Hi! Although Lit Space has primarily published visual art and writing so far, we’re always open to featuring original music written and/or performed by teenagers. And over the next few months, we’ll be interviewing young musicians about their experiences, their creative process, and their interpretation of the connection between music, visual art, and writing.
Today’s interview features Pluto Forest aka Foster, a seventeen-year-old singer/songwriter with a beautiful voice and a unique creative vision who’s recently released her very first single, “High Holy Days,” just in time for the Jewish high holidays! Shanah Tovah to all who celebrate, and without further ado, meet Pluto Forest.
What do you like about being a musician?
The cool thing about music, or, at least, songwriting, is that you have two different mediums to play with- lyrics and sound. So I get to write my lyrics, and then choose how I want to showcase them with sound. For example, one of the lines in High Holy Days is “Underwater, hands on hips” and that line is quieter than the rest of the song, which was intended to reflect the singer being underwater. Getting to utilize melodies, silence, and instrumentals in addition to words to tell my stories is super fun, and I’m excited to experiment with that more as I get more experienced as a producer. I also really love performing live. There’s a sense of connection that I feel with an audience (even if it’s just my parents) when I’m playing my music live that’s really unparalleled, at least by any of the other art forms I’ve tried. Music (in my opinion) exists to be danced to, heard, sung along with, and celebrated. When I play live, all of those things are within reach.
What are some things that are hard for you when it comes to being a musician?
Right now specifically, isolation has been really hard for me. My music existing to be heard is sort of a double edged sword, especially when it feels like there’s nobody to hear it. I did a Zoom concert at the beginning of quarantine and I’ve performed in a few virtual shows, but the experience virtually just isn’t the same. Recording and releasing High Holy Days has helped- the quality of the song is much better over streaming services than Zoom- but I’ll still be relieved when it’s safe to play live again. It’s also generally difficult for me to write instrumental lines. I was a singer before I was a guitarist, and I was a writer pretty much as soon as I learned how to write my name. As such, my lyrics and vocal melodies tend to be a lot more interesting than my guitar lines, and I’m often frustrated by my own lack of technical skill. I feel like it holds me back from writing more compelling music. Ordinarily, I’d ask someone else to play guitar for me, but collaboration is a lot harder during quarantine.
What's your favorite lyrics from High Holy Days?
I think my favorite lyric is “Your pool is only four feet deep, but hey, the water’s clean,” in the second verse. That was the first lyric I wrote, and the easiest one- probably because it comes directly from my life. The whole song is mostly written from the perspective of my younger self, but about experiences that I’ve had more recently, and the pool lyric is about one of those experiences. I like it because I think most people won’t necessarily understand it, and it sort of comes out of nowhere in the context of the song, but I get it, as does the subject of the song.
What inspired you to choose the stage name Pluto Forest?
My girlfriend came up with it, actually. Forest is an anagram of Foster, and I was always going to use something involving Pluto because I just really like Pluto. The interesting thing about Pluto is that it’s really, really close to being considered a full sized planet. It meets two of the three criteria- it’s in orbit around the Sun, and it has sufficient mass to have been almost perfectly molded into a sphere by gravity. The only thing Pluto is missing is clearing its debris field. That means having absorbed all of the objects in its vicinity into its own gravitational influence. But Pluto’s orbit draws it too close to objects on the Kuiper belt (like the other plutinos, which are too big to be absorbed into Pluto’s orbit) to be considered a full sized planet, so it’s relegated to being a dwarf planet forever. Or until NASA changes its classification criteria, anyway. I think most people can probably relate to that- you’re really close to accomplishing something, but there’s an obstacle that’s just too big to move out of your way. Pluto gets it. Anyway, I’d like to live by a forest on Pluto. It sounds like prime real estate. The inhabitable temperatures might be a deterrent for some, but I’ll bring blankets.
How long have you been a musician? How strongly has music influenced your life overall?
I’ve been singing since I was little- I started taking it seriously in fourth or fifth grade- but I only started playing guitar around three years ago, and I didn’t start taking lessons until last year. Music has influenced my life pretty heavily. I started actively choosing what music I listened to, rather than just listening to the radio, in seventh grade, and since then I’ve pretty much always had headphones on. The genre of music that I’m listening to at any given moment in time influences the way I dress, the way I speak, and sometimes even the way I act. And I listen to a lot of different genres, so you can imagine how hectic that gets.
Are music and poetry linked in some way for you?
Oh, absolutely. I started writing poems before I started writing music, so I’ll always think of my music as poetry that rhymes, with melodies added. I go to school- LaGuardia High School- for vocal music, and I’ve taken some theory there, which has made my melodies more interesting and less like a background to my lyrics, but I’ll still always be a lyricist first and a songwriter and musician second. I’m always writing something, even if I’m not actively typing words, and usually I can tell before I finish it whether it’s meant to be a poem, a song, or something else entirely. But I have, on a few occasions, sat down to write a poem and ended up with a song, or vice versa.
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