Alexis Green is a music student at Chico State. Green picked up playing the keyboard while she was in Costa Rica and has brought her sound inspirations pack to the states. Once other people started noticing her unique talents she began to produce more music for public audiences.

Who are you?

Who am I? I’m not really sure yet, I ask myself that all the time. What I am sure about is that art, especially music and rhythm and melodies, songs that make you dance and feel; that’s always resonated with me. My major is Spanish, I also love culture a lot, I traveled to Costa Rica for a year through study abroad. I’m from Los Angeles, the South Bay: Carson, California.

When did you start to produce music?

So I decided to pick up a keyboard so that I could produce beats better. While I was in Costa Rica I started to be inspired and encouraged by my Costa Rican friends and family to create music.Even if I didn’t master it I wanted to become familiar. So through my study abroad advisor, they pulled some strings and got me permission to use the practice rooms in the university for both semesters. So when I got back to LA I bought my own keyboard and brought it up to Chico and I’ve just been practicing. So now I produce my own stuff and make songs that way.

What was the turning point that made you want to take up music as a career?

It was a huge point in Costa Rica. I initially started making music as like affirmation to myself, like self-talk. Some songs you don’t hear what you need to, and for me if something isn’t fulfilling a need that you have, don’t complain about it, do something about it. So I started creating my own songs based off of what I wanted to hear, and most of it was positive affirmation to myself, like talking myself through certain things. When I started uploading it, people started responding to that well. Like stuff that was for me, they enjoyed it, and they would encourage me even more. When I started seeing how much of an impact I could have on people’s lives, both in Costa Rica and back home my family would see that I was posting on Facebook, it made me feel ‘wow this could go somewhere,’ like I actually have something.

What are your inspirations?

Life, and different situations and feelings and emotions based off of the situation that is in my life, that’s where I get a lot of it from, is just what is going on in my life. Also if I hear a song by someone like Anderson Paak or James Blake or Hiatus Coyote, hearing certain existing melodies. Sometimes if there’s a jam session happening or listening to a song and you hear all these different instruments at once, in your mind you’re hearing a different melody that would go with it. I think ‘I wish this melody was in it but it’s not’ so I just try to use that and run with it. Friends, family, food sometimes inspires me. Anything really, that’s what my notebook is about, writing different stuff, how I interpret different things.

Can you explain the significance of your journal to you?

It’s not simply one journal, I go through journals really quickly. I fill them quickly because I write in them every single day. I record my dreams in my journal, which helps me in different ways. When I write sometimes, if I’m feeling a lot of stuff I’ll write it down and take a step back to observe it, to look at it from a different standpoint. So when I’m writing a song and I have a melody but no words to put with it, I think ‘well what have I been feeling this entire week’ because I want it to be relevant so I just look back and one word will just inspire me and I’ll expand off that.

Mitchell Kret can be reached at [email protected] or @theorion_arts on Twitter.