Photo credit: Cara Robbins
For the last month, Melina Duterte has spent part of nearly every day talking about Carly Rae Jepsen. She set herself up for this. In the press material for Everybody Works, the Oakland indie-rocker’s fantastic second full-length under the moniker Jay Som and the first she intended as an actual album (2016’s Turn Into was more of a compilation of scattered recordings), she referenced Jepsen’s cultishly adored record E•MO•TION as a key influence, knowing full well it’d become one of the dominant talking points for the record. “I talk about her in literally every single interview I do,” Duterte says, “but that album is just so good. It came out in 2015 and I am still listening to it.”
In a landscape where even indie music publications cover major pop releases with more relish than rock ones, there’s nothing all that eccentric about riding hard for a pop album, especially one as well-received as Jepsen’s. But Duterte’s fan-boy enthusiasm for E•MO•TION speaks volumes about how deeply she relates to music. She’s a joy to talk to about just about anything—I caught her by phone fresh off a plane in Austin, ahead of her SXSW gauntlet, and she couldn’t have been more polite about having another variation of the same conversation she’s probably had dozens of times—but she particularly comes to life whenever talk turns to other artists.
During our conversation, she ecstatically endorses a song she’s been enjoying lately, “The Magician
