Hi, everyone! Last week, I sat down to talk with Ethan Fields, the Orlando-based musician and social media personality. Fields is currently a student at Harvard University who found success on the app TikTok- best known for his impersonations of various popular artists. With over half a million likes and nearly 30,000 followers on the app, he's one of the biggest breakout stars in recent times. I was super excited to sit down and chat about his process, TikTok lifestyle, and side project with Chelsea Garden. Hope you enjoy!
NOTE: THIS INTERVIEW HAS BEEN EDITED AND LIGHTLY CONDENSED FOR CLARITY.
bazzreviews: When did you first realize pursuing music was what you wanted to do?
Ethan Fields: I’d say it was probably between my ninth and tenth grade years of high school, that’s when I first got super into recording. I found so much joy in creating stuff like that. I put out some songs on my SoundCloud, released an EP my junior year, and seeing my stuff out there on the Internet really solidified that for me.
br: Which albums and artists served as your biggest influences?
E.F.: It’s definitely evolved a lot over time. In middle school, I know I was into some various forms of electronic music.. That changed into shoegaze music when I got a little older, My Bloody Valentine and Ride were two really big names, too. Once hip-hop kind of exploded with so many new faces in the mid-2010s, I started trying to incorporate some of that stuff into my music. Listening to deeper projects like To Pimp a Butterfly and such were super formative of my current taste. I think as of now, though, everything feels so genre-blended, and the 1975 is a band that has helped me understand that current music landscape.
br: I know you have a band back home called Chelsea Garden, but how did you meet the other members of the group?
E.F.: Well, one of the members happens to meet my brother, so I think it’s safe to say we’ve known each other for quite a while. The other two people that form the band were guys I met through the studio I took music lessons at. There were a lot of connections up front, so it was never super hard to meet musical people. We all live in a suburban town and all of us happened to be indie musicians.
br: What’s the significance behind the group’s name?
E.F.: For a point in time, we were called “Local Pharma,” which I’m sure you know as a play on the term “big pharma.” We were at our first show, and I vividly remember saying the band’s name out loud to a group of people. I’m like, “well, this is a mouthful.” After that, we were just brainstorming a bunch of different names on a whiteboard one day, and one of the names that happened to come up was Chelsea Girls. That’s actually the name of a film by Andy Warhol, but we realized that we didn’t want to directly copy the name. We liked the sound of it, though, so we were trying to figure out how we could modify it. The word “garden” came up, and we all thought it sounded catchy enough.
br: You’re also a student at Harvard, what has that experience been like so far?
E.F.: It’s been cool! I think it’s been really easier to find a niche up there and play the type of music I’m interested in. That being said, it’s been a little bit difficult to manage the workload with working on new stuff. While this whole pandemic thing is not ideal, I think the good thing that came out of it was online classes. It gave me so much more time to work on new stuff and build up a bigger following than I ever thought I could have had.
br: You’ve also experienced quite a bit of fame on the app TikTok, what fueled your interest to make videos about songs done by other artists?
E.F.: It actually just started off as a one-off bit, with the first video in that series being that crossover between the “Wii Sports” music and the 1975. The goal there was to make something in the vein of all those impression videos I had been seeing on TikTok. While someone could be like, “hey, I can sing like this singer or talk like that actor,” I’d never seen anybody impersonating anyone’s music before. So, I wanted it to take it a step further in that regard. It’s weird because the “TikTok generation” really has a love for that 2007-2013 era pop music. Being able to touch upon everyone’s childhood, having a meme-like quality, and using the app as a vehicle to practice music production was ultimately a very appealing form of content to me. So, after the 1975 one did well, everything you’ve come to see in one of my videos became a recurring joke. For example, the Seattle Sonics hoodie I always wear, me saying “What’s up?” were all kind of done ironically, but it just spiraled into becoming a part of my “brand” so to speak.
br: I also see you wearing a Seattle SuperSonics hoodie in a lot of your videos, are you a big fan of basketball?
E.F.: Yes, I do love basketball. Playing NBA 2K is a huge part of my day when I’m not working on music or making videos for TikTok. I’m really excited for the season to start back up, but it’s a bummer that so many of the big stars have decided to sit out this shortened season. In reference to the Sonics hoodie itself, it comes from my younger brother’s rec basketball league. This team is probably from about four or five years ago. They were called the Sonics, and my dad was the coach of the team. I guess we had some Sonics hoodies laying around for whenever they were warming up or on the bench, and I asked if I could borrow it for the day. I thought it looked pretty fresh and would look cool in some of the videos I was going to make. The rest is history.
br: How have you reacted to the success you’ve had? What’s the best and worst thing that has come from it?
