A Chat with Juliet Daniel

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to conduct my first interview in 6 years (!! :O) with the lovely Juliet Daniel. Juliet is an alternative-pop musician currently residing in the city of Seattle, with a brand new EP containing three high energy genre-bending tracks speaking on the scope of digital life. We chatted in-depth about her latest release (and title track) No New Friends, her experiences in the tech world as a former Microsoft employee, her creative identity and upcoming artist plans. This was such a fun interview, Juliet was so kind and incredibly easy to talk to - I've been beyond excited the past week to be able share all of the words and thoughts we exchanged over Zoom <3 (Video will be uploaded soon!)

Make sure to check out the brilliant new track No New Friends released with Malldate on March 20th, completing the No New Friends three-pack including tracks such as Battery and Half of Me. Make sure you keep up with Juliet to catch a future show and any upcoming releases!

Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to talk to me! Just to get started a bit, who's Juliet Daniel? How would you describe yourself as an artist and a musician?

Yeah, who am I? Juliet Daniel is finally consolidated with the artist version of me. When I first started out, I actually went by a stage name. I was just called Juliette, but the I was stylized, so it was an exclamation point. (JUL!ET) Part of the reason I wanted to do that was for the sake of a little bit of anonymity. I came from the corporate world out here, which is why I still live in Seattle, and I thought I was going to be that version of Juliet Daniel. So claiming my name as my artist name was actually a really big move for me last year. Another reason why I initially strayed away from identifying my legal name as my artist name - it just felt a little bit lazy. It felt a little bit singer songwriter-y.

When I was first starting out, I was making a lot more of that type of music. I came from a background of more folksy, stripped-down acoustic stuff. I think that's part of why I never fully got into music as a kid, I didn't really understand electronic production. I didn't really start to understand it until a couple of years ago when I was having my music recorded and I'd sit in on the production sessions. I actually learned how to produce my own songs too. I wanted to be more genre expansive than just singer-songwriter, and I felt that I was being pushed into that by the few people that I was working with at the time. Part of the exclamation point was that I had always envisioned doing more experimental, electronic-y stuff, like 'No New Friends,' like 'Battery' and 'Half of Me' that are on the 3-pack project. I always wanted to do something in between alt-pop and electronic. I just fell in love with hyperpop maybe 3 years ago - and I think a lot of people who make hyperpop, like AG Cook would never say "I make hyperpop music". He would say I make experimental pop music.

People actually making it and founding the movement don't really see themselves that way. I understand it's totally just a Spotify playlist gimmick thing. I'm really glad that we have a term for that kind of music, even though it's still pretty blanket. There's just so much range within that - there's more guitar music, there's more pop punk music within hyperpop, and then there's also more not vocal forward, really electronic, almost trance-like music. It's so much in itself, but I love how bold the genre is. I like how it's not afraid to piss some people off. I think it feels right for me to be diving into that right now. But I wouldn't define my artist project by genre either. After this, I'm actually going to be releasing a bunch of indie-type of songs. Some of them are a little bit more genre bending - one of them has a pretty crazy switch up that does delve into a bit more hyperpop. But I'm not limiting myself by genre here. I have thought about making multiple projects just so I can go really hard on one end and really hard on a different type of genre. But I think everybody listens to a bit of everything.

Definitely, everyone is so expansive.

Yeah! I want to make these different types of music. I listen to all different types of music that I don't make too. It's just who I am. I'm leaning into authenticity more. I think a lot of artists have this question of, who am I? versus who is the artist project? I think that there's no way you can logically put your entire essence into your artist project. I think emotionally you can put your entire essence into it, but I think in terms of the logistics of it and communicating who you are, you're always sub-selecting which parts of you go into your artist project. It's not that I don't want to tell the whole truth, but now I'm so much more comfortable funneling those things directly into my artist project, even if it's not going to be a complete set of them. Whereas before I felt a lot more pressure to conform to more pop sensibilities and create a character that was coming out with this music, just doing a stereotypical love and limerence type of narrative that I've heard in so many pop songs.

