January 2, 2025
This Tuesday in The Lounge, we’re kicking off our first Open Mic Night of the year with featured performer Type A Minus! Known for her introspective songwriting and immersive soundscapes, she crafts music that balances raw vulnerability with ambient folk textures.
Get to know more about Type A Minus ahead of her performance on January 7th!
What is something you have learned from a musician / songwriter / producer you admire?
I admire Julien Baker’s songwriting so much. She writes a lot about addiction, which I do as well. What she’s taught me is that you can just say the thing. There’s been times I’ve been writing and I’m like “oh that’s too dark” or “oh if I play this for people they are going to know too much about me,” or “I need to put this in a more poetic way.” At the end of the day, you’re writing for yourself, right? I need to be able to say things as bluntly as I need to. I also think that forwardness is often appreciated from a listener’s perspective.
Where do you start with writing a song? (Lyrics, chord progression, etc) Can you give one example from your repetoire?
9/10 times I start with lyrics. That’s the part of songwriting that feels most interesting and important to me. Often, a melody will come as I write the lyrics, but I rarely write a guitar part, or add instrumentation until the lyrics are finished – though I will tend to fine tune them. The album I’m working on now deals with a time in my life, about two and half years ago, where I was going through a major mental health and addiction crisis and ended up hurting someone I loved pretty significantly. I was jotting a lot down of things to just process through that and ended up with the opening line to a song that is actually already out on streaming called “In Conclusion” and the lyrics, much to the point of my previous answer, are pretty straight forward “The first person you ever hurt so much / you wonder if you should have been allowed outside / I’ll repent to anyone willing to hear / I will find no punishment fair”
What do you wish you had known when you started writing music and performing?
That it doesn’t need to be “cool” or what you think other people will find cool. I had a band before Type A Minus with a few of my best friends from high school. I absolutely love those boys and also really appreciate that early experience of what it was like to write music and teach it to other people to perform, but it was also very early in my time living in Philly and getting to know the scene and I felt immense pressure to be making the music I thought people would like and have fun watching. Yes, people are not going to be like, hype, at Type A shows, but watching people seated at my shows having a different type of transformative experience has shown me that showing up authentically matters and people can take it or leave it.
Are there any pre-show rituals, performance styles, references you consider as you translate your music for the stage?
I’m still working through how Type A’s music should be presented live. Over the 2+ years Type A has existed, it’s been a solo project, then a trio, then a different trio, and currently more of a solo project just due to schedules, life happenings, etc. I’ve really enjoyed playing more ambient sets recently, but I also miss playing with my band and think I’d like to expand the band to have drums and another guitarist. When I talk to other musician friends about this they often remind me I can present my music in all of these ways and that I don’t have to lock in to just one. That feels a little stressful to me, because that means my time is being split rather than giving 100% to one version. I come from theater and opera, so I really value rehearsal time and being prepared. As it stands, I want to finish this album then make a decision on how to proceed, be it band lineup, aesthetic, and so forth based on the final arrangements of these songs. It’s been helpful to try a bunch of different things out, though.
How do you practice trusting yourself as a songwriter?
The really short answer is that, if I feel like I’m bullshitting myself, I rewrite or scrap the song. I mean, sometimes you just write a bad song and that’s easy to navigate, but the true practice is practicing honesty. There are, of course, aspects of craft and construction that come into play, but I can see right through myself if I’m writing something that is shallow, or not what I really want to say. Also, I still have moments of wavering confidence in my songwriting. I’m not the best guitarist. My closest friends are incredibly good songwriters. It’s hard to not compare yourself, but at the end of the day we all have different strengths and I do believe mine is my willingness to be honest and vulnerable and building a soundscape around my lyrics that really drowns the listener in what I’m feeling. So if I’m not doing that, the song needs to change.
You have such a full sound even when you perform solo! How do you approach arrangement for different performances? What is most important to you in centralizing a distinct sound for Type A Minus between different arrangements of the same song?
Thank you! Some performances are easy because I do write songs that can just be guitar and vocals; or guitar, looper pedal, and vocals. Often those are just practical decisions based on venue, or the other artists on the bill. Same goes for deciding to do full band shows – it’s just scheduling and venue considerations. I know that’s not the most interesting answer, but it’s true. When it comes to the solo set with a big sound you are discussing, where I have my guitar, looper pedal, laptop, mixer, etc, that is where I think the true sound of Type A really lies. It’s ambient folk music, basically. When it comes to arranging those shows, I have to consider my limitations of what I can do as just one person and that honestly yields some very cool and interesting results. I get to do a lot more sound design work than we do as a full band currently, though I hope to connect those two things more so in the future. Some songs just plain only sound good with the full band when we have a bass player, and some songs sound way better with a wall of ambient sound. Luckily, when it comes to recording these songs as I’m doing now, it gives me a lot of opportunity to do the MOST with the arrangement and strip down and adjust as needed based on what sort of show I’m playing.
Is there a place in Philly that has ended up in a song of yours AND OR a spot in Philly you frequent?
So this album I’m working on and the songs I have out all detail things I was experiencing while living in Philly, but don’t mention any specific places. I definitely view it as a Philly album just because I was the one writing it and I know the location(s) of where certain things happened, or I’m mentioning certain friends in the city. However, I do have one song we love playing as a full band called PHL – which is the airport code for the Philadelphia airport. I actually wrote the song when I moved back here from Boston in 2020, but didn’t finish it / rewrote it somewhat in 2022. I grew up in Philadelphia, and the song is sort of a meditation on all the places I’ve lived and people I’ve been. The recorded version is almost done and my bandmate Vayda says it sounds like being in the airport waiting for your return flight home.
