her work as a player, engineer, producer and band member has been a real treat. I think she has room to be way less humble; she can pretty much do everything and anything.”

When Rolling Stone first interviewed Jay Som back in 2017, the piece ended with Duterte expressing her desire to collaborate with friends. “I’ve only worked by myself really,” she said. “It’d be nice to mess around…with people I really admire.” Presented with that quote today, Duterte almost gets choked up. “Wait, that’s so cute. That makes me so emotional,” she says. “I said that?”

Belong, the new Jay Som record, is an intoxicating bouquet of reference points that encapsulate Duterte’s life as a listener. Many of the songs began simply as Duterte working through riffs and arrangements that reminded her of music she loves: There was the demo titled “Cloud Nothings Idea” (lead single “Float”) or her “Drake-slash-Hovvdy song” (album opener “Cards on the Table”) or her “Broken Social Scene-slash-Alex G song — a very easy prompt for myself” (“Casino Stars”).

Dacus praises the mix of styles on this record: “No sounds are off limits,” she says of Belong.

While most artists talk about their influences as a means to finding their own individual sound, for Jay Som, her favorite records are an end in and of themselves. 

“I want to sound like other people,” she says. “Some people get really confused when I say that because they’re like, “Why would you want to sound like someone else?’ And I’m like, ‘That’s why I make music’….A lot of people are scared of feeling that way because we want to feel so unique, and that we’re pushing the envelope, but everything’s been done before. If you just keep doing shit that you love and are proud of, that’s the most unique thing you can do.”

WHEN JAY SOM’S touring was suspended in March 2020 and the world began to shut down, Duterte started teaching herself some new skills. She settled into the Los Angeles home she shared with her longtime partner, Chastity Belt’s Annie Truscott. (Also living nearby was Eagles of Death Metal’s Jesse Hughes, who’d regularly subject his neighbors to shouting late-night karaoke renditions of Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You”). 

And she began honing her record-making skills. The career she’d built for herself since her 2016 debut, Turn Into, no longer seemed viable for the time being. But working on others’ records during lockdown did. 

“It feels like I went to school for five years,” she says. “I was on YouTube and Gearspace every day, just annoying all of my engineer friends to see if they can teach me things, and blowing my stimulus check on audio gear. That changed everything.” What began as a side project — helping out on friends’ home-recorded indie releases — quickly blossomed into a full-fledged new career, at a time when touring as an independent artist remained a dicey proposition even with many returning to the road. 

In 2021, she released a collaborative album with Palehound’s El Kempner under the moniker Bachelor. Then boygenius called. After working on 2023’s The Record, Duterte traveled the country in style with Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, and Dacus. For someone who’d spent much of the 2010s crashing on friends’ floors, having her own bass technician and eight different instruments in her rig was a huge change. “My face would hurt from smiling every single day,” she says of that tour. 

All of Duterte’s experiences working with other artists greatly impacted her relationship to her own work. But they also, at times, made it harder to figure out her relationship to Jay Som. “I had a major identity issue with my work,” she says of this time. 

Earlier this year, deep into the recording of Belong, Duterte was flooded with self-doubt. “For the longest time I remember thinking, ‘Should I just give up Jay Som and become a full-time producer?’” she says. “I did have those moments where I was like, ‘I have no business singing… What is going on? What’s the end game here?’ Just classic imposter syndrome. Like, ‘Am I too old?’”

Duterte had helped enough artists escape from the depths of their own insecurity in the past few years to know that such thoughts and feelings were simply part of the creative process. And she had her own collaborators — namely co-producers Joao Gonzalez, Mal Hauser, and Kyle Pulley — to ground her. 

Looking forward, Duterte is inspired by artist-producers like Cate Le Bon, who has made a career out of juggling both roles. The combination offers a sort of balance (and busyness) that she craves. “It’s kind of weird to say, but I clearly see the next five to ten years of my life,” she says with a laugh. “I see a lot of new people in my life, and just growing with a lot of the people who are with me now.” 

She sees herself re-introducing her Jay Som songs to a crowd of new fans who might be too young to have heard them when they came out a decade ago. She sees herself taking a break from producing for a minute while she focuses on Jay Som, then diving back into that work in due time. She sees herself seeking out more opportunities around the globe: to try to work with Japanese and Korean bands, and to one day bring her family along for a tour of the Philippines, where her parents are from. She sees herself making less guitar-based music.

“I just want to get better,” Duterte says. “I want to collaborate with more people on the off days and weeks on tour, and I want to get into the studio and I want to record people whenever I’m in their city. I want to write new songs.” 

But what is she most excited to do at this very moment? Duterte smiles. 

Right now, she says, she just wants to play Jay Som songs on tour.