Marilyn Hucek Opens Up In "Marilyn"

Marilyn Hucek released her first EP, Infinity, four years ago — an exploration of everything from the topics she sang about to her song choices. “I was singing different songs, I think it’s eclectic — like you have kind of a dance-electro pop forward song, and then you have a folk song and a little bit of thighs in between”

Since then, Hucek says she’s honed her craft. “I just graduated from Los Angeles Academy of Artists and Music Production where I was writing everyday, and I had spent time in Nashville writing and time at NYU and their summer songwriting program. My craft has gotten better, but also my [overall] vision as an artist.”

Looking back on her song “Vulnerable”, the singer says it was the song that inspired her debut album. “That song is very conversational. It’s very personal, a bit autobiographical, and this theme of being vulnerable definitely carries into my debut album” taking us to Marilyn.

Images Courtesy of Marilyn Hucek, photographed by SOMA

Marilyn is Hucek’s personal journey throughout her life. “I feel like it’s very much the human experience, and me personally, through my journey through womanhood. I touch on love, grief, loss, and topics around societal pressures”.

Guided by her feelings, songwriting is, in a sense, almost healing for Hucek. “It was very much my coping method to dealing with some of my thoughts, hardships, and feelings” she told Contemporary Girl.

When she first started writing Marilyn, she was “very freely writing and didn’t have a concept in mind.”

“I was really keeping myself open and just writing about the topics that felt really pressing for me. After it, it was a year long process of writing and I was spending time in Nashville and Los Angeles, and towards the end of that writing process, I looked at a collection of songs and found some through lines and realized that this was a collection of songs that felt like the most personal and pressing for me to release that I felt like I had something to say that I really wanted to share with the world.“

Her overall creative process varies for each song. For instance, the story behind Marilyn’s closing track, “Neil Young” starts at what Hucek calls an “inspiration trip” at the state park in Nashville. 

“I feel like I’m very introspective, observant, and able to be in touch with my thoughts and feelings when I’m alone. Those are sometimes the best moments for me to songwrite and be creative” Hucek tells us. “As I was on this hike, the chorus to Neil Young came to me out of thin hair — the line ‘you might not remember me, but you remember Neil Young’ — and I was like, oh my God, this is so good. I need to write this song.”

Images Courtesy of Marilyn Hucek

“[When] we wrote our first draft of the whole song and then production, which we wanted to be more minimalist. I had spent months tweaking the lyrics to that song — like it was actually the longest I’ve ever taken working on a song. I sent it to a mentor of mine — his name is Marty Dodson — and I had met him when I was doing an artist development program in Nashville. I was like, I would love to get your two cents on this song because he’s like a top, number one Billboard songwriter in country. We ended up hopping on Zoom, and he helped me tweak a few lyrics and words to have the song punch harder. Every song is different [though], and some songs come to me faster than others. ‘Neil Young’ was a long time in the making, because I was like, ‘I need this song to be perfect, like every word needs to be intentional’, you know?”

Hucek also dives into her multicultural upbringing with the Spanish track “Me Salvaste El Alma”. “My Chilean culture has always been a part of our life growing up, and she’s always made an effort to introduce us and have her culture be rooted into our everyday life.”

Having grown up in the States, Hucek had, like many others growing up multicultural, a prominent American influence on her life. “I grew up speaking Spanish in the house, and to this day I’m bilingual, but being in the states I think there’s definitely a heavier American influence, so I made a conscious effort to make sure that I made an effort to start writing in Spanish and have a Spanish song on this album.

“I want to make my family in Chile proud, I want to represent my Hispanic heritage. I like the idea of having a bilingual album, because that’s an accurate representation of how I am”

Listen to Marilyn on streaming now