Geneva Jacuzzi is a pop artist working in the strange paradise of angels — Los Angeles. A mother of invention, she is exalted as an early pioneer of the modern lo-fi bedroom pop terrain, and is a notable figure in the underground scenes in Hollywood and Los Angeles, with her influence spreading worldwide in the pop, noise, and independent art communities. Geneva is further recognized for her work in visual and performance art, fabrication, fashion, and film. She directs and produces music videos and video art installations, designs and produces her own sets and wardrobe, and choreographs her stage performances.
Her latest album, Triple Fire, is out now on Dais Records.
Julia Holter is an LA-based singer-songwriter and producer, whose latest record, Something in the Room She Moves, is out now on Domino; Geneva Jacuzzi is an also-LA-based multimedia artist and performer. Geneva’s new record, Triple Fire, just came out on Dais record, and to celebrate, the two friends got on a Zoom call right before the release to catch up about it.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Julia Holter: Well, hi! Congratulations on your new record that’s coming out in a couple days. It’s so crazy how hard it is to put out a record. It sounds really bratty, but it’s a lot of work to release a record. The administrative work is crazy.
Geneva Jacuzzi: Yeah. You just put out a record too, right?
Julia: Yeah. I mean, a few months ago.
Geneva: You’re fresh, you know how much work goes into this. I don’t think people understand how much — I mean, here we are just bitching about work.
Julia: No, I know. But it’s funny because I think it’s just gotten increasingly crazy. There’s so many elements that the artist has to deal with now, and the way that you have to have things ready for social media… I don’t want to make the whole conversation about this, but recently I heard someone — an independent artist releasing a record with an indie label — describe it as it like running a presidential campaign.
Geneva: That’s it. I’ve been thinking about that this whole time. I’m like, Do I have what it takes to run for president? [Laughs.] I think I might.
Julia: [Laughs.] Totally.
Geneva: My career is, like, washed up. Should I just get into politics? Because it’s kind of the same.
Julia: Yeah. It’s complicated because there’s all this administrative work that involves the computer and… I’m going to sound really old, because I’m complaining about technology. But it takes away from the creative side, and it’s a little intense.
Geneva: Exactly, I agree. I don’t think that makes you sound old. I think that all artists are sort of dealing with that right now, with social media and the real world. I mean, it took me two hours just to put one post up on 20 platforms — TikTok, Instagram, X, Facebook, this and that, and tagging everybody. And then when you don’t tag people, they get mad at you.
Julia: Oh, I know.
Geneva: They think that you’re doing it on purpose. But it’s hard to explain to people when you have to do so many things, it’s not like you don’t care and you forgot about them, it’s just hard to keep track of all that stuff. And it can be overwhelming for artists to take care of their own project, take care of everyone that’s working on the project, and then market it and also be creative and interesting. You’re really working every single part of your brain. Emotional, logical, everything. I’ve been doing this record campaign, and I’m getting ready for this show coming up at the Lodge Room [Geneva’s record release show in LA was on 8/31], and I’ve had to do this edit — which is a creative thing for me, but I’ve been doing all of this busy work, and every time I sat down to edit, I couldn’t focus on it. It’s hard to be creative when you’re when you’re being a business person.
Julia: It is so hard. I just had the same thing where I was spending all this time figuring out some financial thing with a show yesterday, and then I was supposed to work on some music. But it just is a completely different part of your brain, and I felt so worn out. It’s just a part of it, I guess. But sometimes I’m just like, “This doesn’t work anymore. I can’t do this.” Then you play a show and it’s really fun, and you’re like, “OK, OK, this is worth it.” [Laughs.] It’s just constant ups and downs.
Geneva: Yeah, I want to quit pretty much every six days, I think, on average. Every Friday I’m like, “OK, I don’t think I can do this anymore.” [Laughs.]
Julia: Well, you have this new record, which sounds so great and is so fun, like all of your work. Your music always has a very distinct sound, but you also love to challenge yourself and try new things — I remember this point when you were coming out of Bubonic Plague [Geneva’s old band] and started to make solo music and things became funkier.