Even though my writing hasn't entirely changed, I think I'm writing more songs about friendship and societal stuff that really draws me. That's one reason why I wanted to write No New Friends. At the time, I was working on an EP that I thought was going to be called Digital Life. It was all going to be learnings from having worked in tech before and feeling complicit in that, while now feeling complicit in a different angle because I'm relying on social media to promote what I'm doing. So to get what I need, I feel like I force other people to spend more time on screens, which doesn't feel that great all the time.

A lot of that was rushing through my mind as I was writing this song, which I thought was gonna belong to a collection called Digital Life. I realized that was still too limiting of a canvas for me. The next project is gonna be a fuller body of what I've actually been thinking about and what I actually think is unique about my personal story and about my artistry. But the 3-pack feels really right to me. All the artwork I wanted to have - using the phones because I think it's so relatable. I think it's so beautiful to romanticize the day-to-day, almost reclaiming it and being like, "if I have to be here, if I have to be on my screen, isn't it funny? Isn't it romantic?" I love art that's based on mundane things and makes me feel seen.

I love that! That is such an in-depth answer. I love how true to yourself you are within your art, it's so inspiring. Getting into the No New Friends 3-pack and the single coming out, I took a listen to it today. It's so freaking good! I love it. It's exciting and upbeat - I'm obsessed. Can you tell us a little bit about the inspiration behind the name of the title track and how it ties the other two songs together into a full three-piece project?

The title of the song, No New Friends, it's sort of sarcastic. I am making new friends all the time - case in point - but I feel like the ability to make no new friends in the wild specifically is a little bit suffocated nowadays. I think there's pressure from the outside, but there's also pressure from within. I think it's pretty ironic how it's easy to make new friends online and not all of those actually turn into real life friends, but a lot of these organic instances of waiting at the bus stop are robbed of the ability to actually meet people in the wild. I just wonder about the repercussions of that. I think in a healthy society, we are running into more people who are differently minded. Part of the way to do that is to meet people in the wild. Not saying that there aren't societal factors that keep people out of the same neighborhoods and that everything was gonna be fair in the first place. Not at all. But I think that there is a certain amount of whimsy in the day-to-day of feeling like you actually might meet a new friend in the wild.

I wonder what it's doing to us socially, to my generation and to generations younger than me, that we are potentially getting good at making friends online, but we're not as good about meeting our neighbors. I'm super guilty of this. I've definitely sat in my driveway on my phone because I just didn't feel like talking to my neighbor who's outside. So it's weird. I think a lot of people are having friendships that are a lot more shallow than the deep one-on-one friendships that are in person. I think that's leading to a lot of sadness and loneliness. The only way I really knew how to write about that was in a sarcastic, flippant tone. They're all technologically inspired, there's Battery which I wrote in the similar time period to No New Friends. No New Friends has just been sitting in the treasure trove for a while. It took me a while to find the right producer for that too. It's an all-female team, which I love.

It's me, it's Malldate, or Rin is her name, and it's also Amava or Madison, whichever one you like. Amava is an amazing hyperpop artist based in Nashville, we're all living in different cities. I think one of the beautiful things about hyperpop is that it's created by the digital landscape - so many people are collaborating on Twitch, which I did for the first time with Malldate. It's neat how it's so pandemic prepared to this whole genre. It's so low-budget prepared that it very much speaks to my heart and the conditions that I have in my life right now; the conditions that I had when I was first starting to make my own music. It's kind of weird, it's paradoxical because these are deep genuine connections that I have through music and through online avenues. If it weren't for the internet, I wouldn't have been able to make this with my friends who are genuinely my new friends now. But I am conscious of the online existence pulling away from the day-to-day, in real life, organic kismet type of experience.

Did you find yourself having any challenges creating a project across so many different states?

There wasn't too much back and forth. It was pretty sequential. I had been working on a lot of music, so that's probably why it took so much time. Rin's been teaching at School of Rock and working on so much music herself. She released a couple of songs and has been working on some really OG hyperpop stuff. Amava and I started the song (No New Friends) in Nashville, maybe in November of 2024. We basically wrote the whole thing in the room and then I did a couple more arrangements for inspiration on my own in Seattle.

Then I was working with my friend Camille Cano on a remix of my song "Stare You Down," which is on my collabs EP. I was realizing, oh, Camille has a really cool hyperpop song, which is way different for Camille too, because she's a bit more ethereal, dreamy; a little acoustic-y pop. I really liked the song "Focus on You" that she made with Malldate, we connected based on that. I just had this "No New Friends" demo with me and I hadn't really done anything with it, so it made sense once I'd found a producer that I was dying to work with, that I had this song that was dying to be worked on, right? We were working on it, finishing it up, and finally got the final version in January.

