It's Myles' SCOPE Selects this week! Myles is our social media talent and honorary voice of SCOPE's Instagram and Facebook. They are a punk kid at heart, that is for sure. He'll be making some noise with his solo project under the name of "mars hojilla," so get hyped!
Name: Myles Evangelista (he/they)
Hometown: Peoria, Illinois
Year: Junior
Field of Study: Biomedical Engineering (focus on Biomechanics and Biomaterials)
SCOPE Position: Digital Marketing Director
Three Favorite Albums:
- Ever After // Marianas Trench (just turned 10 this year!!)
- Hollows // City Mouth
- MONTERO // Lil Nas X
Favorite Concert Experience:
My eighth-grade graduation present was seeing Fall Out Boy at the Illinois State Fair, which was my first concert for me and not just tagging along with my family to see their shows. My parents dropped me and my older sister off at the fair and left us to go shopping in Springfield. The venue turned the racetrack into standing room only, with the stage at the center of the track. Even though my sister and I stood against the fence at the back of the track to avoid getting swept up in the pit, the distance didn’t make me feel like I was missing out on the show at all -- I yelled, I headbanged, I boosted myself up on the fence every once in a while to get eyes on the stage. By the end of the night, my voice was so shot that I couldn’t even answer my mother’s polite inquiries about the concert, but my emo boy heart was still screaming.
Hobbies/Interests/Fun Facts/Campus Involvement:
I just accepted a research position in the department of Biomedical Engineering, which is super cool! So if I’m not studying or working in the Seamans Center, you can probably find me playing mellophone with the Hawkeye Marching Band (regular season might be over, but the B1G Championship is in just a few days and I am looking respectfully for a bowl game) or decompressing at home. I’m in the process of releasing my high school band THEory DROPOUTS’s last project and trying to start a solo project in Iowa City under the name mars hojilla. Stay tuned!
The Deep Cuts:
When I first make a playlist for someone, I always keep my intro and outro songs the same. The habit itself is lightly influenced by SCOPE alum Anna Nelson, who orchestrated the first SCOPE Playlist Exchange that I can remember. She said that it helps her playlist creation process to put something that acts like her signature into the playlists she makes (in her case, a song with her name as the title). “Curse My Name” by City Mouth is my go-to intro because it remains my favorite song in the history of ever, over three years after the lead singer of my band introduced me to it -- something about the combination of soul-crushing lyrics with Chicago pop-punk flair gets me every time. “Listen to Your Friends” by Declan McKenna is my outro of choice because I loved it as the closer on McKenna’s What Do You Think About the Car? album, so I figured it would be a great closer in any context (and I’ve been right so far).
I encourage you to listen in order! I wrote it in the playlist description as well, but every song on the playlist has been considered as the best song I’ve ever heard at some point in my life, so it’s set up pretty chronologically. The first two songs after my intro were ones I picked up from listening to my parents’ music before I started exploring my own music taste. Even if they aren’t my style now, they set in stone that I wanted to play music so I could shred keys like the piano solo in “Chiquitita” and make gentle fingerstyle patterns like in “The Boxer”. Besides getting that timeline feel from listening in order, you’ll also get some sick back-to-back song transitions. One of my favorite things in music is when artists make the songs on their album flow into one another when you listen to the record top-to-bottom, and both the Ever After album and Hollows EP I mentioned earlier do it well, so I threw my favorite transitions into the playlist.