St. Panther on Coming of Age, Coming Out, and Speaking Up

We already know it’s the next generation who is going to save us. They have all the good ideas, the blanket acceptance of our human family, and the drive to mix activism and ethics into everyday life. Up-and-coming musician St. Panther is no different, and we wanted to get all her musical secrets, so OUT FRONT chatted with her about making music during a pandemic and what she has in store.

How did you first get into music?
I’ve always been learning instruments all throughout my childhood, so I started playing piano when I was three, and then took piano lessons for some years, and then migrated to guitar and drum lessons. And then, in terms of producing, I kind of got more serious with producing throughout high school and middle school. So, like 2012, coming out of high school, I started recording my friends and then started recording myself and my solo projects, and it kind of just built from there.

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What do you have in the works right now that you’re focusing on?
Releasing the EP These Days and working on the creative end of videos for the EP. It’s exciting!

Have you had a lot of changes to your musical plans in light of COVID?
Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, in terms of videos, we’ve gone through a lot of treatments and changes and tried to find ways to be creative at home and find out how we can create content from where we are. So yeah, a lot of things have shifted to web now with livestreams and a lot of those things in the creative realm.

What are you most looking forward to when you can get out there and play live music again?
Being able to connect with people again; you know, we’re all kind of social people as musicians, so I think it’s really important to, like, get back out there and see how the music is connecting physically. So, we’re doing a lot of that over the web, and I’m really excited to get back out there and play in person.

How do themes about the queer community, social justice, and other important issues show up in your music?
I think they’re all from personal experience, so I’m really writing about reflections of experiences that I’ve had either struggling as myself or coming into myself and kind of putting those stories in my music, just reflections of me growing up queer, feelings that may happen in relationships, and things like that, being a reflection for other people listening to the music and coming into the music with maybe similar identities.

So yeah, I feel like the things I am doing are making a difference, like I did this collaboration with this skate company called Contenders that was in my area, which is still pretty conservative. So, we partnered together to create that openness within that community since it’s still very macho and kind of a boys club. We do small things like that wherever we can and kind of just open the doors a little bit more each time.

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Why do you think it’s important now more than ever to have that message in your music ?
We always work with this fluctuation of feeling like we’re in a really great place as a whole, like we’re right there with the changes, and then sometimes, we’ll experience things that kind of take us a little bit back. So, I think it’s good to have a constant precedence for standing for the right things and having equality just be all across the board, for
everyone.

I feel like that will continue as my work progresses, just standing for those things and making equality present in our work, the places that we’re hired, you know, just creating more opportunities for our community, which is important.

For more info on St. Panther, visit stpanther.com.

*Photo by Daniel Parsons