Nayla Savannah, By The Beach
Nayla Savannah lives a life defined by sound.
A theatre sound designer, voracious music fan and musician in her own right, the singer-songwriter / emcee thrives to a soundtrack of her own making, whether that’s the music of her favourite artists, the cues of a spotlit soliloquy or the sounds of her own heady compositions. It’s through this all-encompassing passion that we first met, back in early 2017, at a small Los Angeles art gallery.
We were brought together by Kilo Kish, an artist indispensable in Nayla’s own artistic journey. “I wrote my first song to a ‘Kilo Kish type beat’ in 2012,” she recalls, listing the understated yet psychedelic hip-hop act as her chief influence. It comes as no surprise that Kish has proved so essential, with tracks such as 2012’s “Navy” awash with the same spoken-word approach Nayla takes to emceeing. It’s a style that fosters a confessional tone, one that’s as candid as it is deliberate, each and every syllable hitting with a deceptively loose precision. “My sound is like spoken word with battle rap influences over ambient trap music,” she offers up, the sharp summary a testament to her introspection.
It’s Kish who towers above her other artistic antecedents, amongst them “The Internet, Earl Sweatshirt, Jill Scott & Erykah Badu,” though this tapestry of influence only accounts for a fraction of her distinctive style. It’s poetic that Nayla’s “first song,” penned to a Kish approximation, was prompted by a high school talent show. “It was full of boys,” she explains. “It made me feel like, where are the girls with musical talent? I told one of my peers we would have a rap battle in a week.” If a week seems generous, it was the first time that Nayla had ever tried her hand at the craft itself, and those seven days proved a crash course in the art of rhyme. “We had our battle at school – he was impressed, and quite frankly so was I.”
It wouldn’t be until she graduated, however, that casually writing rhymes would culminate in a fully-realised project. “When I got to Long Beach City College, I met this guy in one of my engineering classes who made beats and he invited me to my first session in one of the studios on campus. It inspired me to write my first mixtape, Free to Say.” If her interest in the mic was driven by that male-dominated talent show, the next step was more a happy accident that a motivated move. It stirred a passion within her, however, and the newly invigorated Nayla has been writing and recording ever since, stepping into the world of artists she so respects.
That’s not to say her taste was blinkered. “I grew up on oldies, but I also had a lot of Disney music to listen to,” she says, a cross-genre mix familiar to any ‘90s babies. “At some point as a kid, I started requesting rap CDs and Chris Brown CDs, and it grew from there… the CD I listened to the most was Crunk Juice,” she adds, laughing.
““Dial” originally started as an instrumental I made over the course of a year. It had been through so many different phases, and I wanted to sell it because I realized I couldn’t rap on it,” she explains, her trepidation steeped in the slower, largely unfamiliar tone of the beat itself. Nonetheless, feeling inspired, Nayla took up the pen. “It was a challenge to write such a slow and vulnerable song, it was about my then-relationship. “Dial” was something that was never intended to be released, but after getting the approval from my friends it was official.” It stands as an exercise in versatility and adaptation, seeing as the cut “didn’t fit the vision [she] had for Bixby Beach.”
If the title Free To Say exemplified Nayla’s first foray into the boundless world of emceeing on tape, then her most recent project – 2019’s Bixby Beach – sees the titular Long Beach neighborhood as a force unto itself. It’s here that she lived throughout her time at LBCC, the spaces and places it represents shaping her bars and coloring her shift into adulthood. It’s worth noting that OneFourOne itself is a reference to a physical place, chosen too for the impressions and realisations that it came to represent.
Nayla’s take on place and the psyche goes beyond the titular neighborhood, underpinning tape track “Garden,” an earthy illustration of wellness and self-preservation that renders the psyche growing, flowering arrangement. “Everyone has a garden,” she explains. “If your flowers are dying and you know and you don’t try to bring them back, you can’t expect a harvest or expect to relax.” The garden requires maintenance: sometimes watering, sometimes pruning, but always cultivation of some form. It’s impossible to unwind “if you’re not right within.”
“My garden is special /
I drink here, I smoke here, I chill…”
When she spits “I’m working till my name on closing credits” on “Subtle,” she really means it. Her work as a sound designer might not have impacted the screen just yet, but her passion for the craft has helped shape her approach to her own music aspirations. “When I’m trying to produce music for myself, I look at sounds differently now,” a consequence of her immersion in the theatre. “All sounds and sound effects are welcome.”
“I think the theatre has also influenced me to crest with an intro, an arc and a resolve, unlike my usual methods of just doing something... which isn’t always a bad thing,” she adds. It’s not hard to see how the craft would complement her art: furnishing moments with passionate embellishments, fashioning evocative cues and recurring motifs, and running the gamut of human emotions all fold into the musicians toolbox.
These skills rear their head again on Bixby, in the fierce admonishment of “Forest,” which pulls from an experience that literally hit close to home:
“So I live by this law firm, Larry H. Parker, and these lawyers were having a Christmas party in the office, but still having their regular business. An attorney that worked there was going to get fired from the firm. He was a partner and that didn’t sit well with him. He went home upset and came back up there shooting. He killed some people in there and himself. The attorneys he was after were at their other office down the street, on Atlantic and Roosevelt, they didn’t get it.”
It’s a grim sign of the times, a story that mires Nayla’s cut in a uniquely American brand of tragedy. It’s not so much foreign as less immediate, at least to many, but the community reckoning with the nature of the incident left an impression on her. “The neighborhood gossip was interesting, which inspired the song. Tragedy inspiring art. It was crazy because nothing usually happens in my little neighborhood.” Within this structure lies an intense emotional crux, and the feelings that underpin the harsh verses on the cut are steeped in seldom-invoked values, ones largely undercut by Nayla’s easy going demeanor. “I hardly have problems with people that can’t be resolved, but things that don’t sit right with me? I won’t fuck with you period. No gray area.”
Beyond the town of Bixby, the confines of the studio and the reach of LBCC, one particular space bleeds into her compositions: her bedroom, where tracks come together on the fly, moments of inspiration snowballing into vignettes and melodies. It’s not all that surprising that Nayla would be a self-professed “bedroom producer.” The intimacy of her lyrics, the comfort of her bars, the candid flow with which she wields them: all let on an artist comfortable with the personal and particular. She’s says been creating without intent these past few months, and whilst each and every unreleased effort helps crystalise her approach, it’s almost time that we get to hear them.
“Bixby was supposed to be a temporary stop, but it turned into a 5 year stint,” she says, looking back on time spent in the LBC. Life sure does have a funny way of working out: from the impulse that drove her to write those first rhymes to the feelings that made Bixby feel like home, Nayla has been both an active agent and a passive passenger in her musical journey. It’s a choice you make and a trip you take, sparked by spontaneity but steered by happenstance. She’s more happy with where she’s at.
“Bixby Beach means change, sedentary, relaxation and thoughts at the beach.”
It’s a trip we could all afford to take.