At Take Magazine, we take music seriously, regularly featuring New England’s coolest, most unusual and most diverse set of musicians and music-adjacent artists. In the past two years of publishing, we’ve brought you everything from Grammy-award winning pop stars to musicians crafting their own experimental instruments. As the music industry reinvents itself, and people continue to subvert and transcend genre classification, we promise to continue to scour basement shows, online forums, and music festivals for the region’s best.

In the meantime, we’re upping our music game to bring new music right to your ears. Each time we feature a musician, we are going to ask them what they’re listening to and then create a playlist for that artist on our Take Spotify channel. Though not all the artists on these playlists are from New England, several New Englanders have already made the cut. For example, Vermont’s own bedroom pop crooner Bella Ortiz-Wren, aka bella, shared a Ruth Garbus track on their playlist. Garbus is also a super confessional dreamy pop crooner from Vermont like Ortiz-Wren…who knew there were so many!

Some of these playlists feel like a personalized mixtape (see The Rap Scholars‘ playlist or the picks from Home Body), while others are lists of full albums from different artists. Either way, you’re guaranteed to hear something new or fun and familiar.

In addition to these custom playlists from featured artists, Take Magazine staff curated a playlist of some of our favorites. The strange diversity of tracks on the Staff Picks playlist mirrors the eclectic tastes of our staff as a whole. You’ll find catching pop tunes from New England heroes, classical chamber music, sad bastard indie, neo soul, and much more. We’ll be adding more tracks to the playlist each week, so be sure to check on it frequently.

But wait there’s more. We want to know what you’re listening to as well.

Submit your favorite songs right now to pr@takeindustries.com email or get us on any social media platform with the hashtag #heytakealisten with an artist name and the title of the track you’re currently obsessed with. Check our Spotify channel soon and see if your pick made it on our list. Extra points for New England bands and songs we haven’t yet heard.

Playlists From Across New England

The Rap Scholars

David Seidel aka Mysterybear

bella

Soggy Po’ Boys

Jenn Van West

Molly Brown

Home Body

Top image: Hannah Mohan of And the Kids, featured on our staff Spotify playlist | Photo by Montgomery Sheridan

The post Take a Listen: A Spotify Playlist Just for You appeared first on Take Magazine.

Bella Ortiz-Wren is the resonant, inviting voice behind bella. Their most recent release, Wild Rose, continues bella’s honestly dreamy, low-fi bedroom tunes but in a bigger way, featuring longer songs, more tracks, and a bit more musical urgency and variety.

Wild Roses cover art by Bella Ortiz-Wren

Wild Rose invites listeners in for a peek at something familiar and revealing, like that small handmade gift living on your best friend’s shelf, or the edges of a love note emerging from a passing stranger’s journal. Undoubtedly, Ortiz-Wren engineered a unique sound and poetic diction for Wild Roses, though their approach mirrors other musical acts that fit into the “bedroom tunes” genre. What makes bella different is their precise use of these select sounds melding with their candid intimacy to create a signature poetic paring of music and storytelling.

For Ortiz-Wren, songwriting is not a linear craft. It functions not only as a means of expression but also as a way to process complex feelings about love, loss, and identity, “I would see writing songs as a form of journaling. I’ve never kept a journal, but I can track different memories, experiences, or feelings through the songs I’ve written,” says Ortiz-Wren. “It almost feels like a necessity.” This honesty and transparency is present in every note sung by Ortiz-Wren and in every echoing guitar cord.

In addition to the simple yet universal narratives embedded in these songs about unrequited love, the wilderness, and queer feelings, Ortiz-Wren writes about the complexities associated with being mixed race in the United States. Themes of reckoning with this specific identity are throughout Wild Rose and, according to the artist, are especially apparent in the song “siempre dejo algo,” the only track where Ortiz-Wren sings in Spanish. “That song is about this experience of floating in between these two places and not feeling very grounded in that position,” says Ortiz-Wren. “I think there are a lot of people who are biracial or bi-cultural who have the same experience of erasure or scrambling to scrape [together] what it means to have a mixed identity. I’m expressing a loss, and I’m not sure what that loss is.”

Bella Ortiz-Wren, singer/songwriter – bella
Marlborough, Vermont
Bandcamp
Facebook

Top photo Bella Ortiz-Wren of bella | Photo by Willa Chandra

The post A Wild Rose From bella’s Bedroom appeared first on Take Magazine.