E.F.: Considering that I only got TikTok as something fun to do during quarantine, I never expected to get any sort of a fanbase on the app. To think that it’s very possible that this “new normal” could last very well into the winter and early next year, I’m hoping to just fully embrace it and see where it goes. I think one of the most fun things about all the success is just reading through the comments section on a lot of the videos. To see people engaging with the content to an insane level of detail is something that blows my mind. Being an indie musician with a small following and having someone notice your content means so much. I don’t know if you saw the “every band documentary ever” video I made, but the most liked comment on the video was someone noticing the way our guitar player (Blaine Ruth)’s toes were bent on the staircase. I’m like, what the f--k? That was on screen for maybe one or two seconds. I think on that notion of notifications and checking the comments section, it’s got its downsides. I know it’s as simple as turning notifications off or whatever, but I won’t lie when I say it can be really tempting to constantly check what people are going to say.
br: Tell me about your obsession with the font Helvetica?
E.F.: Wow, I’m really curious as to where you heard that, but yes, that is true. I love typefaces, they can convey a lot about certain people. In fact, I don’t think it’s out of the question to say that people have “spirit fonts.” Helvetica just happens to be mine. In terms of building a musical presence, I’ve been using that same font- Helvetica bold, italicized, and condensed - to ingrain that this is me and my music. The way that visuals tie in with music is super important to me, and you’re seeing that more often these days. Whether you’re looking at an artist like Frank Ocean or the way he designs his record covers, or more artists going down the route of creating “visual albums,” we’re definitely in an age where it’s so much more feasible to do that.
br: You’re also really into philosophy, what are some of your favorite concepts?
E.F.: I will say that my knowledge of philosophy is not all that great, but again, another great find on your end! I took an intro to existentialism in my freshman year at Harvard, but I haven’t pursued the field as much as I have with other things. In terms of ideas and concepts, would I consider myself an existentialist? Yeah, probably. I think in everyone’s daily lives, we all try to fill our day-to-day time up with whatever we can to create this sort of illusion of progress or whatever. I even feel that way about my TikToks. What if I get 25,000 followers, could I get 30,000? When does it all end? On another note, I really like a lot of allegorical texts, and a lot of famous philosophical ideas can be found in there. Chelsea Garden actually has a song called “Signals,” which is loosely inspired by this existentialist play called “Waiting for Godot.”
br: Is it true that you got to play at Lollapalooza with the School of Rock All Stars?
E.F.: It was one of the craziest weeks of my life. We had a pretty polished set of cover songs, but that was about it. We were one of the acts that played super early in the day and on one of the smaller stages at the show, which actually wasn’t that bad. Yes, all the top-billed artists play later in the day, but we had the rest of the day to kind of just walk around Grant Park and see or meet different artists. It was enough to blow my fifteen-year-old mind. I remember seeing Halsey on her side stage in the artists’ village, a couple of us tried to walk and meet her. Two security guards instantly came over and shut that down. Plus, my naive ass didn’t realize that I was taking a picture for someone who was posing with Vic Mensa. In all seriousness, from a musical perspective, to have been able to talk so many incredible musicians, even if it was for a few minutes in such a concentrated area, was something I’ll never forget. A lot of the people I met four years ago are people I am in touch with today. A lot of the ideas that I learned from those artists are tricks I’m utilizing in tracks I make. For example, this one guy was teaching me this jazz chord, and he told me “use this in some of your songs, it’ll sound dope.” Talking about this is making me feel excited for when stuff reopens, man. As soon as COVID is over, I think one of the things at the top of my to-do list is to go to any music festival I can.
br: What was the writing process like on your newest EP, Yellow?
E.F.: That was super fun! I wanted to go towards a pop and trap direction on the record because that’s what’s “in” right now. I’ve been a genre hopper for a while, so it’s nothing new for me. I hadn’t added anything to Spotify since the record I dropped my junior year, which I mentioned a bit ago. I had mostly released my stuff through SoundCloud, and those tracks really ran the gamut of punk rock, pop, etc. After Harvard sent us home because of COVID, I really felt like dropping a project of sorts. It was more of an improvisational effort rather than formulaic, which I guess is good. I wasn’t even thinking, “okay, I’m gonna use these four chords,” or “the song structure is gonna go verse/chorus, verse/chorus.” It would be more of, “hey, I have a four-bar loop of a trap beat, how can I build off of this for the next four bars?” I would basically be sitting in my room for hours in front of a synth, finding different loops that would help the song progress.
br: How does writing your own music differ when writing for Chelsea Garden?
