Baileyrp Looks Towards the Future
Photos by Jacob Silverman
The best things in life come unexpectedly. At least that was the case for 26-year-old Bailey Panzeca, known professionally as Baileyrp. Panzeca makes music like you’ve never heard before. Self-described as “beep boop calculator music” in her Instagram bio, her album, _Everything, is composed of the layered whirs of multiple Teenage Engineering Pocket Operators she bought off Facebook Marketplace not too long ago. Through the noise, her lamentations of heart break and devotion are raw, yet packaged as these perfect little pop songs. There’s a sense of comfort in her music, each listen of the album feels like falling in love, going through a breakup, driving aimlessly when you don’t know what to do, staring at the ceiling, people watching on a park bench, and falling in love with life again – all in a tight 27 minute package.
This spontaneity in sound is no accident. Panzeca has a lifelong love for music, debuting the Baileyrp moniker over a decade ago and graduating from music school trying to turn that passion into a career. _Everything is Panzeca’s debut album, released in August, and has been garnering attention online thanks to her strategic marketing on TikTok and Instagram. The live renditions Panzeca has posted daily since before the album’s release inspired her to record and drop a remix album appropriately titled, _Everything, re-imagined, a month after the original’s release. These renditions are more stripped back than the studio recordings, often just Panzeca singing over a few Pocket Operator loops and a guitar; as if you’re sitting on the couch with her – a close friend showing you her new song.
What strikes me most about Panzeca and her music is the authenticity. I first discovered her while scrolling through Instagram reels and finding myself captivated by a live rendition of the song, “Enough,” where she added a tremolo effect to the vocals and guitar. The comments on the post were all over the place, one user critiquing the effect as, “the wrong choice,” to which Panzeca responded saying there is no ‘right choice’ in music. That’s my kind of person. Other comments compared her style to the likes of Imogen Heap, Panchiko, and Radiohead. Upon seeing she was based in Colorado, I immediately reached out for an interview.
We met on the eve of the fall equinox in the mountain town of Nederland, which proved to be a bit of a mistake as we were caught in the mob of eager ‘leaf peepers’ looking to get their first glimpse of the changing autumnal colors. This felt fitting as much of the aesthetic of _Everything is based in lush shades of green, while the lyrics talk about change and moving on after a breakup. Change is something Panzeca is quite accustomed to as I’d come to find out.
“I'm Bailey, I've been making music for like 11 years now. I grew up in a musical family so my dad played the guitar and he's the one who kind of got me into it. I asked him to teach me a few chords and I took it from there; that was probably when I was 15. I went to college for music production and since then I've just been doing customer service stuff and music on the side. I took kind of a long break from posting it, but I’ve been making music the whole time. Just recently I started to get back into it because I realized that I had made all these songs, so I kind of made my album by accident. Like I made the songs on purpose, but I didn't really intend to do an album. That's where I'm at. I put that stuff out and now I feel like this is the first time I'm going really hard actually trying to do music as a career, and I have the clearest vision that I've had.”
What about this personal renaissance in music made it feel like now is the time to like go all in on it – like why does this feel different than all the other times?
“I think I've just gone through a lot of personal growth since graduating college. I was in a relationship and when we broke up is when I started posting my stuff more. I think I realized that I just wasn't putting myself out there in the way that I could be and I had a lot of growth to do when it came to confidence. That was a huge thing for me and now I feel like I'm there more so than I have been.”
It’s interesting to hear you talk about confidence as a major reason behind putting out music because I feel like it takes so much to put yourself out there, not only just through music, but to promote it on social media – was that part of the challenge in getting the album out?
“Yeah, for sure. On TikTok I always get these videos that are like, ‘you need to post 500 times a day to be successful,’ and I never wanted to do that. This goes all the way back to high school when I made my name Baileyrp instead of my real name because I didn't want the people who followed me in real life to see all the videos that I was posting. I didn't want someone to come up to me and talk to me about it because I would just feel weird. So I had to really get past that embarrassment and started posting and not looking at comments or how many likes it was getting. And the more I did that, the easier it got.”
So, the album – first I wanted to specify, how is the title stylized, is it ‘underscore Everything?’
“Yeah, ‘underscore Everything.’ And actually, I'm gonna give you a secret, it comes from one of my lyrics.”
On the opening track, “Four Years,” Panzeca sings, “They all say they're just feelings, they'll fade / But I'm always afraid / It underscores everything.”
On “Four Years,” right?
“Yes, glad you caught it! There's a certain feeling that underscores the whole album, that was my intention with the underscore. Plus, it also makes it feel more ‘digital,’ and my album kind of falls in that genre.”
Earlier you mentioned that the means in which the album came together weren't necessarily intentional, but I think the way you describe there being a feeling or ethos that underscores everything on the album is really accurate, so at what point in the music making process did you know this collection of tracks was going to be an album?
“So it was a whole thing where I went through the breakup and I had this brief period of time where I was working a seasonal job as a transitional thing because I didn't have my own place yet, and I realized I was kind of just there to recuperate. But then I was like, well, I have all these songs, what am I going to do next? Why not put out an album? It just made sense.”
I notice a lot of themes of heartbreak and breakups so it makes sense that the album was inspired by that. What does that idea of heartbreak or breakup mean to you as artistic fuel?
