A CONVERSATION WITH CAYLEY SPIVEY

I spoke with 22-year-old Cayley Spivey, a Myrtle Beach, South Carolina-based singer/songwriter about her experience in the music industry. Cayley started out playing gigs in hometown coffee shops and has now toured extensively across the country. Under the name Small Talks, the indie pop rock singer and guitarist released Until It Turns To Petals in 2017 and A Conversation Between Us in 2019. During our conversation, we discussed the small-town music scene, mental health, sexuality, storytelling, and, of course, TikTok.

Who/what are some of your biggest creative and musical influences?

My favorite song changes every single day, but I think I'm way more inspired by movies than I am artists. Growing up, [I watched] a lot of Disney movies, and I love romantic stories and stuff like that, but I’ve always been a writer, so books are a big, big thing. I like stories a lot more than I am inspired by other artists. 

What are some of your favorite books?

I love Call Me By Your Name; it’s one of my favorite books mostly because of the location and the way that he writes about love and infatuation. I think it’s one of the best pieces of literature. I also like this book called I Am by Howard Falcow; it’s a spiritual book. I like anything about humanity and am really into that kind of stuff.

I know that you’ve talked openly about mental health and how that ties into your music; what has music’s impact been on your mental health and vice versa?

Honestly, I used to say that music helped me find my identity because it did. But, recently, I’ve started going to therapy, and I love it. The best method for me so far has been therapy when it comes to managing mental health, but the more I go there and learn from my therapist about how to deal with my emotional conflicts and everything like that, she’s taught me a lot about how, if you know yourself, your mental health will be better – if you have your “I am” statements. It literally goes back to this book (I Am), but having a good grounding of who you are can really help mental health, so music gave me that. Music gave me a grounding for like, “okay, so this is what I want to do with my life, this is how I want to keep busy while I’m here, you know?”

How did growing up in Myrtle Beach affect your creative vision? I know for me personally as an artist, I often think about how things might’ve been different had I not moved and wonder what others’ experiences have been.

I definitely agree with you on that. It has a big change and difference and effect on everything that you do. I think that Myrtle Beach, being a tourist town, has helped me get kind of a melting pot of influence city-wise, being around new people all the time and how everything is come-and-go and the touristy nature of the town. I think it’s kind of given me a complicated personality, though, because I’ve never lived anywhere else, but I’ve traveled a lot because of music. I feel like Myrtle Beach has shown me what it’s like to be in a small town, have a little taste of the city, and have southern roots, because my family’s down there and half of them are southern. I think it showed me a lot about myself, but I don’t think it helped my career, because I don’t think there’s a lot of musical opportunity in Myrtle Beach at all. There’s not really any venues, there’s not really any places or communities for it. But, I can say that, because of that, it gave me the drive to want to start booking my own shows, and that’s how I started playing music; I started booking my own shows at a coffee shop because nothing was there, so I was like “I’m going to book it myself, then.” It gave me ambition, for sure.

How has your sexuality influenced your songwriting and experience in the music industry? What message do you hope will reach people listening to your music?

Definitely self-acceptance. 100%. TikTok gave me a way to reach a lot of communities at once and find people who really stick with me, and can relate with me, and stuff like that. That’s coming from Myrtle Beach, where I feel like I’m stuck, and there’s not a lot of people who relate to me or have the same kind of goals. Then I put myself out there on an app like TikTok, and suddenly I’m meeting a lot of queer people who are super artsy and have lots of dreams, and all this stuff.

It doesn't matter how weird or different you are. Whatever makes you different makes you special and unique, and I want anybody who comes to my shows to celebrate that. And not even just queer people, because I do mainly want it to be a safe place for LGBTQ people, obviously, like I want everyone to come and feel safe, but I don’t want it to be a dividing kind of thing. I want it to be that anybody can come here. Anybody with any kind of quirks who’s a good person in general can just show up and feel safe. And I want lots of diversity at my shows. I just want it to be a literal melting pot of a bunch of quirky, complicated people.

[My sexuality] influences a lot of where the songs come from. I write a lot about love, so my experience having complicated relationships growing up because of being in the closet or not being in the closet or just trying to figure out what the hell it is I’m feeling, that definitely affected all of my songs. I definitely sing a lot about complications in love, because there’s a lot, you know? It’s complicated.

Similar to the last question, how has your experience been in the South Carolina scene (and in the music industry in general) been as a woman and as someone in the LGBTQ+ community?

