Collaborators waiting for the right fit
5 things to know about Felix Cartal and Sophie Simmons’ single ‘Mine’
VANCOUVER — New Westminster DJ Felix Cartal (born Taelor Deitcher) is one of Canada’s top EDM producers. With 1.6 million monthly Spotify listeners, his music ranges from tight originals such as More (w/Kaskade) and Killing Time (w/R3HAB) to official remixes for everyone from Selena Gomez and Ellie Goulding to Diplo.
Sophie Alexandra TweedSimmons , a.k.a. Sophie Simmons, is an American-Canadian model, children’s advocate and singer-songwriter. Her musical career started to really accelerate following the release of 2018’s “Black Mirror”. Her father is a classic rock icon, KISS bassist Gene Simmons and her mother is Canadian actor Shannon Tweed.
Together, Cartal and Simmons have crafted their first collaboration. The single “Mine” is a bouncy track readymade for this “summer-not-summer” COVID-19 situation we all find ourselves in.
You can dance to it. You can get all misty-eyed and pensive to it. In other words, the duo has crafted one of those pop-tronic ditties that delivers nostalgic memories married to minimalist beats and one of air-punching youth power pronouncement choruses.
Simmons and Cartal talked to Postmedia about the song and it’s tricked-out video. This was the first time that Cartal had hooked up a conference call via mobile.
1: More music is coming out due to COVID-19 . It’s festival season and DJs like Felix Cartal should be blowing up tents at festivals all over the planet right now into the fall. That’s not happening, which means that there is “a lot more time to work on producing new materials.” This collaboration with Simmons is the result of a creative connection that goes back about five years. The two were waiting for the right fit and Cartal says “when Sophie played me the basic mix of ‘Mine’, I just loved it.”
2: Songwriting is like selfisolating. Cartal says nothing is more normal for anyone in music than locking yourself in your room to work on material all alone or only communicating online. This can go one well beyond any measly 14-day period, sometimes taking months. Having everyone else in the same place means you don’t need to apologize for not being around. Simmonds notes: “I’ve gotten to work with more of the guest artists that I’ve wanted to work with from this than ever before, because they aren’t all incredibly busy being on the road and performing constantly.” She also notes that gaining access to who you want to be sharing ideas with directly is a far cry from the standard studio set ups where “there are people in the room trying to be involved who are only there because they know somebody and think it’s a social thing.”
3: Parents and piano . Simmons can’t thank her parents enough for pushing her to learn piano and how to read music and it’s been a boon to everything she has pursued musically. Cartal says he implores everyone to “learn how to record your s—t, so you know how to make your voice sound the best it can and get your vision across to others you work with quickly.” The common language of the keyboard appears to be one of the easiest ways to communicate ideas.
4: “Mine” is a single . For the moment, the single out on “Physical Presents” has already reached Top 25 on the iHeartRadio charts. Simmons, who co-wrote with the production team called the Gifted, says the track languished for a while as she tried to find the right collaborator. “That’s a scary thing, to turn someone down and say no, when you are just getting started as a songwriter,” she said. “But finding the best possible home with someone who is a friend and also who made the song turn out in the best-case scenario made it all worth it.”
5: The video is quite stylish . Styled by Carlee Wallace (Teen Vogue, Marie Claire US, Billboard), the video featuring a young couple paired up in matching sweat suits performing mundane tasks against fully washed colour-blocked frames. Shot in February, there was no intention to mirror the “sweats on all the time” contemporary reality. Rather, Cartal was inspired by similarly colourblocked videos by Billie Eilish and others. Note: Both artists kept their matching jumpsuits.
“Mine” is available for purchase via the usual streaming services and websites.