Q&A: Brent de la Cruz’s Debut Album 'RENDEZVOUS, 1998.' Combines Light and Darkness
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY IVONA HOMICIANU ☆
Photo by Tyler Eastlick
RENDEZVOUS, 1998. EXPLORES THE SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE LIGHT AND THE DARK MOMENTS. The debut work from Brent de la Cruz is a combination of BLANC and NOIR, two EPs released earlier this year. The principle is that one cannot exist without the other. The artist tackles subjects such as mental health, reconnecting with the inner self and relationship to others in a thorough introduction to Cruz.
The San Diego native has a multidisciplinary approach to his artistry. Along with producing the album, his imaginative mind pushes him to design and direct the visuals that accompany his music. With a hands-on approach, Cruz is deliberate and authentic in the sound and imagery that reflect his lived experience, composed of late night skating through the streets and parks of San Diego. These moments lead him to paying particular attention to the world surrounding him.
The result is an honest and introspective project defined by confessional lyrics and distinct alternative production. RENDEZVOUS, 1998. weaves the tracks together and rearranges them in a comprehensive narrative. “Streets” introduces us to the roots of the artist, laying out his ambitions for the project as it transitions into “A Little More.” His candid approach materializes with “Save Your Breath,” where he pursues accountability.
“Day To Day” dives into the reality of being at a low point, with a rhythmic production that doesn’t take away from the message of the track. “Cry” has a more stripped back sound that merges with the vulnerability of telling someone else about being unwell. The album continues the journey through the darkness, until we make it to the bright side; first by acknowledging the state of mind in “Somebody,” then with non-linear progress in “Solace” until reaching the happy ending, “Sweet.”
Luna had a conversation with the artist about his album RENDEZVOUS, 1998.
LUNA: Congratulations on the album! It's a very big deal. How are you feeling now that it's finally out?
CRUZ: It's bittersweet. More than anything, it does feel like there's a weight that's been lifted. It's always really exciting to see the response to things after kind of just sitting on them yourself for a long time. I'm very grateful to have been given the opportunity to actually sit down and put something this thoughtful together.
LUNA: I'm curious about the title of the album. I'm guessing that 1998 is your birth year, but how does it tie in? What do you mean to convey with it?
CRUZ: This album came at what I felt was like a very transitional part in my career. The idea of having a new spark, and having somewhat of a fresh start on things again, was a big piece of this. It was a combination of two EPs, NOIR and BLANC. Both allude to a lighter and darker side of things. Visually, we tried to do a duality of a lot of things, like having something be very familiar, while also having an unfamiliar element in it that makes things feel a little bit uncanny. RENDEZVOUS was kind of just trying to be a fully encompassing origin story that takes pieces from both the lighter and darker experiences, things that I have gone through while putting this thing together. The beginning of the rollout was back in 2023, and so it took a little bit of time to finally sew everything up together.
LUNA: It’s nice that you get to say it's finished now, and it's probably a relief to have it be complete. You said it was written during a transitional period in your life. Is there a specific moment that prompted you to be like “I'm gonna create this album”?
CRUZ: After putting together Finding Boo, that was the last time I went to put a body of work together. Since coming out of that, I really wanted to be more intentional about the type of music I was making, as far as the sounds go, and then also the visual side of stuff. I've always appreciated when artists are intentional about their work and curating specific images and brands. I know it's really interesting, because I think you only have such a small window of time before the world will find you, and then they'll perceive you however you want. I think it's really fun in these beginning stages, because you can kind of control the narrative for a little bit and then people will decide whether they like it or not, how they want to stitch you together and who they want to compare you to.
LUNA: Talking of you working on the visuals, it's so impressive that you direct, edit and design everything. Do you find it difficult to part your time between these different facets of your art?
