I’m From Here: A Conversation with Really From
Part of our But Where Are You Really From? season
Really From is a record about home.
In the song ‘I’m From Here’, guitarist and vocalist Chris Lee-Rodriguez describes his with a poetic lyricism that belies its literal meaning:
“If you ask me where I’m from
I’ll say the rage, the lights, thе sea
I’ll say the pain passed down on mе”
With a Chinese father who grew up in New York City and a Puerto Rican mother, he explains, ‘lights’ and ‘sea’ are the strongest associations people have with those places. He reveals a lot in three short lines, both implying an inherited trauma and a question of what it actually means to be ‘from’ a place – something he describes as an “abstract idea” in itself. Influenced by the recently departed Stephen Sondheim’s book Finishing The Hat – which flips the adage to claim that, instead of the devil, God is in the details – Lee-Rodriguez employs an economical songwriting approach that ensures only those most sacred of details remain intact. It is neither borders nor boundaries that define us, but the homes we build with people and the experiences we share.
Really From, the band of the same name, formed in 2014 when its members met while studying at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Originally called People Like You, in 2018 they changed their name, influenced by the question: “Where are you really from?”
It’s a question they’re familiar with – four of the five members are of mixed heritage – and they talk about being asked it with a sense of weariness, as though its ubiquity had taken the once-fresh sting that they felt when they were younger and less weathered by its presumptions. “People are trying to analyse you or put you in that box in their mind, like, ‘where can I most easily categorise you to make it make sense to me?’” says bassist and producer Sai Boddupalli. “It’s such an othering feeling.”
When speaking with the band, it’s clear how much they make space for each other’s experiences, varied as they are, and the solidarity they find in these threads of relatability growing up as mixed-race people in the USA. When drummer Sander Bryce details growing up both American-Iranian and Jewish and the spike in racism he and his family faced after 9/11, the lack of Middle Eastern representation he felt at the time meant he found kinship with other people of colour, particularly his town’s Korean community, before discovering that same unity in this band: “I feel at home when I'm with my bandmates because everyone else has had a really unique experience as well.”
In 2021, when they released their self-titled record, the Really From moniker began to represent a new phase and identity for the band. “It associates, not only thematically and lyrically but musically as well, that we're a mix of a lot of different influences and genres,” says Lee-Rodriguez. And while themes of multiracial experience and immigrant upbringing in America feature heavily on this album, it isn’t the group’s first foray into these subjects. Under their previous name, tracks such as ‘A Song About White Supremacy’ and ‘You Need A Visa’ had political overtones, but above anything, their music finds its way back to the idea of home, Lee-Rodriguez explains. “That is your first introduction to culture and ethnicity – it’s the traditions that you hold with your family, and they hold with their families and their community. They’re your first entrance into understanding what it means to be part of a people. That's what a lot of these songs are trying to understand. I talk about that with my own family, and we all navigate through our own experiences.” The ability to communicate with your loved ones is another idea closely explored; on lead single ‘Try Lingual’, the vocal interplay between Lee-Rodriguez and co-writer Michi Tassey pushes and pulls at not just the shame felt by not being able to speak the language of their families but the racism that actively denies that connection to them.
“I smile like I can understand
But my mind reminds me I can’t
They taught me it’s not of this land
Forgive me I’m unlearning the practice
Of self-blaming habits”
For Tassey – who also sings and plays keys and synth bass in the band – there’s a sense of dissonance at play: “Nowadays a lot of people will ask me, ‘Oh, your mom's from Japan, do you speak Japanese?’ And when I say no, they're like, ‘That's such a shame that you don't speak your mother's language.’ But then in America, there’s that mentality of ‘You're in America, fucking speak English.’”
Lee-Rodriguez continues, “I was never taught Spanish because in the 90s in the States, if you were an ESL [English as a Second Language] kid, you wouldn’t get the same attention, so that was kept from me. And when I got older, the perception shifted a little bit – or at least in some parts of the country, not everywhere – where bilingualism is accepted, and I work in a community where there are a lot of Latin American immigrants who can only speak Spanish. So I'm trying to talk to them, to my family members, and my Spanish is really bad.”
“It feels like a missed opportunity,” Tassey concludes. “There’s that sense of constantly grasping and slipping when you’re listening to somebody speak a language that you think you should understand.”
Tassey’s experiences are unique to that of her bandmates at the point where racism intersects with gender. In the song ‘Yellow Fever’, she explores the prominent fetishisation of Asian women through her memories of an incident she faced as a teenager.