I love this question, and I always give it this answer, because I’m trying to sort of prove a point to everybody, but being a woman in the industry is exactly that: being asked all the time, “what’s it like being a woman?” We stand out. Sometimes it’s a great thing, and sometimes it’s a bad thing. You know, I’m sure you’ve been to a show, being a bass player and everything like that where somebody had assumed that you might know less, because you’re a girl. I’ve had shows before where I walk into the venue and they mistake me for a fangirl, like I’m not in the band; they don’t even know. I was making fun of it [in a video on TikTok] because it’s such a common thing. I can’t wait for the time when we don’t even need to ask those kinds of things, but it’s worth talking about right now, you know what I mean? And that’s exactly what I mean; it’s worth talking about right now which sucks, because we want to get to a point where women are just the same. Like, we do music; why does it have to be a big, shocking thing. Why are we doubted?

Guys aren’t like “what’s it like being a man in the industry?” And we want to get to the point where we don’t have to ask that question. But the reason people ask it is because we are not treated the same. Right off the bat, that’s your proof, that in any interview with a woman in music, we’re always asked, “what’s it like?” because there are problems.

I personally first discovered you on TikTok; how has that platform influenced how you’ve been doing things recently, and do you think that it’s a good tool to use as a musician?

TikTok has been kind of a saving grace through COVID because of the fact that a lot of artists are not working now; we can’t play shows, we can’t do anything. All we can really do is put out music, but even with that, there’s a lot of more important worldly things that [have] happened. Everything when it comes to the entertainment industry was like, “we need to pause this and focus on the pandemic or everything going on.” But, TikTok came around, and it’s cool because it still gives artists a chance to promote themselves and put their music out there in a place where they can’t tour it, and they can’t do shows, and they can’t go promote themselves in person. So, TikTok has been great, because it’s been able to make me feel like I can still work and reach people without being on the road, which is what we were doing previously. I guess it made it a bit more media-based, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing in 2020.

Have you been working on any new projects during quarantine?

Yes! The new project begins this week. I’ve been working on this for a year and a half; it’s taken so long. I’m so excited to get this out, but it begins this month, finally.

What has inspired your recent music?

Definitely COVID and the world’s changes. Everything like that really shook me up a little bit. I learned a lot from the Black Lives Matter movement, so that really inspired me a lot, just everybody involved in that movement and everything that everybody had to say. Like I said, I’m inspired a lot by people, so when I meet interesting people or hear interesting things about the world or how people are interacting with each other and things like that, that really inspires me and makes me want to tell stories from these perspectives of the people that I’m meeting.

Do you tend to write more from your perspective or from the perspective of other people?

It’s a really strange mix. I pull from other people’s experiences; sometimes when I meet people, they’ll inspire something, and I kind of turn it into my interpretation of it and usually will relate it to something that happened in my past. I’m a big reflective writer, so when I write, it’s usually about something that already happened to me paired with some new information. When I connect the two, it’s almost like my own way of finding closure; I bring this past thing that I wasn’t really sure how to process yet, and then I apply it to something [new] that happened, or maybe some information I got from something else, and then a song comes out of that, by comparing those two. It’s almost like how I work through finding my own perspective is writing with others and throwing it all together and being like “that is where I stand in this situation, and that is where I think I was inspired.”

How would you best describe the evolution of your music since you started writing and performing in a band setting to now?

It came from a super indie, raw, young writer place where we didn’t work on the songs a lot; the first EP that I put out, we wrote it and recorded it in like a week and just threw it out, and we were like “this is good.” And it is, it’s good to me; I liked it, but we didn’t take our time cultivating it to its best potential. I think now I write almost like I’m carving marble, because you have to get to the good parts now, where I first started with this mindset that everything was good. I think I became more of a critic, but I like that because it gives me more challenges. It keeps me from being bored. I don’t always want to be satisfied with my art, because I just don’t think that would be very inspiring.

Where do you see it going in the future?

I’m hoping a world tour. I want to do that at least once in my life. I have really big goals like a lot of other artists, but I can see a lot changing with the next couple of releases, because I think that this new direction and this new sound and these new songs, especially, they’ve taken so much time and detail that I just can’t see it not showing up for itself. When the song comes out, I think people are really going to be able to relate to it and take it and make it their own, and that’s what makes a successful song. So, I think it will do really well, and hopefully we will get to that world tour.

You can find Cayley on Instagram and TikTok @cayleyspivey. “SFU”, her first single under her own name, comes out on August 14th.

Questions and responses have been edited for clarity

Images courtesy of Common Ground Collective.