Bridget Barkan On Her Musical Journey
“I was dedicated to just being an artist,” the multi- talented actress, singer, songwriter, and performer, Bridget Barkan explains. Barkan released her latest single, “Good Things,” on May 24th, where she used her songwriting process to help her understand the complicated positive and negative emotions during that time in her life.
We sat down for our interview at The Chelsea Hotel in New York City. Barkan and I sat in the back corner of the restaurant. The atrium room was filled with natural light, unusual in the city. We sat on the couch near the courtyard doors, ordering, then sipping, coffee and tea out of simple white mugs.
Barkan’s electric and inviting presence makes the conversation feel eternal and ethereal. She explained her origin in music as being influenced by her father’s career, which led to her growing up in music. “Well, the journey began, obviously, and I always reference this because it's true, sitting at the piano bench with my dad. That was the entrance. I feel like music was just a way of life. My dad was a songwriter. He was in the industry from the 1950s and on, and he had a lot of success. And then when I was born, not so much, but he never stopped. He was always in the studio. He would take me to studio sessions, and I would sit in these old studios with the big boards and the huge vocal booths and the drum rooms.” Barkan credits these memories as the beginning of her interest in music. However as she got older, she knew in her heart that she was an actress.
“I was working as an actor already as a kid, so that's just what I did. And that was going to be my life. I had this very raspy little voice. And I would always get these voice jobs, things for radio or commercials and stuff.”
As Barkan reached her 20s, her mom gifted her a guitar. “Through all of my youth and my teens, even though I was writing songs, I never played an instrument. My dad was always trying to teach me piano and I didn't want to (learn). You kind of don't want to be what your parents are.” She still resonated with being an actress, and that title became a main part of her identity. However, it was in her 20s when music started to shift within herself. “I never want music to never to feel like it's not mine, which when you start to be a hired musician or a hired singer, it changes your relationship. I was dedicated to just being an artist.”
Later in her journey, Barkan applied for a job playing music with kids, which she originally resisted. She explained that she was told to just come in and audition. “I got the job. And then I went from being really nervous and scared that I'm just going to play music for kids and that my career was going to die.” Soon she was teaching every day, and this job positively took over her life. “I taught five classes a day. I loved it so much. And it rejuvenated because I had this lull of things. I wasn't sure what I was going to do, then there was this resurgence of my love of music and my guitar.”
This experience resparked her love for music and finding her space in the industry. “I started playing. I started recording. I ended up meeting people and started writing an album. Just going out and playing the guitar, which I hadn't really done a lot. I felt like my guitar skills were basic, but I wrote so many songs.”
Around the time Barkan was working on an album, a friend recommended she go audition to sing for a band called Scissor Sisters. “I was like, ‘I don't want to sing background for someone.’ But back to this thing, if I sing and get paid I'm going to lose something. That's just how I felt. I wanted to just stay an artist as much as possible. But I got this opportunity and auditioned for this really cool band that I knew, and I got that. I ended up going on this tour and it didn't end for three years. And we went all over the world that year.”
Barkan came back to New York after her time touring and recording with Scissor Sisters, and returned to her roots as an actress and artist, creating her one woman show, “The Love Junkie.” “I started performing at Joe's Pub and had a residency there for a year. And that one woman show, “The Love Junkie,” was a story of all of my relationships that were complete disasters, but told through lots of humor. It was a long burlesque act. So I came out in one look, and then I would take off a layer and tell a story, take off another layer and tell the story. Once I did that, everyone in my life was like, ‘oh, now we get you.’
During that time period, Barkan describes continuously working with different music producers after returning back from tour. “I felt like that album that I had made when I was on tour, it didn't capture all of who I was. And I was starting to discover these aspects of myself as a performer.” As she began focusing more on writing, creating, and releasing songs, Barkan found a way to make music that was completely true to herself; each song becoming its own movie. “And so each song then became its own thing. It became a little movie. It became a world, a character I would play.” Combining her love of acting and music, she found a way to marry her two worlds together without the pressure of conforming to one genre or brand image as she created.
