MIA GLADSTONE Channels A Positive Affirmation Life Coach in 'LOOPY' Album
New York-based rising star MIA GLADSTONE is a true force to be reckoned with as she is a triple musical threat (singer, songwriter and producer). GLADSTONE invites listeners into a spiritually grounding and bright pink world of fantasy, positive affirmations and flawless beats in her LOOPY album. LOOPY is the songstress’ portal to a celestial world and acts as GLADSTONE’s philosophy on self-love, growth and the positivity that is immersed in her music.
GLADSTONE plays various characters throughout the project, most prominent being Mia Gladstone, a world-renowned life coach who became too powerful and was banished to an alternate dimension where she is stuck replaying old tapes of herself preaching affirmations.
“I really liked being this life coach, because in my everyday life, I use positive affirmations to just center myself and I journal a lot and so I write affirmations pretty much every day and I also start all my shows with affirmations,” GLADSTONE says. “So I wanted to build that out and make it kind of comical and loopy.”
Throughout LOOPY, GLADSTONE’s 11 tracks unlock new characters and new conversations with sheer liveliness that makes her a star in the making. The songstress is using her musical powers and positive affirmations to change the world around her.
GLADSTONE’s self-awareness shines through on LOOPY as she explores the highs and lows of everyday life through trippy pop beats and a diverse range of lyrical content. While she lets her advocacy for social justice initiatives shine on songs like “CORPORATIONS” ft. Maiya Blaney and Uhmeer, GLADSTONE also leaves room to reveal her inner emotions as it relates to herself and her relationships – cue “OPEN LETTER” ft. Teezo Touchdown. In tandem with the project, Mia is creating a digital community for queer, non-binary and femme-identifying producers with Producers Who Produce where she pushes educational initiatives and offers cool production tutorials.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Thank you for talking to Unpublished Magazine. Our readers would love to get to know you and your music more. Your album LOOPY just released last month, huge congratulations on the release which is a total beauty. Can you talk about the inspiration behind the album and how the creative process looked like for you?
[MIA]: It was really fast and it represents trust, because it was this project that for most of its existence, it was the only thing I was involved in. It stemmed from the beats I would make alone in my studio in my basement and then turned all those beats into full songs. I wanted to create a whole world around the music and make it more of a visual project and a place than just music. I teamed up with my friend William Allen Harris, who made a bunch of videos with me for it of me trapped in this pink box embodying this positive affirmation life coach. We basically created a bunch of characters that expanded into a whole world.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What was your favorite character to play or channel into?
[MIA]: I really liked being this life coach, because in my everyday life, I use positive affirmations to just center myself and I journal a lot and so I write affirmations pretty much every day and I also start all my shows with affirmations. So I wanted to build that out and make it kind of comical and loopy, because the concept for it is that there was this life coach named Mia Gladstone who was world renowned and then essentially deemed too powerful and banished into this dimension called the pink box where she's just stuck watching old tapes of herself, like preaching to people about positivity. It was really fun building that out and I loved doing all the makeup and just really weird looks for the life coach, so that was probably my favorite.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Based on all the album artwork with the colorful and bold aesthetic you incorporate into the album artwork itself and your overall style, how would you describe your own personal aesthetic, like what's the inspiration behind that?
[MIA]: It's really hard to say it's not very intentional, like it's all very well thought out. I've always loved colors, like I love vibrant, vivid colors. I love pink. I just wanted to experiment and I just gravitated towards things that felt good, and for me, I just love bright colors and very graphic imagery.
[UNPUBLISHED]: You're a triple threat in the music industry; singer, songwriter and producer, what are some ways you find creative inspiration outside the workplace and channeling into your music?
[MIA]: I draw inspiration from everyday life, and I also don't really treat music as a practice more so just like a therapeutic release. So I think naturally, I just make stuff when I feel like it and it's always stemming from whatever I'm going through in life. I feel like the more life experiences that I have, the more stuff I have to write about. I love nature. I love spending time outside. I love making food. I just love things that feel good.
[UNPUBLISHED]: In your opinion, where would be the perfect environment or place to listen to LOOPY?
[MIA]: I love that question. I feel like it's a really good project for commuting, like it's a project to listen to while you're on a journey to a destination or just on a walk.
[UNPUBLISHED]: You've collaborated with a variety of artists for LOOPY like muva of Earth, Semiratruth and Lance Skiiiwalker, on top of countless others. How have those collaborations and experiences been for you?
