London born and NZ-based Deryk channels a unique, rhythmic vocal energy that is reminiscent of places other worldly. She shares with us her insight on identity, self-acceptance as a creative with ADHD, and the intricacies behind her debut single “Call You Out”.

How would you describe the journey to your current identity from your youth to where you are now? What significant experiences have you transformed into something so powerful and something you're proud of?

It's mainly my failures, they're certainly the biggest thing that I think about when I think about what's moulded me into the musician that I am and the person that I am, it's always failures. That's what I'd say has definitely evolved me into the artist that I am.

What in your mind was one of your significant failure or something that you found is like a roadblock and what did it take for you and how long did you realise that was actually a positive thing?

It's interesting, is a failure a failure if afterwards you realise that it wasn’t, but at the time you really thought that it was, you know? I guess in my mind, I did truly always think it was a failure, which is why I've kind of titled a failure, I only found out I had ADHD when I was really young, I would have been like 20. Around then. I mean, it's something that's super common and so many people have. It was never something that I shunned or anything, but I just had no idea.

At that age, I couldn't cope with really basic life things. I found it very difficult to respond to emails, I’d sit there and try to do it for a while and then I just couldn't send or finish it. Yeah, there were just lots of little things that I struggled with so often that I could see that other people process and do reasonably easily. I used to be really hard on myself about it. I wasn't in an accepting place at all for a very long time, for many, many years. By the time I was that age, I couldn't cope anymore.

I went to see my GP and she had known me for awhile and she just mentioned it and she was like, ‘I think you may have this, but I obviously, I can't tell you, I'll put you in touch with the psychiatrist’.

So, I went home when I spoke to her, she was literally like, ‘I can't believe that this has never been picked up.’ Because she had to look through all of my school reports, from when I was a kid, all of that stuff. I think for me, that truly was at the time failure after failure, because it was constantly every day. So many things that I couldn't concentrate on or finish. And now I look back and all of those times was actually just me not understanding and accepting how my brain is.

Yeah. It wasn't your fault. I think, especially with an ADHD diagnosis and especially in girls, I think, does that stereotype of add or ADHD as being the kid, like screaming and throwing stuff, but it erodes your self esteem when you realise you're like not getting ahead and that's super interesting. Did receiving that diagnosis bring a bit more clarity or how is processing that, I guess in terms of your self concept?

It definitely brought a lot of clarity because I was always very passionate about music and words, I always considered melody being my strongest passion, writing them, I’ve always created my own tunes. Even as a kid, I'd be hooked on the melody of a pop song and kind of just mumble my own words, singing along to the songs that my sister loved. I know now that all of that was ADHD kind of like behaviour for sure. Just because of how in a dream I was about a lot of things and I think that certainly impacted my self concept for sure.

Well, if in that zone in itself, it's a bit more of an advantage being able to hyper focus and be in that kind of flow state of music where you are a creator. So, you know, at the end of the day, having that energy to put towards that. That's fantastic. And it really shows through and I mean it's a talent in itself.

Thank you. It's pretty jarring and I think when you feel it, cause there's a identity crisis that you have, I'm sure many of us have experienced it when you find out something about your self a lot later in life or I know for some people, it’s ridiculous finding out they’re twins later in life, but for me when it's your whole world and you felt like you had been through a lot already find that out. It's very intense. So I think I'm super grateful for it even though I guess in my mind there's still a side of me that's like wow imagine if I had have known all those years, how I operated at school and how I would've done things, it would have been very different, but something that I found really interesting about the ADHD diagnosis was on both sides of my family, at least one boy has it, ADHD is just not similar in males. It's very different. I think that may have helped me appreciate it being missed more because I was like, Oh, okay. I understand that it wasn't because of my gender. It was just because it presented itself differently. It wasn't because i'm a female it's because of how it was presented, which was easier to wrap my head around.

No, totally. I've been through the exact same thing as you. I received an ADHD diagnosis at 21. It makes so much sense. At first I just thought, am I incapable? Or am I lazy and how come I can only do one thing. I think it's so admirable with your music as well. And that's why I touched upon, it kind of being a super power or the hyper-focus or the particular passion that comes with ADHD, something that I suppose people, or maybe neuro-typical can’t obtain. So I think as with anything, that's why and touching back on that value thing, I think it's really cool because, in fact, you've been granted such as, it's like a special power beyond what normal people can access. So yeah, even though it's a failure over diagnosis, I think it's a really fucking cool thing for you. And it clearly shows through.

