Q&A: Mia Garcia’s ‘water memory’ Provides a Light to Determine the Reasons of Our Existence
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY IVONA HOMICIANU ☆
‘WATER MEMORY’ EMBRACES THE QUESTION WE’VE ALL ASKED OURSELVES— What is our purpose on Earth? Along with this question, Mia Garcia approaches other essential questions about our existence as humans. The album takes us on a voyage of inner exploration, equal parts rooted in spirituality and philosophy.
Garcia is a San Diego-based artist, whose Cuban-Mexican heritage allowed her to have a broad view of music. Combining Bossa Nova, Cuban rhythms, jazz, folk and R&B, her creations lay between a strong focus on atmosphere and on circulating emotions. As a multi-instrumentalist, producer and composer, she brings a uniqueness to her art through her never-ending curiosity.
The title track, “water memory,” sets the tone with a magical soundscape and lyrics calling for the return to a childhood viewpoint, of discovering with wonder. “doorway” talks of the self being reflected in other people. It conveys their effect on someone, regardless of the nature of what is reflected. “love you for a lifetime” has a minimalist production, with guitar strings soothing the listener.
“fantasies” speaks of not having a defined path due to the lack of people resembling you, and daring to imagine your own destiny. It leads onto “chrysalis,” a song that compares the perception of self to other people’s, and how we seek to know the truth in those perceptions. “swimmin deep” shows the connection and inherent process of knowledge between two people.
Throughout the album, Garcia’s layered vocals create a dimension of imagination and projection through for the listener. Starting with a piano, “space between” explores endings and the grief that comes with it—it is not only a loss of another person, but also of who we are. “long for love” represents connection in a hopeful and reassuring manner, framing our need for attachment to others as natural.
Nearing the end, “the orbital nature of returning” is an instrumental track meant to be felt. It echoes the message of being all the versions of ourselves that we were before, throughout all the changes. water memory closes with “the light.” The song takes all the knowledge acquired and returns with a question: Where does one’s soul go after passing away?
The album is accompanied by a film, where we follow the perspective of a cosmic being discovering our planet for the first time. The protagonist goes through all that makes us human—love, grief, curiosity, to name a few. Through a voiceover that places these precious lessons upon her, she goes through the natural world surrounding us, from the woods to the sea and everything in between.
The message is clear: our current world has evolved immensely since our beginnings, to the point where we tend to forget the elements that made us who we are, and in turn, we forget our essence. The project encourages grounding, to define our purpose based on reconnection to our roots. Although it explores the meaning of our existence, the answer is not imposed. Instead, water memory provides a guide to imagining your way there.
Luna uncovered more details about water memory, released today.
LUNA: Congratulations on the album. It's such a beautiful body of work.
GARCIA: Thank you so much, I appreciate it!
LUNA: How are you feeling now that we're approaching the release date of the album?
GARCIA: I feel as though I've been pregnant, not that I've ever been pregnant but just imagining what it might feel like to be pregnant, with this music and all of this time. It's an interesting combination of that feeling, which is excitement but also a bit of pondering the unknown and a bit of fear of letting go, but also joy to let go. It's my first time ever releasing my own solo music, so there's a lot of feelings for sure.
LUNA: Yeah, that's a big deal. You're a multi-instrumentalist, what instruments do you play?
GARCIA: My main instrument is guitar, but I also love playing piano and bass, and then I produce a lot so I consider Ableton like an instrument. I love synthesizers. I recently acquired an upright bass and a cello, which I haven't started learning yet, but I'm super excited about those.
LUNA: That's very impressive. That's a lot of instruments, and especially with producing too.
GARCIA: Oh, thank you. Yeah, I love it. It's so fun.
LUNA: How do your Cuban-Mexican roots influence your artistry?
GARCIA: I grew up listening to a lot of Cuban music and a lot of Mexican music, so I think those subliminal sounds creep in. Not necessarily the exact genre, but more so the feeling and the energy. In terms of the drama of it all, I feel like Latin roots can definitely have a very deeply emotional intensity to them. I think that comes through a lot of the times when I'm writing music, there's this deep intensity to it in a way. Through the lineage, some of those things kind of seep in.
LUNA: That’s beautiful. Your project and film is titled water memory. How did you come up with the title, and what does it represent for you?
GARCIA: Essentially, the title came from a series of dreams and realizations where I came to understand the world and my life through the vessel of water. We all come from water. The Earth is made of water. We are made of water. There's this through line, where that undercurrent of energy and water carries us through life, the lifetime of the Earth, the lifetime of humanity; with the essence of that understanding, we have the memories of all of that time, because it's a shared essential element. The title came about because of that thesis, that foundational understanding of life that I held.