“Spitting out blood
From biting my tongue
You’re calling my name
Even though you can’t pronounce it”
However, the length of time passed since it happened made her question whether or not she would even write the song, let alone release it. “I think every single one of us has read a headline about the fetishisation of Asian women, and that's something that's talked about a lot nowadays, but very few of my peers growing up could have related to that experience,” she begins. “Part of the hesitation in writing the song was I felt like ‘Is it even worth talking about anymore? Should I just be over this?’ … [but] as a 13 or 14-year-old girl, I didn’t have the confidence or knowledge to stand up for myself or call out what it was. I didn’t even know what I was calling out. I just knew that I was disgusted by it.”
The discussions that Really From instigate through their music is one of the most compelling things about the band. Despite describing themselves as ‘indie-jazz’, they have an intrinsic association with emo, punk and DIY. To paint with the broadest of brushstrokes, the space they occupy in ‘alternative’ music is interesting and timely, given the scene has found itself in an existential bind in recent years when it comes to diverse representation and inclusivity. Long dominated by men, and particularly white men, one of the fiercest and most enduring critiques of emo and its adjacent genres is its thematic focus on their stories: those of middle-class, white suburban heartbreak from a limited – and frequently misogynistic – perspective that rarely looks beyond its own feelings or front door.
They’re certainly not alone here, with a fresh and burgeoning wave of new acts coming through and changing the face of contemporary emo, but whether they intend to be or not, their existence as a band is radical. The content of their songs is still profoundly personal – that of love and pain and loss – but explored through more nuanced and complex lenses that include things like racialised objectification, or the impacts of immigration policy. What they bring to the genre's constant evolution is bigger ideas, both musically and conceptually, drawing from its traditions and sounds while traversing jazz, pop and ambient electronica in boundary-pushing ways – avoiding hurried, haphazard collisions of sound and aesthetics. The way they build songs is intentional, but following restrictive boundaries of genre is of little interest. “I love the term genre-agnostic,” says Boddupalli, much to the amusement – and agreement – of his bandmates.
“We're so deeply influenced by the people that we grew up listening to,” continues Tassey, as the group (minus trumpet player Matt Hull, who is not on the call) discuss the musical influences of their families, from South Indian classical to 20th-century American pop, with reggae, salsa and 80s in the mix alongside the alternative artists they have bonded over as friends, such as Regina Spektor or The Sound of Animals Fighting. “We’re not trying to set out to make an ambient track or a punk track… our biggest concern is making the best song, making it sound the best that we can and doing what we feel like is the most honest expression of who we are as musicians,” Lee-Rodriguez asserts. “I also think when you're ethnically ambiguous, you are able to transform into different spaces and exist in tons of spaces… because there's not really one image for us or one space for us. So when you feel like you don't fit in anywhere, you can go anywhere.”
Community building through music continues into Lee-Rodriguez’s work as part of a non-profit organisation, ZUMIX, where he teaches music to young people from immigrant communities in East Boston – largely from Central and South America – as well as supporting mutual aid and advocacy work. Currently, he is working with a group of students on a songwriting project exploring gentrification in their neighbourhoods. “It connects to what we do [as a band] too because while we're not overtly political, say like a Jeff Rosenstock record, we still are discussing things that are directly affected by political decisions, whether it's immigration, language, or even simple things like divorce. I wrote ‘I Live Here Now’ with Sander [Bryce] a week or so after the election. It’s really just understanding and describing your experience and trying to name your place in the world. And it is a very transformative experience for us because we're able to take up space with other people, who are able to connect with this music from everywhere.”
In the album’s closer, ‘The House’, Lee-Rodriguez grapples with his parents’ strained relationship and now empty house, and how that impacts his sense of self and identity. Stylistically, it’s an outlier on an otherwise slick record, stripped right back to a raw cry of a voice and an acoustic guitar in keeping with his DIY punk background as he asks:
“Half trainwreck or half burning sea?
Half Boriken or half Chinese?
If I’m the sum of my parts
How can I be whole if their eyes won’t ever meet?”
Adam Parshall (2021)
The record begins and ends where the personal meets the political – at home. Really From, as a project, is a collective embracing of mixedness and fluidity; the music they create building a home in itself and redefining the role it can play in forming the spaces, the cultures and the communities in which we build ourselves.
Kristy Diaz
Twitter: @diazzzz
Instagram: @diazzzz
Really From
Twitter: @reallyfrom
Instagram: @reallyfromband
This piece is a part of our But Where Are You Really From? season, made possible thanks to the BFI Audience Fund awarding funding from the National Lottery.
