Local artists promote self-acceptance
Sometimes accepting who you are is the best way to succeed.
This is the lesson learned from sisters Natalee and Alexa Falk, USU seniors in interdisciplinary studies, who went from the brink of success performing songs they were told to do and evolved into artists with their own personalities conveyed in their music. They are now a band named FALK, after their surname.
At 6 and 8 years old, the duo started a country group called “Two-stepping.” Natalee said they matured and started working with several different producers including John Deer, who has also worked with SheDaisy, a country music group founded by sisters Kristyn, Kelsi and Kassidy Osborn from Magna, Utah.
When Natalee and Alexa started working with Deer, he was also working with different artists in Brazil.
“He was working with this really big artist in Brazil, Vanessa Camarco, and was submitting songs for her album. He’d been writing with us, so we decided to submit some of ours as well as his own and ours was picked,” Alexa said. “This was when we were 8 and 10.”
The sisters had platinum hits in Brazil and were receiving a lot of media attention.
“It kind of happened on accident,” Alexa said. “Pretty soon we were in the entertainment business.”
Natalee was the youngest artist signed to the label and Alexa was tied to Michael Jackson. At the time, they were in the cross-over country genre, but the label wanted them to be more pop.
“There wasn’t really a cross-over category,” Alexa said. “Taylor Swift hadn’t come out yet, so they wanted us to be more Disney, more pop, more radio friendly.”
She said they had to ditch the country roots and venture into the Disney pop direction with head mikes and dance moves.
Eventually, the girls signed with a different management company that wanted them to be a pop-rock band.
“We recorded this album in Sweden,” Natalee said. “We became ‘Faces Without Names’ and did this east coast tour where we had the opportunity to work with a lot of producers and meet a lot of people.”
She said they developed great relationships with people in the business, but they were never 100 percent behind what they were doing.
“It didn’t feel like it was totally us,” Natalee said.
Natalee and Alexa spent about ten years being the “up-and-coming artists,” according to Natalee.
They were pulled out of school and were back and forth between Los Angeles, Nashville and Utah.
“We were trying to be normal kids, but we were always on the brink of becoming a success,” Natalee said. “Every time, right as it was going to happen, they would always want to dictate how we could look and sound and what we had to do – like if we had to dance on stage or have instruments.”
“It was more about marketing instead of music,” Natalee said. “We spent so much of our lives being almost famous.”
“Our friends were in the music business and were successful artists and producers and Nat and I were always back and forth between a normal life and being on the road,” Alexa said.
The heartbreak of never quite surpassing “almost famous” led the girls to enroll in college at a young age. Natalee graduated high school early and came to USU at 16 years old to work with Mike Christiansen in the guitar program.
While Natalee was progressing her instrumental technique in Cache Valley, Alexa began studying at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where both sisters had been accepted and recieved scholarships.
“John Mayer taught my songwriting class,” Alexa said.
She said the experience was surreal, but they decided to take a break from college to pursue another record deal that inevitably also fell apart.
“We hate the back and forth and being dictated – told what to do and how to sound,” Alexa said.
“We really weren’t behind what we were doing,” Natalee said. “We would put it out there and hope for the best, regardless of what happened or didn’t happen, we were still proud of the music and the material.”
They hit a breaking point when they were 15 and 16 years old.
“I wrote this song called ‘Deadly Beauty,'” Alexa said. “It was never really meant for our albums, it was more or less a song for myself.”
At the time, CosmoGirl magazine was having a songwriting competition and Alexa decided to submit the song. She said there was a three-month voting period and she ended up winning.
The song, which was meant as a side project, hit Salt Lake City radio station 97.1 ZHT and the response was overwhelming, Alexa said.
She said it was around that time that she and Natalee decided to go their own direction.
“Everyone we were working with told us we can’t put out certain music, we can’t put out ‘Deadly Beauty’ because it’s too serious, we can’t put out certain things because it’s not radio,” Alexa said.
Natalee said a lot of people in the music industry are just looking for what is going to hit on the radio.
“They use Christina Aguilera as an example,” she said. “You do what we want so then you can do what you want when you have that momentum. We don’t want to do that.”
“You have to get in the door and then you can go up and down the elevator,” Alexa said. “We wasted a lot of time trying to please other people.”
“Nat and I decided this wasn’t fun anymore – the process was hell,” she said. “If we’re going to do music and love it, we need to do it our way.”
Alexa said that was when they stripped everything and came back to USU.
“We’d rather play in coffee shops than do major tours with something we don’t like,” she said.
Their decision to accept themselves coincided greatly with the meaning and background of “Deathly Beauty.”
Alexa, who said she experienced the physical and emotional travails of an eating disorder, said she wrote the song to help and heal herself. She said she’s realized that “Deadly Beauty” – and other songs written with a personal background – are the ones listeners resonate with more.
“That’s when people are touched by your story,” Alexa said.
Aside from having experienced an eating disorder, she said almost every girl can relate to having self esteem issues.
“I think everyone has that feeling of not being good enough in some sense,” she said.
Natalee, who hasn’t ever personally struggled with an eating disorder, said she can still relate not only has a family member, but as someone who has experienced that kind of thought pattern an
d struggled with self-image.
“I think it’s something we’re all working on, to be better people, and to have a better frame of mind to where your thoughts empower you and don’t degrade you,” she said.
Since writing and producing “Deadly Beauty,” the Falk sisters have teamed up with the National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) based out of New York City. Along with being official ambassadors for NEDA, Alexa and Natalee are donating part of the proceeds from “Deadly Beauty” to the non-profit organization.
Last year, Falk performed on the Brooklyn Bridge for the NEDA walk.
“Lex and I are totally into the law of attraction,” Natalee said. “Back when we were ‘Faces Without Names’ and released this song, we had put the symbol of NEDA on this postcard.”
She said they had never had a connection to them and thought it would be cool to get a sponsorship if they ever found out about the song.
“I don’t know how it came about, but four years later I’m looking at my grandma’s fridge and I see this postcard and realize that we’re ambassadors for this organization,” she said. “It’s kind of a blur. From a painful experience, many cool things have come.”
“We’re hoping that every year we’ll come out with a song that keeps girls going,” Natalee said.
“Kind of an anthem,” Alexa said.
Natalee said what they’ve come to love about the experience is that they can relate to the girls who come to their shows.
“It’s really such a universal thing,” she said.
Natalee said now everything they promote has been carefully crafted.
“Everything we have on our album now, our artwork, our name, our look and our genre – it’s been hand selected and totally created by us.”
– natashabodily@gmail.com
Twitter: @Natasha627