Right Now: In Conversation With Bella Rios

Interview by Katherine Cardinale

I recently had the chance to speak with singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Bella Rios, a pop-rock artist who currently attends Princeton University. Bella’s most recent musical endeavor, a single titled “Right Now,” is a ballad about accepting the fact that a chapter of your life is ending abruptly. In this interview, Bella and I discuss topics like the inspiration behind her new single and her life as a full-time college student and musician. Listen to the new single, “Right Now,” out on all streaming platforms today! You can also view the music video for the single here.

LOUDSPEAKER COLLECTIVE: Hi Bella, thank you for speaking with me today! I’d like to start out by asking what is one thing you would like for your fans to know about you as an artist?

BELLA RIOS: I hope people that listen to my music know that it’s a true, authentic representation of myself. I think one of the most incredible and unique things about music is that you very quickly get to know someone you’ve never met intimately. I think you get to know them by listening to their innermost, most vulnerable thoughts and expressions, and I think that’s how music is able to comfort people. It reminds you that there are people who are going through what you’re experiencing, or have gone through it and gotten to the other side. And I hope my music does that for you. And I hope you know that it’s the most authentic and honest representation of myself and that you know me in that way.

LOUDSPEAKER COLLECTIVE: That makes sense! How do you juggle going to school and your career in music, because I know you are also pursuing an economics degree at Princeton, so I feel like that’s definitely difficult.

BELLA: It’s been incredibly difficult, I won’t lie. I gained my footing freshman year, and I focused on my academics and social life when I first got here, just because I didn’t want to let that slip past me. And as a result, music kind of fell to the wayside a little bit. It wasn’t as much of a priority as it always had been in high school. And one day, I woke up during that year and I was like, “Oh my god.” Something had felt off for a little bit about just my overall happiness and fulfillment. I had a show out of the blue later that year, and the second I got off stage for the first time in way too long, I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is what’s been missing from my life! Of course — my passion that I used to devote hours and hours to religiously in high school, I’ve let slip, and now I don’t feel like myself, because it’s that massive part of me.” And ever since that experience and that realization, it’s become a lot easier to motivate myself to incorporate it into my daily life and to continue pursuing it. Because the brief moment that I didn’t have it at the forefront of my life, I didn’t feel 100% myself or 100% happy, and so I treat it as what I imagine my student athlete friends treat their sport. I block out practice time, I block out writing time, block out social time, and I just make it happen, because it’s that massive of a part of me. And once I realized that, it really was easy.

LOUDSPEAKER COLLECTIVE: That definitely makes sense. And I feel like, when you have something that is like a passion of yours, and you can balance it out with things you have to do every day. For me, it makes those things a little less draining, you know? It kind of gives you something to look forward to and balance out.

BELLA: Yeah, it’s like a reprieve from the rest of my schedule. Okay, like, macroeconomics, financial history. Now I can write a song about that boy who dissed me this weekend — that’s great!

LOUDSPEAKER COLLECTIVE: Were there any specific people, places, or things that inspired you to write your latest single, “Right Now?”

Bella Rios: The song has two points of origin — I guess that’s what I call ‘em. I wrote the first draft when I was a junior in high school, so I just wrote half? The current version has about half of the first verse and half of the chorus from this first draft. But when I was a junior in high school, I was told by my parents that we were moving to Tennessee for my senior year of high school. And obviously that was incredibly jarring. I was dealing with emotions of anger, loss. I mean, I didn’t know how to feel. I was confused, I was stressed, I was sad. It felt like something was being ripped away from me way before I had ever expected it to. At least now in this circumstance, I know that I’m supposed to be graduating in four years, but that was a sudden shock where I felt like an experience that I was expecting, and people and a place that I had loved, were being separated from me. And so I wrote the first draft about that during that time, but I left it. I never was like, oh, this is 100% it. Something wasn’t clicking, but I was looking through my old demos earlier this year, and that one came up, and when I listened to it, I was like, wait, these lyrics are incredibly, incredibly relevant to me right now. I’m a little less angry about this situation, more sad. But that’s when I decided, like, “this is exactly how I’m feeling, I want to finish the song.” And so I did, based on the experiences and people of the last four years. So if I had to pinpoint the things that inspired me most, it was definitely my core friend group. I’ve been so incredibly lucky to have almost all the same best friends since the first week of freshman year. They are some of the most amazing women I’ve met in my life, and I hope to be friends with them for the rest of my life. They’ve definitely influenced it. Princeton as a place has become my second home. Honestly, sometimes I refer to it as home when I talk to my parents and they get offended. So definitely Princeton itself. I mean, everything about it, from the Sunday morning debriefs with my girlfriends to lunch with them every day. Every moment I’ve spent here inspired that song, and it’s going to be hard to say bye to any and all of them.

LOUDSPEAKER COLLECTIVE: The theme of “Right Now” is embracing the fact that a part of your life is ending sooner than you want it to. If you could pick one moment from the past year to bottle up or hold onto, what would it be?

BELLA: Yeah, there’s literally a million! I’m gonna get in my feels! But there was actually this one particular day that my friends and I still reference, and it was one of those rare moments where in the moment we were like, “oh my god, guys, we’re gonna miss not being able to do this.” We had that reference while we were experiencing it. We were like, when will we ever be able to do this in our life? Again, it was after a random night out. Maybe it was Parents Weekend? We had, like, hangover brunch with all of our parents, and then we’d all resigned ourselves to not doing work. I don’t know why that was also a part of it. It was a rare occasion where we decided we were not going to spend our Sunday catching up on stuff we should have been doing that weekend. Instead, we ordered a box of Dunkin’ doughnuts, a lot of coffee… oh, and pizza, because we need salty with our sweets! We have a couple friends on the basketball team, and we just watched their games on the shitty TV one of my friends has in their common room. There were three of us on a beanbag, two of us on the couch, two of us in the rocking chairs that come with our dorm room because we have no proper seating, and we rotted there all day. There was nothing about the circumstance or the event that was particularly incredible, I guess, but that’s why it was so amazing. I’ve never had such a great group of people where all I’ve wanted to do all day was hang out with them in a common room, and there’s nothing else I feel like I’m missing out on. I wish I could teleport back to that moment all the time.

LOUDSPEAKER COLLECTIVE: For sure. I feel like it’s always like the smaller moments too, at least for me, that stuck out, like, from my undergrad as well. They weren’t necessarily the “biggest” nights, objectively. They were more random ones where I made very specific memories.

BELLA: All we did was talk about the night before. The debrief was really crazy that weekend! I think that day might have contributed. A lot of things happened during Parents’ Weekend, which I really didn’t expect!

LOUDSPEAKER COLLECTIVE: How does this release fit into the bigger picture of your career or upcoming projects?

BELLA: I think, like every song, it’s a more recent, honest depiction of who I am as a person and artist. So of course, it forms my artist project in that way. But I think, of course, in keeping with the theme of the song, as much as I’m scared of losing what I have right now, I’m presented with a new beginning and new opportunities and the excitement of all of that. So I guess in a way, it’s a marker of the closing of one chapter and the opening of another, and hopefully loads, loads more music lessons and life to come.

LOUDSPEAKER COLLECTIVE: Thank you for your time! Is there anything else you’d like to share with your fans?

BELLA: To anyone who is listening to my music, music is what I love, and I wouldn’t be able to do it or even consider doing it after I leave school without your support, and it means so much to me. You have absolutely no idea. And yeah, thank you, basically, for listening. And if you ever want to see me live or keep listening, I’ll be posting updates on my socials 24/7!