Mereba in Conversation with Producers Against Misogyny

By Lily Amiclo, Stella Smyth, and Abby T. • April 30, 2021

Mereba wants you to feel seen. From Philadelphia to Ethiopia, the Los Angeles-based artist and producer made a lot of stops along the way to get to where she is now. Mereba let her music ebb and flow with each move, searching for a through-line that would eventually manifest as her debut album The Jungle Is The Only Way Out. Mereba sat down with Producers Against Misogyny to talk about her journey as a producer and deconstruct her song “Planet U.”

Mereba’s new single “Rider” is out today, April 30th.

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STELLA SMYTH: How did spending your formative years in Pennsylvania and North Carolina shape you as a person and artist?

MEREBA: Growing up in Philadelphia, there’s so much culture and music. Hip hop, especially, was blossoming at that time, and my older brother exposed me to a lot of what was going on in the city. But also, I just had a really diverse group of friends from school—I was exposed to, I guess, a worldly perspective. Ever since I was little, I was curious about blending sounds and influences together.

It was hard going from one of the biggest cities in the country to a small city in North Carolina. To me, it really felt like a town—a small town. It forced me to go inward because I had trouble making friends, and I felt really alienated and different. That lasted the whole time that I lived there, but it ended up being something that I was thankful for because I learned who I was outside of my friends and community. I started playing guitar and writing songs a lot to have someone to talk to… which would be my notebook, I guess [laughs]. I think that is still present in my music—that intimacy and knowledge of self. 

SMYTH: I can imagine. Did living in Ethiopia impact your creative approach?

MEREBA: Yeah, I was sent to live in Ethiopia by my father. I mean, going across the world and meeting your family for the first time… it’s hard to explain how transformative that is unless you experience it. Beyond the personal aspect of it, absorbing everything there and finding those universal elements to music that connect with people no matter who they are or where they’re from—that is kind of what I got more interested in after living abroad in my father’s country. 

When I came back, I felt like I was ready to construct a sound based on all of those different influences, and that’s kind of what got me to where I’m at now, sound-wise. 

LILY AMICLO: That’s such a vast journey to make relatively early on in life. It’s cool that the music you were making ended up following where you were. I was actually going to ask you what got you into producing your own music? And why is that important to you?

MEREBA: I mean, I’m only on my first album with a label! But, I still produce. The next project that I have coming I produced, as well. I like working with other people, too, but I didn’t go to a label before I knew what my sound was. I didn’t go to anyone before I knew exactly what I was trying to accomplish. 

When I was a bit more green and younger in the industry, I didn’t quite know how to achieve my sound. So I worked with people and had pretty bad experiences. Because of that, I just took a step back like, “I’m just going to chill, get this day job, and learn how to produce.” I wanted to learn how to get the ideas that were in my head out in a tangible way. 

AMICLO: That’s so important, and learning to do that can be really powerful.

MEREBA: Right, and it wasn’t easy. You have to be honest with yourself to be like, “Is this actually good or not?” And for a long time, I was producing, but it wasn’t right yet. I wanted to get to a place where I could be honest with myself and enjoy what I was making.

The cool thing is that everyone I work with now really respects that I produce my music, so they have no issue collaborating on the production. Knowing who you are before you step into sessions and meetings makes everything a lot easier—that way, people can’t try it [laughs]. But you know? People already know what to expect to a certain extent and respect where you are coming from.

ABBY T: Yeah, that’s very true because people really will try it! 

MEREBA: Yes!

ABBY: If they catch some hesitation, they’ll step on you and write the song. Before you know it, you missed the train.

MEREBA: Exactly.

SMYTH: So what is your home studio setup like? Do you have a go-to interface, mic, or DAW?

MEREBA: My DAW is Ableton and my interface… I have a Duet, but it’s on its last legs. It’s beyond its last leg at this point. My co-producer and good friend, Sam, has an Apollo and I use that often. I just moved recently, so my home setup is not really it right now. I have these used monitors that I got at Sam Ash [laughs], my guitars, and sounds in Ableton, really. That’s how I make my demos. At this point, I tend to make all of my demos, and if I like a song enough, I’ll take it to a studio to do the vocals properly. But really, most of it just exists inside of Ableton. 