CRUZ: Yeah, it's a lot for sure. It’s one of those things that's really bittersweet, because on one hand, I love doing the visual side of stuff, but I spend a lot more time making music, so there's a lot more of a flow state that comes with music. Whereas with the visual stuff, I'm still in that phase where I don't know how to do a lot. It's been a process of learning just based on my hardware what I can accomplish, and how to avoid project files from being corrupted, and what it takes to prevent my computer from crashing when I've rendered. It's frustrating, but it's also so much more rewarding because I know how much work I put into it.
A reason I wanted to kind of start doing that stuff to begin with—and I've had a lot of help directing this stuff with my good pal Tyler that I grew up with—there's definitely a sense of if I can do it with this small of a budget, and my own camera and my own lighting and all this stuff, I can just film stuff in my apartment. We did that a couple times, and I'd edit it to look like we're out somewhere else. I feel like I’ve slowly become a Swiss army knife. There’s still a lot to learn, but at the end of the day, I know I have an invaluable skill set at this point, and I'm really proud of that.
LUNA: I've seen your music videos, and I think it's absolutely insane in the best way of what you can do with a small budget. I'm saying that as someone who went to film school, I know the amount of budget that needs to be put into these kinds of projects, and the amount of work that you need to put into it. I just wanted to say congratulations on that.
CRUZ: Thank you so much. I think it was probably the “Soft Words” music video, we basically did that for free. That was the first one we did for the project. I did like a lyric video for “Alone,” but “Soft Words” was the first actual music video, and we basically shot most of it for free. I have photos that I'll maybe put out one day of us, just me and Tyler, wagoning up a bunch of film equipment and lights, and we hiked it a quarter mile of a mountain and plugged stuff into generators. We got locked into the park that we shot at. It was too late to get out. It was a whole ordeal.
Each video had such a fun learning experience. I bring that up because we just bootstrapped that one entirely. For the most part, it was just figuring it out every step of the way; but now knowing that type of stuff, I feel comfortable and more excited to be able to have bigger budgets when they come, because I feel like I will know how to utilize them so much better than if we were to just start off with a big one. When you have such a small budget, you can’t cancel the shoot day, you paid for the location. Granted, it was still very similar to what we initially had written, but we were able to extrapolate on that, and Tyler and I went off and filmed for like, an entire week just the two of us to get the extra shots. It ended up being way cooler.
LUNA: What comes first in your creative process, the lyrics or the melody?
CRUZ: Melody almost every single time. I feel like, as a listener to music myself, what I really appreciate is what gets me moving and makes me feel a certain way, and typically the first thing that comes are the melodies and the music aspect. If I have something I really want to say, then I'll figure out how to put that in a song and write around it, but most of the time it's just a lot of scat vocals. I'll just go produce whatever I'm making, and then I'll kind of mumble into a mic for a long time, and then words start forming. What I try to do is really feel what the instrumental is trying to say, and just kind of feed off of that like, "This feels like this experience that I've had," or "This feels like something I kind of want to delve into here," and then words start coming.
LUNA: There's a confessional nature to the songs. Do you ever worry about putting it all out there?
CRUZ: Well, I don't have a therapist, so this is probably like the best way to do it for me. Maybe I should just go find somebody that I can vent to, but for the most part it feels like I'm able to express myself in a way… because I'm a pretty introverted person, which makes this a hell of a career to try and pursue (laughs), but I feel like I try to write intentionally in a way that keeps things somewhat metaphorical to where even if people in my life are listening to the songs, they still might not know who or what situations I'm talking about, not all the time. I do put stuff in them that is very specific, but I think I do a pretty decent job at keeping what I need to keep close to myself.
There's definitely a line that I try to ride where it's like, how comfortable can I be while still being as vulnerable as I can be? At the end of the day, people want to relate to things. That's what I like in music, that's what everybody appreciates the most in art, you go to it and you resonate with it, because it's something that feels relatable. If you're just so vague, you're not going to make anybody feel anything, and I'm not going to have that same passion about putting it out, it won't feel as special if I don't talk about what I want to talk about.
LUNA: Speaking of relating to music, I really love the reference to Kyoto and Phoebe Bridgers.
