It’s Saturday, the last night of Tropical Heatwave, and just a mile away from the WMNF festivities, dozens of polished crust-punks and hip-trip liaisons gather at the Frolic Exchange, an eclectic clothing boutique and occasional performance space in Seminole Heights, where Soapbox Soliloquy, aka Jasmine Deja, plays on a platform stage decorated with dripping Christmas lights and glittering scarves. It’s intimate and intricate; like a punk-rock tea party.
Strumming sweetly on her ’60s-era semi-hollowbody Vox, the diminutive 20-year-old with long dark hair cautions her seated disciples, “Just because you think someone is cute, doesn’t mean you have to fuck them.” She gets soft, then loud, then noise-loud, before luring them back in with layers of dreamy percussion and subdued guitar.
A week later, seated on the massive wooden porch at Roser House Volume II — one part informal art co-op, one part living space in St. Pete’s still-funky Roser Park — she says she wrote the song after seeing a guy stumble into the street and yell at his girl. “‘Just because you think they’re cute, doesn’t mean you have to fuck them,’” she remembers him saying. “I was like, that’s the thesis statement. That’s the song.”
Soapbox Soliloquy sounds like what you might find in the tape deck of an Old Ford Galaxy, a psyched-out lovechild of Loretta Lynn and Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Anton Newcombe (with all the work ethic, but minus the drama). Deja’s vocals are a siren’s song, neither breathy nor contrived, but earthy and mesmerizing. Combined with her multi-instrumental skills on guitar, bass, drums and percussion, the result is distinctly Deja.
Housemate and former Sonic Grafitti bassist Dane Giordano describes her style as abstract and poetic streams-of-consciousness. “She is a punk, a new kind of punk,” Giordano remarks. “A colorful and boundless punk.”
As a musician, she immerses herself in her sound. And, Giordano notes, “she’s a fucking beast on the drums and no matter how fast or slow the jam gets, she never stops.”
Deja grew up in what she calls a “sterile” suburb of Wesley Chapel, admitting she didn’t like Florida until she moved to St. Petersburg to study English lit at USF. Jamming with friends in a band called Article 47, she’d write material for Soapbox in her campus dorm. Performing a show at Fubar with Archaic Interest, she met “all these lovely characters,” including Selectric’s Drew Anthony. Shortly after, Deja saw Sonic Graffiti play. And the story goes, “I like you, you like me; wanna jam?”
“He told me about this hippie house on top of a hill,” she says, referencing the Roser House. “I couldn’t believe this was right behind my college. People were doing the same thing I was doing, with the same intensity.”
After she joined Selectric in December of 2013, Anthony says he felt like he’d found “a lost piece of myself.” They’d switch instruments constantly, Deja even getting then-non-drummer Anthony behind the kit for a song she wrote. “I told him to just caveman it. And he did it perfectly.”
“She is always reminding me [that] music is infinite,” Anthony says. “No idea is too wild not to go after.”
She recorded half of her debut, Everybody Knows Nobody, inside her “Mac & Cheese Studio,” the kitchen of her then-garage apartment, and second track “Cardinal Direction” incorporates a whistling teakettle. Later, she Instagrammed a picture of a mic facing the stove with the caption: “I have no idea what I’m doing.” She says she wrote “Cardinal Direction” while “smoking a joint and watching a cardinal on the gate in the yard as the rain began.” And that’s kind of what it feels like, too.
Last fall, she took a class on “Love & Lyric, Sex & Sonnets” with Professor Lisa Starks-Estes, which inspired the album’s content. “She’s really knowledgeable about Shakespeare and there was lot of love poetry,” Deja explains. “It was definitely present in all those recordings. It just happens sometimes and I don’t shy away from personal feelings. It’s real.”
She moved to Roser House in December and recorded the rest of Everybody Knows Nobody. The ground floor is an overgrown menagerie of equipment, recycled objects and artwork. Her current recording space, dubbed the “Rhom Bus Studio,” is upstairs in her bedroom. A full drum kit is situated at the foot of the bed; mixing boards, chords, and effects pedals surround it. There’s a stand-up guitar and mic space across the way. Here, she spends hours, loses days working on music. The tracks start with guitar. Then she records over and over. Then she listens. She tries new material in Selectric first because “Selectric is louder and less me; Soliloquy is all me nutted out in my room.”
Her job as a sales associate at a Macy’s fits her lifestyle. “Just got my sales report card back, 2/5 across the board, not satisfactory and not, not satisfactory.” She laughs, “I’ve got school and four groups to play in, I need something simple to keep afloat.”
In addition to Selectric and Soapbox Soliloquy, she has a new project, Veiny Hands, and frequently collabs with girlfriend Katherine Kelly (formerly of Sons of Hippies, currently of Pleasures). When she escapes her writing cave to perform, she blends melody and dissonance seamlessly, using loops to make the experience completely different in a live setting and, she says, “to make it more interesting for the listener and myself. I don’t want to just stand there with a guitar. I want to take us into the spaciness and weirdness of this music. Everything matters.”
See Jasmine Deja play…
…as Soapbox Soliloquy with The Wallies, Slowshore, Brendan Ciccone, Sat., May 16, Crowbar, Ybor City, $7
…in Veiny Hands with Pleasures, Sonic Grafitti, Sat., May 23, 9 p.m., The Bends, St. Petersburg, free admission
and in Selectric, opening for Jackson Scott, with Poster, Thurs., May 28, 9 p.m., New World Brewery, Ybor City, $6; soapboxsoliloquy.bandcamp.com, ItsSelectric.bandcamp.com.
Hear Jasmine Deja as Soapbox Soliloquy play…
… at her bandcamp page and pick up a copy of the album there, too.
This article appears in May 14-20, 2015.