SMYTH: Do you have a favorite microphone?

ABBY: That’s what we want to know!

MEREBA: [Laughs] I mean, at home, no. I have a Shure SM7B—the most standard mic. I feel like everyone has that mic. But at the studio, I think it’s a U 47… I’m seriously not a gear person. It’s actually kind of embarrassing how little I like to think about those things.

But before that, I would literally just record into my Macbook. And for “Planet U,” that’s just how it started—I was just singing into my computer and sampling it. I’ve definitely grown into using more quality things along the way.  

AMICLO: I think that pretty much everyone here can relate to that. [Laughs]

AMICLO: The way that you present your music is so original. I love how you add spoken word to your music videos. As an artist, myself, I’m always wondering: how do you balance artistic vision and marketability? 

MEREBA: In a lot of ways, I feel like I still live in an imaginary world where I don’t have to think about marketability. I just want to make music that connects with people, you know? That sort of philosophy isn’t always very popular in the music world—I feel like people spend a lot of time trying to engineer it in the opposite way. Like, you figure out how to be marketable, and then you fill it in with the music. 

My favorite thing is making a song that is needed in the world and will make people feel seen. At a certain point, I realized that as unique as every life is, most of us go through very similar emotions—they’re caused by different things, but the way that we process things can be really universal. I feel like that is what I focus on most, as far as marketability and making music that can stretch across groups of people who are seemingly different. A lot of times I just hope that being honest and true will be enough to market it because I don’t have some master plan behind my music. I just want to be honest and, hopefully, inspire people to be honest in their art.

I don’t have much of a theme beyond that. What I’ve learned in the process of putting my music out there, is that there are a lot of people who are looking for that type of art, too. People don’t want to be sold to. They’re looking to be understood and felt through music and art. 

ABBY: I feel like it’s really encouraging to hear that point of view from someone we respect and admire. The last session PAM did was with Devonté Hynes and someone asked a similar question—his answer was something like, “I don’t think about that!” [Laughs] I was like, yes!

MEREBA: [Laughing] Yeah, that’s great!

ABBY: We spend so much time trying to prepare ourselves for what the industry will be like, and that’s really important to take in but it can distract you from the creative aspect of it. And that’s why we do what we do.

MEREBA: Yeah, usually, I know people have good intentions when they try to prepare people for what the industry is gonna try. And I wish that I had more experience and knew more about what to avoid. But I find that the artists I like the most tend to not really think about marketability… that’s just what I’m into, though. 

ABBY: Well and it sounds like, from what you’ve been saying, that you’ve been able to develop a team of people who are also your friends and you can lean on for support. I feel like that’s really important. A question I have is, what do you wish you knew when you started as an artist and as a producer?

MEREBA: I just wish that I had empowered myself earlier to be my own producer. I don’t know how it is now, but when I first started producing, women producing their entire projects wasn’t really a thing. And I mean, thank god for the women who were groundbreaking. But most of the time when I stepped into sessions, it was not something that was encouraged. And honestly, that had an effect on me. I wasn’t confident in that area—even though I played instruments as a kid and always heard the production in my head when I would write songs. It took me years to actually feel confident enough to materialize my ideas. I had to say to myself, “Okay, I’m the producer.” It was just a mental block I had on producing, and once I got through it I was like, “Dang, I could’ve been doing this! I could’ve been steering my own ship.” 

I think having confidence in your own ability is what leads you to be able to experiment and find something that’s missing from the world—we all have something we can give that nobody else can give. 

ABBY: What you said about standing in your own way is so true. You could meet someone who happens to be male and they’re like, “I’m a producer.” We immediately validate them. And then if you say that same thing, and it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been doing it—you don’t believe it. That guy could’ve just started yesterday, and he feels bad! I have friends who have been producing for five years, and they’ll be like, “Yeah, I kind of do it on the side.” No, girl! 

MEREBA: [Laughs] Exactly! That was me, and my friends would be like, “Why do you do that?!” If we’re being real, we’ve understood how society has worked for a very long time. Men claiming that they do something from the first day they start, versus women, who might know the ins and outs of that thing but haven’t been empowered to give themselves that title. It’s a very common thing in our society. It manifests in different ways, and for me, it was with production. ◼︎