Zolita

Zolita

on viral success, her multifaceted creative process, and falling in love again

In so many ways, my next guest needs no introduction. Zolita is a singer, songwriter, and filmmaker I’ve followed for years. Her dedication to her music, production, visuals, and directing makes it hard not to be constantly amazed by how her mind works — and it is true that once you’re a Zolita fan, you’re just hanging on for dear life with the rest of us. Releasing only a year ago, her music video for “Somebody I F*cked Once” currently sits just below 50 million views on YouTube. Only enhanced by the addition of a cinematic visual, Zolita’s ability to capture the all-encompassing, ineffable feeling of being a teenager in love has grown her fanbase substantially in the last year. As I say to Zoe below, You Belong With Me by Taylor Swift was the song I listened to in high school to feel most understood as the girl with a crush. For Zolita to make that opportunity of understanding possible for an entirely new generation of queer teenagers is a triumph. She kept the momentum going by making the “Somebody I F*cked Once” video the first part in a trilogy that just wrapped up six months ago. As of this week, she’s fresh off the premiere of the first video, “Ruin My Life,” of her next four-part series. Zolita’s music videos are only getting bigger and better — I just feel lucky to be part of the ride. ◇ 2022

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Zolita: Oh my god, I'm so happy this is finally happening. 

Cariann Bradley: I know! Things have been crazy. I'm so excited to talk to you. I feel like I've been wanting to do this forever.

Zolita: It's been a crazy year, but super exciting to finally get on with you.

Cariann: Yeah, same here. I’m excited for you and Dimitri to do the cover shoot for this feature. He’s amazing.

Zolita: I actually shot four music videos in a row a couple weeks ago. We were pretty intense on that,  so we decided to hold off until after that was done. 

Cariann: I feel like your projects have just blown up these past several months. What has it been like for you and everything after the “Somebody I Fucked Once” video? And how has that been?

Zolita: It's been a really crazy year. It's crazy that we literally shot “Somebody I Fucked Once” exactly a year ago. So, when I was thinking about that I was like damn. The amount of stuff that's happened and changed over the course of the last year has been so crazy and the coolest thing about this past year is that I finally have a team around me. Over the last six years of releasing stuff as Zolita, everything has always been independently done myself. And it's still so independently done, and I still have my same team of queer people around me creating the videos, but now I have people on the music side that are helping me.

So, I signed to AWAL and I got a manager and a publicist. All of the things that can now help magnify it and bring things to an even higher level, which is so exciting. I'm still doing exactly what I did before, but I just have more people around me, supporting me, and working on it with me. It's been so exciting. My dream has always been to be able to create video pieces for all of the music that I release. The next EP is a full visual EP, and I shot four videos in a row. That's just my dream. It's definitely been really exciting, all the opportunities that have come over the past year.

Cariann: That's amazing. Maybe some people don't know this, but in my opinion, the real pocket that you've dug into is almost as a filmmaker, and you edit everything, and you're doing all the music — I feel like that's finally connected with everyone in your fan base. And it's made it into something you can do and hopefully get paid for. So, that's amazing. Were you a film major in college?

Zolita: Yes.  I studied film at NYU. I think wanting to make music videos really came from a place of hating structure so much and hating… it's like the idea of having to go to make narrative film or to make feature film, it just seemed like such a long process. And also, as a pretty experimental person, I like the idea of music videos where you can do anything and get away with it. Continuity doesn't matter as much. There wasn't even a music video class at NYU, but I took experimental filmmaking classes and they would let me make music videos. That's how I started doing Zolita, it was literally at NYU in those classes.

Cariann: I'm such a huge fan. I'm not a musician in any way, but I'm such a huge fan of concept albums. I've always really connected with concept albums. And honestly, I think it's because, growing up, I was such a Taylor Swift fan and she's just the kind of person that puts 1000% into every single project. The album booklets and all these secrets that she creates for us as fans. I loved the three video series that you did. So, you're coming out with an EP that you're making completely visual? Is it just going to be four videos or is it going to be more?

Zolita: Right now, it's six songs. There's four cornerstone videos and then there's going to be two other, for me, more chill videos.

Cariann: What's your main inspiration in these videos that you're doing?

Zolita: Hmmm. Main inspirations?

Cariann: It doesn't even have to be a film, it can be a feeling or whatever.

Zolita: The whole series is centered around a road trip. So, going into this EP, prior to the EP, I'd always just chosen songs or written songs for video ideas. So, everything was super ‘video first.’ And when I signed this year and started working with a lot of songwriters and producers and doing sessions every day, we went into this EP with the idea of, okay, we're going to choose the six strongest songs. Then that was the challenge for me was like, how do I weave a narrative through all of these songs that are so different and are just in such different head spaces?

And also I want to make a music video series that connects again and how can I be in different spaces in these music videos? I came up with this idea of a road trip. There's a narrative through the road trip and a reason why I'm on it and a place I end up. And of course, there's a romantic aspect to it as well. A lot of different themes. My dad lives up north in Santa Ynez and so it was my first time doing it in this way, shooting and bringing my whole crew and staying up there and it literally felt like we were at summer camp. We were just on this vineyard for a week and it was really a special experience.