That's so exciting! Do you feel like taking your time with the track gave you more creative freedom in it all?

Yeah, I think it did. I think sometimes I have to sit on things to know how they stand up. It's easy to go one of two directions when you're in the room on day of or very shortly after. Either you can be really hyped on something that when you look back on doesn't really hold up, or you can be in an overly self-critical mood, right? Not really seeing the good things about a song. Then if you kind of let it sit and you come back to it, chances are it's really good. If you're excited when you come back to it, chances are that it's gonna continue to hold up. I think that's an advantage when it comes to this song. Out of the 3-pack, Battery is definitely the fastest turnaround.

I wrote it with Will Scharnberg, or Hideout Hill is his producer name. We wrote it just us 2 in LA in March of last year, then I released it in May of last year. That was one of those songs where it was just like, "when you know, you know". It's still one of my favorite songs. I feel like it's so meaningful, I had just come back from a trip and I went back to therapy in February. It unlocked so much for me to write about last year, I moved really fast last year, and Battery was part of a sequence of that. Half of Me I also feel we finished pretty fast, but I sat with it for longer because I was kind of figuring out which thing belonged to what project.

Half of Me was actually the first song where I didn't come up with the concept myself. The hook was given to me, most of the hook was already written when I got in the room by my co-writer Elan Wright. I had to figure out, what does this hook mean in the context of my life? Because it's really catchy, but how am I gonna make this my own? How am I going to relate it to the stuff that I've been thinking about?

The song hook was originally written as, "half of me wants to stay, half of me wants to run away, look at the mess you've made, look at all that you've done to me". The next line was different, "I shouldn't have to beg for a little bit of sympathy" — it's mostly unchanged from what it was in the beginning. I just didn't really like 'sympathies.' It was too sad, so I changed it to 'energy'. I was trying to figure out the verses, "what does it mean?" Originally I think it was intended in a more on-the-nose, love-hate relationship codependency with an actual other person. Since luckily I've never actually experienced that amount of codependency with another human being, to me it resonated as more of a metaphor for getting attention online and the turbulent relationship that that can create.

My friend Moretti, it's so funny, also works with Elan which is part of the reason why I really wanted to work with him. Moretti's also in the collabs EP, but I had never heard her version of the song. Apparently she'd worked on a version that was more about that codependent interpersonal relationship. Her version's a banger too, I won't share it with everybody. That's for her to share, but it was so cool to hear her spin on things.

It was a way different approach to writing. I'm usually almost always starting from a concept that I have created. Even if someone else is making a different beat and we're writing the day of, I am at least mapping the beat to a list of different concepts that I have in mind. If I'm not coming in with a voice memo demo of my own or even like a light production.

That's so interesting - how you can take one concept and turn it into something that is more relatable to you and your experiences. How do you feel that 'No New Friends,' the track and the entire project, differs from your previous releases?

I think it's more about acknowledging the effect of technology, committing to that as a theme, and doubling down on what makes me unique as a person, which goes into my artistry. I think social commentary on relationships with online media is a thing that is done over and over again, but usually in bits and pieces as little parts of songs. It's usually like, "Oh, you watch my story but you never text me." I like that in this 3-pack I've doubled down on seeing relationships through the lens of technology. Even Battery, which isn't so much about actual technology itself. The theme of that song is "I feel used up because you're objectifying me, but not in the way that people think they're going to be objectified, in the way of having to be perfect all the time, not having emotions of my own." Like having to have unlimited capacity, being endlessly rechargeable, being a machine.

I think the 3-pack is different in terms of it's going beyond just the format of a love story and into relationships that really matter - I mean, two of the songs are mainly about friendships; relationships that really stand the test of time, and the relationship to self. Some of my other songs have done that too, but I'm just really excited about this lens. I also think that sonically, things are going a bit harder. Battery and Half of Me are a little bit more tame and center of pop, but the sped-up version of Battery does sound quite hyper-poppy, which I love. Half of Me has the pitched-up vocals, which my dad keeps on texting about, he really doesn't understand pitched up vocals. I feel like I'm finally making the type of music that people above the age of 60 might not understand. I hope that when I'm 60, I'm listening to weird shit.