Through the long journey, Barkan wrestled with the idea of keeping music as something she could hold and love just for herself. “I mean, to be truthful, I gave up on this idea that I was going to make money from music. Because back to what I said, once I started being hired, I did go through an experience as a singer for Scissor Sisters and other bands where I lost a little bit of the joy of why I love to sing.”
When asked how she felt she has grown since the beginning of releasing music in 2009, Barkan responded with, “Well, I'm definitely not as much of a perfectionist. I definitely know what I want more now than I ever have.”
She explains that she produced her first singles herself, and became empowered by learning the tools and having that knowledge of music production. And as she’s gotten older, she gets excited about the idea that she is “finally going to create these characters that I've lived in as an actor. I would've loved to have figured this out 10 years ago, but it's a journey.”
During the pandemic Barkan created a program for New York City public schools teaching her five-step songwriting process. She explains the process like growing a flower, “You've got to get the soil ready, get your seeds, you have to water it, give them some sun, and then it grows.” She felt like if she was going to teach this program, she needed to do the process herself.
“The final goal of the song was to transform the depression I was feeling into joy or at least moving the energy out. Getting whatever was weighing me down out of me so that I could feel more light and I could feel more motivated and move forward.” There was a lot to be felt during the time she was focusing on her five-step process and honing in on what she was feeling. “That week, it was October 7th, and the events that unfolded in Israel were happening. All of that was happening really, really fast. And people were saying things from all these sides, and I was just like, I hate it all. I don't want people to die. I just don't want people to die. It was October, that was when I was due. I had a miscarriage earlier that year, and so it was just like everything was happening. I had a lot to write about.” She chose to let all of those emotions rise to the surface, feeling everything in order to process and let it out. “So I did the process where I just released everything. And then I sat with it, let it all come up, and then I focused on what I really wanted to feel instead. The longing for peace, for joy, for a home, for all of these things. And I was knocked out. I was so emotional and drained. I just took a nap, which in the process is the sunshine, you let it rest. And I woke up and I heard this melody in my head. But I was really thirsty. I woke up and I was like, ‘if you’ve ever been thirsty.’ And I was like, ‘that’s it, that’s the melody!’”
Barkan describes how the lyrics for the song came to her throughout the process, “I wrote the whole song in one sitting right from my journal, and all of a sudden that's when the magic happens. And that's the thing you can't necessarily teach, but you have to trust that if you bait it, it will come. Then you have to follow it wherever it takes you.”
“Good Things” explored the idea and her own personal journey of taking grief and changing it into something artistically positive. When asked if that took time to learn to do, Barkan responded by stating, “I think I'm still learning how to do that. I think going back to, I don't want to say compartmentalizing it, but it's like there's something I'm still learning. My father passed in 2020 and I still have not written a song about him. I have so many little ideas that have come. I will say that whether it's grief or any feeling that I have, if I can come up with a lyric that describes it and it rhymes and it flows, I feel like in some way I have closed a chapter on something. It feels like it helps me finish a feeling. I also don't think art heals it completely, because although this song was encapsulating some very specific things, I went through all the grief again after the song was done. I still went through it.”
Throughout the body of “Good Things,” the phrase, “two things can be true at the same time,” continuously repeated. This phrase encapsulates the conflict of emotions that can come throughout the grief process. “I believe when you share with others, that is also the healing too. That is the process of healing. And then in the music video I sang it so many fucking times as I'm dancing around. So therefore I'm moving the energy as I'm actually moving my body. I see the music video as the next process, creating all of that visual stuff, all of the choreography we did, and then to finally share it all, it does feel more healed.”
By this time the restaurant at the Chelsea had gone from just us in the small corner to an early dinner rush with groups of people filling up each table. Our plain white mugs sat untouched for some time with coffee stains down the side. However, it felt like no time had passed at all. Barkan was asked one final question as our time came to a close, what does she want people to take away from her music?
“That you can be vulnerable and strong, you can be strong in your vulnerability and that you can turn fucked up things into fun. Things can be transformed. I know how I feel when I'm in the car and I am singing along to songs that I love. Whether I'm going through my nostalgic phase and listening to old Janet Jackson or whatever, it's the joy that I get from songs. It's a combination of so many elements that are still just rooted in truth and joy.”
Photo credit: Will Polanco
