Alternative-pop artist, SEE just completed her residency at Arlene’s Grocery on the Lower East Side and recently released her newest music video for her song “She Cries”. SEE is a brilliant up and coming musician was generous enough to sit down and chat with me about her most recent album and how it feels to be looked up to by young LGBT+ fans.

We started off by talking about her favorite song on her EP, Ties, “Closed Eyes Open,” which she says “brings [her] back to [her] roots” as it’s more stripped down and not as “pop-y” as her other songs. She explains to me that when she was young she wanted to be a drummer for a big band, like the bands she listened to, Paramore, Moving Mountains, and Radiohead. And although she has remained loyal to those musicians, she has added other bands like Marina and the Diamonds and Coldplay to her typical playlists.

When asked about fan interactions and comments on her YouTube videos, SEE cites a sincere YouTube comment from a fan who wrote that listening to her music helped them stop cutting themselves. She describes that the way people react to her in person at her shows is much more calm and grateful than the comedic comments she gets online.

As a gay woman, SEE says that although she came to terms with her identity recently she feels a desire to be out and very public. Her first music video for her single, “Potions,” was debuted on the popular site for lesbians and bisexual women, AfterEllen, and has since hit over one million views. In the video, SEE wanted to show a same-sex couple that didn’t need to overcome something and that just showed a couple who was in love without exploiting female sexuality.

The video for “She Cries” showcases a man and woman in a relationship and when asked about why that decision was made instead of casting two female dancers, SEE explains that the video came together quickly and the dancers featured worked with the choreographer to write the piece.

She says that “as important as showing two girls in a relationship is, the more important story is about addiction and these dancers showed that the best."

She also wants her videos to be more open ended so that when a fan comes to the video with one idea of what the song is about, the video isn’t so narrative that their concept is burst. In her future videos, she wants the visuals to really ebb and flow with the audio. When there is a big moment in the song, she wants that to be really reflected in the video.

SEE is now back in the studio writing new music and says that although songs come about with either lyrics or chords first interchangeably, she has been starting with a title to give her music a theme and then writing chords around that feeling and then adding lyrics later on. As she tells me about her writing process, I picture her sitting on the gray tile floor of her home as she does in her YouTube documentary, “Breaking Ties."

She describes herself and her music with simultaneous and humility that makes me feel like I’m in the presence of a star. When I asked who she would want to hear her music if anyone in the world could, she immediately said her dead families members, like grandparents she had been close with.

She later jokes that she would love to play for Radiohead but that she thinks they would say, “what is this pop crap?”

SEE ends our time together with a joke about how awkward she thinks she is after having very eloquently advising her young LGBT+ fans to be themselves as trite as that may seem, she believes it to be one of the hardest but most important things to strive for.