Marinelli talks Halloween and the coronavirus
Marinelli is an LA-based musician and music producer. While he only established a platform for his solo career February 2020, he has been playing music for most of his life. Some of his current projects involve performing in a duo with Claire Chicha called Spill Tab and co-producing for Solomonophonic, but he has also been writing, producing, and recording his own work.
Marinelli’s newest single “Christmas” on October 7, 2020. The album art shows an angsty Marinelli sitting in a well-lit urban street in the evening, with a plastic skeleton mask drooping over his forehead. The song’s mellow melody and gentle frustration fits especially well with the loneliness that envelopes all of us as the pandemic continues to interfere with our lives--keeping us away from our friends, family, and partners.
Marinelli chatted with Soul Talk over the summer about his musical youth, his adamant hatred of the coronavirus, and his single “Halloween”.
LB: So your name is David Marinelli.
M: My name is David Marinelli, but my artist name is just Marinelli which makes everyone sound like they're my football coach.
LB: Was that on purpose?
M: No, I went through a lot of different name ideas. The first one I had, which generally people reacted with “yuck” was Sticky Girl. I had a SoundCloud called Sticky Girl and released two songs with it. But like, you can't call yourself Sticky Girl and just be stuck with that name for years.
LB: Yeah, it doesn't sound ideal *laughs*. How long have you been using your current stage name?
M: Since February. This is very new. I just started doing this--like, writing songs for myself--last May. I have been producing for people and writing music for TV and stuff. I played in bands for years. I feel like I got a lot of really bad decisions out of the way when I was really young. Like I had a horrible manager, but we were pretty good. I just played drums in the band and the singer in the band was Finneas, Billie Eilish’s brother. Just growing up with him and playing in his band, talking about songwriting and stuff, was so good.
But I didn’t really write that much for myself until about a year ago.
LB: Can it be disorienting working with people who have reached such success and then starting out on your own?
M: Oh, no. I mean, I have plenty of friends who are really successful and it's just inspiring. It's like, 'they could do that, so I could do that,’ you know? There's enough success to go around. I think that it's easy to compare yourself to other people. But liking someone else's music doesn't mean they like your music any less.
LB: So you've been in the music industry for a long time then?
M: If you count being eleven and playing drums part of the music industry, then yeah. And it's funny, I took it just as seriously back then, which I didn't really need to.
LB: Do you think that's a product of your placement? Being in Los Angeles?
M: Maybe. I'm sure some of my decisions to be a musician are due to my environment. It's a much harder choice to make if you aren’t in a place like this. Because eventually you're going to have to move to a place like LA and that's a big commitment. And I never had to do that, which I'm thankful for, but sometimes I kind of wish I had some big dramatic moment that there was no turning back from but I don't have that.
LB: Have you had any big turning points in your music career?
M: Of course, I mean even this year when I released Turtleneck Sweater, my first song, and was like "shit, this makes sense. This feels right." It was like the first time in a really long time that I'd done something that really, really felt right.
And I did a Subway commercial--like I wrote a song for a commercial. And that was a huge thing for me. Cuz it finally felt like someone could actually make money doing this. Yeah, making music for commercials is really fun.
Of course there's like a million little things that you can look at and that change the way you do things. But there's only two or three big ones and I think the Subway commercial is a huge one and releasing Turtleneck Sweater is another one.
LB: What was the creative process behind your music videos?
M: Halloween was funny cuz it was just this theatre by my house that we broke into *laughs* and then we’d figure it out. Like it was the first real music video that I directed and my friend Jade filmed all of it. I find that it is really hard to give up creative control but you have to at a certain point. And every time I make a music video I am more comfortable giving people more space. Jade was really great because she just let me figure out my own stuff for that music video. We had this whole storyboard idea, Claire was gonna shave my head. It was gonna be this whole big thing and then the razor that we got was really old and shitty. It took an hour and it was really painful. We wound up with much less footage than we thought.
I feel like I get to make a song again whenever I make a music video. Once you've written the song, you can produce it any way you want. And it kind of feels like you get to explain the song to the audience all over again in a completely different way. I feel the same way about music videos, except it's a skill set that I just have not developed and I have no idea what I'm doing, which is really fun. *laughs*
Yeah, I started directing music videos for other people too now, which is really good. It’s all such, *laughs* it’s such bullshit.
LB: Oh? How so?
M: The Turtleneck Sweater video, which was crazy because I made it in Photobooth before the virus happened. It was like two weeks before everyone was doing things in Photobooth. And I would like this to be a big quote, that I am anti-coronavirus.
LB: You're anti-coronavirus? What does that mean? *laughs*
M: I hate the coronavirus. I wish it were gone. I'm not afraid to say it. I know other people won't go this far but I'm going on the record against the coronavirus.
I hate the coronavirus because it is personally of great inconvenience to me.
LB: Just one reason?
M: Yes, because again, I cannot emphasize this enough, it is a great inconvenience to me.
LB: Okay, fair enough. *laughs.
M: I hate the virus. It totally ruined my summer.
LB: What were your big plans?
M: Oh wait, no, there wasn't actually enough time to make plans for the summer. It's funny because I started writing music for this project because I had just gone through this breakup and it took me so long to get over it. Putting out Turtleneck Sweater, it was like "wow." I've grown so much as a person and turned all this growth into something, and it's beautiful. And I was very happy for two weeks. Like, I had been sad for years, and this was how I got out of it.
I was supposed to do a show, and I never got to do my own show.
I've been doing things with [Spill Tab], between that and my own music
I've been doing so many things and they're all over Zoom. So I just spend so much time on Zoom, and [without the coronavirus] it would have been in coffee shops or something like that. You could add that to the list; I personally don't like the coronavirus because I like going to coffee shops.
LB: Going back to your single "Halloween". What was your inspiration behind it?
M: I was listening to...funnily enough, I was showing my friend one of my other songs, and he was like 'those are cool chords, I'm just gonna use them,' so it's the same chords as this other song that's not out. But I don't know, I was just at my parents house and they weren't home, but I had a bunch of friends that were needing places to stay, kinda in and out of LA, and so my house kind of turned into this weird halfway house for, like, two of my most talented friends. And we didn't decide to start making a song, but it just kind of happened which is not normally how things work out for me, none of us are jam-type people. But it was cool.
The song's just about growing older and, you know, your life would kind of suck if it didn't change but it also sucks when it does too.
Lyrics and Meaning Behind “Halloween”
So sorry bout your Halloween
and your Valentine’s Day
You were in Tennessee
Saying how our lives change
And asking “why don’t we?”
“These lines are point blank about a breakup. You [breakup] because you need to grow as a person. There's a ceiling to the growth within a relationship”
The feeling is right but i still feel alone
Do you have the time? Forgot to charge my phone
“I had this shitty iPhone 6 that had the infamous battery issue. It was dying all the time and I'd be going to parties by myself because I didn't know what else to do.”
Ooohhh I’m making friends out of lovers
“I do this thing where I don't ever cut people out. This line is just about relationships changing. It's neither a good nor a bad thing. It just happens.”
And a strange place out of home
You know I can’t stand
Growing older
Two kids in a band
More members than fans
No head on their shoulders
“This verse is just about being in a band and how much I miss that. Making music when no one was telling you that you shouldn't be doing that. I missed that. But that's just part of growing older, you know? Change is difficult and necessary. There's a gazillion songs about that, this is just my way of saying it.”