OSKAR O. INTERVIEW: Finding Your Identity in Pop Music
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“Just do your shit. If there are some people that you don’t fuck with, just don’t fuck with them, you know?" For singer and producer OSKAR O. (she/her), this was the simple mindset that got her through two years at one of the most prestigious music schools in the world.
The environment at Berklee College of Music is notoriously tough — a lot of musicians that attend don’t even expect to finish. Students are in constant competition with one another from the second they apply, and while implicit competition is a norm in our current post-secondary culture, it’s a little different when your studies are in such close quarters with your identity as an artist.
Many aspiring musicians question if it’s even worth attending. Is the pressure within the scene really necessary for what you gain? Regardless of any uncertainty that may be levied against Berklee from the broader music community, Oskar is a testament to the type of talent that the school can help cultivate. Her success up to this point has much more to do with her inherent artistry than it does Berklee, but it’s pretty safe to say that Berklee helped nonetheless, even if it wasn’t the right choice in the long-term. “I wasn’t super sick into the scene, because it can become an echo chamber of basement shows... but I was happy just playing shows when I could.” Never too far in, never too far out. That balance is crucial to navigating the industry, and it’s even more important in maintaining your sense of self as an artist, something Oskar values more than anything else.
OSKAR O.’s music is an easily-accessible mix of experimental pop, R&B, and alternative, sprinkled with some wilder industrial and hyperpop influences — subgenres that new stars like Billie Eilish and Charli XCX have brought into the mainstream. “When I heard Billie for the first time, I felt like she was making music I had made in my head,” she remembers, “but I try not to draw influence from her and saying ‘Oh I wanna do that, too’... mainly because I don’t want to compare myself to the most famous 17-year-old in the world,” she jokes. (Of course, she knows a Billie comparison would be a compliment.)
When she’s doing straightforward pop, artists like Lorde or Benee come to mind, but OSKAR O. really doesn’t fit within any mainstream comparison. If anything, there are hints of Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange at some points in her music’s reluctance to stay in one sonic place. There’s a painting-like quality to her production choices, where pitch-shifted vocal motifs float in and out of the mix like auxiliary brushstrokes on a canvas. Her songwriting is sharp and personal with some rap influence as well. “I mess with the whole ‘R&B girls’ scene. I love Kehlani. I love Jhené Aiko, Summer Walker. Vocally, and kind of from a songwriting standpoint, those are my queens.” But none of these influences adequately define her music. It’s an undeniably cool combination of genres and modern pop aesthetics that seems ideal for a new generation of open-minded listeners.
Classically-trained instrumentalist isn’t the first thing you might think of listening to OSKAR O.’s new-age R&B-pop, but classical piano was actually her first principal (a loftier “major,” if you will) at Berklee. After a year grinding to keep up with the piano curriculum, she transitioned into production and arrangement to realize some of the ambitions she had as an artist. “I didn’t really know anything about production prior to coming to Berklee... I’d already been writing songs for about two years, so I kind of started thinking that I have to find some dude to produce my music for me and put up with all of that bullshit. Then after a while I realized I didn’t have to do that — I could just make my own beats.”
She began releasing her own self-produced music and generating some local buzz around Boston about five years ago under the name O. Rittenburg. She had been going by O as the years went on, but she eventually embraced the name Oskar as she grew more confident in her self-expression. “I had never fucked with my given name, and as I got older I realized ‘I don’t need to go by this anymore…’ I just wanted something that was more androgynous, and I kept the O. for the moniker.” After finding comfort in OSKAR O., everything started to click, and in 2020, she began rolling out promotional singles leading up to her debut album.