Geneva: I think you and I both have a really broad range of musical likes and things that we listen to. It’s hard when you’re an artist to really be like, “This is my sound.” You’re just being creative. You hear something new, you get inspired, and you want to try it out. Like, “Wow, that’s a funky bass line, I want to try that.”
Julia: [Laughs.] I just remember that song “Group Dynamic” — this is probably really ancient history for you — but it was a whole new color palette and it felt really fun. It felt like something with the rhythm section changed, or there is something sort of industrial feeling with the rhythm and the timbres of the new music you’re doing now.
Geneva: Well, it’s funny, the new record really does what you’re talking about. The spectrum is wide on this record, and there are definitely some funky tracks. [Laughs.] There’s some industrial hard hitters and there’s some ballads, and there’s some almost smooth jazz even.
Julia: I love that.
Geneva: When I was a little kid, I used to have to listen to music to fall asleep, on headphones on my Walkman. I was raised Jehovah’s Witness, and we were limited to the type of music I was allowed to listen to — it had to be kind of clean. So Beatles records were the thing for me when I was a kid. White Album was my favorite record and I listened to it every night.
Julia: Me too.
Geneva: Really?
Julia: Yeah, that was my favorite, too.
Geneva: It’s all over the place. You can tell they were experimenting a lot with different types of sounds and genres, and they weren’t trying to make a straightforward, clean cut record. And I think that solidified what a record is supposed to be in my brain. It has to be like a whole journey, you know?
Julia: Exactly.
Geneva: High lows and ups and downs, and this style and that style. And I think that when I approach record making, I get bored if two songs sound similar. And I know that from a marketing, commercial standpoint, that’s probably a bad thing. It’s good to sort of stay in your genre. But I’ve never been able to do it. I always have to try different things.
Julia: Totally. The White Album was very formative for me too. I was a kid listening to it, and it became normal as a concept to me as a young person that that would be a record. Even visually, just the layout of the insert is so cool. That whole record was foundational for me as a model for a record not having a narrative. Sometimes people say “concept album,” but I don’t think I’ve ever made, in my mind, a concept album. I just make records, but they maybe have a lot of different things they’re doing. But I think it’s funny too, because — again, I don’t want to sound curmudgeonly, but I do feel like there’s this desire for neatness and knowing what to expect right now. I really struggle with figuring out, “What is my branding?” I don’t ever think about that, but I realize that’s something you’re supposed to do. Or also for the ideal Spotify plays, you should have music that people know what to expect… I don’t know. I mean, no one tells me these things — they don’t say, “Julia, you need to do this.” No one’s expecting me to be a pop artist. But I do feel like generally society expects that, which makes it a little hard to be an artist.
Geneva: Of course. Because in corporate society, you’re meant to make money, Julia! You gotta make money! [Laughs.] I was just talking to a friend the other day about Spotify — and I haven’t been using Spotify this whole time. I just got someone put me on their family account, I kid you not, two months ago because I refuse to pay for it.
Julia: No, me too. I don’t use it. I mean, I sometimes look at it, but I don’t have a paid version.
Geneva: I just look at how many listeners I have so I can plan my future or whatever. I mean, this is crazy — I’ve always used YouTube. Because the deep cuts, the rare stuff, the out of print, the B-sides… All of the good stuff is on YouTube now. But I started using Spotify recently, and one thing I don’t like is how you go to an artist page and you have to scroll kind of far down just to find their records. They always put their top singles at the top, so if you want to go to a band, you have to listen to the their radio hit. It’s really funny because Mac DeMarco did a remix of a song I collaborated on, and that is the top Geneva Jacuzzi song — and it’s not even my song. So if anyone wants to check out Geneva Jacuzzi, they have to listen to a Mac DeMarco remix of someone else’s song that I did a guest vocals on.
Julia: That’s really silly.
Geneva: I guess that’s the way it goes. I have a question: Now that we’re talking about the biz and all of that stuff, when you record music, do you have it in your mind, “This is going to be released, it’s going to look like this, it’s going to end up like that?” Is that part of your creative process?