Music really keeps you young. I'm 28, so it's really nice to feel like I'm starting for the first time right now. I'm finally offending my parents in a real way. That's been a big career goal of mine. Yeah, finally. Just wait, if he has beef with Half of Me, I can't wait till he hears No New Friends. He's going to be like, "the whole song? Are you kidding me? This you?" I'm just in love with the process right now.

So speaking within the technology scope as a whole, I read that you can be described as a creatively enlightened tech burnout. How do you balance writing new music, recording, producing, and promoting yourself while not losing yourself within technology and social media? How do you make sure you don't crash or burn out?

Well, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I do just crash and burn out is the real answer. But when I am managing myself well, I run or walk or do yoga, go to the gym. I do something active every day. For me, running has really been it lately. I actually just ran a half marathon in between two shows that I played in LA last month.

It felt really good. I'm really glad to be healthy, and I want to continue being healthy. Ben Gibbard from Death Cab for Cutie is a huge runner, and that's part of why he can still tour. I feel so inspired by musicians who do that, who take care of themselves. I really like this question too, because I think it's so glamorized especially in certain cities to smoke cigarettes or pop so many zyns or stay up forever and ever and drink a lot of alcohol. Substance use is a big problem in our community and just the fuckery of sleep schedules.

Also just psychologically, it's so much to feel the pressure of perception, especially when you're adding the online component, feeling like you're always being watched. Even if you aren't an artist, you kind of are always being watched and listened to. That's a scary thing. So just being able to take a break and sleep enough is really important.

I'm definitely working on my sleep hygiene a bit, but having my activity every day helps ground me and make sure that I'm always taking some amount of me time. I also think singing itself is so good psychologically and just doing my warmups in the shower, really basic things like that. I also am vegan, so I'm very careful about what I— well, I'm not too careful about what I put into my body. I care enough, but not too much. I feel like there's purpose, there's principle behind why I do what I do. I don't cook anything crazy, but I would say I eat pretty healthy. Then going back to therapy every week now for a year has been great for me.

That's really awesome. That's something I've been trying to get back into myself, self-care as a whole. It's so easy to get caught into that loop of staying up till 5 in the morning and drinking a ton of coffee and energy drinks. Hitting my vape every 2 seconds.

Yeah, I feel so anxious a lot of the time too, I have actual generalized anxiety. I finally got diagnosed with ADHD, which I had no idea about, towards the end of last year. I'm just figuring stuff out right now— it's an ongoing process. But I hope that if I'm somewhat open about these kinds of struggles, other people will feel more seen and welcomed. The other thing that I want people to know is that just because your struggle isn't apparent, just because you can make it through and you can fake it, doesn't mean that it doesn't take some stamina points away from you. A message that I've been fed over and over in my life is, "as long as you can be productive and successful through your productivity, then the fact that you're suffering just cancels out" which is not true.

A lot of my upcoming work is around more mental health type of causes. I don't think this 3-pack directly calls out mental health as much. It definitely talks about turbulence, but the project upcoming is more on identity and the invisible suffering that a lot of people go through when they know they're not where they need to be, but it's at least a publicly validated place. I feel that's a really underserved group of people. Like no one wants to feel sorry for the tech bros, I feel sorry for the tech bros. There's so many people who relate in other ways, even though so many parts of that job are entirely unrelatable.

Previously working in engineering and product development, how was that transition into music for you? Was there a specific moment where you decided, I need to get out of the tech bro industry and move into an industry with a little more creativity and artistry?

I think it was kind of a slow fade out and a slow fade in, and there was a lot of overlap between both of the journeys. In 2019, I moved to Seattle to work at Microsoft, and I was working at Microsoft for 4.5 years. I started as a product manager and I was working on the HoloLens, which I loved because it was emerging tech and it was very games industry adjacent. I like people who come from the games scene because they're a lot like hyperpop aesthetic and they're sort of punk too. They're just more free-spirited, the work-life balance is super whack, but they're also quite artsy within tech. So my view on tech was really skewed because of the team that I was joining and the fact that it was emerging technology. Very quickly I was forced into something that was way less cool, was more hand in hand with the sales team, which I did not like the culture of.

