After the release of her latest single, the LA-based singer-songwriter is ready for something fresh.
Aminta Skye was five years old when she and her family moved from Senegal to Eugene, Oregon. Trading the dry summers of West Africa for the perpetual rain of the Pacific Northwest was an adjustment, though being so young, she remembers little of that transition period. But moving to the United States did mean one thing for Skye, one thing that set her on a course for the rest of her life: for the first time, there was a TV in the house.
Flipping through the channels, Skye landed on Disney. “Hannah Montana” was airing, and a new episode was about to start. From the first note of the opening song, Skye became obsessed. The only thought in her brain, and the thought that would occupy her for years to come, she told me, was: “I have to be her.”
“Hannah Montana” might have planted the idea of being a musician in her head, but Skye’s upbringing also played a role. “I grew up around a lot of good music,” she said, citing her mother’s love for reggae and U2 as formative for her own taste now. And though most of her family members aren’t in the music industry, there was a general love for music around the house; some of her siblings play instruments as a hobby, and she and her sisters grew up dancing. Even beyond dancing, Skye explained she was “always writing songs from a young age, but I just didn’t realize that songwriting was its own thing.”
Sitting in a courtyard surrounding the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, Skye was clearly in her element. Like many of the green spaces at USC, the courtyard was overrun with squirrels; each time one approached—and boy did they get close—Skye was overjoyed and unnerved all the same, spinning (unconfirmable, unfortunately) tales of squirrels being imported and cross-bred with the local population to produce a special USC variety, resulting in the larger-than-average, almost cat-like squirrels that were surrounding us. Beyond the squirrels, over the course of an hour, Skye said or waved ‘hello’ to numerous people who passed by, all of whom greeted her in kind. “LA is awesome,” she said, noting people’s friendliness in the city. “I think I’ll probably live here for a long time.”
Although now in her final year at USC, Skye first moved to Southern California for a boarding high school. She attended Idyllwild Arts Academy in a mountain town about two hours east of LA to focus on songwriting. Before high school, she wanted to be a singer, thinking that “all songwriters were singers, and all singers were songwriters.” But being immersed in an arts-focused school, Skye realized that though singing and songwriting aren’t mutually exclusive, they are often regarded separately in the music industry. So she pivoted to honing her writing skills, while still performing and establishing herself as a singer.
“I got out a lot of bad music,” said Skye, laughing, about her time in high school. “I love songwriting as its own craft, and I love writing for other singers and in other genres than pop rock, which is like my project.”
Skye’s own music thus far has been classic pop punk, drawing on her lifelong love of Paramore and a childhood growing up in the Pacific Northwest, where artists such as Nirvana, Fleet Foxes, and Elliott Smith hailed from. Her latest song “Forget it All” evokes the sound and heart of artists such as Paramore and Avril Lavigne, as well as the non-conformity and lyricism of early Fall Out Boy. The lyrics reference the Greek myth of Perseus and Medusa, in which Perseus, the son of the Greek god Zeus, is tasked with killing the snake-haired Medusa, whose gaze turns people to stone. Skye’s lyrics reimagine the story, so instead of slaying her, Perseus begs Medusa for her mercy. “Better to become a statue and feel nothing at all, even to lose the good memories, than to endure the pain of a broken heart,” Skye said in an interview with The Luna Collective.
Skye is inspired by the self-investigative lyrics of her favorite artists, such as Paramore, The 1975, Jeff Buckley, and Taylor Swift. “I definitely relate to [them] with my writing style,” she said. “I approach songwriting as interrogating and investigating yourself even in a story or a memory, like where you stood even when you’re wrong.”
The lyrics come to her in tandem with the sound or rhythm of the song, and she joked that people who write lyrics with nothing attached “need to be locked up.” For Skye, writing a song without considering rhythm is a near-impossible task. “Where do you want the internal rhymes? Rhythmically? Yeah, that’s the other thing, rhyme and rhythm. No rhythm—that is not an ethnic way to [write songs].”
As a queer, Senegalese-American woman, and self-described leftist, Skye’s life experiences and worldview play an unspoken role in her approach to music. “There’s so much cognitive dissonance in a worldview that’s inherently exclusionary because we are so complex individually, and contradictory and multifaceted,” Skye said. “And I feel like queer people, because we already don’t fit into a certain societal standard, have done so much questioning of ourselves and introspection and [had] those hard conversations in the mirror [that are] so helpful and key to being a creative and being a songwriter. I think creatives are very queer and I think queer people are very creative, because sexuality and gender [are] creative.”
One of the biggest surprises, and a full-circle moment that Skye experienced as a burgeoning musician was the realization that all of her favorite artists were influenced by Black musicians in some way, whether it be The 1975’s guitarist Adam Hann pursuing his craft because of a love of funk music, or Jeff Buckley’s biggest idol being Nina Simone. This realization was validating for Skye, who grew up feeling the need to justify the space she occupied in the punk scene as someone of African descent.
Although Skye’s foundation is pop punk, the singer-songwriter is looking forward to a new era of emotion and sound in her music. Where Skye’s previous music bared her soul to listeners, she describes the new era as “smile, cheeky and friendship.” She said she’s excited to lean more into pop music traditions, focus on melody, and make music that’s “a bit more upbeat and fun”—not that she’s entirely leaving her roots, though, as she still cited Avril Lavigne as an inspiration for her next step.
Besides taking a new step tonally with her songs, Skye aims to release music more frequently than her previous “one song a year.” Simultaneously, as a senior at USC, she’s looking to make the most of her last few months in the program. “I’m trying to be present, look around, and have a good time and not stress out about the future,” she said. Skye explained that she circumvents anxiety about what’s ahead by imagining herself in the future and looking back on herself in the present. In the future she’s rich and successful, living in the home of her dreams and pursuing her creative passions for a living. She doesn’t have to worry about the present, then, because as she said, “I’ve already made it.”
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