Meet Tarune — TWENTY MINUTES LATER

Mar 31

Mar 31 Meet Tarune

Meet Tarune, although you’ve probably already seen him on TV. Tarune is the solo project of the multi-talented Giullian Yao Gioiello. While you can watch Gioiello on shows like “Scream,” “The Carrie Diaries,” and “Marvel’s Iron Fist,” you can also listen to his music on streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music. His two singles, “Goodnight Baby” and “Met a Girl,” are heartfelt and honest and everything that you could hope for a song to be. I got the chance to speak with Gioiello about his creative process, upcoming releases, and more.

YOU HAVE SUCH AN IMPRESSIVE ACTING RESUME. WHAT MADE YOU WANT TO START WRITING AND RELEASING MUSIC? HAS MUSIC ALWAYS BEEN A PART OF YOUR LIFE?

Yeah. It’s funny cause I’ve been acting for a long time, since I was a kid, but really my main hobby my whole life has been music. I used to sing in a Church. I’m actually Buddhist. I grew up singing at these meditations that me and my dad would go to. I’ve been writing music ever since I was eleven or twelve—really bad music obviously, and I had a couple of rock bands and did little shows as a teenager. Music has been such a massive part of my life for most of my life, and it was kind of surprising to me that I hadn’t really done anything professional with it. I had been recording music on my own for a long time. Last January, 2019, I came back from the New Year and was like, “I have ten versions of this song on my computer from the past five years. Let me record one that I feel really proud of and put it out.” That’s how I started doing this. It’s just that most of my life it was very private. But it was always where I put my personal and private impulses, and what I did at home late at night. If I had any kind of emotional experience or problem, I wrote a song about it. When I was acting, shooting a show called “Scream,” I found myself in Atlanta for three months. The first thing I did when I got there was buy a guitar on Amazon for 80 bucks. There’s a lot of downtime in acting, like waiting to be told to come in and work. I spent every second of that time writing, producing, and playing the guitar.

IS IT HARD TO BALANCE ACTING AND MUSIC? OR DO THE TWO ART FORMS INFLUENCE EACH OTHER?

Last year, when I released “Goodnight Baby,” I was like, “I’m going to take this way more seriously and maybe I’m going to have to give up acting for a little while.” And it's not that you have to do either, or only one, but I did notice myself needing to focus on music a little bit more. It depends what kind of person you are. I would say if you have a job in acting it’s great. Like I said, I was in most of the episodes of that show I just mentioned, and I still would have almost two weeks where I would be doing nothing in Atlanta with no friends or family nearby. It was almost like, “How could I not do music all the time?” But if you don’t have a job in acting, you’re doing a lot of auditions, which ends up being your day job. Right after I put my song “Met a Girl” out, I had to take a break from recording because I was having so many auditions for acting stuff. It's sort of like, as the balance sways, you find a way to balance things out. It's definitely possible. It's actually kind of a cliche now, that actors and actresses find themselves producing music, or at least writing it on their own, because we do end up having so much free time while we’re working on something.

HOW DID YOU LAND ON THE NAME TARUNE?

Tarune is actually my sanskrit name. It’s from this Buddhist group that I grew up a part of, so I decided to use that. I didn’t quite feel comfortable using a name that wasn’t something that I felt like people could call me.

WHAT DOES YOUR SONGWRITING PROCESS LOOK LIKE?

It's very casual. I find myself having trouble identifying with a more professional writing situation than I do with what I’ve grown up doing, which is like, I’m alone in my room and I feel something, so I start my voice memo on my phone. I have maybe one or two lines that I center the song around, and then I improvise until the inspiration is gone. For “Met a Girl,” which I put out a month ago, I went on a date with a girl, and I came back the next day like, “I gotta write a song about this.” I just put my voice memo on, grabbed my guitar off the wall, and I had this line, “I met a girl who was crazy and proud.” I wrote that song in about five minutes. I tend to record all of the impulses that come around an idea. I’ll do three or four voice memos minimum, maybe sometimes I’ll do more, like ten or twenty. Then I’ll sort of take a day, let them sit, and then the next day I’ll write down my favorite lines and refine them to have a bit more of a rhythm, or to match the feeling. It’s cool cause I’ll write about seventy percent of the final project in the first ten minutes, and then the last thirty percent will take anywhere from a day or a year. But the original idea is always quite ephemeral and based in an inspiring moment.

DO YOU PRODUCE YOUR OWN MUSIC?