CRUZ: She has a way of really pulling at those heart strings. She's incredible. I remember when I was in Japan, music felt so much more important. Japan was always somewhere I wanted to visit, but songs felt so much more alive, maybe because I was being more present and stuff.
LUNA: There’s a particular feeling when you're out of the country, when you're traveling, and you see everything through a new perspective.
CRUZ: And songs too, I feel like they almost have different meanings or at least you can attribute different meanings to them, because you're seeing things in such different perspectives. I made it a goal to listen to specific songs when I was in specific places.
LUNA: I was wondering like, how did you feel when you were making the album and when you finished it?
CRUZ: It's funny, this isn't even unique to music, because I'm thinking of other references. When you start something, you're like “this is gonna be great!” and halfway through it, you're like, “oh, okay, this isn't really what I expected.” When you approach the end, it’s like, “I'm glad I did it.” That was a lot different than what I expected. This is something I've always been trying to work on, because I definitely have a habit of starting songs and not finishing them, because it's so much more fun to just get out ideas, it’s a whole other thing to commit to putting that final nail in the coffin on things, because it's like, that’s finished and I can't change it. There's definitely some deeper psychological reasoning I've yet to uncover behind that.
Finishing it, I felt very proud to have done it, and I'm proud of the work that's on it. I'm excited to start working on new stuff too. Ultimately, I'd say it's more fun to start things, a lot more fun. It’s not fun getting those final exports, but you feel so much more proud of those last moments. Starting it is an experience of fresh and exhilarating stuff. Finishing it is, you kind of got to pull yourself together to be like, "All right, I'm committing to this." Again, I don't even think it's quite necessarily unique to making an album. I feel like that's kind of a general experience that I've had across any big sort of project, but ultimately, it’s an overwhelming sense of gratitude.
LUNA: The album ends with “Sweet,” which is the most hopeful and happy song on the album. What are you hoping that listeners take away from this project?
CRUZ: I've said this before, and I feel like this still holds true—at the end of the day, I really just want to be able to provide what other artists have provided for me, in a sense of something that can benefit you or bring you some type of feeling or joy in your day to day life. There's so many different ways you can consume music and at the end of the day I just want to be able to bring somebody something that they can appreciate in their day to day life and help them get through whatever tasks they're trying to put forth.
That's something with the visual side of things too. I look at that and I think they're both such unique mediums, in the sense that music is something that you can consume while you're going about your normal day to day life, and with visuals, it's a lot more of an intentional thing, you have to sit down and kind of devote your attention to. I feel like combining the two of them together—just music videos or beautiful scores—something really magical happens. That's kind of the ultimate form of art to me, you can combine the two. What I would like people to take away from this is just a sense of companionship through the music. I just hope people like it.
LUNA: I'm sure they will, honestly, it's a great body of work. Do you have any inspiration for your music videos that come from any films?
CRUZ: This was probably, like, the biggest one for me within the past five years, but “Everything Everywhere All At Once.” I love the color grading first of all. [A24] really have a sense of choosing films. I feel like every time they put their hands or get involved in projects, it's bound to evoke an emotion that's really intense, whether you want or not, but Everything Everywhere All At Once just had such a strong impact on me because the score is beautiful. I believe it was Son Lux, they did an incredible job on the score. It was such a beautifully crafted movie, and I feel like it integrated the music in such a tasteful way that just stood out to me.
LUNA: My last question is, what do you have planned for the next few months?
CRUZ: First and foremost, a lot of rehearsals. Live shows are going to be coming pretty soon. And then, I'm just always working on music, always trying to sharpen my skills in the visual world and collaborations and stuff, so I'm staying busy. We're in the new "FC 26." They just announced the soundtrack two days ago, so hopefully we can make something really cool out of that. Ultimately, I really want to try and leverage whatever opportunities that might bring about, and I feel like a big piece of that is getting a live show up and running. That's kind of on the forefront of the radar for now.
LUNA: That sounds really exciting. I hope everything goes well and congratulations again on the album, it's really special.
