Breaking into the music industry is no easy feat. It’s ruthless and intimidating; even moreso if you’re a woman trying to do your thing and make a name for yourself.
Considering it’s International Womens Day, and we’re championing a bunch of badass women who are following their passions and dreams – no matter what others say – we wanted to introduce a young producer who’s just released her first single.
Tori Levett sat down with PEDESTRIAN.TV to chat about making music, taking criticism, and who inspires her to chase her dreams as a producer.
As someone who has always been a bit of a music geek, Tori found herself getting along to gigs more and realised that she wanted to be the one up there making others dance.
I had friends locally who started touring as DJs and I got to watch as they grew and got more of a profile, which I thought was awesome that they were doing something they were so passionate about and loved doing.
I bought decks, had a few lessons and for the past few years now I’ve been doing gigs around the place.
Tori’s love for being able to control and manipulate the music she’s playing in her DJ sets got her thinking about moving into making her own music. Falling into producing felt like a “natural progression” to her, and it allowed her to work creatively in ways that were new and challenging.
Coming from a childhood where she was surrounded by music and instruments – Tori played guitar and piano as a young kid, and was always the one showing her friends new music – learning to produce electronic music and train her vocals to work with the beats brought Tori back to developing skills she gained as a young musician.
Tori tells us that she’s heavily influenced by Halsey – an unapologetic woman creating music that celebrates loving and being true to yourself – and Tori draws a lot of inspiration from Halsey’s mantra of not listening to anyone that tries to put you down.
This is super important for me as I’ve always had people try to put me down about everything I have ever done, from Djing and making music to what I wear on the weekends.
I generally ignore the “girls can’t produce music” phrase. But I’ve had some harsh criticism and feedback from other musicians I respected trying to tell me what genre I should or shouldn’t be producing or not at all.
I don’t think anyone should be cornered into a genre, you should just make what you love. Music has to be an expression of yourself and I learnt that through process leading up to releasing ’Something Bad’. You just have to follow your instincts and see where it ends up.
Tori’s just dropped her first single, ‘Something Bad’ on Spotify, so hop to it and support women in Australian electronic music that are taking no shit from the boys club.
