Name: Bestfriend
Members: Stacy Kim (vocals / instrumentals), Kaelan Geoffrey (vocals / production)
Interviewee: Stacy Kim
Nationality: Korean-Canadian (Stacy Kim), Canadian (Kaelan Geoffrey)
Current release: Bestfriend's places i've left EP is out April 21st via Nettwerk.

If you enjoyed this Bestfriend interview and would like to know more about the duo and their music, visit their official website. Stacy and Kaelan are also on Instagram, bandcamp, and twitter.



Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?

For me, the impulse comes from a near-frantic need to say something out loud. Sometimes the need appears without context, but most of the time, inspiration comes through stories: movies, TV, books, people I’m talking to.

“Love Always Came So Easy For You” was partially a result of having just finished a rewatch of season 2 of Fleabag.



It’s such a rounded show full of flawed characters that made me want to yell at the screen. I know people exactly like that! I am often a person who is exactly like that! This is exactly how it feels!

For you to get started, do there need to be concrete ideas – or what some have called a 'visualisation' of the finished work? What does the balance between planning and chance look like for you?

I definitely find it significantly harder to start something without a concrete idea, but it doesn’t have to be anything elaborate. It can just be a classic “thoughts from the notes app” idea, or even just coming up with a concept before we start writing.

As for the chance part of things, this is where I think Kaelan really comes into the picture when it comes to songs that I’ve started. I’ll have ideas of the finished work — like, say, the foundation of a house with all of the wood frames. I have the drawings, I know what colours I want to use. But Kaelan’s the one who really has a knack for translating things and filling everything out.

“Anxious People” started a lot slower - like, 100 BPM with only my voice and telecaster. I knew I wanted it to be a lot more frenzied, so Kaelan took it and made it exactly what it is now.



I’m at, like, a 90% success rate with taking the chance that he knows what I’m trying to convey.

Do you have certain rituals to get you into the right mindset for creating? What role do certain foods or stimulants like coffee, lighting, scents, exercise or reading poetry play?

I write a lot at night, partly because it’s always quieter and it feels like people expect less from me. Also, can’t go wrong with a little bit of weed!

Outside of that, I don’t have much of a ritual. On the rarer days – and these are my favourite ones – sometimes I can say to myself, “I want to write a song,” and then I’ll sit down and write a song.

Otherwise, sometimes I literally just sit around and hope that some form of inspiration comes.

What do you start with? How difficult is that first line of text, the first note?

Once I have the concept, starting the song is actually the least difficult part. I start with turning a phrase into a melody, and then I keep writing from there.

I try not to write with any preset structures or arrangements in mind; if a verse starts feeling like a chorus, then I’ll try it as a chorus. If the song doesn’t have a chorus, I’ll let it not have a chorus.

Hardest part is letting a song do what it wants.

When do the lyrics enter the picture? Where do they come from? Do lyrics need to grow together with the music or can they emerge from a place of their own?

I’m a lyric-first person in general, but generally they’re always changing; sometimes in minute ways, sometimes it’s a complete overhaul.

It can also really depend on what direction our own personal lives are headed, or what headspace we’re in.

What makes lyrics good in your opinion? What are your own ambitions and challenges in this regard?

Honesty! Honesty, honesty, honesty. You can tell when an artist has put a lot of themselves into certain songs. There’s a sort of specificity to it that I can’t quite put a name to. Maybe it’s just in the humanity of it all.

This question actually brings to mind this New Yorker interview that Nick Cave did recently. There’s this part about AI-generated songs I love, where he essentially says – and I’m paraphrasing here – writing is something that is too fundamentally rooted in the frailties and faults of human nature to ever be able to be machine-generated.

Honesty is so important, and so noticeable.

Once you've started, how does the work gradually emerge?

It’s a bit of a scattered timeline, and there isn’t much of a rhyme or reason to it. Sometimes I’ll have a 30-second demo that I’ll send to Kaelan. Sometimes I won’t send a song to him until I’ve worked hours and hours on it.

I think the ones I spend hours and hours on are the ones where I know exactly what I want from it, and the 30-second ones are the ones where — if I may extend the previous metaphor — I don’t know what the house looks like yet.

Often, while writing, new ideas and alternative roads will open themselves up, pulling and pushing the creator in a different direction. Does this happen to you, too, and how do you deal with it? What do you do with these ideas?

