Herizen Guardiola on Creating Magic for Her EP "Come Over To My House" and Life After "The Get Down"
Engage in a conversation with Herizen Guardiola for more than five minutes and you’ll understand that she knows — and is at total peace with — exactly who she is. She loves to wear “fairy clothes” (think gauzy, wispy, floral) while frolicking in forests and will go off on a tangential rant about her disdain for social media at the drop of a hat. She speaks of her music so lovingly and excitedly that you can tell it’s her heart in sonic form. She champions her childishness, is honest about past emotional trials, and is passionately opinionated. Herizen is all-the-way good with who she is and even if you never get one minute of conversation with the musician, her new EP will allow you to understand her on a similarly crystalline level.
While you might recognize her from her breakout role as Mylene Cruz on Baz Luhrmann’s Netflix series, The Get Down, Herizen’s goal was always to make her own music. She joined the show knowing it was a musical drama and would, therefore, allow her to flex her vocal chops for the masses and gain a solid fanbase. “The show was a good opportunity for people to hear my voice and for me to start coming up on the scene,” she tells Teen Vogue. And now, two years after the series’ release, the 22-year-old is dropping her first solo project, a seven-track EP titled Come Over To My House, out on October 26. Written over a two-year period, the project covers everything from the toxicity of social media (Herizen once threw her phone away to escape it) to, simply put, just feeling good.
“I call it my jungle magic EP,” says Herizen, whose sunny, velvety voice makes the project’s nickname sound that much more mystical. “It makes me think of the jungle and making each song was just a really magical experience. The moments that I wrote about — they’re really intimate and special to me. I want everyone to connect to those little sparks and just feel good about it and smile and be happy.”
Raised in Miami by a Buddhist mother and a Rastafarian father, Herizen grew up in an environment that encouraged individuality, an appreciation for nature, and a disregard for the mainstream. “My sister and I were homeschooled and we weren’t allowed to watch a lot of the TV shows and movies that other kids were or listen to hip-hop or rap,” she says, who instead was exposed to music centering on love and purity. “My parents’ religions definitely gave me a head’s up in terms of understanding how important it is to be true to who you are,”
Although Herizen moved to California when she was 15 and eventually attended a public high school in Santa Monica (“my mom didn’t want me to be totally socially awkward”), nothing could have prepared her for the way in which being cast in The Get Down would turn her world on its head. “When I moved to New York [to shoot the series] I realized that my social skills were a little funny,” she remembers. “I was 18 and over the next two years I learned a lot about myself. It definitely made me more resilient because I had to become an adult really fast — New York is a tough city to be alone in.”
Despite the challenges it presented, such as being away from her family and nature along with jumping head first into a very public and demanding career, Herizen is quick to add that the experience was 100% worth it. “It definitely helped me realize that that world is a big place and it taught me that I’m good because I’m so connected to myself. It’s easy for kids to go out to a big city and lose themselves but I was still super grounded.”
Upon wrapping the show, she immediately began working on writing songs that would ultimately end up on Come Over To My House. Herizen had initially moved back to Los Angeles but soon decided that she needed to further decompress from New York by spending time somewhere remote and homey.
“I needed to get out of the city and submerge myself in nature and my family and animals and the river and just kind of get out,” explains the artist, who settled on Eugene, Oregon. It was there that all of the EP’s songs took shape. “I was able to go there and pull myself out of it all. I noticed what I was missing and I also noticed how superficial the world was once I was in the middle of the forest just camping. I realized how silly it kind of all is but also how fun it all is.”
Naturally, these musings and thoughts often manifested in song form. One of the EP’s tracks, “Social Jungle,” is a clever commentary about Los Angeles’ superficial social scene and the negative aspects of social media. When Herizen was cast as Mylene she quickly gained an immense amount of Instagram followers. But once she began using the platform to portray her true self, and not the idea of her fans had created in their own heads, Herizen experienced firsthand how damaging social media can be.
“My hair is curly and sometimes I don’t shave my armpits — when I started speaking out about being all-natural, I noticed a lot of people were unfollowing me,” she recounts. “A lot of them were men who just want me to take my clothes off and who want to body shame and compare women and all of that. I started feeling negative emotions and I was like, why do I even care? I don’t even know these people and they’re ruining my day!” It all caused Herizen to delete her social media apps and take a major break from her phone. “I just have this dream in my head that before Instagram everything was better. We spoke to each other. But now people are constantly making fun of others — it’s a nightmare. I could go on for days!”
Despite her fair share of encounters with trolls, Herizen Guardiola and her music remain largely optimistic. The EP’s title track, “Come Over To My House,” provides a dreamy shot of upbeat optimism.
“My mind and my body and my soul were all one in Oregon and it embodies that happy feeling,” says Herizen, who wrote the song in stream-of-consciousness form, ad libbing lyrics over a track her producer had arranged. “When people listen to ‘Come Over To My House’ I want them to laugh, because I was smiling the whole time I made that song. I want them to put the music up so loud and dance feel good because I made this EP when I was feeling really good and I want everyone to feel that energy,” she says. “There’s a lot going on that’s violent and aggressive and angry and I just feel like we need a little jungle magic in our lives right now.”
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