How did Salem Ilese go from dropout to 44 million streams in a matter of months?

I first meet Salem Ilese in the Los Angeles recording studio her boyfriend and producer Bendik Moller rents a few days a week. It’s almost midnight, and they’re putting the finishing touches on a new single they’re working on for another young artist, Lev. Moller co-ordinates the session while Ilese goes into the booth to record backing-vocals. Ilese, who had a free evening, came in to help on the track.

The next time we speak, these evenings off will have become a thing of the past. Her single “Mad At Disney”, which she wrote with Moller, has just gone to number 1 on the Spotify viral charts, overtaking Cardi B’s “WAP”. It’s racking up over 1 million streams a day and Salem’s following has rocketed from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands. The person I chat to now, though, is no different to the one I met in March, five months before her 21st birthday when her life changed so drastically.

When we first spoke I’d left the studio, shortly after midnight, yet when I arrived the following morning the couple were already up and discussing possible song concepts for their next session. I am introduced to Ilese’s soon-to-be famous lizard, Lil Cow, and we sit down for the first of two conversations about her life, under vastly different situations - for the world at large and the artist in front of me. On both occasions however’, the Salem Ilese I meet is the same - warm, bright, kind and switched on. She strikes me as everything the industry looks for in a rising star, snuggled on the sofa of her coolly tiled West Hollywood apartment, juice in hand, Moller sat beside her, warmly encouraging her.

Ilese grew up in Northern California and moved to LA after dropping out of Berklee College of Music two years into her degree. She started singing when she was four years old, and by the time she was 12, she was the youngest member of a prestigious songwriting camp in San Francisco. “I walked in, in a sparkly shirt and the woman who ran the camp said, ‘Hey I have that same shirt’, and that woman turned out to be Bonnie Hayes, who is now the head of the song writing department at Berklee College of Music, and has writing credits with the likes of Cher and David Crosby.” Hayes became Ilese’s mentor –training her in singing and songwriting. “When she got the job at Berklee I thought ‘Ok, I’m going to go there too.”

Meanwhile Moller, reclining opposite his partner, had also been musical since an early age, developing a serious interest in music in high school in Norway, which he describes as being “70% music.”

“That was when I got a glimpse of the level I had to be at. My classmate was one of the world’s best saxophone players. He went to Harvard and was better than his professors. So that was the dedication I was seeing, that I had to aspire to.”

Moller began producing in high school on Logic but didn’t find out until later in life that this was something he could pursue professionally. “When I read through a list of Berklee alumnus I saw there were professional songwriters in there, and I was like ‘what?!’ There’s no industry like that in Norway.”

Both embarked to Berklee in Boston, where the couple met, and where Ilese focused on writing and playing gigs around the city - with her parents allowing her to get a fake ID to get in. Moller on the other hand started approaching production and writing with a professional outlook, working at an astonishing rate on 30 songs at a time.

The two were introduced in a writing session they went to as a favour to a mutual friend, and they wrote Salem’s 2018 single “Impatient.” This was the song that first got the music industry turning heads towards her, and soon they were collaborating on an entire EP together named 757, released in October of last year. “It’s about packing up, dropping out of college and starting fresh. I’m terrified of planes, and the 757 is the plane that goes in between Boston and LA.” Ilese tells me.

What makes the collaboration between the two, so effective, I ask Moller? “We work together really fast. So fast that it gets to the point where we have to stop writing and start producing or we have too much stuff.”

Even in an interview setting this rings true. The pair have an almost electric energy, a magnitude and force to them. I can imagine them as impressive in boardrooms and business meetings as they are in studios, yet intriguingly, it is this setting that they find most challenging. Ilese takes over from Moller in explaining this, expanding upon the struggles of being a young female artist in such a saturated industry.

“Almost every single meeting I’ve had with someone in the industry has culminated in someone commenting on my appearance. A mentor of mine told me, ‘Hey, you need to start dressing like an artist. You can’t leave the house in sweatpants; you need to dress up for sessions’ Ilese tells me. "So, I started to really care about what I looked like. I had a new self-awareness. When I got to LA, I had a meeting with this guy who said, ‘You’re very genetically blessed, but we need to ugly you up a little bit.’ At first, I was like ‘OK...’ but then I realised he was saying that he thought I was pretty and that meant no one would take me seriously as an artist. And I wasn’t OK with that - acting like I care less by wearing sweatpants and no make-up. That’s so wrong, it’s just playing to a stereotype, that says that physically attractive people can’t be smart or talented.”

We discuss Billie Eilish and her bikini post of 2019 – a picture so natural, non-offensive and common for most teenagers, but so heavily contested and criticised for its perceived departure from her usual image. Where Eillish said of the image that she was just wearing what she wanted to wear, Salem expands, “Billie is stunning, but she dresses it down, so people don’t doubt that she’s talented.”

Does Ilese herself manage to do this? “I don’t like to think too hard about image, because I don’t want to make myself crazy. I am just trying my best to be as authentic as I can be. Those comments used to bring me down for a second, but the more I think about it, the more I just want to change their minds.”

