Jay Som: Belong
Six years ago, in 2019, Melina Duterte released Anak Ko, the expansive sophomore album from the project that had quickly grown far beyond its so-called bedroom pop origins into something resembling an actual band. Duterte still wrote and produced that Jay Som record, but her friends now surrounded her, playing parts of their own. But when a shuttered touring industry scrapped Jay Som’s ambitious 2020 plans, Duterte realized she had long needed a reset from the road after several years of constant pivots between touring and writing, anyway. She decided to splurge on herself and her lifelong interest in production. She self-produced all of her records, after all. So she committed herself to manuals and online tutorials, peppering experienced friends with questions about becoming more than her own home-recording engineer.
She never could have imagined where the past few years would have taken her – collaborating, producing, touring, and working on so many incredible projects with a wide range of artists. So when Duterte reckoned the time had come to revisit Jay Som, she did not pretend to be hidebound by the project’s past. Instead, she let the half-decade of life she’d lived and work she’d done since releasing Anak Ko filter not only into her songs but also her process. The new friends she’d actually had time to make in Los Angeles now that she was off the road—especially Joao Gonzalez (of Soft Glas) and Mal Hauser (a collaborator to Mk.gee and Illuminati Hotties)—became key partners, as Duterte opened her music to others like never before. But she also opened up her music to herself and her memories, writing songs that revisited the sounds of her youth with the benefit of her experiences as a musician, producer, and performer. She was neither shy about her influences nor limited about where they might lead her. And so no previous Jay Som album sounds quite like the new Belong. It is a map of the first 31 years of Duterte’s life, all leading to the present.
“When you try something for the first time, you’re always going to hold some type of fear, but I had to come to terms with the fact that I had to let go of some control,” she explains. “This record is essentially still me, but a lot of choices were made by friends who helped me, because I trusted them.”
Though Duterte has never been one for special guests on Jay Som’s intimate records, Hayley Williams had insisted on singing together at some point since the band opened for Paramore in 2018. So Duterte and Steph Marziano—another new friend who has written with Bartees Strange and Cassandra Jenkins and who began working and hanging with Duterte after Williams introduced them—went to Nashville to try a song together. Later, Jim Adkins of Jimmy Eat World and Lexi Vega of Mini Trees would join the record as well.
And while Duterte’s production credits have mounted spectacularly since 2020, she knows enough to know she might not always know best. As she neared the end of Belong, she went to Philadelphia’s Headroom Studios, where producer Kyle Pulley told her that, simply as a Jay Som fan, he wanted to hear more of her. This became her first time working with another producer on Jay Som, yet another sign of her opening the band to others’ ideas.
For the better part of six years, she mostly checked out of Jay Som, cultivating and tending to the other side of her artistry. Now that she has returned to the band itself, she wonders where she belongs within an indie rock ecosystem, or how much of the rest of her life and work she is willing to give up to live up to that role. This is why she named these songs Belong, after all, as she tries to figure out where she fits into the wider world as an artist, producer, and person. “Do you really want to go? Will you hate what you will find?” she sings near the start of that title track, built on a seesaw of repetition. Duterte doesn’t know the answer yet, how she balances being an acclaimed and in-demand producer with being a proper bandleader, too. She just knows that Jay Som is back, invigorated by more ideas, experiences, and inputs than it’s ever enjoyed before.
