This past week, I had the wonderful opportunity to talk with Asya and Chloe Saavedra of the band Chaos Chaos, who are performing at the Casbah in San Diego this Tuesday, October 22nd, 2024. Chaos Chaos is a sister duo known for their refreshingly honest lyrics and dreamy sound. For the tenth anniversary of their album “Committed to the Crime” they are releasing a vinyl of the album that features a new and reimagined version of their song “Do You Feel It” which will be released on October 25th. In our conversation, we got to talk about fashion, the importance of being honest when writing lyrics, the process of making a song, and more!

Chloe F: Okay, I wanted to ask also, this is off the topic of music, but I love your guys’ style so much and your fashion sense. Has that played a part in your stage presence or performances?

Chloe S: Definitely. Yeah. We’ve always been into fashion. It’s interesting because for us, part of the fun of fashion has always been being crafty or trying to recreate something. Growing up, we had an unhealthy obsession with magazines and editorial photoshoots. We would try to recreate the outfits we’d tear out of magazines. We’d go to thrift stores and think, okay, we can pair this sweatshirt with these things. We’d try to find things that were exactly like it. I was obsessively looking at every designer brand’s new line and runway collections. I’d go to Goodwill and see, “Oh, cool, Prada is doing this oversized suit short combo.” I’d get that oversized suit and cut it with a sewing machine. For us, it’s always been a huge part of expressing ourselves.

Asya: It feels like a fun layer to add to the music.

Chloe F: That’s awesome. And you have a sewing machine too, right? So you’d make it your own based on what you got from the magazines?

Chloe S: Exactly.

Chloe F: Do you have any fashion icons from those magazine clippings you looked up to?

Chloe S: Yeah. Let’s see. We loved Agyness Deyn growing up. I think she is coming back because of the Indie Sleaze trend. Asya, PJ Harvey was a big one for you. Her stage outfits are so cool. She brings a completely new alter ego with each album. Asya, I feel like you really like the idea of reinventing yourself or shedding skin.

Asya: Yeah, we were just talking about stage outfits for the upcoming shows. I love fashion, but I have my own weird relationship with it. I don’t know all the designers, but it’s a big part of the performance and the creative vision. Figuring out what makes you feel powerful elevates your performance. I always just tend to like really kind of bold, epic, epic clothes that are weirdly combining feminine and masculine elements. That makes me feel really powerful. But if I go too far in one direction, sometimes that’s, it’s not hitting the mark, but there’s like a balance where something about it just feels really, really cool. And I feel like a lot of performance is kind of, blending things. I think it’s interesting figuring out what makes you feel powerful or like power to give your best performance.

Chloe S: Exactly. Right now, I’m just in my pajama outfit, but for us, it’s about elevating. Even when you have access to the best designs, being self-made and creative is part of our ethos. That’s the Goodwill hustle!

Chloe F: Totally! It reminds me of the saying, when you look good, you feel good, which helps with confidence on stage and overall performance.

Chloe S: I feel like you’re learning things about yourself too with identity and kind of harnessing masculinity and femininity and figuring out what sort of combination of both makes you feel the most powerful and in your skin. I think for some reason, for me and Asya both, we both have never felt like being fully feminine is allowing us to express ourselves the way we want. We always have a bit of a tomboy thing.

Chloe F: I wanted to ask about your beautiful album covers and EP covers, especially the extravagant outfits. My favorites are “Theater” and “Ethical Plum.” Where do you take inspiration for your music and music video outfits? I love your music video outfits, especially your recent one, “Do You Feel It?”

Asya: That’s such a big part of our creative process. We both really love doing that. It feels important. We bring different things to the table for the visuals. When we do a music video, we create a visual mood board, brainstorming and putting together ideas—film stuff, photos, photographers we like, and fashion then we put it into a melting pot and figure out what works and makes the most sense. Chloe studied photography in college, and we’ve drawn inspiration from a lot of the photographers she learned about. Yeah, we keep returning to the same ones like Justine Curland and Philip Lorca de Corcia.

Chloe S: We try to blend high fashion with art photography, capturing the mundane but with something ethereal or heightened in the outfits.

Chloe F: That’s a perfect way to describe it.

Asya: Justine Curland’s photographs of girls across America really resonate with us. It’s called “Girl Pictures,” right?