I do. I’ve kind of been a bit too precious about it. I always find myself coming back to the idea of producing myself because a lot of people I look up to did that, at least in their first couple of albums. There’s just something about a self produced album that is incredibly sure in its vision. I love collaborating with people because you create all kinds of new things, but if you can produce, it’s really cool to find your sound on your own. Since I was ten or eleven, I was messing around on Garageband on my crappy computer with my friends. Logic Pro is what I use now, it’s basically just a much more complicated version of GarageBand. You can sort of teach yourself over time, I think a lot of people do that now. A big inspiration too, in terms of producing my own stuff, was seeing that Steve Lacy had done his EP on his iphone. I was just like, “There’s no fucking excuse.”

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR MUSIC TO SOMEONE WHO’S NEVER HEARD IT BEFORE?

People always ask for a genre, and I’m still figuring that out myself. My influences are James Blake minimal-electronic, and Bon Iver folk-electronic. I really love soulful vocals, and at the same time folky singer-songwritery stuff. It's somewhere in between. It's not quite that obvious in the two songs I’ve put out, which are both very folk-singer-songwriter songs that are a little bit experimental. I really like taking the folk sound, which has been done the same way for thousands of years, and warping that with the technology that comes out as it comes out—automated harmonies with pitch shifting/any kind of electronic warping that elevates the sound is what I try to go for. So again, if I was to say genre, I would say like folk-R&B- electronic-experimental. The tracks I have coming up are a lot more in the R&B realm, which is why I say R&B. I listen to a lot of Daniel Cesar, Frank Ocean, and Choker. Music to me is about taking an emotional, private, experience, and then sharing it as purely as possible, in a way that is enjoyable to the ears. That’s what I’m trying to do.

I LOVE THE TWO SONGS YOU HAVE OUT NOW. WHAT CAN WE EXPECT NEW MUSIC WISE?

I’m working on a song called “Paris Syndrome,'' which I wrote last March. It actually has a drum in it which is pretty exciting. I’ve got the next three or four songs, but I’m not sure if they’ll come out as singles over the next couple of months or as an EP. They’re definitely going to have a little more of a lift to them— more of a beat to vibe to. There’s a song I wrote a long time ago, called “Forget Me Tomorrow,” which I’m really excited to bring to a more modern vibe. They’re all sad bops, but the releases are all gonna be in the realm of folk-R&B. That’s the kind of world I’m going towards. I’m not saying people are going to get up and dance, but they’ve definitely got a little vibey thing going on that I’m excited to show and play. If you listen to the two singles I have out now, you probably think I hide away in a cabin somewhere. “Goodnight Baby” is a lullaby, and “Met a Girl'' is like a folk song from the 1800s. I wanted to put those out, and now I have a couple of songs that I think are a little more upbeat.

WHAT’S ONE QUESTION YOU WISH PEOPLE WOULD ASK YOU EITHER ABOUT YOURSELF OR YOUR MUSIC?

I guess just a comment on the self-producing thing. It’s really difficult to do all the stuff on your own. For example, it took a year for me to get “Met a Girl'' out after “Goodnight Baby.” At first I was like, “Let me do this on my own. It's always gonna be all me. And just share that with everybody, just me and my music.” I’m pretty much over the narcissistic thing. I’m excited to work with some people that can bring something new and different to my writing, and specifically to my production. Producing is a painstaking, detail oriented, torturous world of making the right choice and then sticking to it and hoping that your ears are trustworthy. It’s crazy. It's another world. But I really love tech. I studied coding and web design in school alongside acting. I’m really into computer and audio engineering, so I have that background, but I would say separately as a PSA to other musicians, “Don’t feel the need to produce for yourself.” When I work as an artist with a producer, it's really amazing to not think about producing and just focus on creating the sound I wanna make. So definitely don’t let that discourage you. I’m actually kind of speaking to myself.

WHO WOULD BE YOUR DREAM COLLABORATORS PRODUCTION WISE?

I’m a huge fan of Frank Ocean, as half the world is as well, so I would really love to work with Malay, who is his main partner in production. DJ Camper has produced a lot of my favorite songs, Daniel Cesar and H.E.R. are sort of my favorite R&B go to’s. And then I really love this guy Nick Hakim, who makes really incredible slow, minimalist, groovy stuff. I worked a little bit with a guy in his band, Joe Harrison, and that was just a dream. I would love to continue working with them. I want to find somebody who can really bring a little bit of the groove to slow, bedroomy, folk stuff and sort of find that middle ground.