[MIA]: They've been amazing. It's been awesome getting everybody involved. Every artist I reached out to was so receptive to the music, and I also feel like they all experimented in ways I couldn't have foreseen because every artist that I chose to feature on it, it's like very expressive and experimental in their own right. I send them beats that they wouldn't normally hop on because I just wanted to see what they would do and see if the music would resonate with them. It's been such a blessing and very validating to me as a producer to get these amazing artists on my beats.
[UNPUBLISHED]: I'm very interested in learning more about your song “CORPORATIONS” as it touches on social justice initiatives. What was the message you hope listeners can take away from that track and what inspired the song?
[MIA]: I initially wrote the intro of it, “corporations controlling the nations” in a little poem in 2017. I was sitting in a lecture while I was doing a music program in Ohio, and I'm sitting in a lecture thinking about how corporations control everything. It's something I think about a lot, like I feel very anti-government, anti-establishment, we're all victims to capitalism and it's something that we can't really avoid. I like to talk about that kind of stuff in my music and it all stemmed from that little poem. I've never been asked about that song, but that's one of my favorites.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Do you have a favorite song from LOOPY? Do you have one that you love that just stands out with a specific message or lyric in that song?
[MIA]: I always loved “I LEFT THE WINDOW OPEN,” just because it feels so grounded and I wrote it in my backyard. I was just surrounded by birds chirping and trees and it was like a really beautiful feeling, so whenever I listened to that song, I just remembered my old life in Jersey. I really liked that one but I really can't pick because all of them are like such different processes and they all represent different moments I've had.
[UNPUBLISHED]: You got a lot of support from your listeners and friends and family. How's the response been overall?
[MIA]: It's been amazing. This is the first time I released music and I didn't really care about the results in terms of commercial success, like typically when I drop something I get really obsessive about how it's doing and I just keep checking the stats. With LOOPY out, I just didn't give a fuck I was like, I've put all this work into this and here we go. It's yours now. I found that through having that energy around it, the response has been amazing because it's not forced at all. I'm not like obsessively pushing it, so it feels like the people actually listening to it are just even more engaged.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What was the hardest song for you to write, either lyrically or emotionally for you?
[MIA]: “EMPATHY” was kind of a heavy hitter. None of them were that hard for me to write, like all the songs flowed pretty well because I didn't have pressure when making any of them. They were just songs I was making for fun in the midst of doing a million other projects. “OPEN LETTER,” I would say just in terms of difficulty to complete, “OPEN LETTER” was the hardest because I kept making new versions of it and new parts because initially it was just the hook. That beat from the hook repeating throughout the whole song, and then I was like I need to expand this and that was quite difficult to finish.
[UNPUBLISHED]: I love that one of the concepts you uplift is self-love and how you incorporate self-love through everything you do. What are some of your favorite ways that you show self-love to yourself?
[MIA]: That's such a sweet question. Love can look like so many things, I feel like self-love is the same thing as self-care. It's being intentional and giving yourself the energy that you would give to a best friend. It's always been really easy for me to show love to maybe romantic partners or friends and then not as natural for me to give myself the same energy. I try to be intentional about that, like if I'm gonna pamper myself like what would I do for a partner? I love to do breathing exercises in the morning. It is very grounding. I love to lay in the sun. I love to just allow myself to be and not put the pressures of productivity on myself, because for most of my life, I was obsessed with working and being busy. It's nice to just relax sometimes, so I think that's a good form of self-love.
[UNPUBLISHED]: There's obviously a lot of queer and femme people in your fan base. Why do you think it’s important to support and continue to uplift queer topics and the queer community?
[MIA]: I think it's important to have representation in music, and for me, it's really important that people have community. I'm so passionate about having a community and that's just naturally my community. I just want people to connect and feel and to relate to each other and have safe spaces to exist. I think about the fact that we're all more similar than we are different, and sometimes we can just feel so separated from our differences.
[UNPUBLISHED]: How are you feeling in this current era of your career? What does the upcoming year look like for you that you would love to share with the magazine?
[MIA]: It's hard to say because for so long LOOPY was my guiding source and I was anticipating that to happen next. Now that LOOPY’s out, I’ve chilled out and now in the past couple of weeks I’ve started making music again and just expressing myself has been nice with not having a specific goal right now and it feels so good. I just want to put stuff out, share it and enjoy my life.