It was a lot more suited up, business, just saying random shit to persuade people and not really actually making products better. So I decided to switch over to Word, and there were a lot of interesting learnings on that team too. I'm really glad that I worked for both of those teams. Overall, I had a good experience at the company, but I'm really glad that I'm not there anymore. No regrets, basically.

Godspeed to all my former coworkers who are there or have moved elsewhere. We're all following our dreams in different ways. It took me a while to realize that my dream was way different than people around me and way different than I thought initially that I could have committed to. I started my artist project 2 years into that job just because I was bored and I was writing songs. After those 2 years, I'd come up with 4 songs I wanted to turn into an EP. I worked with my hometown producer on those and learned the basics of production myself. We also made a quick album, and then after that I was like, okay, I'm gonna try my hand at producing my own things. I released Nice Try, which is self produced. It's still my most popular song, at least for now.

After that, I started crafting a sound, experimenting. I've started working with more folks in LA and other cities too. I'm going to New York soon and hopefully going to do some sessions over there. One thing turned into another and I got to a point where all of my signing bonus stock had vested and there wasn't really too much financial need for me to stay at Microsoft. I'm glad that I didn't make any decisions that would have locked me into that kind of lifestyle. I'm really glad that I didn't buy a house or incur any of those other big expenses. I'm really glad that I've been relatively healthy the whole time. I'm really glad that my folks haven't needed my help, that my folks have helped me so much.

There's a lot of privilege in being able to do what I did. I don't wanna pretend that it's like, oh, it's just because I'm braver than everybody else. I had so much privilege to be able to do this. But I think that it's such a beautiful thing to be ruled by your own sheer force of will instead of by what you said you were gonna do and you're too chicken to stop doing that just because, you think that's what integrity means. I'm so glad that I personally moved past that.

Is there anything you have planned for 2026? Any tours, new music releases?

Someone bring me on! I would love to join as support on a genuine tour. I do sometimes talk myself up like I am going on tour, but really I'm just playing a couple of shows in a different city. I think I'm going to play a show in San Francisco in May or starting in June, and more shows in LA. I'm from the Bay Area originally, so I definitely am going to have some more in San Francisco, Oakland, maybe even in my small little hometown in Sonoma County. I would love to play in Portland soon.

I'd love to play in Vancouver, BC, just more West Coast stuff. I would really love to do a show in New York, especially when I'm out there next month. I'm figuring it all out, touring on a budget, not stringing a lot of cities together, mostly just focusing on specific other cities. In terms of what I have coming up, I have a show in Seattle on April 17th, the SF show in June, and then I have some festival dates that I might need to wait to announce.

I had no idea you were from the Bay Area originally. That's so cool! Did you get a lot of inspiration from the Bay Area? I know they have crazy good music and art scenes over there.

I know they do, but living in such a rural part, I just didn't really have access to it so I didn't get a ton of inspiration. I learned how to play instruments growing up, but I never saw myself becoming a musician like that. It was a weird amalgamation of music where I grew up. I had access to random world music that would play on Tuesdays in our town square. One time there was a country pop artist that came through. There was a jazz band at my high school that I was part of. There was concert band. I did a couple musicals. I learned a little bit of classical piano. I actually grew up around a lot of bluegrass music. NorCal actually has a pretty good bluegrass music scene, and my dad's from the South, so he's definitely part of that kind of world. I grew up around a lot of these insane shredding bluegrass musicians, and I was really intimidated, but it was really fun to be part of these festivals.

Super different to what I'm making and what I'm listening to now. I always listened to music though, from a pretty early age. I think I first started to craft my taste in music around middle school - I first latched onto the pop bangers, all the Justin Bieber, all the Katy Perry. I love 3oh3! and I feel like they're a precursor to hyperpop, this band. They're very tongue-in-cheek.

In high school, I really started listening to a lot of Phantogram, which are still one of my favorites. Two Door Cinema Club, that whole era of indie pop being called alternative music. It is too, but it's like everybody across the board would say this is alternative. Whereas I feel like the genres mean something slightly different now.