Chloe S: Yeah! You should check it out. It’s cool because we have four sisters, and that sister dynamic isn’t often captured well; it’s usually either sexualized or viewed from the male gaze.It feels like stories and imagery of girls and women are often undocumented, so we draw from that. Philip Lorca de Corcia captures mundane moments—like someone outside a gas station—but with a romantic lighting that makes it beautiful. Larry Sultan does something similar, capturing moments with a story to unpack. We want to do that more and work with amazing photographers like them. It’s interesting because high art photographers often have their work in places like MoMA. I wonder if they would agree to shoot an album cover, but that would be a dream. Someone who’s actually going to see, someone who’s not just like a kind of commercial photography based who’s very focused on the aesthetic. Someone who’s like, oh, I see something weirder or interesting going on with like your guys’ sister dynamic. And I’m going to like, in a documentarian style, like have that come through in the picture, you know? I love that. Yeah, that would be awesome.

Chloe F: You never know! They might find it a creative challenge. Chloe, you studied photography in college, right?

Chloe S: Yeah.

Chloe F: Have you both dabbled in other creative spaces before, during, or after starting music?

Chloe S: Honestly, I don’t think I’m gifted at anything else besides music. I have interests in photography and fashion, but my life has been mostly about music. Asya has done film composing, which is more technical than just creating art.

Chloe F: Would you say, Asya, that’s almost less creative in a way, even though what you’re doing is still an outlet for music, but is that kind of more restricting because it’s people telling you what they want from you, from your music?

Asya: Yeah, it can feel more restricting because you’re working within someone else’s vision. Depending on how much it aligns with yours, it can be restraining in different ways. But there’s creativity in those constraints.  So, yeah, it’s weird because sometimes it feels really annoyingly restrained where I want to do something else, but I know I have to do this specific kind of thing that the film crew wants. It forces you to think about things rather than just going through a formula for writing a song. It opens creative doors and makes me feel more inspired when I return to pop songwriting.

Asya: I feel that way about other art forms too. It refreshes my creativity for music.

Chloe S: You’ve also done a lot of writing, right?

Asya: Yeah. I love writing; it’s connected to music for me. I write and then it inspires lyrics or song direction. It’s part of the songwriting process. It’s humbling to do other art forms. We put so much work into music, and sometimes we take it for granted. A couple of years ago, I submitted an essay to a writing retreat, but it got rejected. It was a bit out of my league, but it showed me how hard you have to work to be skilled at something.

Chloe F: Hearing that is really interesting. And that leads me to my next question I wanted to ask, how do you guys start your writing process? Do you begin with music, instrumentals, or writing the actual lyrics?

Chloe S: It varies for different songs. Asya often starts on her own, and then I get involved, or vice versa. It’s more common for Asya to start the songs. She’s more of the songwriter, pianist, keyboardist. It’ll be like Asya will have a poem about something or a journal entry or some significant thing that happened that she has written about and has some imagery that’s kind of poetic about it, like “Blue”, for example. I’ll take on a co-songwriter/producer role, almost like a therapy session, it’s very surgical. It can be difficult because when something is vulnerable, it’s hard to hear if it’s not coming through clearly. We push each other to really get the message we want to convey.

Asya: It’s about making that intention clear. The roles have become jumbled for our new material. We’re trying to be more honest and vulnerable than ever before. If one of us starts with the lyrics, the other pushes them to bring it to that honest place. We know each other well, so we understand what we’re singing about. Neither of us gets away with a lyric that isn’t fully honest. If something feels off, the other will ask for clarity. It’s scary, but it feels like a different method. The new material definitely feels more vulnerable. It’s cool to be involved in different ways; there’s more freedom and exploration.

Chloe S: It’s hard when you don’t have that support. I trust Asya when I question if something is too bold. She encourages me to go bolder. It’s nice to have someone to bounce off of. Our biggest goal is to have a feeling or intention come through in the song. It’s interesting because there’s certain chord progressions or certain chords and melodies that feel like you can say anything on it and it sounds cool. But when it gets a little bit more pop and happy, then it’s really hard to say things that are honest and have it feel like there’s a fine line of it getting cheesy sometimes. So that’s kind of one of the hardest challenges for us is figuring out that line and how to still be honest in those songs. It can be challenging when certain chord progressions sound good but make it hard to say something honest without sounding cheesy.

