From Church Choir to Solo Artist: Meet Gaia Onlxne

24-year-old Artist Gaia Loraine, grew up with the love for music. She started writing as a ten year old. Eventually, She started her musical journey as a church choir, later she moved into traditional choir, starting her music career. She likes to capture human emotions and express herself through her works. As a young artist, she likes to play with different kinds of sounds and music. After she got into the Hofstra University Audio production program, her music career truly started.  

We spoke to Gaia Onlxne, the artist of her new single “L of the year”, to know more about her journey.

Tell us about your journey as an artist.

My name is Gaia Onlxne. I’ve been making music for about four years now. I have been musically inclined since I was little. 

I grew up in church choir and then I eventually moved on to traditional choir and then I did shows, so like music’s always been in me, and then I decided I wanted to take a more realistic approach and that’s what led me to audio production. But I just knew a lot of cool people and I ended up working. I’ve worked a lot of odd jobs. So for a while I worked at Applebee’s as a hostess, and people complimented me and it just stuck and then like two to three engineers later and two different stage names later, here I am.. 

What inspired you to become an artist?

I’ve been writing music since I was ten, but in terms of like, I never thought I was gonna do anything with it to be honest. 

I’ve always been really closed off with talking about feelings and so initially music started as an outlet for me to try to learn how to, I guess feel that sounds, I hope that doesn’t sound too robotic. But, you know, and then I had really always appreciated the way that music seemed to capture intense human emotion in a way that maybe you don’t get from a picture or that you don’t even just get from reading something. And I just wanted to be able to create that for myself as a means of escape and then it ended up becoming something that I gained skill in and that I ended up realizing I could do something with. 

Honestly, when I first started recording music, it was just to teach myself how to be able to get to a point where I would understand my own feelings. I guess self-actualization was always the goal. Having a career was like a happy accident. 

How did you get into music professionally?

It’s kind of like just the same thing. I was already going to Hofstra for audio production, so I was going to school to become an acoustic engineer regardless. I was gonna be a sound engineer in this field regardless. But in terms of the specification and music, that just kind of came because I loved music. 

I showed people that I’ve been writing songs for a long time. I showed one of my friends at that time, a snippet of something I was working on and he just encouraged me to come and record it with him. And then kind of the rest was history. I just realized I had an act for it. 

Can you describe your sound & genre? Has it evolved over the years?

Oh, absolutely. I would say the biggest thing about my sound is nonconforming. I’m going to probably choose 10 different genres before you can put me in a box. Like I’m gonna do everything because one, I’m 24, so I’m young. “There’s so much time to figure out what I want”, my goal quote to be with this. I think right now I’m just more in the business of I’m really trying to figure out my limitations as a person and as an artist. and I think that the way that my sound has evolved is really based on that. Like, I’m going to push myself to sound different. 

So, let’s say I did a rock song out of nowhere for whatever reason, maybe it might not come out, but guess what? Maybe now I’ll do a country Western song, just because I can. And you might not hear the rock song, but you might hear the country song and you might not hear those steps of those steps of evolution, but they’re all to like the way I create. 

And so I just see the way I kind of bounce off walls for lack of a better word. and it pushes me to find pockets and spaces that maybe the conventional mind wouldn’t see or even me in a conventional mindset, I wouldn’t have seen. 

Can you walk us through your creative process?

Uh, like writing a song, music video, because there’s different things, because I kind of do everything, unfortunately. I think it’s kind of just that I’m blessed. Writing music is not easy. I don’t have that problem. 

Lyricism, I was a poet before anything. I learned what a stanza was, when I was in when I was six years old. You know, I remember learning how to read with my grandmother before I went to school, words were always a part of me and they spoke to me deeply. 

And then the more I understood language as a whole and like, you know, not just proper sensitive structure and things like that, but also the ways that you can utilize different words and language and you might think that two things are synonymous, but you use two words that you think are synonymous and they have two completely different meanings. And so I think for me, the biggest thing is one, I need to like listen through to an instrumental or find, like a beat or something whichever I end up calling it that day to make me feel supported, to make me feel like, okay, I have something I can base this off of. And then I’ll do one of two things. 

Either, depending on how much I feel the instrumental, sometimes I’m just really lucky and it flows like water and it just comes up very naturally, of course, you know, I reflect uh, like looking back to make sure, okay, do I repeat any lyrics? Does this sound too simple? Can we add any, uh, like anything more in depth in terms of metaphors or things like that? 

How do I want to do the composition? Because I also compose the vocal elements. Like I think of the vocal elements as I’m writing the song. 

So I might want background vocals here. I might want to add an additional layer here. I might do something I might ask for a beat switch right here. 

So it’s active, like jumping around. But I guess like in that way, um the lyrics and everything kind of just flows, and then the other option is that I have to think about it. And usually when I have to think about it, it’s like I need an idea. 

So in that case it’s like if I’m stumped, I might be like, okay. uh, I actually wrote a song not too recently about, uh interview with a vampire, which is like a really popular show on Amazon. I didn’t know what to write about. And so I used the allegory within the show as a way to describe how I feel in the active social performance, like trying to be a normal person and he has this great line, that’s like, I’m your unwilling devil. 