Cariann: I bet. The pictures looked so fun.

Zolita: So fun.

Cariann: Dimitri has told me so many great things about you and the crew that you've surrounded yourself with. When I talked to him about doing the shoot, he raved about how excellent you are at curating the people around you to be such a safe space and that it creates such a special liminal energy when you're filming these projects.

Zolita: I think that’s where the magic of these videos comes from. I always talk about with “Somebody I Fucked Once,” why that video felt so, like… it captured something so magical. All the people on that set were queer and I think we all had this feeling of like, oh, we're making something right now that is going to help young queer kids in a way that maybe we would've liked or would've benefited from when we were younger. And that was a really exciting feeling to be like, oh, damn, we're making something that's going to change people's lives and that this project is also healing us.

Cariann: Healing your inner child. The queer community, the queer kids coming up in the next generation definitely needed a "You Belong With Me" moment of their own. And I'm glad that they got it.

Zolita: 100%.

Cariann: Is the new video the same character of Zolita as in the former videos? Or is it a new iteration?

Zolita: New character as Zolita, yeah. A new version of Zolita. Whole new cinematic universe.

Cariann: I love it. The Zolita Cinematic Universe. 

Zolita:  It was exciting to come up with this whole new cinematic universe and cast of characters and there's tons of cameos, which is exciting. A lot of familiar faces. And there's just so many iconic road trip movies and iconography that it was so fun to get to reference.

Cariann: I can't wait to see them. I was a fiction major in college, so I did a lot of fiction writing. I got really burned out after school, just feeling like… it was similar to what you were saying [about film]. It's like, you'll never be able to have a successful novel, you'll never be able to do anything with this English writing degree, and it just felt really discouraging. A couple months ago I started working on a script, and I had never written a script before. I just fell in love with it. It reminded me why I love writing so much and I felt like I was healing a part of myself by writing some of my past experiences into this character that I was writing. I didn't think I would ever find something like that again, that felt that way. And I've been making mood boards and playlists and all these things, full character profiles. I just love going in and doing the most on a project. Probably should do less, but I'm just always doing the most.

Zolita: That's so awesome. What an amazing thing,to rediscover or come back to your love of writing through a different format of writing. Sometimes that’s what it takes.

Cariann:  I just love all-encompassing creative projects like that. So the “Somebody I Fucked Once” video —  you and Tatchi's chemistry was amazing. How did you guys get connected and how did she end up starring in the video? Also, is she a good pronoun for Tatchi?

Zolita: She or they! Tatchi is old friends with my little sister through YouTube. I've known Tatchi for years, but in passing. And, so funny, months before “Somebody I Fucked Once” was shooting, Tatchi had DMed me and was like, "I just literally went on a marathon watching all your videos, so iconic. I would die to be in one of the videos one day, oh my god." And at the time I responded, I was like, "Oh my god, yeah, we have to do something together sometime!"

When the whole thing went down where the person I’d cast initially couldn't do it anymore, I FaceTimed my little sister, and I was like, "What the hell do I do? I have the whole crew. Everything is booked. I have to find somebody else. I'm still going to go through with it." And she was like, "Tatchi is in LA randomly right now. You should hit Tatchi up." Tatchi was living in Maui at the time and was literally here looking for apartments and happened to be free that weekend. And the rest is history.

Cariann: Wow. That's perfect timing.

Zolita: Divine, serendipitous situation. When we were shooting that video, that was the first time that we really spent time together for real. We just have such amazing on-screen chemistry together and just adore each other. It was just so perfect that we had to continue the series.

Cariann: The stars aligned. That's awesome. I actually found you through [your sister] Luna. I grew up as a YouTube teenager, so I've been following Luna for years and I found you through a video that she did a long time ago where all the siblings tried to do what the other siblings do.

Zolita: Oh my god. Yeah!

Cariann: You were trying to teach them the choreography to “Shut Up and Cry,”and I just became obsessed with your music. So, it was funny that it worked out that way.

Zolita: That's so funny. I love that.

Cariann: I'm curious, were you ever interested in signing before you did now, but were worried about your creative vision being affected?

Zolita: Definitely, yeah. I feel like for the longest time in my head, I needed to have leverage before I signed with anybody. I've heard so many horror stories, like living in LA and the pop music scene of people signing too early when they don't already have their fan bases worked out. Just the idea that I'm such a control freak, which is why I do everything on my own projects and edit all my own stuff. The idea of someone telling me when I can and can't release my art, that just sounds insane to me. I couldn't handle that. But of course, there were a lot of moments where I was like, god, it would just be so much easier. Obviously money is so tough as an independent artist making such high-level productions like I'm making. This year when the “Somebody I Fucked Once” video happened, the thing happened that everybody tells you about when you have a viral moment — the labels I’ve always dreamed about reached out [to me] within a few days.

Cariann: Wow.

