Meet ADDIE: Boston-based Queer Indie Pop artist

All photos courtesy of @photo_dystopia

Adeline Vamenta, who goes by ADDIE, is defying the odds as a new musician in the local Boston music scene. During her junior year in high school, the 20-year-old indie rock artist amassed more than one million streams on her single “Drive Slow.” This past year, she released her debut album Crater Lake and played shows in multiple cities for her tour.

Originally from Westwood, Massachusetts, Vamenta attends Berklee College of Music in Boston as a music production engineering major. In a recent Zoom interview, she abruptly gets up to shut a closet door to hide her cluttered belongings. She briefly mentions her incredible experience at queer indie-pop band MUNA’s concert at the Royale. “It was amazing. We were pretty close too. It was just gay church,” she says. In an oversized, forest green sweatshirt and washed black straight-leg jeans, Vamenta slightly hunches forward in her desk chair. Her silver heart-shaped Tiffany & Co. necklace is glued to her chest, as it is in every appearance, and her chin-length, deep brown hair and wispy bangs hug her face.

As a child, Vamenta was obsessed with musical theater and determined to become a Broadway performer. “Even in middle school, up until eighth grade, I was like, ‘I will be on Broadway,’” she says. After getting rejected from a musical theater high school and attending the summer Charles River Creative Arts program in Dover, Massachusetts, she developed an interest in songwriting and playing the bass guitar.

One of the first songs Vamenta wrote was her breakout track “Drive Slow” during the summer after her freshman year. The queer anthem discusses the crush she had on a girl who was preparing to leave for college. Cooper Evello, a Boston-based music producer who taught her how to play bass at the Charles River Creative Arts program, assisted in recording “Drive Slow” in a school auditorium and mixed it on a laptop in his living room. 

She released the song in the fall of 2018, then was added to Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist, one of Spotify’s main playlists that contains a mix of 30 songs based on a user’s music taste. In April 2019, she woke up one morning to 12,000 Spotify streams overnight. Up to this point, she had not been open about her queer identity, even to her family. “That song actually kind of outed me because people were talking about it and rumors spread. And then all of a sudden, everyone knew, which I didn't really care that much, but it's kind of unfortunate,” she says. Since then, she has enjoyed a flow of roughly 20,000 monthly listeners, which continues to grow by the thousands every month.

Before her senior year of high school, Vamenta planned to attend a five-week program at Berklee in which high school students experience a typical undergraduate curriculum. But right after she turned 17, her dad, who was also a musician, passed away after battling stage four lung cancer. “I missed the first couple days of the program because of the funeral, so that made my experience there really tough… My high school career was him battling cancer and also teaching myself bass and writing songs and releasing them,” she says.

Although Drive Slow was a great achievement, Vamenta doesn’t want it to be the song she is best known for. Evello says her hard work as a young musician does not end with that one famous song. “She has a million plays with her one song, but she still has to work to get those other songs up to snuff and out there and spreading it,” he says. 

Evello emphasizes that her unique lineup as a singer, songwriter, bassist, and producer continues to contribute to her success. “She definitely has an unusual work ethic compared to most upcoming musicians. She’s always obsessed with her project in the best way,” he says.

In June of 2022, Vamenta released her debut album Crater Lake, inspired by her fascination with the Oregon lake after she learned about it in her seventh-grade science class. “It’s special because it’s not like a normal lake. It formed because there was a volcanic explosion that was filled with rainwater, and I’ve never been but I don’t know, it just seems so mysterious,” she says. 

Crater Lake is danceable, indie-rock perfection, and ADDIE’s most vulnerable work yet. The theme is Vamenta’s fear of change, especially as she leaves her teenage years behind and enters adulthood. The entire album contains songs she had written before turning 20 as an ode to the end of her teenage era. “I feel so overwhelmed with all of the things I want to do in life, but I also feel anxious that they won't always be there for me to do because the world is like not waiting for you, so what if I go to Crater Lake and the water is not as clear anymore because of pollution?” she says then apologizes for rambling. 

Every song on the album discusses evolution in some way, including the love songs. Vamenta says that even if the tracks talk about a positive transformation, there is still an underlying worry that they are too good to be true. In the title track, she dreams of taking a trip to Crater Lake with her significant other before their connection took a turn for the worse: “I wanted to see the world with you before you changed.” 