I adore that you shared that, I'm so stoked because honestly, it’s so liberating when you hear other people have gone through like something similar, I feel like more people need to be transparent because ADHD is one of those things that’s been really stereotyped. It’s not something I share regularly at all, but there's definitely been moments when family members or someone have said like, ‘Oh, but you don't seem like you have ADHD’, because a lot of people assume if someone's ADHD that they're like hyperactive and all over the place. Whereas if you really look into things, when you mentioned the hyper-focus, I was like, wow, that truly is like one of the main characteristics for me, melodies, music, instruments, light and creating is my hyper-focus. So yeah. It's cool at the end of the day. Yeah. I accept it now for sure.

Yeah, it’s old attitudes, you can't blame family members or anyone else because there's not enough education around it, but those stereotypes are rigid, they makes you feel so isolated and incompetent. But the thing with ADHD is, you have to find the style that works for you and that's when you truly succeed. If you’ve realised your super points, how you work through in creating them, you've really been served an upper hand on this whole thing. I love speaking to artists who get really vulnerable and share that kind of stuff. One thing I particularly wanted to touch upon that is talking about your songwriting process for your song ‘Call You Out’, when you write a song that is addressing a person, is that song about a theoretical person or is it built upon experiences with different people? What was the background motive? The song to me has a lot of pent up energy, which I think is great.

When I think of the song, it totally is that pent up energy. I imagine an alligator or crocodile in the water, waiting to eat something, that's the visual they think about when I think of the song. I've noticed recently, because I’m working on some new stuff, that when I did this with the EP and ‘Call You Out’, I often don't write about a completely specific thing. It's more that I accumulate memories of feeling the same thing, about many things. And then once Ive felt it enough, I scribe it properly. And that's what ‘Call You Out’ is about, I felt it really strongly it was something that would just pop up a lot.

What were you noticing? What were recurrent things you noticed or feelings coming up, what was firing that up within you?

I feel like what it was specifically about to me was I'm in a mixed race relationship. My boyfriend is half Kiwi. We've been together for years now, I don't think I'd fully realised before the stuff that he has to go through on a weekly basis because of that, so obviously when I met him and we got to know each other so deeply, right now we spend like every day together, there was a lot of things was that really opened my eyes. And this was a track that I wrote like over a year ago. So it was something that was really bothering me for a long time.

With call you out specifically the way that I was able to craft the words was around a couple of key experiences that really shook me and really infuriated me. At times where it was like, I'd eaten something so disgusting and there was this foul taste in my mouth and I just wanted to spit it out. So I really embodied how it made me feel and really relieved it. Every single word that was written down was really just me putting myself back into that place of screwing myself my face up and just being like, yuck. I just want to end this.

So when you’re writing from these experiences, there's the idea that art and music serves as both a catharsis and a call to action. What have you found to be the most frightening, gratifying experience in the process when you're producing music and having other people experiencing it, what have been your most memorable moments that have reflected such?

I guess ‘Call You Out’ was the first original track that I put out and that I put out as Derek that I've had feedback from. I was reading through and hearing how people felt about the track that it was super moving hearing how many different perspectives there could be from one song. I adored that people just had their own feeling of what it could be about. And then there could be discussion there, but there was one message that really stuck with me and it wasn't, to me, it was actually one of my boyfriends work friends had described to him what she felt that it was about.

She just really enjoyed it. And she had said to him that she felt like it was a song that every single woman in the music industry could relate to and based on their own experiences, not even necessarily like in the music industry, but just in the workforce. It's kind of, calling out bullshit about anything, just having that confidence to do so. Cause its really difficult I think to sometimes say, especially when its about gender because there is always this underlying inferiority complex when you're in a room full of one or more of the opposite gender. Being able to just call it out, yeah.

I just love this and I'm all for confrontation in a way that's productive, I think it's fantastic. I also want to ask you about yourself when you were younger and what was a defining moment and emotion that made you realise you were seriously going to pursue music?

So, I am half Kiwi and half British, my dad's a Kiwi, me and my mom's British. When I grew up initially I was in the UK and because we're in London, we used to be on the train or in the car a lot visiting family. And then eventually when we moved to New Zealand, there were obviously those trips too, a lot of travel. That's what I remembered the most, all the time we had to like be in our own mind and listen to music. Our parents gave me and my sister Walkmans and we had like a CD kind of sleeve that we put in the middle of the car, always between us.