Oskar has imagined her experimental sound for as long as she can remember. At heart, she’s a brilliant producer. “I mean, I always knew what I wanted my music to sound like, but it took me a long time to find the ability to articulate it — to know what sounds to look for or what sample to use.” Trip-hop influenced drum programming on records like “This Song is Cancelled” and “Sleep it Off” seem to be her sweet spot, and while her production style varies, she has an extraordinarily cohesive sonic identity. A lot of this can be attributed to her highly-stylized vocals, most of which are purposefully draped in auto-tune and layered with distorted or affected harmonies. If she’s not mixing her own music, then she’s right there with the engineer making these decisions. That high level of intention separates her sound from a lot of her peers, especially in the bubbling “bedroom pop” scene. “I’m breathing down their necks the whole time if I’m not in the booth.”
Her latest single, “Unlearning,” is a prime example of that attention to detail. It’s an elevation of pop music and R&B that is as listenable as it is ambitious, both lyrically and musically. “This song was about my last ever relationship with a man. After it ended, I was still caught up, having feelings — I just had no perspective. I wrote this song when I had that ah-ha moment of thinking I might be over it. I started to notice my subconscious thought patterns changing, and I realized I was unlearning.”
The track is pretty subdued compared to some of her other releases, but it still has that signature production and processing that reminds you who’s singing it. “Unlearning” is stripped-down by Oskar’s standards. Its arrangement is limited to a sparse piano progression and her usual sampled drums, leaving plenty of room for her candid lyrics and rap-like delivery.
Right when you might think you have a grip on the song, a new element jumps out and demands attention. At some points, it’s a new melodic layer gliding through a harmony you didn’t know you needed. At others, it’s a robotic ad-lib, smashed with distortion and formant processing that make it sound completely genderless. As the chorus comes in, glitched out, 2017-Bon Iver-style background vocals cut through the mix, adding a futuristic twist to an otherwise straightforward delivery. “I just love super compressed vocals and thick harmonies and fat low end.” And even these elements are contrasted with reverberated, lush harmonies that remind you more of Bon Iver a decade ago — clean and underprocessed, sonically and melodically free. Despite so many angles of delivery, everything sits perfectly in place.
That ability to contrast varying styles and production choices within one song is what makes an arrangement like this so special, but this calculated minimalism didn’t always come naturally. “I struggled with production. I hear so many ornate, orchestral arrangements, and then I want to just layer everything. But then I also understand the value of having a few elements that are really well-arranged and mixed.” It took awhile for Oskar to hone in on the ideal mix of maximalism and minimalism, and despite handling most of her production and songwriting solo, she’s made connections within the industry and has had some help refining her sound along the way.
After her freshman year ended in 2018, Oskar was able to get into a songwriting incubator program at a well-known studio called Power Station in Manhattan. The opportunity came to her via an email from Berklee. Her name was out there and her efforts to network within the community paid off in full. She spent the summer on West 53rd Street in Hell’s Kitchen with around ten other students trying to write songs for film and TV. Although Oskar’s career aspirations certainly weren’t to pen the greatest closer for the Grey’s Anatomy credits, the program introduced her to producers Matthew Wilder and Jared Faber, two industry vets who expressed interest in developing her as an artist. The three of them would eventually sign a production contract under the name Biz A Productions.
Throughout the next year or so, Wilder and Faber hounded Oskar to come to LA full-time, but an opportunity to study abroad in Spain was throwing a pretty big wrench in the timeline. It was a massive point of conflict. As an artist, do you invest in life experience or do you put all of your time and effort into the business end of your career as early as you can? “It ended up working out,” she remembers, “because I just had a bunch of shit to write about when I was in Spain. I made all the music that made them pull the trigger on me, ultimately.”
She maintained contact with Biz A while she was in Spain, sending over demos and running ideas by her new team, and although Oskar credits them with helping her refine her sound, that process wasn’t always the smoothest. It’s difficult to transition from doing everything yourself to having someone else weigh in on your art. “It was frustrating because there were points where they didn’t love what I was writing. I was struggling with how much of myself I wanted to compromise, but it didn’t end up being like that. It ended up with me letting go of shit that I probably should’ve let go anyway. Like, who wants to hear [another person] singing Berklee R&B?,” she jokes. “Like, no. I needed to give that up.”
