Nice To Meet You, Ouida!

Mixed Asian Media - July 15, 2022

By Bri Ng Schwartz

Photos by Mark Chua

Styled by Mey Saechao

Multidisciplinary and multiracial, Sam Hyland (otherwise known as Ouida) reminds me of the power in not being just one thing. Her music, family background, education, and day-to-day work inform all that she is. I was fortunate enough to get a small taste in this conversation.

When did you realize that music was your path? 

A 9 years old, a friend of mine in school wanted me to sing with her in front of a class. Immediately after doing it, I was addicted. It was the first I was really excited about something. From there I was always making up little diddies. I was making up songs every day with no intention but to entertain myself and make something kind of fun or funny for my friends to sing with me.

I got to the point where I would pick a word out of the dictionary and try to write a song about it. I just fell in love with the craft pretty early on.

Now you're going to need to tell me one of those words from the dictionary and what song came from it.

The word sesquipedalian got put in front of me, and it basically means “very long word.” I remember using that in my book report. I was like, “It's a book full of so many sesquipedalians.”

That is too funny.

It was so obscene. It's a long word to describe a long word. It doesn't get sillier than that. I remember the first song I wrote was called “Heartbreak” and I was 9. What I thought I knew about heartbreak was from watching a lot of Smallville on TV.

We all thought we knew everything when we were 9, you know? That's a funny segue into my next question, which is kind of the opposite of that word. How would you describe your sound in one? It could be a simple word, it could be a complicated word such as…

Sesquipedalian? [laughs]

It's kind of perfect we're talking about this. The experience of being mixed race is like never having to neatly and perfectly fit into one box in a way that everyone can easily identify and not ask questions about. With my music I feel this pressure to have to be one thing. 

But it's just never been able to work out that way for me. Even with a couple songs that I've released since 2020, they're all very different. I think the one thing that connects them all is, there's a deep wanting and a deep reverence. It's funny, I say that because I'm thinking of a song, “Puerto Princesa.” That's like a fun song, but it's about really longing and wanting to have a life in the tropics, outside of this winter pandemic. Wanting to be kind of free. There's a lot of want. I think everyone can relate to that. It isn't out there, but the music I used to write was dark and a lot more sexualized. I loved Lana Del Ray back in the day. I was 18. This music's a lot happier. It's a lot more reflective and about the sweeter moments of being reflective, rather than tortured feelings of being reflective.

You mentioned Lana a little bit and how that informs your past. Who else have you looked toward for inspiration, and who are you inspired by now? 

My earliest influences were jazz and rock. I listened to a lot, and this wasn't by choice. This was just what was played around me. I listened to a lot of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. I always mention the jazz singers because that's what really kind of shaped my voice. My grandmother was a singer. So when I would sing with her as a kid, she was always really pushing those jazz inflections and also pronunciation, so people can understand you. The musicians I really listen to today really vary. I love Jorja Smith. I was a big Amy Winehouse fan when she was with us. I love SZA.

I love hearing about your relationship with your grandma and how that informed your music taste. Can you talk a little bit more about how your background and your culture has inspired your work over the years?

Filipinos are entertainers. To pass the time, amuse each other, create community and communal experiences, the arts are a foundation. When we talk about karaoke, like that’s a real thing. Karaoke is serious. My brothers could break dance. My sister played some piano. My other brother played viola.

My dad's side, he's Irish American, mostly. He was a singer in our church. His mother was a singer as well, and she's actually half Filipina, my dad's mom. I grew up in such a musical home, I just didn't know any different, and I'm really grateful and lucky for that exposure. My immediate family was all pretty into music, but, like I said, my grandmother was a dancer and a singer, her sister was in SF ballet, and their mom was in the San Francisco opera.

I grew up with their stories about people they'd meet — whether it was like Johnny Cash and “we shared a cab after a show I performed in New York” or whatever it was — and hearing what the entertainment business was like in decades passed, during the times of some of these really fabulous artists that you only hear about as legends.

It sounds like your entryway into the arts was really communal, and that's something that I wanted to ask you about. I was watching your music videos, and you're just surrounded by the most beautiful humans. The music videos seemed very collaborative, even though you're at the center. Was that an intentional through line in your work?

Yes and no. So much of the music is this kind of exploration of my own identity. I wanted that to be felt and seen in the videos. You know, you can't talk about the diasporic experience without having people of the diaspora and that diversity there as well. So I reached out to friends, acquaintances, and people that I knew had been openly explorative about their mixed identity or their Filipino identity and asked them if they wanted to be a part of this. And I think the reason it looks so collaborative is because it really was. I never asked anyone to do anything without first asking them, “Is this how you want to be, how you like to represent, how you want to experience this?”

Especially with “Coffee,” that first video. I think we took that a step further with “Puerto Princesa.” I kept thinking, being in the Bay Area, it’s such a melting pot. There's so much cultural exchange happening. 

The first video was like, what does it mean to be a modern woman in the Filipino diaspora? We're in power suits one minute, the next minute we're in traditional dress. Then in “Puerto Princesa,” it was who we are as a community within our other communities, you know? What other elements are we incorporating into our identity? It's not just from our heritage, but it's also the living breathing place of where we are.

It makes a lot of sense, and it touches on something else I wanted to talk to you about. I know you do work outside of your music around equity, diversity, and representation. I'm curious to know more about that work.

I'm a consultant, and I support other thought leaders in leadership development training. We do organizational cultural assessments, then provide and implement strategies that are co-created with them to try and find ways to build and sustain equity in systems that are inherently inequitable. 

I think, as a recording artist, there's this expectation people have that labels support you, and you can just do this full time. As an independent artist, you don't have that. So I think it was really important that as I support myself and fund my art in the Bay Area, I invest in the work that I think is really socially impactful and important as well.

How would you say your degree in sociology impacts the work that you do with your consulting and also your music? Do you think it's all intertwined?

I've always kind of suffered (and this is such a mixed Asian thing too) from being left-brained, right-brained. I want to be an artist, but I really deeply care about social problems, and I want to find a way to marry them. In this world, people want you to be one thing. I did study music for a portion of time at NYU, and when I left, I decided to focus on just sociology for a while. And in that process, studying was so healing. It was like I was unpacking and uncovering so much conflict inside that I hadn't recognized as being totally linked to larger social events or phenomena.

I think there's something that can be isolating about being mixed race, and so I really am grateful for the education I did get. I had tools to look at it, define it, and create a new space for it. And that's what I did with my art. I now have a space that no one can tell me nothing about. I'm free to explore my heritage. I don't have to look a certain way or justify it to anybody. And it's not for anyone else. It's for me, it's for my exploration. It ends up becoming a space for other people to do that too, which I wasn't expecting. 

Looking at how music and art impact social change, when we think about all the movements that have happened, whether that's the civil rights movement or the #MeToo movement, there's music. There's songs and anthems that people recognize and attach to them. So the power is there, and it just goes to show that we're all inextricably linked together through shared expression.

On a little bit of a lighter note, if you could tour with any artist, who would it be and why? 

Dua Lipa, she's super cool, and the new album’s so exciting to me. Jorja Smith and I could do something cool together. Also SZA. Lyrically, what a genius.

What's next?

I released a song a month ago called “Nice to Meet You,” and that song is really special to me. The music video for that is going to come out sometime next month, and it's a lot more about growing up in San Francisco. I have a collaboration with an Irish rapper, his name's JYellowL. Also, Ruby Ibarra and I have a song coming out together. It's going to be on her new album in October.