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 Music Spotlight: Alison Sudol

New year, new you, same Music Spotlight. This week we’re highlighting singer, songwriter, and actress Alison Sudol. You may recognize this triple threat from 2016′s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them as well as its more recent sequel, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald.

We talked to her about what it’s like having so many career oaths, what her newest music means to her, and listened to her open up about her struggles with anxiety and depression. 

What’s it like to have such separate music and acting careers? How do you balance your life between the two? 

It’s definitely a challenge, trying to balance two careers. They each feed and challenge me in different ways, and I’ve found that going from one to another makes me much more creatively fulfilled than if I just focused on one. Thankfully, I have an incredible team who work together beautifully so the overlap is generally kept to a minimum. 

What I have learned from doing it for some time now is that sometimes you have to make sacrifices in one field to give the other the attention it needs. I’ve been very focused on acting for a while now, and now it’s time for music. I think the most important part of creating balance, though, is doing what I can to stay grounded personally. Slowing down, taking care of my body, taking deep breaths—these little acts of self-care keep me from turning into a total stress-ball. Oh, and CBD.  

What inspired you to create music about mental health, particularly anxiety and depression?

I’m particularly connected to my songs about anxiety and depression at the moment, because when I wrote them, I was in a fairly dark place and really didn’t know what was going on with me. I wrote about the things I did because I had to. I was trying to figure stuff out that really didn’t make sense at the time. Writing has always been a kind of therapy for me. I had a lot to work through at the time, and I felt so lost. The melodies coaxed words out of me, out of my subconscious more than anything else, and it took me a long time to process what I had written. It becomes meditative, when you sing words again and again. The meaning shifts and changes, depending on my mental state at the time, but each time, I find myself untangling a little more of the mystery.  

How did you deal with your anxiety and depression? Any advice for those going through it? 

I didn’t know [I had anxiety and depression], not for a long time. I was afraid to admit that I was having a hard time, even to myself. When I finally sought help, it was because I felt like I was going crazy and I didn’t know what else to do about it. I couldn’t stop crying, I couldn’t pull myself together and I couldn’t see a way out of it. For a while, I took a mild antidepressant and started doing more intensive therapy. The antidepressant gave me the energy and strength to dig into things in my past that were causing a lot of the depression, which I hadn’t been able to get into before without disassociating. 

It was life-changing. But then the antidepressant started to give me intense anxiety. I started taking medicine for that too. That got to be a bit of a mess, especially when a third medication was prescribed to help even out the other two. What I’ve learned is that it’s really important to be on the right stuff, and have the right people advising you. It may take some work to get there.  What was right for me for 8 months turned out to not be right in the long run, but those months were incredibly important. I made countless changes to my life, breaking old patterns and choosing healthier behaviors across the board, and as a result, my mental health state improved greatly. 

The best advice I have for you is to follow your instincts around your wellbeing—find ways of creating quiet space in your day to check in with yourself. Learn how to listen to your body. Cultivate friendships that support your health, and your friends’ health in return as well. Find a good doctor who can talk to you. Get a counselor of some sort, if you can. 

Most importantly, just know if you’re suffering from mental health issues, there is no shame in it, or in asking for help.

Based on your musical journey so far, what’s your biggest takeaway so far?

Trying to be “perfect” is a gigantic waste of time. Mistakes are human, and we all need to see others embrace their own humanity so we can embrace our own. Also, stop trying to please everyone, and make something that makes your body hum with joy instead.  

If there was one thing you could change about the music world today, what would it be?

It’s a shrinking business, and there’s a lot of fear in it these days, which leads to people being very invested in keeping things familiar and easily assimilable. There’s a great affection for things which fit in boxes, which make people feel safe. I wish that we could strip off the sticky shiny vanilla veneer that is slapped on most popular music and go back to a time where you could hear a person’s soul in their songs.

So much music to me sounds like plastic these days. It all sounds like it was written by a couple of dudes in a windowless room in Santa Monica or some fancy song-factory in Sweden. I just wish people would take more risks and stop trying to sound like each other and make some actual music. I feel like we’re hungry for it, and as long as we keep getting fed more and more junk food, the value of music is going to keep going down and the business is going to suffer worse and worse because of it. 

We need to share our true selves with each other, and make way more music from that. And I hope that more people on the business side of things will get fed up with the boxes too and start taking more risks, so more unique, heart-driven music can have a chance to be heard.

Want to hear more from Alison? Check out her latest music video to “Escape the Blade” here, and follow her on Tumblr, too!