In 2020, Julia Gargano and her mother were holed up at their family home in Staten Island, getting "extremely crafty" with a screwdriver and glue-gun and "all of these beeping boxes and freakin' jungle of wires everywhere," setting up for Gargano's Zoom performance on the remote, pandemic-era season of American Idol. It was an experience that Gargano chucklingly and accurately describes as "trippy," "Truman Show-esque," and "freakin' weird as heck."
Now, four years and two record deals later, Gargano is back on Zoom under similarly surreal yet very different circumstances. She's chatting with Music Times from the more exotic locale of Wailuku, Hawaii, where she's rehearsing for this upcoming weekend's Sunflower Farm Music Festival charity event organized by her current label, Licorice Pizza Records. There, her new alt-pop buzz band Ferry Townes will be sharing a stage with legendary all-stars like the Beach Boys' Al Jardine, the Doobie Brothers/Steely Dan's Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, Guns N' Roses' Gilby Clarke, Bowie bassist Carmine Rojas, and the Stray Cats' Slim Jim Phantom.
And this time, she's truly ready for the big leagues.
Gargano jokes that American Idol Season 18, much of which was filmed in contestants' homes after L.A. production was suspended due to coronavirus concerns, "was an introvert's dream," explaining: "Live television is a scary thing, for me especially — just to be in front of that studio audience, the judges, right in front of you. It's all much more glamorous in that sense, but there is a pad of comfort when you're in your home and your mom's right there literally in the same room with you. So, it definitely had its benefits! I felt more calm when I was performing."
As for her remote elimination on top seven night, Gargano chuckles, "I always pictured being with Ryan Seacrest in front of a crowd and him being like, 'It's your time to go home.' It's a little more gentle getting the news from your bedroom."
That obviously wasn't the end for Gargano. One of Season 18's standout contestants from the moment she auditioned with her prophetically titled original song "Growing Pains," she was quickly snatched up by 19 Recordings, the record-label arm of Idol production company 19 Entertainment. But the singer-songwriter, who was barely 21 at the time, while "forever grateful" for the experience, realizes now that she "was not ready. I learned a lot about not rushing things just because there's a buzz. So much artist development needed to happen."
Gargano, who considers herself "a little bit of an awkward-in-real-life human," elaborates: "There were some really confident artists that were on the show and had been doing the whole music-business thing for years and years before they went on, but in my case, I was just still a baby artist. My artistic vision was not clear. And once you're on a show like that, your ego's a little big and you're thinking about all the wrong things. You're completely out of the art, in my case. Like, one night you'll get 10,000 [social media] followers and the next night you'll get 20,000, and it's so exciting, but you're getting hundreds or thousands of followers who are fans of American Idol and not necessarily of the contestant.
"So, now you have a group of people following you that don't know what you really do, and you're like, 'What audience am I trying to cater to?' — versus, 'Why do I love doing this and what message am I trying to send? Where did that message go, the stuff that drove me as a person and writer and artist before all this?' I needed to do some reconnecting with myself and just figure it out, get back to my roots in songwriting. It just was not a great fit, me and [19 Recordings]."
After 19 set up "very speed-dating-like" sessions between Gargano and various professional songwriters, she says she "wound up with a catalog of a bunch of songs that just sounded like a bajillion different artists' songs — and I was so aware of it. There was never a second that that didn't register with me. Even though I love the first two songs I put out, it was not really for me." She says exiting her 19 deal "wasn't so hard for me legally as it was emotionally and mentally; it was kind of like a black hole in my mind, and I leave it there on purpose." And then, "after that high-high followed by that low-low," she found herself thinking, "'Wow. That all happened. Now what do I do? What's the next step?'"
Gargano admits that while she was contemplating her next career move and finally "digesting" her whirlwind TV experience, she floundered for a bit. "I was very insecure in a lot of ways that I didn't even realize; so much came up. When you're on television and you're getting judged for the first time by strangers and typing weird s--- on the internet, you really have to get it together," she explains. "For instance, I was never used to seeing people talk about my body. People talked about things that had nothing to do with music. Somebody can not like my music and I will be totally OK with that, because I understand that music is subjective. I'm very hard to offend when it comes to music. But reading stuff about my body and my weight, just crazy stuff like that? That was rough. It did affect me."
Gargano continues: "I did have a level of fame in mind, truthfully, and that was an ego thing. I was kind of reaching for the wrong goal in my brain. The hard truth is, there's an insane amount of work that you need to do to stay relevant. It's super-easy to feel like you failed if you don't keep that level of exposure [after being on TV]. I definitely had moments where I had to snap myself out of feeling like the 'moment' was over, whatever that means. I'd never had anything like that at all close to that before, and then there's just such a silence that it can leave a lot of room for thinking about what you're not doing, what music you're not making, blah, blah, blah. For a lot of people, it's easy just to stop there and be like, 'Well, that was my time. I guess I missed it.' Even now sometimes, I have that little voice in my head. But it's three years later, and I try to put that mentality way on the furthest back burner there is, not letting the idea of 'you had your time' take any sort of front seat in my brain. Because that's bulls---."
And then, while Gargano — who started playing drums at age 6, took up piano at 8, and was playing New York's famous Bitter End by age 13 — always knew that she wanted to pursue music and "never had a plan B," she was still figuring out her plan A. That's when Grammy-nominated songwriter/producer/publishing executive Billy Mann slid into her DMs. Mann had been impressed by her Idol performance of a P!nk song he cowrote, "Glitter in the Air" (on an episode that, ironically/full-circularly, was filmed in Hawaii), and once the two connected, he became a mentor and advocate who "put me in such awesome spaces and got my mindset back to where I'm making music I love again," Gargano says.
This eventually led to Gargano's deal with Licorice Pizza Records. "And that's what I've been doing for the past three years. This has been so needed and exciting — to come out on the other side of everything and end up with a catalog of music that I'm really obsessed with and listen to for fun," she enthuses.
And that brings us to Ferry Townes, Gargano's new indie-rock project formed with her "insanely talented" classmates from the famed LaGuardia High School, whose debut album is set for a summer release and whose latest single is "T.G.F.K." The song, which stands for "Thank God for Kyle," is a tribute to her titular "bestie through and through" — a rare, refreshing ode to platonic love that showcases Gargano's unique perspective. "We'll never have to date and break up, because Kyle loves boys," she quips. "It's so funny on Instagram in the comments; I saw a couple of people being like, 'Go get him! Don't be stupid!' There are definitely comments about how he's 'The One.' But that's the best part about it: There's no room for any of that petty romantic stuff."
The prolific Gargano hasn't ruled out releasing future material under her own name, like "a whole folky EP, just an acoustic one-takes thing" that she has already recorded, but for now, she's focused on her new chapter with Ferry Townes. (The band name is a loving nod to where she was raised, Staten Island, which she chucklingly admits "definitely has a weird rep.")
"I was talking before about that ego shift and the relationship that I wound up having with music and how it felt off after American Idol, and these other songs that I've been writing for the past couple of years feel so different and intentional," Gargano, now 25, explains. "It felt really appropriate to have a new start — like, Spotify started from zero, YouTube started from zero, and to see growth like that, I really appreciate every little single follow. It's been super-healing and exciting. And I love being 'Julia from Ferry Townes'! It's a tiny bit removed, so I have the space to create whatever I want and try something new.
"Ferry Townes is a really special new beginning for me, just being a confident woman and knowing how to stand up for myself, making music that I love and being unapologetic," says Gargano. "I'm feeling good about myself, which is important. It rocks."
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