A large undercurrent specifically for the project was that I was learning to accept and embrace every stage of my emotions. I learned that if I found the parallel between the way that I was feeling and an element of water, then I could find less judgment for it. If water were melting, instead of being frozen, I wasn't judging the water for changing states. I was pretty much just accepting it and allowing it to change depending on its environment, and I found that type of mirrored empathy in my own life and my own way of thinking about things.
LUNA: That’s such a nice concept, having an element through which to view life and to be human. There's an ongoing theme of nature throughout the album and the film. How did nature come to be such a big part of your life?
GARCIA: I grew up swimming and surfing and exploring tide pools. I was feeling the most like myself and the most comfortable when I was surrounded by nature, which obviously, we are nature. It only makes sense that through that connection we just become closer to ourselves, in a way.
LUNA: Yeah, I thought it was so well executed in the film, because it's just stripping away all of the world that we have built and going to the basics, like we are humans, we are living on Earth, and this is how it is. The songwriting on the album is very poetic. Are there any poets that inspired you?
GARCIA: Lots of poets. I really love Nai Palm’s songwriting. I love Octavia Butler’s storytelling. As a writer, I love Mary Oliver.
LUNA: I can definitely see the Mary Oliver influence.
GARCIA: Oh, thank you. I think I'm a student of the world around me and whatever makes it in is just a product of everything that I absorb.
LUNA: There was a quote in the film that really captured my attention. It was, “Living will become the task of listening.” I think that is so real, because when everything is gone, all you're left with is just human nature, the world and listening to yourself. That was very beautiful.
GARCIA: Aw, thank you.
LUNA: There's a question that rings throughout “fantasies,” which is, “All these fantasies, which one to believe?” Could you talk more about this question?
GARCIA: It's interesting, I wrote that when I was about 22 and I just recently turned 25, and the meaning of that has shifted a lot for me. When I initially wrote it, that song was an ode to queerness and exploration and openness and essentially encapsulates the idea that a lot of the times as a queer person, we don't always have an open example of what that looks like in life, and all the different ways to live that; whereas other types of lifestyles, you don't have to think about it or dream about it. It's right in front of you all the time. In queerness, I think that a lot of my life, I held out these dreams or fantasies or different ideas of what could be, never necessarily attaching directly to one but staying open. After sitting with that for a while, one of the most beautiful aspects of queerness is the ability to dream and envision your own future, not one that someone else wrote for you.
LUNA: In a few words, what are the themes like that define the project?
GARCIA: I would say that water memory is about the orbital nature of return, how everything exists as a cycle. It's all about the process of departing and exploring, setting out on some type of adventure or quest, and through time, learning the things that help your soul to evolve. That can be through love, through grief, through dreams, through learning about the natural world and learning about yourself in that process. It's a love letter and a return to yourself.
LUNA: That's beautiful. This is joining one of the questions that I had, which is, in “doorway,” there's a prominent “you.” Who is it supposed to represent?
GARCIA: The idea with “doorway” is that every single person you encounter is a mirror in some way. I say, “Visions of light, reflections of time, asked me to open the door.” That's the initial meeting of a person and the more that you explore whatever journey that is with this person, they reflect different parts of you, because everyone is a mirror, but the texture of that facade might look different. You realize different things about yourself and that experience makes you come to terms and witness parts of yourself that sometimes are painful, sometimes they're beautiful, but pretty much every time they are necessary. It just depends what you do with that information after.
LUNA: That's so interesting, because the way I interpreted it is talking to either a past version of yourself or a future version of yourself. There wasn't a specific person that I was thinking about, just seeing things that either have persisted from your past or things that are meant towards your future.
GARCIA: I love that, and I think that's 100 percent true too. It's not always about the person, you had it even more direct. It's really about you and how you're processing that.
LUNA: “the light” is the closing track, and it encapsulates the project really well. There's such a healing energy to the song. Could you talk us through your creative process when making this particular song?
GARCIA: “the light” was a piece of music that felt like it existed when I started making it. There was an energy of nostalgia. A lot of the times when I'm making songs that I really, really feel very close to, it feels like I have a chunk of marble or some natural stone, and I'm chipping away at something that already exists there. This was one of those songs. I had just gotten my first wurlitzer keyboard, which I'm obsessed with. It's one of my favorite instruments that I own and I've looked forward to owning it for years, so I was just playing it all the time.
Sometimes, when you play an instrument all the time, you start playing the same things. I noticed that one of the progressions that I was going back to frequently at that time was this specific chord progression in “the light” and generally speaking, I wouldn't choose to have the same chord progression over a six minute song because I like playing a bunch of chords. I like exploring portal harmony, but for this, the idea behind having those circular chords throughout the whole thing was that it becomes a mantra. Even though there's a lot of dynamic variation and when I was writing the lyrics I had already written the chorus and those introduction lines right when I had started playing it. As I sat with the lines, “When the light comes closing on, will I stay here?”, I began meditating on life and death and where we go when we leave this earth, and what the core foundations of humanity are. “the light” is much like a lot of the songs on this album. While it is a statement, it's also a lot of questions and exploring.