Folksy components were included in the last chorus based on the distorted playing style of guitarist Buck Meek from the indie-folk band Big Thief. “I told Ashley, my girlfriend and guitarist, to do the worst solo she’s ever done, just play horribly like Buck Meek or something. You can hear a little bit of it but I put it pretty quiet,” she says.

Vamenta created the album in hopes of performing it live at house shows, so it avoids electronic production and instead emphasizes upbeat, garage-pop that creates a carefree, fun environment for listeners. Her favorite song to play live is the bass-heavy track “All The Sun,” which starts off as a confession of the phases of insecurity she undergoes. Halfway through the track, she uses these feelings as motivation to turn her life around. “I saw the sun for the first time in a week / And I caught a glimpse of who I wanted to be.” 

Crater Lake also shines as Vamenta’s expressive outlet to openly discuss her queer identity. “About You” in particular confesses that she can’t shake the connection she had with her past partner: “Her face turned into yours / I just want to be in love like we were before.” The post-breakup recovery anthem starts off with a pacifying acoustic guitar intro then picks up the pace with an indie-rock breakdown that matches her frustration, as she repeatedly belts “What do I do about you?”

Many of Vamenta’s listeners consist of people who identify as queer. Before the album, she admits that it took her a while to write songs that made her sexuality obvious because she didn’t want to feel inauthentic about curating a queer audience. “It feels good to own it, so obviously, I want to do that and connect with people that have a similar experience because I don't know, the queer experience is just different. A queer love song is not the same as a straight one,” she says. 

While making Crater Lake, Vamenta drew inspiration from indie-rock artist Indigo De Souza. “I love her. I swear she’s like a witch or something, she’s so good,” she says. “I actually want to be her more than I want to collaborate with her.” 

Evello engineered, recorded, and mixed the album with Vamenta in an incredibly small space in his apartment that is filled with instruments and equipment, such as guitars, a keyboard, and a microphone. Despite the scattered room’s overwhelming first impression, Evello’s laid-back and calm personality sends peaceful vibes to anyone who enters this space. He jokes that Vamenta chose to work with him since he is the type to support most of her decision-making. “She knows that I wouldn't get in her way too much. So if she felt strongly about something, I wasn't gonna be like, ‘Oh, no, that's not it. In the industry, you gotta do this,’ which I feel like a lot of producers and even engineers can sometimes do,” he says while laughing.

While working on the album, Vamenta was also booking her summer 2022 tour with her band of Berklee students: Guitarist Aaron Fitzgerald, drummer Justin Jen, and her girlfriend/guitarist, Ashleigh Wulf. The tour occurred in July and included eight northeast cities where they stayed with family members in each place. Vamenta originally committed to having an all-female band, but when she couldn’t find enough musicians committed to playing shows every weekend, Fitzgerald and Jen came into the picture.

Vamenta says the tour varied in quality, but it was memorable to play shows with her new bandmates that eventually became her best friends. She chose each city based on venue owners that responded to her, which sometimes sent her to places in the middle of nowhere, such as Littleton, New Hampshire. But those turned out to be some of her favorite places because of the venue owners’ passions for DIY music. 

“We pulled into [Littleton] and were like, ‘Oh my god,’ because it was in the mountains. I mean it’s literally called Littleton,” she says while chuckling. “But it was so cute because we walked around the town and there were posters of me all over the town.” Overall, the tour taught Vamenta that smaller communities tend to be the most encouraging and even pay the most.

Boston house shows offer the most consistently supportive crowds for Vamenta and her band. But otherwise, she says, Boston has few venues for musicians. “I feel like in general, there's just not a huge [music] scene except for Berklee, but a Boston house show is so fun because what else are those people doing that night?” she says.

Vamenta isn’t rushing to produce her next album or single and is waiting for invitations to perform, rather than seeking them. It’s a hard mindset to acquire at Berklee, where students feel pressured to constantly release music. For the rest of the school year, you can catch Vamenta and her band performing at house shows almost weekly. She plans to continue writing music and release a new album sometime this year.