I started to scour the internet for small songs and smaller artists. I had a pretty old car so even though I'm not old enough to really need to burn CDs I actually did burn CDs for the audio quality in my Corolla 2003. I rapidly discovered a whole bunch of new music because if I had 5 songs, but then I had 80 minute CDs, I didn't want to just burn 5 songs to that. So I'd go find 15 more songs. I got good at curating my own sense of what I wanted to listen to in the car. I think a part of how I write is a lot of music that you can listen to in various atmospheres - the car or on a run, or maybe not at a dinner party, this next one. But yeah, I think I've loved music as a fan far before I loved playing music.

I think loving music as a whole is so important. I was doing the same - listening to Two Door Cinema Club, Phantogram, I loved it. I would have a little autoplay music bar on my Tumblr page. Being a music lover, I've never been able to create my own music, but I've been inspired to make art from music generally. I love how it's just all connected to creating, like someone created this song and now I'm inspired to create this photograph or drawing, it's so fun.

Totally! And getting inspired by a different medium than is the one that you create in is such a thing. I love watching stand-up comedy, some of my best friends are comedians too. It's nice to have a form of art that you're genuinely a really big fan of and you're not actually pursuing it as your own creative form. It's just so enlivening when it becomes too much to only listen to music, only watch music videos or live shows. It's so good to have other forms of art to balance it all out and make you appreciate the one that you've chosen.

Yeah, definitely 1,000%. Last question that I have - what are 3 fun, interesting facts about you that your audience probably doesn't know?

One fact about me is when I first moved to Seattle, I was really big into triathlons and the endurance sport community. Most of my friends from my early 20s are people that I met through the outdoor scene. I'm no longer crazy outdoorsy, even though running is still a big part of me and I do bike occasionally, I like going on bike trips and all of that. It's kind of a random thing to have done and I probably did it because I wasn't so passionate about anything like music, and I was like, what do I do to spend all my time? I met so many great people through it and it built so much confidence in me to be able to do those hard things. I got to see some pretty amazing views for my long rides, my long runs, et cetera. That's a part of me that I feel isn't highlighted so far in my music. I do have a song that is going to come probably next year that showcases more of that. Outside of me.

Also, I have always loved photos and modeling. When I was in 4th grade, maybe even 2nd grade, I got to model for this children's toys catalog. Hearthstone or something it was called. I got to run around a field with something, not a kite but it was kind of like a streamer. Everyone's basically in second grade, but I remember getting paid $50 and wearing a special outfit that they had set aside for me. It was just a turquoise top and some jeans, but I loved it. I felt so famous. It was such a childhood. I've just always loved the stuff that other people look down on as frivolous. I really don't think it's that way. I think that we're so trained to do that because a lot of these things are shit that women are good at and of course it would make sense to undervalue it.

So I've always had a soft spot for posing for photos, taking photos too. I was so bored as a kid growing up because I would be left at home a lot and had to entertain myself. I have one younger brother, so it was just the two of us and our video games and whatever games we could make up ourselves. I would stand in the front yard with my purple point-and-shoot camera and I would take macro-mode, close-up photos of flowers. I'm not a photographer-photographer, but I think I've always been fascinated by cameras and I've loved posing for things. I would have so much fun milling around town with my friends when I was in middle school and high school, just taking photos of each other. I enjoyed it so much.

My third fun fact is that I have been to 6 continents, not 7 continents though. I have to go to Africa. I went to Antarctica last year in January, which was a wild experience.

How was that? What'd you visit for?

I went there on an expedition with my mom and my brother, and we got to kayak in the Antarctic Ocean and see all these different penguin colonies, all these different species of penguins, whales and seals, it was amazing.

I've definitely done a lot of world travel. I'm glad that I've taken breaks from tech and also from music to do that. This year I'm going to be a little bit more locked in on the music thing and not doing as much travel, but I'm really lucky for all the things I've gotten to see in the world. In another life, my top priority is just traveling everywhere possible. I love learning languages. There wasn't that much diversity in the county where I grew up, but there was a strong Mexican-American population, so we also had a really strong Spanish language immersion program. Out of my secondary languages, Spanish is my strongest one because of that. So that's helped me travel a lot too.

I think that's all the questions that I have, thank you so, so much for chatting with me. I really appreciate it!

Thank you so much! This has been so much fun

This is a written transcription of a video interview

Interview by Eva