Coco Goupil is a singer and part of the band Amiture. Amiture has been releasing music since 2021 and currently has one album out titled The Beach. Goupil is a Grace Church alumni from the first high school class. She is currently working on some solo projects which are set to release soon. Both her band's spotify and her own are linked above. 

Interview Transcript(not directly quoted)

Q: Can you briefly introduce yourself? 

A: My name is Coco Goupil, I am a Grace Church Alumni. I’m a working musician here in New York City. I play guitar and I write songs in a few different groups. Music is something I’m really passionate about, but it’s something I’ve only really gotten into the past few years. I used to consider myself more of a visual artist and that’s what I studied in college. It is still part of my life, but music has brought my life in another direction. 

Q: Can you introduce your band? 

A: I’m in a band called Amiture. We play at least a couple shows a month on the indie rock circuit. We play here in the city and we’ve got an album coming out next month and a small tour planted in March for South by Southwest. I make stuff on my own also. Probably in the next year I will be playing solo shows as well with my own material. 

Q: How did Amiture start? 

A: It started when I was a freshman in college, there were a couple friends I was playing with and that was more of like a noise rock experimental outfit. I was focusing on visual art for a couple of years, I was putting all my creative energy into that, but music always came more naturally to me. However, I felt like the visual world required all my attention. Then, a couple years after I finished college, one of my friends from that band, from when I was 18, had started this project called Amiture. He’d put out a couple albums under that name, solo. It was more in the dance world, which wasn’t something I was into at the time, but he was really adamant about having me join and adding these live guitar parts to these very digitally inspired pieces. I was brought on just to add to what he’d already done, but we started writing together pretty seamlessly and that developed into a recorded album. Something that really facilitated Amiture was that I was living upstate at the time and I had a studio space where we could rehearse every night and be as loud as we wanted. That space really made that possible. I’m finding that here in the city there are different qualities and restraints on what I’m able to make. I think restrictions are helpful also and there are other freedoms in being here. Environment plays a big role in these things. 

Q: Does visual art still play a role in the music you make?      

A: Definitely, I think especially as a guitarist, a lot of my work as a guitarist feels very sculptural to me. The sound of guitar, at least in terms of tone, fills the midrange, you need it to take up a certain volume within a song. Conceiving of the space and the song in a physical sense; it’s a full body experience that is very related to sculptural and visual work almost like a scaffolding.

Q: What is your writing process like? 

A: The writing process for me comes in a lot of different ways. Sometimes it’s collaborative where I come in with something and whoever I’m playing with builds off of it or the other way around. With writing lyrics, a lot of it starts with journaling and storytelling. I think it’s valuable to have different avenues of songwriting, times where you’re just at home playing in your bedroom, but sometimes it is more of a social thing. Sometimes you bring something you’ve made at home to a group of people and they help you develop it. 

Q: Do you prefer writing by yourself or writing in a group? 

A: I think there’s a real power in writing in a group; mathematicians work in teams. The more brains you have together the more powerful the outcome can be. I also think about that in terms of novels, which are often more cultivated, or maybe even smarter, than the author who wrote it because it’s something they’ve worked on that's compounded over time and it becomes greater than the individual. That said, it is really important to be independent as a songwriter. If you’re writing with people it is important that you’ve spent time writing by yourself and come into writing sessions with an articulated voice and a good sense of what you’re interested in. It is important to be able to enjoy the fruits of both solo writing and writing in a group, they fill different purposes. Recently I have been more interested in writing by myself. I’ve been putting my other projects on hold to focus on that, which is not something I have worked so hard at before in such an intentional way. 

Q: Is there a subject you find yourself writing most about? Do you write more about your own life or about fiction? 

A: I think a little bit of both. I will start with stories from my own life. In terms of lyrics some of my inspirations are Townes Van Zandt, who, coming out of country music, have such an amazing capacity for storytelling. Country music is able to talk about life in a way that other genres are not able to get at in a way. On one hand it is very much ‘slice of life,’ and on the other hand it is very able to approach hardship and difficulty. I’m very interested in that. I think also, as artists we can be vehicles for stories that aren’t our own, that are beyond us. Sometimes I write about stuff that has nothing to do with me in a mythic sense. 

