By Tara Thompson
If you’re looking for new music to listen to you came to the right place. Caleb Rippee is our school’s latest up-and-coming artist. Caleb would describe his music as experimental. “I kinda like to experiment with all sorts of different stuff, primarily I like rock and metal… lots of ambient kinda things.”
Caleb first started making music when he was very young, “before I had a proper phone.” His cousin had a launchpad app he would use to mess around with, that would pre-make music. “I really enjoyed making stuff like that, using that to create kinda this dubstep electronic stuff, it was pretty bad but, it was kinda the start you know? It was the only way I knew how to make music.”
He got his first guitar on Christmas of 2019, a gift from his parents he would never forget. “It was this kinda cheap like acoustic guitar, kinda off brand, it was called Rogue acoustic guitars. I remember using that.” After his parents got him that guitar he started investing in his own, with his own money. “After the first acoustic one I got, I’ve gotten all the guitars and stuff since then. Counting the acoustic I have 4 guitars. 2 of them are acoustics 2 of them are electrics.”
Music has always been a part of Caleb’s life, ever since he was young. “That’s kinda what got me into rock and stuff is’ cause’ I realized later in my life that all of these songs I’ve grown up listening to them without realizing it, so it just has like such a nostalgic quality. Music has definitely always been affecting my life. Even when I was like in elementary school, I loved music very much and it’s always become such an obsession for me.”
Caleb’s main inspiration for pursuing music is a band named Breaking Benjamin. “When I first started listening to them I just fell in love with their music you know, and I would remember watching like videos they would make of them like just hanging out as a band and all this other stuff and I was like I wanna do that.”
The qualities of a great musician, according to Caleb, are measured by “their willingness to experiment with different styles.” He went on to say that “some of the greatest musicians stuck to one genre and were really good at that one genre… Good musicians can be great in one genre and great musicians can be great in multiple genres.”
Caleb also strongly agrees that “songwriting and lyric writing are two very different things. A lot of times lyrics, for me at least, can be improvised to fit the song or I’ll have like poems I’ve written and I form the song around the lyrics, so it really just depends. There are a lot of artists that are really good at writing songs but really bad at writing lyrics or vice versa… A lot of times there’s really cool music and then the lyrics are some of the dumbest things you’ve ever heard in your entire life.”
The best piece of advice Caleb ever got was from a man named James C. Burns who was mostly known for being a voice actor for Call of Duty. “I had asked because I was really struggling with second guessing myself and knowing whether my stuff was good and he said you have to decide for yourself what good is, make music that means something to you not to other people, and that’s something I think a lot of modern music lacks is people writing for themselves or writing for the passion of it, ‘cause when you write music for other people its harder to see yourself in it.”
The best piece of advice Caleb can give to new songwriters, is to “write music that you want to hear that’s not out there. If there’s some type of music you want to hear that doesn’t exist just make it yourself.”
beniciapaw.com 