“I guess I do use my heartbreak a lot as fuel for my songwriting and creative stuff. But I also think that using it for my songwriting is interesting because I almost can't say how I feel until I put it into a song. And then I listen to the song and I'll be like, wait, that's actually so true. Even though it just came out. It's like someone else talking to me and I'm writing it down and then I have to read it back and process it. I think that whole process helps me grow and helps me learn. Not all the songs are just about the other person either, they’re also about myself and how I am in relationships, and it just helps me get a better vision of what actually happened and brings me back to reality where I can also kind of go into outer space with the songwriting stuff. That's my space where I can just do that, so in real life I can be more grounded. It just helps me process everything.”
That totally makes sense, I guess on a more personal level, how are you feeling about the heartbreak now that the album is out?
“Feeling better. It's kind of tricky because we're still on good terms, so it was rough for a while and I'm still obviously processing a lot of stuff, but I'm in a good place now. It's been nice putting my songs out and having people relate to them is super helpful too.
Did you start making the album or the songs on it right after your breakup?
“I made them during the relationship/while the breakup was happening. While it was impending, I guess.”
Has this other person heard the album?
“Yeah, well I don't know. She knows it exists. She told me she can't watch my videos so I don't know if she's listened to the songs.”
It takes a sense of vulnerability on both sides to grieve and process these things, especially on a very public scale.
“Yeah, for sure. I was like, ‘You can block me if you need to. It's fine.’ It makes sense.”
Did you have any second thoughts about releasing some of these songs?
“Yeah, and there's a couple songs I didn't release, but ultimately I decided that if I didn't release any of them, I would be hurting myself, or holding myself back in a sense.”
Panzeca fiddled with her Pocket Operators through much of our time together in Nederland. I didn’t ask but I could only assume she was working on something, playing old loops, or just having fun with the machines.
I learned more about her in this time too. She’s originally from Ohio but moved around a bit before settling in Colorado for her relationship. She currently works at a coffee shop where she watches the regulars line up five minutes before the store opens. She’s looking towards the future, trying to book shows and working on collaborations with people she’s met on the internet. Her Instagram following seems to grow by hundreds everyday and she sold out her first run of _Everything CDs the day they dropped. Despite all of this, the attention doesn’t seem to be getting to her. She remained composed and curious – asking Audrey and I about ourselves, laughing at my jokes, putting up with my sporadic style of photography. I tend to get nervous before any interview and in the few hours we spent with Panzeca, I felt like I got to know her pretty well. A shared excitement for art and the future radiated through each new location we hit.
_Everything was equally inspired by 2hollis and Ed Sheeran, with hints of Mk.gee in the mix. I even saw Panzeca jokingly referred to as Ms.gee in the comment section of one of her ‘re-imagined’ posts. Listening back to older Baileyrp tracks, the recent shift to embrace electronic sounds becomes apparent. Tracks like “Bluff” lean heavily into autotune and vocal pitch shifting, while the lengthy “You Win” is built off droning synth sounds and trap inspired drums. The whole album stays true to the “beep boop calculator music” mantra Panzeca coined, but never strays from her natural songwriting capabilities.
Tell me about the decision to lean more into digital aesthetics on this project.
“I think it mostly had to do with my decreasing attention span, which I think a lot of people are having because of social media. I used to be super into making really slow, Phoebe Bridgers type stuff – and then I still like that music – but I honestly just couldn't focus. And so bringing in the drum beats just keeps me locked in – it's because of my attention.”
Do you still spend the same amount of time producing a song or feeling out the album as you feel like you used to?
“Honestly, no, I don't think so. I think that I've learned to be more decisive. I used to spend a lot of time tweaking the same thing over and over and making it sound worse and then just throwing it away. So I think that I've learned to be more decisive, which actually cuts down on my time.”
You also released _Everything, re-imagined recently, when did that come into the equation?
“That came into the equation after the TikToks started blowing up and they got people to listen to the album. But the ‘produced’ versions of my album, I don't know how I would play them live because I kind of did some weird stuff on there. So I had to come up with new versions to do live and then people really liked those versions and they wanted those versions on Spotify. So I did that.”
What's different about making these more stripped back versions of the songs compared to the fully produced ones?
“I think they feel more raw, vulnerable. They're less produced, obviously, so I think the emotion comes through more. The guitar is a lot more prominent. I don't even know if I have guitar on a lot of my album, which is interesting because guitar is my main thing. They're a lot more straightforward to record because they're live versions so I can just play it live and record it. The produced versions are much more tedious – I have to go in and chop stuff up and rearrange it.”
If I had to describe the artistry of Baileyrp in one word, it would be versatile. In addition to her music, Panzeca showed us a Pokemon Snap style game based on the Cambrian era that she started as a thesis project. To this day she’s finding new ways to reinvent the songs off _Everything by switching up arrangements and even recreating each of her songs in Minecraft. If you’ve ever been obsessed with a specific live rendition of a song, you’ll understand the feeling that these kinds of recreations invoke. For someone who can scale the spectrum of the hardest hitting electronic contemporaries to the biggest names in popular music, Panzeca has still found a way to carve out a niche for herself – fueled by her lived experiences, tenacious work ethic, and love for the art she creates.
_Everything, _Everything, re-imagined, and _Everything else, the final set of recreations, are available to stream everywhere. You can keep up with Bailey on Instagram and TikTok @baileyrpmusic. Thanks to Bailey for talking with us!
Interview and photo assistance from Audrey Jane.