SALOMÉ SOL'S WORLD IS FULL OF EASTER EGGS

Once I moved out of Miami, I started feeling the otherness of being Latina in a way I never had there. So I thought, Okay, I can explore Spanish now. Even coming into the music scene here and wanting to experiment, Spanish felt like something that was mine, a part of my culture I could develop in my own way. I think it started from a sense of insecurity around music, where I wanted to be left alone to understand what expression meant to me before I was fully part of the scene. Being othered for singing in Spanish felt protective, like a sense of privacy. So it was kind of the opposite of what you'd expect: not having it around made me lean into it even more.

That's tied to something I work with a lot: nostalgia. I actually haven't been back to Miami in almost a year because it's always available to me, and I've been writing about it a lot. I'm inspired by the surrealism of Florida: the tropics, the clash of politics, opinions, and cultures. I've stayed away this whole year to understand what still lives inside me when I'm not there.

Sometimes you want to be in the moment, but you can only really see things for what they were once you look back. I think about that in New York, too. There's so much beauty here, but I'm not reminiscing about it while I'm here; I'll digest it later. When you're creating, a lot of that surfaces. All the memories, all the things you pinned in the moment, sometimes not even consciously. They just stand out in your memory and end up in your art.

The choice of Spanish specifically: I think poetry just feels more raw in that language, especially as a writer working across essays, songs, and poems. With music, Spanish feels like the heart talking. It lets me say less without intellectualizing. When I speak English, I feel like I switch on a very intellectual part of my brain. With Spanish, it feels like: This is what I feel. This is who I am. I think that's the sentiment I want to bring into my music.

Growing up Latina in the U.S., Spanish is something you reserve for the people you love. It becomes precious, held close to the heart. I think that's beautiful.

A lot of the lyrics are elusive, a little esoteric, because the song is inspired by the myth of a woman drawing you into the sea. Some of it comes from Cuban tradition: Yemayá, the sea goddess, and the idea of a seductress—a magical, mystical figure who comes alive at night, tied to the coast. Which is what all the Latina baddies are doing at the coast, really: coming out, seducing, partying. I wanted to capture all of it.

There's a song, “Otra Vez,” that's built like a collage, and there's a reference to the Sinbad Motel in it, a motel where I used to have sleepovers with a lover because it was fun to be somewhere trashy. I wrote a poem on a completely different topic and mentioned the Sinbad in it, and nobody knew what it meant. Everyone assumed it was some elusive turn of phrase, but it was that motel, which also has its own story in my upcoming essay collection.

It's why I love writing: it's the blood of the work. You write a film before you shoot it, write the script before you direct it, write the lyrics before there's a song. It's the foundation every other medium grows from.

So when people ask, “Why is she doing all that?” to me, it's never felt like different disciplines. It's the same practice, just expressed in different forms. Among artists, there's an understanding of that. But on a larger scale, I've run into a lot of confusion too. That's the price you pay, and it's part of it. People are going to be confused by your work while you're in the middle of the process. It is what it is. We spend so much time trying to explain ourselves, or feeling like we need to, when really the work will show it. It's confusing in the moment, but that's just the name of the game.

What I was seeing—and what I've always seen growing up in Florida, such a right-wing place with so many minorities—is how susceptible we are to propaganda. Propaganda creates buzzwords, and buzzwords create fear by making something feel similar to a time when you felt endangered or ostracized. When you're writing, the words you choose carry such strong connotations that certain ones can flip a switch and shut down someone's defenses, when otherwise there'd be a lot of common ground. I understand the buzzwords that keep you from turning your attention to this. I want you to look here.

So with writing, with making art, I think it's really important to take a stand and know what you believe. Because if you're going to represent people through your work—represent ideas, represent what someone's going through by communicating your emotions—you're being a representative. That's political, whether or not the work is explicitly political.

As much as I think artists should be vocal and take a stand, I also think it's our job to remember that, since we're using our humanity to create, we have to connect with everybody regardless. It's not an easy choice, but it's an important one if you want to understand humanity, because that's what you're tapping into as an artist: the most human parts of yourself.

Writing about politics with that in mind means sitting with the discomfort of it: I have to love someone who thinks I don't deserve rights. I have to love someone who holds atrocious views, even while I'm angry at them, even when I don't want to be near them. But if I stop seeing their humanity, then I'm no different.

So writing into that means trying to find a dialogue. I want you to see Palestine right now. I want you to see the immigration crisis we're living through. How can I connect with you beyond my own leftism?

There's a history here. There are people who've been hurt who are now hurting other people. We can all empathize with those cycles because war and genocide have been happening since the dawn of time. We have the capacity to understand that without TV or social media, in just a few words.

If I hear a word like “Trumpy,” my instinct is to recoil. But maybe that person comes from a working-class background and is worried about where their next meal is coming from. I can relate to that as an immigrant from a working-class background myself. Once we set the fighting words aside, we can actually connect. That's always what I'm trying to do with my writing: not necessarily prove a point, but show where I'm coming from and make it accessible to people on different paths, so there's room for everyone.

Back to writing, and the word itself: it has so much power that you want to handle it with sensitivity, especially when you're writing about something like that. The essay came out at a very sensitive time. It's only been two years, but I got so much hate for it.

It made me appreciate art even more because art captures the essence of humanity. When the media is lying, when governments are turning their backs on their people, what we have to do is hold onto the truth and speak it from the moment: say what people are thinking and feeling when no one else will.

Beyond what that means and where it comes from, for me it's been about following a string of curiosities and trusting there's a bigger picture. I talk about this with my little brother a lot. He's into politics, tech, and business, but he's receptive to the art I make, and I've always been receptive to his ideas. I think it's a mistake to keep disciplines separate because, no matter what we're doing, we're all searching for a truth we can't fully access. That's why we keep trying, keep writing. Once you catch a glimpse of a certain vision, you want to capture it. You start down one path and want to see more, and you begin noticing how everything connects.

For me, it's this: I have a vision in my head, something grand, layered, visually compelling, connective. And when you try to build that, you realize, Wait, this music is actually very mathematical. Studying audio, I start understanding physics, understanding science. Fashion tells a story, too. It's how we tell stories about ourselves before you even open my journal.

I remind myself of that, too. I want to learn everything, like we all do, like the Sylvia Plath fig-tree image that haunts every woman. I have to ask myself, Okay, where am I spreading myself too thin, and where is it actually serving the vision? That's how I know what to cut, because there are always different fruits, different plants you could water. But you have to know which ones will grow together to build the thing instead of distracting you from it.

And you have to fuck up. There's no right way. You have to do a lot of wrong things. Ambitious people can get obsessed with getting it right and just keep pushing, but failing is the most important part. We have to go through the stretches where our screen time spikes because you have to know what that feels like to understand your own limits. Otherwise, there's no ceiling, and you don't know how far you can fall. You have to know your own trenches.

It's about knowing yourself. You start changing because of the work you're doing, and the work you do changes because of who you're becoming. I feel very aligned with this liminality, this stage of my life where I'm embracing leaving everything I know to go somewhere else.