Carpool by isabeltate

Before they had written any songs together, Isabel Damiani and Tate Chavez’s lanes first intersected in a class on Balinese gamelan at UC Berkeley. As Isabel pursued her business degree and Tate plodded towards a career in economics, they both shared something they wouldn’t actually connect over until years later–a certain dissatisfaction with the paths they were on, and a simultaneous sense of escape in music.

Their individual pursuit of that escape would bring them both to Los Angeles, where they would bump into each other again two years later at Icon Collective, studying music production. Connecting over their multicultural backgrounds and their shared experience at Berkeley, they began to dabble in musical collaboration in 2020 during the Covid-19 lockdown, keeping in touch over FaceTime and texting files back and forth.

As pandemic restrictions eased, they continued to write together, spending hours in each other’s home studios honing melodies and crafting a sound inspired by their love of electronic-influenced pop acts like Kllo, Mura Masa, and Jai Paul. It was in this process that they really got to know one another, combing through their memories together and creating a collage of shared perspectives in each song. Those early demos formed the basis of what became the Carpool EP–both a sonic manifestation of the friendship they built in the process, and an assurance of their ability to carve their own lane together.

music by isabel & tate