"I was always a music kid from the beginning," she tells New Times. "There was never really a time that I wasn't making music. I started writing songs when I was 14. I was having a lot of really big feelings, and at that age, they just sort of came out of me."
Vania Junco is a six-track folk rock EP featuring songs written from the age of 17 through today. Despite some delays, the stars (plus resources and her refined artistry) finally aligned for a formal release.
"It just took so long. So now it feels like a really big relief," Junco admits. "There was someone inside here all along just begging and pleading, saying, I need to have something out that people can listen to," she says.
The EP began as a senior project, which Junco paused, then picked back up after graduation. One major reason for the delay was the significant time she'd spend perfecting her tracks, a habit she eventually learned was rooted in more than just fine-tuning.
"I found out I had OCD pretty late in this whole process, and that completely rewired how I thought about my artistic process," Junco shares. "I grew up always knowing and hearing that I was a perfectionist, and just really high-strung about things and needing things to be perfect, and I realized that that had been seeping into my creative process."
The EP's standout track is "Say I Haven't Lost It All," a folk-rock song that beautifully encapsulates Junco's style with its unconventional arrangements, layered velvety harmonies, and warm '70s-inspired acoustic melodies.
Growing up, Junco listened to folk artists like Cat Stevens and Joni Mitchell, and was particularly inspired by Beach Boys cofounder Brian Wilson.
"He has these crazy, nutty arrangements that he does with all of these instruments and all of this insane harmony, and then on the same record, he'll just have the most beautiful, four-part vocal track that he recorded all himself," Junco says.
When it came time to write her own songs, Junco found her compositions lacked traditional structure. She says the EP feels "adolescent" because the songs took shape honestly and instinctively.
"The songs are really hard to bring to other people and ask, 'Can you play this with me?' I have a chart that's like six pages long, because none of the parts repeat," Junco says. "I can't say, 'Verse chorus, verse chorus.' I had to learn how to write that way after, and my writing is taking a turn for the normal now after this record."
The EP's cover features a whimsical illustration by Junco's partner, graphic designer Emmanuel Gorrin, who filled the artwork with symbols from Junco's childhood — a house, a spool, a lamp, bugs — orbiting a central figure: a dog.
Junco grew up surrounded by dogs, particularly at her grandparents' home, where she recorded the piano part of the EP's last track "Dog Song."
"A lot of the album — the setting, the subjects of the lyrics, or the recorded audio itself — took place at my grandparents' house. The dogs are an especially important part of it. I've always lived in a house filled with dogs, particularly huskies, which look the most wolf-like of any modern breed. They are an important symbol to me of family, home, and love to a fault," Junco adds.
Beyond her solo music, Junco previously played in the band Loveseat and currently sings with the jazz quartet Abstract Citizen. Now that her debut EP is out, the songwriter is excited to focus on her backlog of music, which she says is more rock 'n' roll and translatable to the stage.
"It really all just comes back to this 14-year-old in the bedroom that I still currently live in, because I'm living at home after college, where I was writing songs and recording them, and I wanted so badly — more than anything — to make an EP or an album." Junco shares. "How I imagined it at that time was: me in the bedroom, I have a headphone recording thing, and then putting it on Bandcamp and Tumblr, and that being the end of that."