E.F.: It’s definitely different. When I write for myself, I’ll think of the melody and music together ahead of time by singing it out. Or, it might come spontaneously when I’m working on something else - it all depends. There’s a lot more room for experimentation, which I touched on in the last question. When I’m writing with Chelsea, it’s a little bit more difficult to translate these abstract ideas I come up with in my head to three other guys. On the flip side, I really like the way that we are all very collaborative. Blaine and I are both the head producers of the group, and we’ll take turns working on the grid at hand. After a bit of time adding our own little tweaks to it, we’ll switch off. It’s way more healthy to do that, because you won’t be spending hours and hours on just one tiny aspect of a track. If something isn’t working, I can just say, “hey, I’m having trouble figuring this out, how would you approach it?” I think our song “Friends” that we put out in April is a great example of that collaborative process on display. It’s got a very anthemic chorus, which Blaine contributed, and it turns into a sweet electronic break, which I put in. I was listening to a lot of the 1975 at the time, so they were responsible for me shoehorning those ideas into our music.
br: How do you come up with video ideas for TikTok? E.F.: Whenever I think of a band I want to mimic for TikTok, I usually just write it out on the notes app on my phone. There are still bands on that list that have iconic sounds that I’d want to see where they’d go. I think the hardest part of the process is finding a song that would map well to another artists’ style. One example of a video that didn’t do all that well was “I Fall Apart” by Post Malone if it was done by Thundercat. Both elements are very niche, so I think that’s why I could have done more with it. So, I think trial and error is key for that. One of my more popular videos, however, “Sexy And I Know It” by LMFAO being done by Death Grips, worked out a lot better. LMFAO is a very memetic group, and it didn’t really matter if I was mashing it up with a niche group like Death Grips. Fans of them would probably watch it anyway to see how I impersonated them. I know the other day, I was trying “1901” by Phoenix if it was done by Pearl Jam the other day, and it kind of worked. When I was in that rock headspace, that’s where I found that Bloc Party/Empire of the Sun idea. It would definitely be interesting to release some of these “unfinished” ideas on my page and see how they do with viewers.
br: What have been some of your favorite videos to have made?
E.F.: I think the first video ever, the 1975 one, will always be close to my heart. I had that idea in my head for a bit, and it’s the one that started it all. The Vampire Weekend video was another that I liked a lot. I think it matters less that it was successful and more of the fact that it was, in my opinion, a good impression. The Nirvana one was probably the craziest one I did because of all the traffic the sound bite has gotten. I loved the Tool impersonation I did recently, I feel like I could release that as a cover song and it could sound good.
br: Knowing everything you do about music now, what is one thing you would tell your past self?
E.F.: I would tell myself to be as out there as possible. Find the channels that people are using to discover stuff, and put the music on there. I’ve made music for a while now, relatively speaking, and this year was sort of a wakeup call for me. I said this earlier, but I have practically nothing on Spotify or SoundCloud for people to hear. That’s where TikTok kind of helped, but with the possible banning of the app around the corner, I think I have to start being more active on other platforms. I think that’s because the personalities are married to the music in the indie community. People who might check my music out on Spotify would see my face and notice that I’m also on TikTok. That wasn’t always at an artists’ disposal ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. That traditional model of making an album, wait two to three years and do the same s--t again isn’t as prevalent nowadays. The people who are the most successful are the ones who are constantly producing and making themselves noticed. As someone who wants to make good-sounding music down the road, that’s how I have to do it.
Do you have any other projects in the works right now?
E.F.: Yes! Chelsea has been a little more restrained because of COVID, and the virtual work sessions aren’t ideal with the way we work. So, any future projects with them might go on hold for the moment. However, i have a new is dropping a new project soon, called All Good in the Neighborhood. Definitely go check that out! I’m also working on a duet with a friend from school that is coming out around the end of July, too. Other than that, there’s a couple of other singles I have in my back pocket that might get released, might not. Moving into August, I definitely want to try and release a possible full-length project if Harvard announces whether they will be online or not. I might explore more alt-rock styles on it instead of going full pop.
br: What music goals do you have for the future?
E.F.: I want to put out as much stuff as possible and have it be the best quality it can be. The rest of 2020 will be reserved for that. That’s a preliminary step for everything else that comes after. I’m not super concerned about possible label deals or live shows yet, but heading into 2021, having a more fleshed-out discography might be helpful for that. If we could open for a mid-level act sometime down the road, I would love to do that. I saw Omar Apollo at a club up in Boston last year, and I feel like Chelsea has the ability to rock that more than the openers there. It just depends on how willing we are to work towards that. Maybe for my solo music, getting a possible live band together and doing some openers for that would be great as well.
I want to thank Ethan for sitting down and chatting, he's an awesome guy who has a lot of great perspectives on music! I wish him the best of luck with what comes down the road. In the meantime, thanks to all of you guys for checking this interview out! Go run up his videos and songs- not only his new EP, but other cuts from Chelsea Garden. See you real soon with some more bazzreviews content soon!
To watch some of Ethan's TikToks, go to https://www.tiktok.com/@theethanfields?lang=en
To hear Ethan's awesome new EP, yellow, go over to https://open.spotify.com/album/5MlHWWPUYY92XBB0qSlXiN?si=bk7hjykMRSGdMf_RZ5ZFdw
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