Julia: When I’m writing, I don’t think about how I’m going to do anything. I don’t think about anything practical. I don’t think about, How am I going to perform this? Should I not do this because it might not be performable? I just think about what the recording needs. I think of recording and performing really differently. Because I’ve had students, for example, be like, “Well, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to perform it this way.” And I’m like, “Doesn’t matter.” Recording is a completely different thing to me than performing. Because often with recording, I’m really obsessive over the production — just like you. I know you’re like this. Every little detail is a thing. And performing is just not like that. Performing, you’re focusing on this weird thing you’re doing in front of people.
Geneva: Yeah. My live shows are very theatrical and there are no live instruments, and I think it’s because when I’m recording, I generally have some kind of dream space or escape that I go to. I create a world, and it’s an emotional place and you can feel it. It’s almost like remembering a feeling you had in a dream. That’s what music is to me.
Julia: Totally.
Geneva: Like, I had this feeling in the dream and I don’t know what it was, but I can remember only the feeling. That’s what I’m always trying to create when I’m making music. So when I’m recording, I tap into that. When I do the live show, it’s hard because since I’m a solo artist, the only thing I can think of to stay true to the music is to play off of that fantasy and that dream world and create that space — almost like you’re in another dimension or in another reality. I feel like that’s the best way to perform the music live. I just play the backing tracks mostly, and create the world that the music was born out of.
Julia: That makes so much sense. I’m exactly the same in terms of recording, and I’ve been most conscious of that recently. Recently I’ve been really obsessive about production, and I feel like I’m trying to capture a feeling — it sounds very new age-y when I say it, but everything you said about that I completely resonate with. And I definitely see that in your shows, because there are all these amazing visual elements that are just otherworldly and always surprising. I think that really comes through in your shows.
Geneva: Thank you. It’s kind of interesting, because I’m one of those weird artists that doesn’t put out a lot of music. I put a record out maybe every seven years, and there’s probably no reason why I should still have any sort of career because of that.
Julia: Well, because that’s how the world is now. It’s like you have to make music all the time, otherwise you’re not valid or something.
Geneva: Yeah. But I think there’s something about the types of shows I do that marks people. That’s something I’m always trying to do: I want to create a memory for everyone. And I think that people resonate with that and they want to experience that. Especially now because of social media — everything’s so in your phone and rarely do we get to go out into the world and actually have this virtual reality in reality.
Julia: Makes sense to me. When I was thinking about your music, as a fan and friend of yours, your lyrics — I wanted to talk about that in relation to what we’re discussing, because your lyrics and song titles feel very visual to me. Like “Clothes on the Bed,” “Love Caboose,” “One Colored Rooms.” I think about that all the time when I think about good lyrics — “I want to walk through one colored rooms with you.”
Geneva: That was actually a play off of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” I think it’s based around the Bubonic Plague, oddly enough — very relevant — where all these people go to a party to escape the plague in this massive house, and then in the house, each room is a different color. I actually co-wrote that with my friend Casey [Obelisk]. He was a surrealist playwright poet, and he actually taught me how to how to write. You basically create an experience, a character, and sort of write around the actions and dialogue, asking questions, pondering things. It’s like playwriting in a way. And I used to be into a bunch of weird shit — I’m always looking at some Dada, surrealist, weird thing.
Julia: Your visuals have that element for sure. There’s always weird shapes.
Geneva: Yeah, it’s like Bauhaus theater.
Julia: I love the way you’re a very industrious person. Maybe you’re kind of a perfectionist — do you feel that way?
Geneva: Oh, god, it’s like the death of me. Yes. I mean, I’ve been learning lately how to — because I’ve had so many projects going on at the same time that if I were to be a full perfectionist on each of them, I wouldn’t be able to finish anything. So I think it’s the art of being able to let go of something. Like, “OK, that’s good enough.” It’s like having multiple children and one kid needs all the attention, and the other one is getting neglected, and you have to step back and look at the whole thing and go, “OK, the family is important.” [Laughs.] I’m describing it like having kids, but you have a kid. I don’t have kids. These are my babies.
