Singer-songwriter Satya has currents of Oakland, New Orleans, and Nashville running through her work, and each of them helped shape her debut album, “Yellow House,” which she released independently on June 5.
The 25-year-old was raised in Oakland, graduated from Oakland School for the Arts, and now lives in Los Angeles. She lived in New Orleans while she attended Loyola University — and made her album in collaboration with a Nashville producer.
Satya said that she became enamored by New Orleans’ mysticism, and its vibrant culture and music scene. After a year and a half of schooling, she dropped out — but stayed on in New Orleans to pursue her musical career. Then, the pandemic hit, and she returned home to live in Oakland with her mom.
Coming home wasn’t easy for Satya. The house she grew up in, she said, held a lot of childhood pain that coming home forced her to face.
“Everything ripped open, and I started to see myself in my childhood and my upbringing in a new way,” she said. “It was that transition of leaving home, living on my own and seeing how other people take care of themselves. Moving back into a space that I grew up in was really hard, and it started to raise a lot of questions for me.”
Those months back her childhood home, and the healing she embarked on there, began to shape some of the songs that would eventually make it onto the nine-track album.
“I can’t lie, it wasn’t easy moving back,” she said. “I needed to leave when I did, and I came home when I did, because I felt it was time to reimagine what the Bay means to me.”
One of the tracks, “Yellow House,” is about that fraught childhood home.
“Yellow house, dead birds, pill bottles missing from the cabinet,” she sings to the accompaniment of uptempo drums and a guitar riff. “What if I say, say that I’m done with all your madness. Up the phone, called the cops, said she’s being violent.”
She moved back to New Orleans that July, in the midst of the pandemic shutdown.
“The story about the song is very personal,” she said. “So there are some things that I am mindful about sharing.”
Satya is soft-spoken, and has tended to be private. It was Nashville producer Colin Linden — who worked on the album — who helped Satya open up about growing up in an abusive household and turn the experience into powerful lyrics. She recorded the entire album in Nashville.
“He created a very warm environment,” she said. “Before even talking about music, it was wanting to understand each other. He was also so happy and eager to share his life stories too, that it made me feel really safe.”
She wrote her first lyrics at OSA
During her years at OSA, Satya studied under Cava Menzies, a multidisciplinary musician, visual artist, and founding faculty member in the school’s vocal music department, where Satya took music theory and songwriting.
Menzies told The Oaklandside that she can remember where each of her former students used to sit. Satya, she said, would sit in the front row to the right.
“She always was introspective,” Menzies said. “I really love that about her. She is calm, kind of quiet, takes a little bit of time to get to know people, but a genuine, genuine soul.”
Menzies said the music writing class became “an outlet for her to express herself and begin to tell her own stories.”
Satya said she began writing lyrics during her junior year. Menzies recalled that Satya began recording some of those early songs and would bring the tracks back to her teacher to get her perspective.
“I remember her excitement about the process of finally documenting her work and taking it to this next level,” Menzies said. “What I loved is that she wasn’t afraid to be herself and become introspective about her inner landscape. That to me is a unique quality of hers.”
Satya has always been willing to come back to the school to mentor other students, Menzies said.
“She shot a music video in OSA and included a bunch of the students,” she said. “Whenever I mention Satya, all the kids remember the video shoot.”
Satya also remains good friends with two of her former OSA classmates, August Lee Stevens and B. DeVeaux, who both graduated the same year as Satya and also became musicians.
Satya released her first single in 2019, at age 19, the song “Not Knowing.” In 2020, she released a five-track EP, “Flourish Against Fracture.” Two years later, she released the EP “Deep Blue,” which includes a love song titled “Oakland.”
After a few months in New Orleans, Satya came home once more. This time, it wasn’t to deal with the ghosts of her past, but rather, to showcase some of her new songs.
She had the opportunity in December 2021 to open a show for another Oakland artist, Mara Hruby, at The New Parish. Before the show, Satya told the Oaklandside how special it was to have her first hometown show there, because it was where she saw her last show before the pandemic shutdown.
Despite Satya’s conflicted relationship with her upbringing in Oakland, she is proud of her Bay Area roots.
“It’s everything that built me,” she said. “Growing up with trauma, I have so much beauty in my childhood as well. I was surrounded by so much community, art, and nature. I feel like it’s all a part of who I am.”
The new album includes two covers with special meaning for her. “Box of Rain,” a 1970 song by the Grateful Dead, is one she would listen to with her grandfather growing up.
“I first recorded that song fresh out of high school, then uploaded it to SoundCloud and sent it to my grandpa,” she said. “It’s his favorite song. I love the lyrics so much.”
Satya said she sat on that demo for years until she met Linden and played it for him. Once he heard it, Satya said, he asked her to record it that day.
When she shared the album version with her grandparents, she said, “They made me cry when they told me how much they love the song.”
Satya opened for Jamaican artist Masego at the Stern Grove Festival on July 21, 2024. Credit: courtesy of Ariel Nava
The other cover is “Fruits of My Labor” by the singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams.
Satya recalled listening to that song in a dive bar in New Orleans when she was out and about with friends. She was so mesmerized by the lyrics, she said, that she stopped listening to her friends’ conversation.
“I went home later that night and listened to what felt like a million times,” she said. “I looked up the lyrics and just sobbed. It felt like a sign, like that song called me.”
It was another cover Landen encouraged her to record. During that session, she said, he casually mentioned that Willams was his neighbor in Nashville. Satya said it felt like another sign.
“Listening through how those two covers landed, it felt like they were so important to add to the project,” she said. “Those are two songs that I’ve really been able to embody into my own world and story.”
Satya said that at first, having sat on demos for so many years, she felt set on the way each track was supposed to sound. But as she met with other musicians who worked on the album, they opened her up to other approaches.
“Somebody would bust out the slide guitar and go over it, and it was the most beautiful thing,” she said. “It also changed the way that I view country music.”
As she was releasing the album independently, Satya signed with the record label Giant Music. Now, she’s back in Los Angeles writing and recording more music — with newfound inspiration.
“I’ve been putting my head down and diving into writing,” she said. “It feels exciting.”
Correction: an earlier version of this story mispelled Colin Linden’s last name.
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