SPOTLIGHT: MIKAYLA FUENTES

Meet Mikayla Fuentes and tune into her album “come home to me”

‘come home to me’ feels like such a vulnerable and grounded title. What did “coming home” mean to you while making this record? 

When I was working on the album, it was honestly the main thing keeping me going. Everything else felt so unsafe and unstable in my life, and my writing was the only place where I felt like I could fully express the true range of emotions I was experiencing. Throughout making the album, so much joy and excitement returned to me, and by the time we were finalizing the songs, I really started to fall in love again with my life and all of its calmness and complexity. 

You describe the album as exploring both comfort and chaos—how did you translate those emotional contrasts into your production choices? 

Jack [Jack Daye] helped so much with this. When I showed them my vision, they perfectly understood, and together we took it to another level. I really have a thing for tension in music. I hate when things sound too resolute, and especially in this album, I love to make people feel uneasy. The title track ‘come home to me’ is probably my favorite example of this. It starts soft, but it’s super clear that something feels off, even from just the first chord. There’s a bubbling sort of discomfort underneath the whole song, and it builds until it finally releases at the end with the crazy break beat outro and a massive stack of adlib vocals. 

As someone who experienced a deeply toxic relationship, was there a particular moment in making this album where you felt yourself begin to reclaim your voice? 

I think that the whole album was so special and empowering to make, but especially ‘loser with a gun’. That song is so incredibly special to me, I feel like it so perfectly encapsulates the range of emotions that I felt while dealing with being stalked by someone who I once  thought I could trust. It feels like there’s nothing you can do, like it’s all you can think about, like you’re constantly unsafe; but then there’s this other fed up side, the part of you that knows that no matter how much power this person has, it doesn’t change the fact that they are who they are: a loser. Additionally, I love the way that instead of shying away from the insanity, this song owns it and leans into it. When you’re going through something like that, it does make you feel crazy, because you’re constantly looking over your shoulder waiting for the next bad thing to happen; it’s an unshakable paranoia. But in this song, I run towards that feeling rather than away from it, and that feels like reclaiming my voice. 

You’ve said the album includes an “unconventional exploration of peace.” What does peace look or sound like to you now, compared to when you started writing these songs?  

To me, peace is the privilege of having enough safety/comfort to notice really small things. Like noticing how good your coffee tastes, or that someone smiled at you, or that it smells like it’s about to rain. When you’re going through something traumatic or life changing, it can feel really impossible to see outside of that; let alone notice the little things going on every day. I’ve always appreciated the little things, but I appreciate them now in a totally new and different way. 

The themes of distrust and betrayal come through clearly in the lyrics. Were you ever hesitant about being that direct, or did the honesty come naturally? 

I don’t think I gave myself much of a choice. It would have been too difficult to try to water down such a deep and real experience. I knew that if I tried to paraphrase or soften any of it, the whole body of work would end up taking a hit. So I told myself that I had to be transparent, with the safety net thought of “I don't have to release it, I just have to get it out of me.” But of course I released it anyway.

Working alongside another audio engineering major, how did your shared background shape the experimental direction of the project? 

It made everything so insanely fun. We were total nerds about so many things, and it paid off in the best ways. When one of us would have an idea, it would spark a whole chain of other ideas, and a bunch of creative thoughts on how we could go about achieving them. Jack is always encouraging me to take things to the next level, and I can’t express how amazing that is to have in a producer. I have a lot of really crazy ideas, and they are always down to try them out, see them through, and often expand upon them in their own way. 

What’s a specific production detail or sonic moment you’re really proud of—one you hope listeners catch on a deeper listen? 

I love this. There are so many. We put so much love into the small details of the album. One of my favorites is that you can actually hear me swallow at the end of ‘the end.’ The sound playing is a voice memo that I took while I was laying down in Japan (it was even called ‘laying down in Japan’). I was just so peaceful in that moment of my life, and it was taken before all of the bad stuff happened. I originally told Jack that I thought we should cut out the swallow, but they said “no, I love it, because the sound could be anywhere, but it shows that it’s happening around you.” When they said that, I knew we had to leave it in. 

Which song on the album was the hardest to finish, either emotionally or technically?

‘dnr’ was definitely the hardest song to finish. We were pretty much done with all of the other songs, and they had all taken this amazing shape, but we started ‘dnr’ really early on, so when we came back to it, it felt like it fell behind and had a lot of catching up to do. Getting the right vocal performance was the hardest part. It’s such a guttural and desperate song, especially in the chorus, and it’s in a very difficult area of my vocal range. There were probably at least three or four different sessions dedicated to that lead vocal. Looking back, I think that the fact that it was in a weird part of my range actually benefitted the emotional aspect of the performance. You can hear a bit of strain, and I love that now because it feels way more representative of the song than a perfect, clean vocal would. 

The album clearly serves as a personal catharsis. What do you hope it unlocks for listeners who may be processing something similar? 

I hope that more than anything the album sends a message to those people that IT’S OKAY NOT TO BE OKAY. When I was dealing with all of the stalking/harassment etc, it was very common for people to tell me “these things happen for a reason,” or “just stay positive and keep being you.” Of course they had no idea what that felt like, and they were just doing their best to be supportive, but being positive feels impossible when you’re stuck in survival mode for months on end. For that reason, I intentionally explored the darkness through the album rather than turning away from it. I want people to know that these feelings are real, and they run deep, and that’s not something that can be nicely wrapped up, nor should it be. It does get better, but the present matters too, and getting through it often means being proud of yourself for simply taking the next breath. 

Now that come home to me is out in the world, how do you feel looking back at the person you were when you started making it? 

I feel so proud of her. I’ve grown so much since then and am still growing every day, but I’ll never forget that at one point during all of that, it took everything in me just to get out of bed, and I did it. I also know that I am so incredibly lucky and privileged to have had such a strong support system of people who care so much about me. Those people made the album possible, but also made everything else feel possible.

Stream “come home to me” here.