Q: How do you keep your music new so that it stays interesting not only for the audience, but for yourself? 

A: It is so crazy and almost impossible. For example, for Amiture, the shows we’ve played recently, we are only playing stuff from the album that is coming out next month. This album was basically finished almost two years ago. Our setlist is a mix of thirteen different songs that we’ve played thousands of times. It gets boring and it gets frustrating. Over time, the arrangements will change. Our live versions are always a little bit different and sound different from the recorded versions. But also, songs are not always going to be fresh and I think that is important. Sometimes our role in the band is to do something pretty simple over and over and over again and that’s good. If we didn’t do that, the song would fall apart. There is so much repetition that goes into it. It’s almost like a zen exercise and also an ego exercise sometimes just to keep it simple and do your role. I’ve learned a lot doing the same set, like 50 times, this year. I’m still growing as a performer, I only really started performing a couple years ago, but getting to do the same set over and over again is an opportunity to do the same thing, but try out small variations. 

Q: Have you ever dealt with writer's block and how do you deal with writer’s block in general?

A: Of Course. For me, I always want to make whatever it is; songs or a collage, but it’s always going to be hard. I’m always going to want to procrastinate. Making stuff is really hard and it’s really scary sometimes. I think the best way around writer’s block is routine. That may sound counterintuitive, there are a lot of ideas about, “inspiration strikes out of nowhere!” That’s true sometimes, but more importantly if I’m writing everyday, that is a lot more generative because it’s a muscle. For me, more inspiration comes the more I’m doing it. 

Q: Do you remember when you first started to record your songs professionally? What is the recording process like? 

A: It’s nerve wracking because one of the coolest things about music is the infinity of it and the infinity in variation. When you record you have to pick one way to go and it’s a little slice of where you were at, at that time. It also doesn’t have to be that big of a deal. I haven’t recorded that much stuff, but the first times I did it were super nerve wracking. I think your first or second take is usually the best one. It’s also interesting because today, especially in pop music, everything that’s being recorded is being augmented in post production. Everything is being changed to be extremely consistent, which takes the human hand out of it. I think it is really funny to be an artist today with that and with AI. There’s a question of ‘why am I doing this?’ and ‘is this valuable?’ It feels like we don’t need humans to do this anymore. The inconsistencies of human error are where character comes in and I think that’s where the beauty is. 

Q: How do you think working in the music industry has affected how you listen to music? 

A: Mostly, as a musician, sometimes when I’m listening to music I can’t just enjoy it, I have to know how it’s working and how it’s made. I’ll listen to an album like 14,000 times just to hear each component; ‘what’s the bass doing?’, ‘what’s the percussion doing?’, ‘how is it being produced?’ That kind of thing. 

Q: What is your favorite thing about your job? 

A: My favorite thing about working in music is the feeling I have when I’m performing and the sense of fulfillment I have when I’m sharing songs that I wrote with other people. That collaborative element is the most fulfilling part. My favorite part is working with other musicians.  

Q: What is one project that you’ve done so far that you are most proud of? 

A: The thing I’m most proud of is the upcoming release from my band Amiture. Our album is coming out next month and we have been waiting for this for so long and I am really proud of this piece of music. As an artist, even a visual artist, I rarely feel that way, I’m super hard on myself and I’m really happy with the work that we have done. We have some reviews that I’m really excited for. I was surprised by how good that feels, to get recognition in that way.

Q: What are your next goals in music? 

A: My personal goal moving forward is to step away from Amiture even in light of the positive feedback we’ve been getting because it’s time for me to articulate my own voice as a solo artist and I’m working towards a goal of making an EP, maybe five songs. I want to do them kind of quickly over this summer. I want acoustic guitar and a couple people singing and maybe some pedal steel and some violin, which is pretty different from the album that is coming out next month, which is pretty heavily produced. I’m pretty excited for that writing process.