A Band You Should Know: Scarlet Rae
Portraits by Elena Saviano.
I met Scarlet Rae at one of our mutual favorite dive bars in Bushwick and left with an hour-long recording that consisted mostly of laughter at our own jokes (underscored by Paramore punching out of rattling speakers), gossip, extensive explanation of celebrity fights on the internet, and the occasional, insightful tidbit about her music career.
Up until about six months ago, Scarlet was producing much of her discography on GarageBand, but not in a middle school, DIY sort of way. Her process can be better described as “experimental.” She starts by writing and recording solo in her apartment, with the occasional company of her two cats (Pigeon pictured below). Sometimes it wraps up there, sometimes she takes it into the studio, but she nailed down her sonics by playing around with GarageBand’s plugins: “Originally I was just using like ‘90s Brit Pop’ or something like that,” she laughed. “I later learned how to EQ it and make it sound different, and that’s when I really felt like I was tapping into my own sound. When I started adjusting it and experimenting with it.” This is the perfect way to describe Scarlet’s artistic approach. Start small. Start with anything.
Don’t overcomplicate it. So many creative people fall victim to doing too much, we agreed, as she explained to me that replicating the sound of bands like Deftones and Team Sleep when she was just starting out helped shape her now very individual, distinctive sound. In other words, intuition guides, and Scarlet follows.
It wasn’t until — crazy story — a personal idol of hers flew out to New York and bought her Logic that she left GarageBand in her past and changed her production process. “One of my friends – I say friends, but he’s in his mid 40s and is in one of my favorite 90s bands – found me through a TikTok live,” she told me in between sips. “He was like, ‘That sounds like something I would’ve made in the 90s,’ and I was like, ‘Wait, who are you?’ And then he said he was in this band called Idaho. I was like, ‘Are you serious?’ I actually have a tattoo of them on my arm. I ended up jamming with them in LA, and later he came out to New York and bought me Logic. It’s so insane.”
Scarlet is a Los Angeles native and moved to NYC in 2020 in pursuit of a solo career, signing soon after to Bayonet. You could say music has always been lodged somewhere in her bones. She played in her first band with her sister; Scarlet on drums, her sister on guitar and vocals. She was three. Her dad then taught her how to play guitar at around eight years old, and soon after she was his resident opener, playing at local pubs around the San Fernando Valley until she was 12. At that point, she cracked open GarageBand and started learning, in a very serious, pre-teen way, how to write, record, and produce her own songs.
I photographed Scarlet at home in her Ridgewood apartment. She put on an Avril Lavigne CD, burned sticks of incense, and offered me a strangely delicious candy that I can’t remember the name of but wish I could. Her walls are decked out in memorabilia from the Smile, Oasis, and artwork made by friends of hers, and she identified a Sudoku book and an exquisite Nicoletta Ceccoli tarot card deck as some of her most prized possessions. In the wild, Scarlet is bright. Warm. Undeniably inviting. Her music, however, is grounded by more mystical and elusive undercurrents: shadowy, serpentine melodies made buoyant by the tone of her voice that are indeed inviting in their own bewitching way. This is a balance that’s difficult to strike and strike well. “I find myself drawn to grimmer melodies as opposed to catchier, happier stuff,” she told me. “I pour all of my emotions into the chord progressions.” I understand her process to be a kind of catharsis. When things are hard, and they always will be, we reach for life rafts. Where the latitudes of identity, of certainty, of comfort and discomfort blur together, music like Scarlet’s emerges. You can’t help but feel connected to the way it moves through you.
Ultimately, there’s never an easy answer for the question “Where do you see your career taking you?” If most of us answered honestly, we’d wind up saying that we mainly want to make enough money to pay rent without a stomach ache but doing so in the light of our passions would be most ideal. Scarlet’s answer was far more genuine. “I want what I make to really impact people,” she told me. “When someone shares with me that they really identified with or related to something I wrote, it feels so amazing. I know it’s cliché, but I see all this taking me to a place where I find my purpose.” She has nailed the nuances of bearing your soul without leaving yourself out to dry. She makes music because it makes sense to her, and the impact is reverberant.