After returning from Spain, Oskar dropped out of Berklee and moved to East LA to start recording her debut project, but LA was a massive departure from where she’d grown up. Raised in a tame Boston suburb called Melrose, nothing about her upbringing would really throw her into her craft until high school. “I’m not from a musical family, but when I was really young I just asked my mom if I could get some piano lessons. Then I just never quit.” But like any kid being forced to navigate music theory when you just want to play, piano lessons lost some of their allure, causing her to take a few substantial breaks and almost stop entirely.
During one of these breaks around age ten, she remembers making a mash-up of around half of the tracks of Lady Gaga’s The Fame Monster. “I had ‘Bad Romance’ in there, ‘Alejandro.’ All of that.” On top of honing in on the arrangement skills in the name of Gaga, she had started writing small songs on the guitar and piano. She was slowly forming her own identity as an artist, but without the lessons, Berklee probably would’ve been out of the question. Oskar was nearly ready to quit her training once she hit 9th grade to make more time for her writing, but she leaned into her high school’s music program and met piano teacher Dorothy Travis. “She basically saved my ass. It was cool because she let me foster my songwriting shit, but also made me shred Bach.”
And this coincides with a common theme in many new artists’ careers. There’s an inclination to do everything yourself and to keep your art as personal as it can be, but in nearly every case, it’s necessary to have people in your life who challenge you and push you in different directions. Without Dorothy, who knows if there’d be an OSKAR O.? In a similar vein, without Biz A, where would OSKAR O. be right now?
A month or so after Oskar was settled in with her team in LA, they too pushed her to work on her craft in different ways, the first of which being a cover song. “I immediately knew I wanted to do ‘Marvin’s Room’... It’s iconic, like six minutes long, and it’s so sad — it’s so real… I just love that song.” Her version of the track is wildly different from the original, but she plays along with the samples and progressions in an easily-recognizable way. Swapping out the filtered drums for a 2-step punk rhythm, she turns “Marvin’s Room” into a grungy synth-fused jam and even incorporates her own verse, adding a vibrancy that contrasts the ambient, nocturnal mood of Drake’s first true-R&B hit.
Even though Drake is one of the last artists I would compare to OSKAR O., it’s hard to deny how influential he’s been on anyone making music since 2010, and to Oskar, there’s even more significance in his image than his music. Songs like “Marvin’s Room” show him riding a fine line between masculinity and femininity. “Since I’ve been more open about my sexuality in music, I never wanted to sound super soft, you know? And I kind of identify with Drake’s duality. In a way, he’s a hard-ass motherfucker, but then there’s that whole ‘Drake wouldn’t treat me like this’ meme.”
Adding her own perspective wasn’t in the plans when she started working on the cover, but her personal connection with the track itself and Drake as an artist made it inevitable. “I had the line, “Guess that’s what I get for falling for a straight girl” in my head and I was like ‘Oh!’... I realized I could write my own verse.” And this addition is really what makes the song. Essentially picking up where Drake left off, Oskar tells a poignant story about being on vastly different pages with an ex. Her melodies are effortlessly catchy and delivered in a Drake-esque, rap-sung style. The cover highlights the duality that she embodies while still moving within the narrative of the original song, swapping the male role out for the female in a pretty boundary-breaking fashion.
“I definitely don’t want to be known for any one identity. People are always like ‘That’s a dope female artist. That’s a dope queer artist.’ And that’s cool, like, I’m glad that’s an angle. But I also would never want that to be a crutch.” This multidimensional ground is something OSKAR O. handles with ease. Aside from the Drake cover, her new album has a massive amount of contrast, both musically and narratively. “There’s some silkier, softer tunes about my childhood, and then there’s straight up rap songs.” She played me the entirety of the record and that’s easy to attest — there are so many contrasting stories and sounds that all wash away the idea of an artist having to be defined through the masculine or feminine alone. The record has a boundlessness to it as it drifts from modern pop to country-influenced tracks. In this way, OSKAR O. actually is a lot like Drake, and that mindset can be a wildly freeing thing to embrace once you’re willing to be vulnerable and truly put yourself out there.