My grandpa is Hindu, and he gave me the Upanishads. I was raised Catholic with the Bible. In my studio at home, I have tons of books in there that I'm constantly reading and researching… Those two specific texts were very influential in the process of writing, because I was looking into the parallels within the Upanishads in the Bible about where light comes up, and a lot of the times it is in the beginning of anything. In the beginning there was light, darkness to light, and then at the end, when people say they're dying or passing away going to some other place, they see this bright white light, which maybe is going home, or passing into a different dimension. There's still so many ways to think about it, but essentially the song is a meditation on life and purpose and intention and where we go when we're no longer here; the purpose of the soul.
LUNA: It’s such a philosophical view, because it's a question that everyone has at least wondered at least once in their life, and to explore it in such a beautiful way, I think it's really impressive.
GARCIA: Thank you. I really appreciate you listening. Since the music isn't out yet, it's fun to talk to someone about it and be like, “Oh my gosh. What do you think? Like, what was your favorite song? And yeah, how did you feel?”
LUNA: How did the idea of the film come to be? Did you get the idea, did someone suggest it?
GARCIA: The film came about because one of my best friends is a director. His name's Enbe. I've always made music, and he's always done drawings or paintings or writing. Ever since we were much younger, we had always talked about making a film that goes with the album, so this was our first time getting to do that together.
LUNA: That's amazing. When there's such extensive visuals to accompany it, I feel that it gives a bigger dimension to the project. Could you tell us more about the concept of the film?
GARCIA: The film and the album have a lot of parallels and themes. The film is titled water memory, and it essentially goes through the storyline of “the light” in terms of themes and ideas. We begin the film with a cosmic being that comes from another dimension, and she's born onto Earth in water. And we get to witness her being led on a journey of getting to know the Earth and herself and others through love; loving and grieving as a process of that. She's led by her higher self. There's seven of the higher selves, so there's many versions of this kind of guide or spirit guardian that helps her to come to understand the truest lessons of life, which is to be here, to love, to be generous, to be caring, to be connected to your essence, which in this case is the water. How this water can be so healing and so cathartic, and another beautiful guide. One day, you come to learn these lessons, and your spirit evolves and and then you pass on and go somewhere else, but you return in a way. It's the orbital nature of returning. The story was written by Enbe, Hana Pua, who's another one of our best friends, and she's the painter that lives in Hawaii.
LUNA: Did she make the illustrated part of the film?
GARCIA: Yes, she made the animation. Absolutely amazing artist. And then, Muoi wrote a narration in collaboration with me over the whole film to be this gentle, poetic guide for the viewer to absorb the story.
LUNA: I think it all comes together so beautifully. The illustrated part too fits so well, and it's such a nice surprise. I was wondering about that particular animation scene, what does it represent?
GARCIA: What’s funny is that so many of the ideas that we have as the three best friends are so beyond what we can do with physical reality, we would need a full scale Marvel budget to make the film that we wanted to in terms of our imaginations. For this one specifically, we were saying, “Okay, we obviously can't have Hana Pua animate the whole thing, because it's gonna take ten years if she does this; but maybe let's pick one song and really go in on the story so we can explore. The essence and the energy of the story in that part are similar to the rest of the film. We wanted to be able to have a bit more expression in the concepts, like when she is falling through this crazy spiral staircase area, and then lands and gets on this other portal to go somewhere, and then it expands into this abstract floral consciousness. It was just our opportunity to be free with our imaginations, which is why I love animation so much.
LUNA: I really like the scene where the protagonist encounters this other girl in the water and they kiss, and it's just natural. It's beautiful. It’s free of all of our norms and traditions. I think it's beautiful.
GARCIA: I love that. I'm glad that it resonated with you.
LUNA: The locations are gorgeous. Where did you film?
GARCIA: We filmed on the Big Island of Hawai’i. I grew up going to Hawaii very often, my dad grew up there a bit too. It's like a second home, I have a lot of uncles and aunts there. We had a couple really amazing friends from Hawai’i that were our guides, and we did specific prayers and chants before entering spaces to make sure that we were allowed. There were specific rituals where we would place a flower or a leaf in a pond, and if it floated, then we were allowed, and if it didn't float, then we weren't. There was a lot of intention and spaciousness in being there. We are also in the process of partnering with amazing Hawaiian organizations for the film release to to help uplift their work as well and help promote the amazing beach cleanups and active repairs that they're doing for the island.
LUNA: What is the message you hope listeners take away from water memory as a project?
GARCIA: I hope that people are able to feel and embrace the orbital nature of change. Although change is never easy, it is a constant, so with each stage of change, and each element of water that we embody allows us the grace, the kindness and the gentleness to move through everything with as much care as we can; to care for each other and the earth.