“Because of Salem’s insane talent, they need to get to know her to see that she’s more than that. Once she’s in a room and writing, nothing matters anymore. Everything else is just credentials,” Moller agrees, eyes flashing.

Stereotyping is by no means confined to body image, or to female only labelling. Moller explains that stereotyping cuts both ways in terms of gender. He too has grappled with labelling in the music industry, as he struggled to be recognised for his songwriting when he was such an accomplished producer. “The stereotype in the industry is that producers can’t write. So I’ll be sitting in a session with a song I wrote, and when they ask ‘Who produced this?’ and I say 'it’s me', I suddenly don’t hear anything from them for months until they call and ask me to produce something. So, they always remember me as a producer rather than a songwriter. Now I’ve learned I have to only tell them I’m a songwriter and hope that that’s how they remember me. I almost have to undermine myself in order to succeed."

When I catch up with the pair a few months later, I wonder whether Ilese's battle with being seen as an artist and writer first and foremost have been magnified or minimised by her breakout success. Does she feel she has changed people’s minds about her, or does she still have a point to prove?

"It’s important to me to use these platforms to talk about the fact that I was involved in the writing process of 'Mad At Disney'...as opposed to just being viewed as that blonde girl who sings it."

“I still very much feel that way. That’s why it’s important to me to use these platforms to talk about the fact that I was involved in the writing process of “Mad At Disney.” It’s actually one of the reasons I like TikTok, because it gives me the chance to go on and put a video up saying, ‘Hey, guys, this is what the song is about. This is why I wrote it’, as opposed to just being viewed as that blonde girl who sings it. It’s definitely, definitely still on my mind.”

It’s not the only reason the artist is a fan of the platform. “Mad At Disney” had been out for a couple of months, picking up modest streams on Spotify, when she uploaded a video of herself on her 21st birthday introducing the song to what was then just a few hundred TikTok followers. When she woke up the next morning, her life had changed. She now has 1.5 million.

One of the most extraordinary facets of Ilese's meteoric rise though has been the way that her TikTok following has crossed over so seamlessly into streaming success and a very quickly established loyal fan base.

“When the song started blowing up I was originally thinking, ‘OK, it will just live on TikTok, it'll probably be really hard to get it to transfer over to any other platform,’ but it was really crazy to see that the second it started blowing up there, the Spotify and Amazon numbers started jumping, then Amazon Music and my Instagram. What was really great about the label I just signed with (10K/Homemade Projects) is we found a way to make sure it translated over to me as an artist as well, which I'm so thankful for because a lot of times songs, books and even artists come in for a moment and then just get lost in dust.”

An impressive branch of this has been how fans have fallen in love with her previous releases as well. Since all of this was made with Moller, I wonder what kind of effect their sudden fame has had on their working relationship, now that they have the entire music industry knocking on their shared door. Will they continue to work with each other as consistently?

“I’ve been working with tons of new artists, writers and producers ever since I moved to LA." Ilese explains. "When I first got here, I would try and get in a room with absolutely anyone, and a lot of those songs I ended up keeping for this project, so there will be some new names on songs that are coming out soon. But Bendik is always going to be the constant thread, because I think he is the best producer and writer that I've ever encountered. So even if he wasn't in the room, I always take the tracks to him afterwards. He’s basically an executive producer for my artist project, and he’s also my favourite person to work with.

“So even though I do have sessions with new people, basically every day of the week, we always try and make time for each other. We write on the weekends, and I often bring him into my sessions. And he brings me into his too.”

We spend a moment reflecting again on her journey, as I start to realise that while her global success may have happened overnight, it is clear that this just a sudden spike in following after a lifelong commitment to her craft. A somewhat bizarre divulgence from ordinary teenage life is that Ilese spent the latter years of high school in a reality TV show. Yet, upon reflection, I realise that her early role on television is perhaps a foreshadowing to her ambivalence with fame and imaging.

“One day I was sitting in Science and I got a text that said ‘Hey, do you want to be in a reality show with me?’ I was 16, and it turned out they had found us on Facebook through pictures and videos. It was called This Is Summer. They filmed for eight months, and just followed us around. But we were all quite normal, and they realised pretty quickly that it was not going to be full of drama. But a load of us did music so that was a nice thread throughout.”

I wonder if this brush with fame was an early indicator of her future success, but she brushes it off. “I am not made for reality TV. I’m not interesting enough for it.”

Clearly it‘s going to take more than a TV show or a globally charting breakout single to give Ilese an ego, but her ease with fame, branding and individuality must stem from somewhere. When I ask her what the biggest moment has been for her in what she describes as “the best month of my life in the worst year,” she does not delve into details of her sessions with bona fide pop icons such as Charlie Puth, the hordes of fans that now flood her DM’s, or Zane Lowe raving about her on his Beats 1 Radio show, but rather:

“I got a puppy!”

Salem Ilese’s life may have taken some drastic turns since I first met her in that studio in March, and it will undoubtedly continue to do so, but as the world may change around her it seems unlikely that she will change with it.

In fact, if she does get a night off in the months to come, you can still picture her using it to help her boyfriend out on yet another hit song at the Burbank studio he rents a few days a week. The only difference you imagine is now, she’ll be bringing the puppy.