Above all else, being vulnerable means being honest, but in today’s social media era, “fake it ‘til you make it” is pretty much the name of the game. Just from looking at Instagram or YouTube, it’s easy to see that Oskar doesn’t play that way. Nothing is overproduced or glamorous. Her music videos are often entirely based on edits from cartoons or stock clips, and the only footage of her is usually shot VHS- or webcam-style.
Her general preference is keeping her team small, but in 2020, this is more of a moral necessity than a decision. Still, the minimal social media presence and transparently low budget is a creative choice. Without a team micromanaging her output and calculating every move, she’s able to be meticulous about the way she presents her music. It keeps everything real. “[My team and I] have had a lot of philosophical conversations about this. I’m really against acting like you’re the shit before you’re the shit. And maybe that’s me being overly humble, but I don’t fuck with glossy shit if you’re not Ariana Grande, you know what I mean?” she laughs. “Maybe If I’m ever heard on a larger scale then that’ll be it, but that’s not what it’s about.”
“I don’t need to posture or anything if people aren’t listening to my music.” And this lack of posturing is the best way to draw listeners in — it gives people something to learn about, something to latch on to as a fan. There’s no hidden budget, no secret deals. She’s not afraid to write about sexuality, politics, or religion’s impact on identity. When you listen to OSKAR O., you know you’re listening to Oskar as herself, not some machine presenting a product. Of course, though, her and Biz A have plans to invest more in videos and studio time in the future when (or more appropriately, if) things open back up. She isn’t so bent on “authenticity” that she’s willing to sacrifice growth. There’s no such thing as being too real for success. After all, “pop” music does require some popularity, and if your plan is to embody the new age of the genre, then investing in yourself as a business certainly carries some weight.
In the future, OSKAR O. doesn’t plan on switching up. “I’d love to continue making pop, but only if it’s informed by all the other dope genres of the world: folk, punk, the hyperpop stuff.” She clearly knows where music is headed — everything is expanding. “I definitely am never trying to do the vanilla dance-pop, Dua Lipa shit. I mean, she’s really dope, but I don’t think I can pull it off,” she laughs. Her focus is more on adopting common pop aesthetics and transforming them, specifically within her production. “I’d rather write a song that’s completely not in the pop genre and then make it pop in the production. I love contrasting the production with the writing, because then you can make anything marketable… I think that’s when people play themselves, when they write a song and then feel they have to stay within the bounds of the genre.”
Staying within the bounds of any single genre has proven to be limiting for artists in 2020. As people’s minds open up to new ways of thinking and society’s compulsion to categorize people thankfully fades away, music has to follow suit. “If I showed someone my music, I’d want them to listen to literally all of it. All of my songs are different, to the point where you can’t be like ‘Oh, that’s her vibe,’ after only hearing one.” Just like we can’t completely understand an artist based on a single song, Oskar knows we can’t understand a person based on a single visible aspect of their identity. “I think that would be inauthentic. Anyone that has a super one-dimensional image, or only one thing that they’re known for — I don’t know, I just imagine that inflicting a lot of pain over time.” And sure, it might seem painful to reveal every contrasting side of yourself to others who may not get it, but that discomfort is nothing compared to stifling the nuances that make us human. “That’s what I’ve found to be the golden rule to me — to just say ‘fuck it,’ but that’s so cliché.” Every cliché has its place, though, and there’s real power in that understanding. Maybe saying “fuck it” to people’s reactions is the foundation of finding relative comfort in artistry — just express yourself and leave it up to the audience to make sense of the rest.