We would listen to them over and over again on our Walkmans, it was so we could enjoy the travel and it just went by really fast. We'd always use up all the CDs, but it was something that I remember hearing these songs over and over again, feeling like that was the only job in the world that I would, that I could do or want to do. I really felt it then. That was when I was like six, then we moved to New Zealand when I was eight.

There was still a lot of travel in New Zealand, but not to the same extent as how much there was in the UK. So I think it was just a lot of listening to Johnny Nash and Bill Withers. It was all music that I wouldn't have been introduced to as well if I hadn't had a Walkman cause the CD's we just got free from the paper and they would just say free CDs with various artists on. And we used to collect those from the newspaper and put them in the sleeve between us and play them. And I think that's when a lot of yeah, manifesting, I guess started, but I guess it’s silly to say manifesting cause I was six, so I didn't really know what I was doing.

So if that was you as a child, when did you start singing, when did you start to create, even if it was like a very rough, when did you start creating tracks or original content whether like you're in your bedroom and you're a just kind of recording things or what were those beginning? Beginning of steps when you became a creator?

I had my first like percussion/drumming lesson when I was about four or five, it started as a group of mothers and children and we'd all sit in a circle and we’d get given a percussion instruments and I just couldn't sit there, couldn’t stay put and all of the other children were really enjoying it. But for some reason my mum tells me, I used to really want to try all the percussion instruments. So one of the tudors come over and said that she felt like I had some good rhythm and that my mum should explore it. So that was kind of the first instrument introduction that I had had. I didn't start keys until I was seven, when I got a keyboard. When we moved to New Zealand, I didn't have the keyboard anymore. We only brought what we had. Next time I had access to a kind of like a keyboard was the piano in intermediate school. So it would have been like 11 and then I did keys lessons at school, which was rad. When I started high school, I started guitar, and then when I finished high school, I started bass and then I started drums again when I was at uni.

In terms of the writing side of things, I started writing short fiction with one of my friends I met in my first year of high school. We would have been 12, she used to write short fiction and one day she had a piano at her house and so she put on music one. I remember watching it like really enjoying it, thinking, I would love to do that, I would probably do that. And that kind of made me start realising that I could mix an instrument with ideas. And then from that point it kind of just trailed off.

I didn't start working on my DAW, like logic or Ableton until I was 19, I'd only ever done voice memos until that stage. But then I went to SAE, which is like an audio engineering school when I was 19, just for six months to get a certificate. That's when I learned how to use Ableton. I guess I just went from there really. It just made sense.

You have so much technical knowledge in the background. So that's awesome. When you were starting to put things out there or create or even now do you have any hesitations and how do you ever come to hesitations? When it comes to, you know judging your ability or blocking out criticism or even if you have self doubt, like what do you tell yourself?

Yeah, there's many hesitations for sure. My hesitation has always been my own insecurities, that's why I went to SAE to initially to get that certificate because I wanted to know the job behind how things worked, I wanted to be able to have the language, talk about it in a studio and be heard when I thought things could go a certain way. Also style, along with that, starting something new 19, I truly did think that I was late to the party. Like only just starting to use logic. Even though now I know that's, that's ridiculous. You can truly start at any age, but I never felt good enough even with my instruments. I've always been very passionate about playing, having fun and just working on things. I never made it a goal to be fluent on an instrument. I know it's like one of those things where that would always come up in my life and be something that I'd be insecure about. Cause I'd feel phony, I can't do an incredible solo and blow everyone out of the water, I know I'd always pick at myself for it. But I think in reality, all of those hesitations were only created in my own head. I don't think that just being so hard on myself has never helped me get anywhere.

All of those little pockets in time where I've remembered to learn, to be like a little bit easier on myself, those moments have always been the moments where I've actually grown the most and enjoyed it the most, which has made me get the most out of something. With the production stuff, I met Justin Pilbrow, he's the man that I co-write the deryk work with. Working with him has changed my life because he gives me such confidence in a studio environment that I hadn't had before, because I had always been so hard on myself, but he was really encouraging and has taught me so much about so much. Like even outside of music.

He's such an incredible mentor, so creative to work with. I think getting to do that with him and then his production style and how he does things has been extremely rewarding. So I think just going back to the hesitation thing, if I hadn't been so hesitant with him and I hadn't let my guard down to see what was happening, I wouldn't have written any of this work really. I think it's so important to let the hesitation slip away and just accept that it doesn't have to be there after a while, you know, growth and vulnerability.

You can listen Deryk’s ‘Call You Out’ here, her newest release ‘One Star’ here & see more of her beautiful visuals here. Words by Jay Rickards