And I was like, and now I have to base an entire song around that. So sometimes it’s like something as simple as one line might build an entire song and then other times it’s more like it just kind of flows together naturally and everything just builds off each other in a way that is cohesive and it comes out really cool. 

What challenges have you faced in your artistic career, and how have you overcome them?

Confidence is the biggest one. Self-esteem. 

But then I also think that just the work is not hard, but the consistency is. You have to show up every day, so you might not feel like yourself on certain days. On most days, you know, I’m just a normal human being. 

In fact, most of these people don’t know I make music and I don’t tell them because they don’t need to  pay attention to me. I’m here to blend in. I do that when I go home. 

Like when I’m out of school, but I think specifically taking up the space to feel like I can take that center role has been so hard. I’m someone who’s always been a leader in the sense of telling people what to do. I’m not the person doing it. 

Like, you know, I’m very good at group projects. That’s why I wanted to do engineering. You know, I’m good at managing a session, I’m good at editing software at putting things the way I know they’re supposed to be. but trusting that I could be the person doing it. 

Like I could be the person that’s getting recorded instead of the person editing or I could be the person that’s showing up instead of being told what to do when they show up. That was a really hard transition for me because I always really understood myself as a background character. I saw myself as someone that was meant to be not seen or heard, to be honest. 

I was kind of supposed to just fall into the dark and just work within the shadows. And so teaching myself kind of not only how to step into the limelight, but to feel at home in it too, like really taking being musically inclined and like putting my art out there seriously and to take myself seriously was probably most of the difficult things out in general, because it applies deeper. It helps me in more than just my career. 

It’s essential to me everywhere. 

How do you handle creative blocks?

creative bumps? Just change. 

I just changed my perspective. So if I can’t write, then I’m not forcing it. I will sit here and you know what? 

I’m gonna do what I can do. I’m gonna listen to inspiration. I’m gonna read some books. 

There’s no point in trying to force yourself to do something if you know you’re not capable. I’ll force myself to show up in other ways, so what if I can’t write, okay, I’ll do beat selection, talk to my manager, what do we have planned for the next, like few weeks, you know, in terms of planning in terms of productions in terms of like, I have a project that I’m in the process of releasing. I have a music video, an additional music video coming out sometime in May. 

So, if I can’t be a writer, then I’m going to do something else. If I’m overwhelmed with producing, I’m going to go be an artist, and if I can’t do either, I’m gonna go be me. 

What’s the most meaningful piece you’ve created, and why?

So, but the most meaningful piece of I would say there is a song I have that is called The Heart and I have created it at a songwriting camp called from like a group called creative space. 

Sorry, it’s been like a year and a half, so I was actively trying to remember, but it’s a creative space. and there were like 25 writers, 25 producers. and I had gotten the heart from the beat, the instrumental from a beat pack. It wasn’t even something that we submitted for like the day’s work that we had done there. This was just something I wanted personally. 

Like I had submitted it, but it was kind of very obvious that the person who was running it, they weren’t feeling it. I think they straight up told me like I didn’t have a hook or something. And so I ended up just keeping it because I was like, all right. 

Like, if you don’t see that this is gold, that’s fine. I’ll keep it. 

I had, you know, I got a lot of things out of the mud and I did not have a lot of support in a lot of different ways. And so I just the song represented the transformation of understanding that that little girl who felt so alone and so in the dark could become a bright shining star. My SSLurred, but I could become a bright shining star, so bright that honestly, I light up my own world. 

I felt so dark and alone for a long time. I felt like I really didn’t have anyone to listen to me, and I think that’s where music came from. Like the need to feel listened to, even if it’s by like a pen and a paper is sad as that sounds. 

Do you have any new releases coming soon? 

I have a couple things. 

I’m working on um I think the biggest thing is like I said I have a project coming up soon so that is set to come out by the summer and we’ll leave that there. 

But I know that I have a new single called Need that me and one of my closest friends, she’s like a dear sister to me. She also engineers my work, she’s fantastic and amazing.. We have a song in a music video called Need, that’s coming out in May and it’s a really fun little cute song. As someone that likes to kind of be more introspective, I don’t put out. I didn’t decide to put it out. 

I’ll make a lot of music when I’m having fun, but I haven’t decided. I’m going to have fun. 

This is a really fun song and maybe it’s not deep and maybe it’s a little cliché, but I’m excited!!

What advice would you give to aspiring artists? 

I don’t think I should be giving them advice. 

I feel like we’re all in the same boat. I don’t think I’m in a place yet where I should be telling anyone what to do other than just, show up. Because literally the whole reason I’m here is because I’m as fortunate as I am to be here with you right now because I showed up, even if I didn’t think that it would go anywhere every single time I didn’t think it would matter. I just showed up anyway. Every single time I didn’t think anyone would care or no one would notice if I was there, I wasn’t. 

I just showed up. Like what’s the worst that could happen? They don’t want you there? Oh well, then you’ll leave. So, my advice is this. One, don’t listen to anyone that wants to give you advice. unless they’re in a place that you personally want to be in, you have nothing to gain from listening to people who share your perspective. 

Because a lot of times they’re talking from a place of desires that they’re not acting on or a place of regret that they’re living in. And then simultaneously, like I said, the most important thing, just show up. Like what’s the worst that could happen?