At the beginning of the year, Yuping Zhu ’21 went to Nashville for the weekend to professionally record her song “Easier” with a live band.
Gonzales said, “I think ‘Easier’ is so special because it’s [Zhu’s] first release ever, and in just this one song you can see how talented she is as a singer and songwriter. I think it’s also really cool to be able to see how she was feeling during certain moments of her life and how she expressed those moments and her feelings during them through her art.”
Zhu began writing songs about four years ago, and feels that ‘Easier’ is unique from her other songs in its lyrics. According to Zhu, ‘Easier’ conveys more than one plot and it is less of a reflective retelling of one singular feeling, but rather many feelings over a period of time. Zhu talked about how the changing seasons inspired aspects of ‘Easier.’
“I’ve always been really intrigued with the seasons and how they change and I think it’s a really beautiful thing watching the seasons change. For me personally, I feel like I have emotions attached to different seasons. I feel differently when it’s fall versus when it’s winter. I wanted to explore the idea of writing about a love that followed the seasons and went with the seasons, so that was the idea that inspired the song,” said Zhu.
According to Zhu, she wrote ‘Easier’ late in the summer after spending a lot of time in Nashville, and the song was, in part, a reflection on her time spent there and the emotions she felt while there. After she finished writing, she returned to Nashville to record the song with a live band. Zhu described what she loved about her experience professionally recording her music.
“I love the process because you sort of just come in with a song that’s just some chords and vocals, and then you bring the whole band in and it turns into something totally different, so it’s really like watching magic happen right in front of your eyes,” said Zhu.
Zhu is planning on releasing her first Extended Play, titled ‘Love Letters,’ today, one week after she released ‘Easier.’ The tracks on ‘Love Letters’ were all written by Zhu over the past summer in various locations. According to Zhu, she hopes to release more music after her first EP.
“I wasn’t expecting to be releasing this song, and I also happened to have a combination of songs that went together really well, so ‘Easier’ is the single of my EP that will come out Friday. The songs just fit together really well and everything sort of fell into place so it just happened,” said Zhu.