Julia: I don’t think I’ve changed that much with my practice so much, the way some people say they had a kid and then they changed a lot. Like, I’m still a mess. I’ve always been really chaotic, the way I work. The way I was thinking of it is, you’re a perfectionist, but to me, knowing your work ethic — because you work really intensely on things — but at the same time, your work always feels fresh and raw. It doesn’t feel belabored or too slick or self-serious. There’s always a sense of humor or some sweetness and emotion. So I think it’s a good balance. I was thinking of this in relation to your lyrics too. How do you come up with them?
Geneva: Well, it’s funny, on this new record, but a lot of the songs I co-wrote with my friend Roderick Edens in Virginia Beach.
Julia: Oh, cool.
Geneva: He’s a really funny, interesting, special person, and when the two of us get together, we just have a good back and forth. Before when I would come up with lyrics, I [did always] like to co-write a lot of lyrics, and maybe 30% of the songs I write alone. But the collaboration process on lyrics is actually really, really fun to do. I don’t think enough people do it, because they want to get all the publishing or something, which is really sad.
But this record was really collaborative. I recorded nine of the songs out in Virginia Beach with my friends over there. We worked on them from scratch. It’s a whole different process collaborating with other people because I’m such a solo person. But I think what happened was, I started working on this record alone — I did “Dry” by myself and then a few other tracks — and I was like, Wait, this sounds like my old stuff. This is boring to me. I’m not inspired by me in a room anymore. So I decided to collaborate on this record. The lyrics were really collaborative — Roderick and I would just come up with some crazy ideas and then go back and forth. We’d go walk the dog on the beach, because he had a beach house and we would just be back and forth, back and forth with our audio recorder on our iPhones, just babbling.
Julia: That’s so cool.
Geneva: It was so fun. Because I think my brain — it’s not that it hit its limit, but it’s just, you can only do so much alone. I got bored, and I wanted to change it up.
Julia: That makes sense. I feel like when I moved back to LA, and I met you, people were making music all themselves. That was a really special thing that everyone was making their own weird, idiosyncratic — fantasies, basically. But now, it’s almost more common not to collaborate. For me, often the performing is where I collaborate with people. It’s so important for me to have my band, to be playing with them live. The other people bring in so much and I would be really bored just playing solo. Now, there’s just this push for everyone to make music as efficiently as possible and use MIDI on everything, and it just sounds like the person worked alone completely. Sometimes that’s really cool and magical, but it can have so much dimension to toss off ideas with others, and have other human brains involved and their weird and idiosyncratic things.
I think it’s really cool and it’s so important to just have fun making music. I love that it’s so clear to me that you always have fun. I mean, I’m not saying it’s always fun, because it’s work to make music. But you seem like you have a good sense of fun with it.
Geneva: Thanks. It’s funny because it’s like we were talking about earlier, about not thinking about the world or thinking about the world — when I make music, I am aware that I do have a small fan base, at least, and hopefully people are going to hear it. I don’t think about it so much in a marketing strategy sort of way. But I’m kind of a loner as a human; my soul is kind of a lone wolf type person, you know? And I think music has socialized me. It’s brought me to people. It’s brought me to countries, it’s brought me on tours. It’s completely expanded my life. And I think that having some kind of collaboration opens up that project, whether it’s in the performing side or in the recording side, to reach more people. Ultimately, we want our music to be heard.
Julia: I feel exactly the same way. I think people don’t always realize that a lot of musicians are kind of not good at the party or not good at socializing, but are really into performing. I realized I liked performing — I was more like, “Oh, I’m behind the scenes. I like to write music.” I thought because I was kind of introverted that I wouldn’t like performing, but it’s actually interesting how that goes the opposite way.
Geneva: Yeah. We’ve been gifted, so they say. We have a gift, and the whole point is to share that gift in whatever capacity. I hope that doesn’t make me sound like an egomaniac… But to be an artist is to have a gift, and it’s almost like your duty to share it.
