Salem Ilese was still in elementary school when she got her first big break, but she was clearly already born to be a pop star. Her supportive parents — her “biggest cheerleaders” and “biggest fans” — had “caught on really fast” that she loved music, so they enrolled her in various music lessons, including a songwriting class at San Francisco’s Blue Bear Music School summer camp. There, she studied with Bonnie Hayes, a veteran songwriter who has penned songs for the likes of Cher, Bette Midler, Bonnie Raitt, Natalie Cole, and David Crosby.
“I was the youngest person there by far. I think I was 10, and [Hayes] took me under her wing. And I remember I was wearing this gold sequin top. It was very loud and bright,” Ilese chuckles. “I walked in and [Hayes] was like, ‘I have the exact same top. I like you.’”
Ilese is chatting with LPTV at Licorice Pizza Records, right before she performs songs from her sophomore album, Growing Down. The seemingly innate confidence she possessed years ago, as a 10-year-old who wore daytime sequins to songwriting workshop filled with much-older classmates, is still there, as she rocks her brightly patterned floral pinafore, glittery friendship bracelets, and Brigitte Bardot beehive. But Ilese admits that her self-belief has wavered over the years.
“I was an only child, so I think I just didn’t have a lot of social awareness [at age 10]; I was kind of just living,” says Ilese, now age 25. “I feel like I’ve lost some of that confidence just growing up, as everyone does. And a lot of this album was actually really trying to tap into that, just blissful ignorance of childhood. … Growing Down is based off of a fun fact I learned, which is trees grow up and down at the same time. And I think people do too. … People grow up, obviously, but we also grow roots as well, and also grow down, in the sense of getting in touch with your inner child.”
It was Hayes who first gave Ilese, who grew up in Mill Valley, Calif., the confidence to lay down new roots in the entertainment capital of Los Angeles. Ilese had first followed Hayes to the Berklee College of Music in Boston (“It was very fitting; my name is Salem, so I got a lot of witch-trial jokes when I was there”), after Hayes got a job as the head of Berklee’s songwriting department. But when Ilese decided to drop out of Berklee after two years, feeling “ready” to give a professional career a shot, Hayes gave her blessing and sent Ilese on her way.
Ilese landed in Los Angeles at age 19 with “no publishing deal, no manager, no nothing,” but she somehow summoned that long-ago sequined-10-year-old’s confidence. “I thought, ‘You know what? I’m just going to throw myself into sessions. I’m just going to do as many as possible with whoever will work with me.’ So, I basically just cold-DM’d anyone I could think of that lived here that I had some minor connection to.” She ended up doing “seven or more sessions a week,” and along with launching her solo recording career with her 2019 EP, 757, began writing for other artists.
“The dream has always been to be an artist and tour the world, but Julia Michaels is someone I look up to, a role model for me, and I watched how she kind of got into it from writing for other people,” explains Ilese. “And I was like, ‘Maybe that’ll be the easiest way to break into the industry. So, that’s kind of what I was trying to do originally, just write songs for whoever needed songs.”
Since then, Ilese has followed the career paths of not only Michaels but of her mentor Hayes, writing for Bella Poarch, Demi Lovato, Gwen Stefani, and K-pop sensations Tomorrow X Together. Her dream collaboration would be with Brandon Flowers (her supportive father took her to a Killers show when she was a young girl, and they’ve been her favorite band ever since), but when it comes to her outside songwriting, one of her “proudest accomplishments” so far has been co-penning Russian feminist protest/performance art group Pussy Riot’s “Princess Charming.”
Ilese met Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova through her song “Crypto Boy,” which was “going viral on Twitter in the crypto space, which was funny because I was roasting crypto boys so hard; it was very anti-crypto!” After Tolokonnikova reached out, the two women met up at Ilese’s “little apartment studio” in West Hollywood and co-wrote “Princess Charming,” and then actually collaborated on an NFT. “This was right around the time where Roe v. Wade was overturned, so we did an NFT with a piece of art that she designed, and the song and all the proceeds went to the Center of Reproductive Rights,” Ilese says.
Ilese has a couple of political songs of her own, like “Awake,” an anti-gun anthem benefiting March for Our Lives, and “Moment of Silence,” a protest song addressing both gun violence and reproductive rights. “Definitely, it takes a lot to write [political songs], just because I feel like they take me so long. I want to get them right. But I do think that as a creator, I have a responsibility to speak about things when they’re happening. I like to think of it as a song-righter, spelled R-I-G-H-T-E-R,” Ilese muses.
Whatever she is writing, or righting, about, Ilese is a self-described “word nerd,” most often starting with a title first (her breakthrough viral hit was 2021’s catchily named “Mad at Disney,” after all). And along with the interesting inspiration behind Growing Down’s title, the album is full of interesting, clever wordplay. “Usually a concept or just a fun play on words inspires the sonic landscape for me,” she says. “For example, I have a song called ‘Dirty Martini,’ and I knew that I wanted to write a song called ‘Dirty Martini,’ but I had no idea what I wanted it to sound like. I was like, ‘What would a song about dirty martinis sound like, sonically? I feel like it needs to be a little folk/country/pop and definitely fast, because they just make you so excited and giddy.’ I just wanted to capture that energy. But it all starts with the title.”
Ilese now seems positively giddy about her future (which will hopefully include a Killers collab) as she releases Growing Down, and she is looking forward to her artistic growth, in all directions. “[The album] is basically just a reminder to leave room for joy in your life, and don’t take life too seriously,” she says. “Just have a good time.”
