Jay Som on new album Belong and working with Hayley Williams and Lucy Dacus

Although there hasn’t been a Jay Som album in six years, it would be wrong to say Melina Duterte has been MIA. Since the release of her 2019 album Anak Ko, Duterte became one of indie rock’s key behind-the-scenes figures: She amassed production credits on Lucy Dacus’s Forever Is A Feeling and the Grammy-nominated boygenius project that placed Dacus, alongside Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, on the Mount Rushmore of gut wrenchingly sad songwriters. And when boygenius went on tour in 2023, Duterte was their bassist performing to vast audiences on a nightly basis.

Duterte says that time spent away from making Jay Som music (in 2021 she released a project with her partner, Chastity Belt’s Annie Truscott under the name Routine) was restorative. Having helped shape the foundations of what has come to be known as bedroom pop, a strain of unvarnished guitar music largely performed and recorded at home, she had started to hit a creative wall.

“It’s really hard to work by yourself when you're just stuck in your own echo chamber,” she tells The FADER via a Zoom call from her Los Angeles home studio. She toyed with retiring the Jay Som project and becoming a full-time producer-for-hire but working with others only pulled her closer to writing for herself. If she was going to go back, though, she knew she couldn’t do it alone. “I wanted to experiment more with other people that could tell me what to do,” she says, laughing.

The latest Jay Som album, due October 10, will arrive with a curated selection of guest vocalists, among which include Jimmy Eat World’s Jim Adkins and Hayley Williams who push her songs into vivid new shapes. Jay Som opened for Paramore in 2018 and Williams would routinely check in over the years to see if there were any Jay Som songs she could sing on. “That is still insane to me,” Duterte says, star-struck by her friend with an “Olympic-level” vocal range. Their collaboration resulted in the crunchy “Past Lives,” one of the heaviest songs on Belong and one inspired by a “cancelled” band Duterte’s reluctant to name and the idea of a karmic debt that you have to pay in life.

Friends also had an ambient impact. El Kempner of Palehound doesn’t appear on Belong, but Duterte says they have helped her become a better songwriter by getting her to utilize her Notes app. “If they have an idea, they write it down on their phone,” she says. (Her most recent entry, the word “Fireworks” and a metaphor for pent up energy, has already sparked a new song idea.)

Read on for Duterte’s thoughts on her place in the world of indie rock, life as an artist versus producing, and what it meant to get her teenage idol onto Belong.

The FADER: Six years is quite a long time to be away. Does the indie rock landscape feel different to how it did when you released your last album?

Melina Duterte: 100%. I completely understand boomers and Gen Xers now. I understand why they're like “Back in my day, we had this and this was awesome.” I get it because TikTok and streaming means everything is so different. It must be really hard to be a newer artist now because it feels like if you don’t build your own following it is hard to get signed. And that's kind of sad. I think you have to make the best music you can and cross your fingers.

Where do you see yourself fitting into this new landscape?

I'm scared to answer that. I don't know if it's healthy and it confuses me. I have worked with so many people where I wonder, “Why aren't you gigantic? Why aren't you famous? ” Maybe that's just the indie world. It's very competitive and there's not a lot of space for people. I’m also a very shy person. I love to be in the background.

Do you think that shyness is why you’ve produced your own music in the past? I’vealways thought that being in the studio with an outside producer must be quite a vulnerable experience.

It's all vulnerability. I started as a teenager and was just figuring myself out. You have these gigantic feelings that you don't know how to express. When you're also shy, it's worse. Music is a great outlet for being shy because if you really put yourself out there then other people find it relatable.

Has music helped you overcome that shyness?

I describe myself as an introverted extrovert now. Years of touring and even stuff like this [interviews] used to be my nightmare. I still have a really hard time in group settings, but production work, touring, press stuff, and just generally having to step out of my comfort zone and talk to people and really access certain things about people has made me a bit more confident.

What pushed you to pursue producing, and not recording, after your last album?

Truly, it was the pandemic. Before then I had just recorded with friends for free or for lunch. When the pandemic hit I spent my stimulus check on a really expensive console that I didn't know how to use, and I became a gigantic gearhead. I got super obsessed with audio because I just had so much time. I wanted to see what it would feel like to be in music doing something else. Production was that natural step forward.

Was it nice for music to be more like a 9-5 job and not an extension of your entire existence?

With a solo project it’s a game that you play and I'm thinking about myself all the time. Production, though, means you meet so many different people and make new connections.

You do also get to choose your own schedule. I try to be healthy about it but those 12-14 hours days can still happen. You're working with people where this is their whole life and they really want to work on things until they’re done. It’s easy to just be like, ‘Let's go for it. It’s midnight. Fuck it.’ I have had to make space for boundaries.

Did you ever think you might not return to making music yourself?

No, I always knew [I would]. I always say making your own music is like a resume for a producer. When people reach out to work with me it’s always because they like the way my music sounds.

How did Jim Adkins come to appear on “Float”?

I wrote “Float” and kept thinking, ‘I really want a guy to sing on this song.’ That’s not something I have ever really thought before and I kept hearing Jim’s voice [on it]. We eventually got connected with him and he agreed [to be on the song] but then things went quiet for a long time and I thought the moment had passed. The album had been mixed and was about to be mastered when, super last minute, Jim texted me to say he was about to go into the studio to record his vocals. I was freaking out and we were texting all day but it was a dream come true. All I said to him was, “Please don't sing like me, sing like Jim Adkins.”

My brother and I were obsessed with Bleed American. We used to share the CD and it became scratched up to the point that it stopped working. I got to tell him that story and it was really special.