3 Questions with Musician Lyra Muse

Though Santa Fe-based musician Lyra Muse has a degree in violin from Ohio State University in her home state and an enduring thirst for the mechanics of music, the songs from her forthcoming debut solo EP, Grounded, are really more about experimentation and feel. Song elements come to her, she says, and through a combination of instrumentation and computer witchery, she brings them to a place that’s a little bit goth, a little bit dancey and a whole lot vulnerable. It’s a long story that brought Muse from Ohio to Santa Fe, but the broad strokes involve pianos and violins, schooling, travel to Japan, busking, college audio classes, relocation to New Mexico in 2019 and a sort of musical partnership with late Meow Wolf co-founder Matt King that ignited in Muse a borderline need to create. Through the pandemic, Muse honed her sound into a semi-dark and introspective melange of looped effects and tracks, numerous pedals and vocals, and she’s finally ready to release to the public on Friday, June 2 (lyramuse.bandcamp.com). We stopped by Muse’s home studio to chat. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s talk about the EP. I want to say it’s a concept piece, is that close?

It’s a smorgasbord. Yeah. A smorgasbord of the...styles that I’ve done, I guess. And it’s definitely a collection of all the songs [I’ve written] since I started making this music in November of 2019—since I reconnected with music. The pandemic was absolutely the thing that gave [me] the time, the space, the energy to do it, and being able to discover that with someone...everyone will say, ‘Oh, yeah, Matt King did that kind of thing for so many people!’ And he did. He helped so many people find their creativity and their spark. This is literally just the product of my guts. This is what I had to do in order to live. I was really fucking hanging on there wanting to give up and die—the mental health struggle, the pandemic; music was the only thing that kept me going. I was just making the things based on my heartbreak, my heartache, my life. Words and melodies. My brain is always moving. I had all this time and I spent it swimming in sound. The songs became my children and I just shepherded them. I love words, I love poetry, I try to find the North Star in the story within the song. Oftentimes, it reveals itself to me. I’m having a lot of fun doing that.

As a trained musician, is it at all hard for you to be more experimental rather than following the blueprint?

This music is very different from what I was doing in high school, what I was doing in college, but it’s related. I was a huge anime nerd and started taking piano lessons...started printing out sheet music from opening theme music from video games and anime and learning them, but I don’t anymore because it’s too constricting. All my songs have...like, you can pick out motifs or whatever you want and I can talk about my classical training, but all that is is knowing a bunch of jargon. To answer your question, no. I know how it works, but I don’t think I know everything. The music is kind of alive and it’s not up to me sometimes. The music is natural, and there is, in a sense, how I studied, but this is about excavating. I want to say that it’s so cliche, but it’s excavating my soul. You’re connecting to something when you’re making music and I like not having sheet music. I do it a little differently every time.

You’re writing about some tough things. Is putting these songs out like releasing them emotionally in a way?

I think so. I mean, in a way, yeah. I’m still playing them live and I find myself singing them to myself sometimes. I’m finding balance. Like, right now I have a song and it’s just piano and voice, I don’t even need to record anything. But then I have all these layers that keep getting added on the longer the song’s alive. In the process of finally releasing them, that is officially a documentation I’ve done that. That being said, playing live is where the song can remain alive.