Zolita: Which was an insane thing to navigate as somebody who, at the time, didn't have a manager. I didn't have anybody around me and to be in all those back-to-back meetings with all of these mostly like cis white straight men was very interesting. But I was like, I'm just going to take every single meeting. I'm going to go to all the dinners and just see what everybody has to say, but I'm really, really glad that I waited as long as I did and that this moment for me happened at age 27. I can just imagine being a younger kid with maybe less knowledge of the industry or less resources and having all these people offer these sparkly deals and big sums of money. It's hard to say no.

“I can be in a healthy relationship and take care of something that's good for me, but also still be creative and inspired.”

Cariann: What's your dream going forward for Zolita, doing this EP that you're doing? Are you wanting to tour or do anything like that?

Zolita:  I think when I release the EP, I'm going to do a mini headline tour situation. And so, I definitely want to be doing more live shows and festivals. I think just getting to do what I'm doing now on an even larger scale and just having access to bigger budgets so I can pay my team what they deserve to be paid. That's really my dream. I just want to be able to continue to make even crazier videos every time. A full visual album would be the next goal. And then ultimately, also just stuff in film and TV, that's something, down the line, that I definitely am interested in doing as well.

Cariann: In producing film and TV stuff?

Zolita: Yeah, and directing. Me and a couple friends turned “Somebody I Fucked Once” into a feature script and have been shopping that around. That would be so exciting to me, getting to do what I'm doing on an even longer, larger scale.

Cariann: That's awesome. I feel like your sound evolved so much. When “Evil Angel” came out, it sounded so much different than what came before it in very specific ways. How is the sound changing in the upcoming EP?

Zolita: The EP, honestly, hits a lot of different sonic notes, which is super exciting. There’s something for everybody on there. “Somebody I Fucked Once” was very inspired by the early 2000s pop-punk energy. I still have a little bit of that on the upcoming EP, but I would say it veers a little bit more into pop territory. A lot of guitar. I would say the whole thing is guitar-driven and that's the throughline. It's all over the place, but the sound definitely still has a little bit of that early 2000s nostalgia, but also goes into the “I Fucking Love You” sonic territory as well.

Cariann: Is there anything top of mind for you that you feel like you haven't gotten to talk about in an interview recently that you'd like to talk about? Whatever comes to mind.

Zolita: Something interesting about the process of writing this EP was that I was in love and in a healthy relationship — the first healthy relationship in my life. I feel like for the longest time I thought I had to be in peril, in a bad place, heartbroken, or just in an unrequited situation to be able to tap into inspiration to write. To realize that I could write some of my favorite things I've ever written from a place of being in love, and for it not have it be corny and cheesy, but instead feel so accurate and beautiful. It's capturing that feeling. It has been really exciting. It's been nice to be like, oh, I can be in a healthy relationship and take care of something that's good for me, but also still be creative and inspired.

Cariann: That's literally so beautiful. I started tearing up when you were saying that. I'm so happy for you that you had that realization. 

Zolita: It's been really nice to grow together in this relationship and heal. I feel like we both went through so many traumatic relationships. We both came into this being ready for a healthy one. And it feels like we've been healing so much of our past relationship trauma with each other. I remember in Portia de Rossi's memoir, I read it in high school probably, when she was writing about her coming out experience or realizing she was gay. She was like, "When I think about growing old with a man or getting married to a man and growing old with him, it feels like stuffy and I will be getting older, but when I think about being with a woman and growing older with a woman, it feels like I'm getting younger every day and being a child forever." I totally resonate with that and I've been thinking about that quote a lot recently. I feel like a child, but in the best way. Obviously, the relationship is so mature, but it's so light and fun. I feel like I have a partner and it's fun, which is so nice.

Cariann: Yeah, it's very life-giving. That's beautiful. Wow.

Zolita: It's been a good year. It's been fruitful in my relationships, love life, and in my career. I feel very grateful.

Cariann: Yeah. I'm really happy for you. And I don't think it's a coincidence that all these things lined up at the same time.

Zolita: Definitely.

Cariann: It's been so great to talk to you. I really appreciate your time. And I'm so happy for you in your relationship and the art that's coming out of it. It's so beautiful and it’s honestly inspiring to me, because a lot of the time I feel like I'm never going to be able to find somebody. It's just nice to talk to people who are in healthy, thriving relationships. It exists. I haven't dated anyone in a while, and my last relationship ended in flames and smoke. But I do think —  and I often forget this — I do believe that as humans, love is one of the only things we're doing right. So, it's important.

Zolita: That's so beautiful.

Cariann: Thank you so much for talking to me and I'm so excited to see the photos that you and Dimitri come up with. And I'm so happy to have you be part of l'Odet and I think that the readers will really enjoy getting to know you, and I appreciate your time.

Zolita: Oh, thank you so much. I appreciate your time and I'm so excited.

Interview By Cariann Bradley  | edited by Kass Ringo | design by Madeline Westfall |   Photos By DIMitrI TZOYTZOYROKOS