This is a great question, and I think it ties back to what you mentioned about lyrics growing with the music. When it comes to writing, I’m a colossal believer of letting instincts take the lead, particularly because I’m not great at that in other aspects of my life. The moment I start thinking about something too much is when I know I have to move on for now.

It can definitely be a bit harrowing starting with a really solid idea, and realizing halfway through that it’s turned into something completely different. That shift means I have to follow an entirely new thread of thought, come up with a new way to tie those threads up. But, at the end of the day, it’s so low-stakes that I don’t mind doing that, and coming back to the original idea a little later.

An example I can think of here is “Tuesday Waltz”.



I got home from a mental health-related hospitalization and wanted to write a really sad, dark, gritty song, because I was really sad! It felt like the natural thing to do. But I sat down and started writing, and it ended up turning into an entirely different narrative. I’m not sure what happened, exactly, but it turned into a song — a waltz, no less — that is entirely about hope.

Especially in the digital age, the writing and production process tends towards the infinite. What marks the end of the process? How do you finish a work?

I don’t think we’ve ever looked at anything either of us have created and thought with absolute, unequivocal certainty that it’s capital-F finished.

That’s the thing about creating – to me, it’s such an iterative, infinite process. There are certain things about songs we released years ago that I wish I could still add to or revise to this day. But I think that if we tried to change every little thing that we suddenly realized we wanted to change, we’d never release anything at all.

When I’m writing with Kaelan, it starts becoming way more about how right it feels rather than an often-arbitrary notion of how finished it feels. Did we do everything we wanted to do in the moment that we were writing this song? Do we know that we’ve put everything we can into this? If so, we feel comfortable putting something out.

Once a piece is finished, how important is it for you to let it lie and evaluate it later on? How much improvement and refinement do you personally allow until you're satisfied with a piece? What does this process look like in practice?

I’ll listen to a finished song on repeat until it’s out, and then really never actively listen to it again. I do think that’s pretty common with lots of artists, though; giving out something you made and then not being able to take it back to make changes is scary.

I’d rather just give people what we made, say that we made it and love it, and let it go.

What's your take on the role and importance of production, including mixing and mastering for you personally? How involved do you get in this?

I think you can certainly have an unproduced, unmixed, unmastered song that still sounds beautiful. But I’m a big fan of songwriting being a really collaborative process.

There are things I wouldn’t notice or think to do that Kaelan will add, there are things Kaelan wouldn’t notice or think to do that our mix engineer Travis will add, and the music we make becomes a sum of those parts. I love learning from them, and I love learning from our mastering engineers. It puts songs into different perspectives for me.

Something that took a while for me to learn was the idea that just because someone presents an idea or changes something, it doesn’t mean you have to go with it. It’s just a presentation of an idea. No one is going to die if you don’t like it.

After finishing a piece or album and releasing something into the world, there can be a sense of emptiness. Can you relate to this – and how do you return to the state of creativity after experiencing it?

Oh, yeah. Emptiness is exactly what that is. You put so much of yourself into something, and then it’s out, and then what? I think there’s always a part of me that wonders if I’m ever going to be able to create something again. Maybe the well’s dried up, and that’s all I had.

It’s like the idea of luck people have where, if something really fortunate happens, it’s easy to think that it won’t happen again. You’ve used up your luck for the rest of your life.

But so far, it’s happened again, and we’ve always continued to create. Crossing my fingers on that one. Lots of life left to live. Lots of luck left to have.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you personally feel as though writing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

Hilarious that you say that about coffee – Kaelan and I are both huge coffee people, and take the process of making good coffee pretty seriously. Shout-out to Chemex.

I think making anything at all – music, food, coffee, decisions – are inherently the same, sure – but it’s also like we mentioned earlier on. Humanity & emotion is at the core of all of it. Everything else is sort of a departure from there. I like how this particular coffee tastes, so I’m going to make more of it, or learn how to make it even better. I like how this song sounds, so I want to make something like it, and learn how to make songs better. Et cetera.

As for expressing things through music – I could not be worse at regularly journaling. So, lots of the things I write are amalgamations of different things I wish I could have journalled about. But those can be anything — from fictional stories to something that happened to me, like, over a decade ago.