Chloe S: Exactly. Some lyrics work depending on the melody and chord progression. You could literally read a Sylvia Plath poem and think that’s so amazing, and you put it on a pop song and it would sound so stupid.

Chloe F: Wow, that’s so interesting, I’ve never thought about it like that.

Chloe S: So that’s definitely something we’re trying to figure out, how to have both interesting nuance and a pop song

Chloe F: How is the process different for writing a pop song compared to a more honest ballad from your poems or journal entries? When you decide it’s going to be a pop song, how do you approach writing the lyrics to avoid sounding cheesy?

Chloe S: Good question. Sometimes, it helps when I just start singing a stream of consciousness with the melody. As I record, my mind realizes what feels right and what doesn’t. Trusting your gut helps guide the lyrics. That can help. Using the stream of consciousness scratch vocal can also help guide. Asya, I feel like your method sometimes is using more sad words that make the turning it more upbeat and more pop

Asya: I think it’s more natural for me to write using more melancholic words in pop songs to prevent them from sounding too bubblegum. I naturally gravitate toward a melancholic vibe, so I try to incorporate that into the pop songs. I usually start from a poem which helps form an idea about what the song will be. In the past, I got excited about production but struggled to match lyrics, so I make sure to have a clear idea of the song’s direction early on. It’s fun to play with words. It’s art. They take on different meanings when sung, and repeating a word can shift its weight in the song. It;s fun to experiment with that and see where it takes you. Lyrics are really important to us. We wouldn’t move forward with a song without solidified lyrics; that feels like a dangerous zone.

Chloe F: I agree. I like that a lot because I feel like when you turn on the radio nowadays, it’s the pop songs that are being released, it’s very much kind of the opposite.I feel like they’ve definitely prioritized more of the sound rather than the lyrics because then you listen to the lyrics and you’re like, like, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Or like you guys were saying earlier, like very kind of cheesy.

Asya:  No, it’s kind of thrown together and then it can be worse. The song is so catchy, but there’s like nothing to hold on to when it’s like that. For me, I won’t be super attached to the song if it has an empty lyric meaning. The song is really good and the lyrics. If the song is really good and the lyrics feel, you know, like, real and clear and good, I’ll be so much more obsessed with the song

Chloe F: 100%. And I feel like most of those songs don’t stay popular long. They might be on the radio for a few months, maybe a summer, but they don’t really stick. If the lyrics aren’t holding it down, it’ll fade away and only make waves for a short amount of time.

Asya: Exactly. Right now feels like a good time for vulnerable, real lyrics. There’s space for that.

Chloe F: 100%. I also wanted to ask about your recent rendition of “Do You Feel It” with strings. It’s gorgeous! What sparked the idea to reinvent the song in a new way?

Chloe S: It was probably the 10-year anniversary. We had broken up for three years during the pandemic, and Asya and I were struggling with our friendship. We spent almost three years not communicating.

Chloe F: Wow.

Chloe S: Getting back together and working on our relationship through therapy helped us start working on the band again. Fans have been asking for vinyl of that record for years, and we’d never done it before. And how do we, how do we embrace something from the past that we never fully embraced enough, but also through the lens of being older and what we’re going through with our relationship? So we kind of, I think that just naturally ended up being part of the song and the music video was speaking to a bit of that. Like, it ended up just inadvertently speaking to the kind of sadness of our relationship being difficult, like, with the lyrics, “Where is the love, the kind we dream of, it kind of makes us young” and it’s like 10 years later, and we’re getting older.It felt like a perfect opportunity to tie a bow on the song and clear space for new things. 

Chloe F: I love that. And like you guys were saying, you never really embraced it when it came out 10 years ago. This is the first official music video. I remember looking for the song back then, and it was often associated with “Rick and Morty.” I’m glad you guys are able to reclaim it and embrace it now. 

Chloe S: For sure. I think some of that stemmed from some lack of self-love and confidence in the past. We were too passive with our music, moving on without fully claiming it. But I think we moved on to the next thing and passively let things happen. Like, oh, Rick and Morty ended up using this song and got popular through that. And we weren’t really doing a lot to, like, take the reins on the narrative and be like, this is our thing. This is who we are. We’re kind of just, like, doing it because it’s what we know and what we like doing. But I think now we’re ready to be showing a bit more of who we are and, like, just claiming it and having that confidence.