The Nashville songwriter talks about recording two versions of the same song at once, raising kids between singles, and why Hell’s Kitchen makes better comfort TV than you’d think.

Bernice Marsala spent 2024 releasing “This Is Me Walkin’ Out” as a defiant, guitar-forward breakup song. Now she’s releasing it again—same lyrics, completely different feeling. Where the first version sounds fed up and ready to fight, the reimagined take strips the anger out and leaves something quieter, almost elegiac. It’s the same door slamming, just in slow motion.

The move makes sense for someone who’s built a career on not quite fitting anywhere. Classically trained on guitar, armed with a music business degree, and a World Songwriting Awards winner for Best Pop Song, Marsala has been steadily releasing singles since her 2023 album Burgundy won Female Gold Album at the ISSA Awards. But instead of chasing another pop moment, she’s been experimenting—leaning into rock, trying different production styles, writing without genre in mind first.

Between Sycamore, Illinois and Nashville, between award-nominated pop songs and whatever this new thing is, Marsala’s been navigating motherhood with two kids, studio time carved out in fragments, and the question of what it means to keep making music when the industry wants you to pick a lane and stay there. Her answer, apparently, is to make the same song twice and release both.

We talked about creative indecision as a working method, the seven-month break after her son was born, and why she binged Guy’s Grocery Games during labor. Also: Hostess Cupcakes only work in the studio, for reasons she can’t explain.

Hey Bernice, thanks for taking the time to chat with me. You know, there’s something almost unsettling about the act of returning to your own work—not to revise it in the traditional sense, but to excavate a different emotional truth that was always lurking beneath the surface. “This Is Me Walkin’ Out” existed in 2024 as this defiant, almost confrontational piece, and now you’ve stripped away that armor to reveal something more vulnerable, more lamenting. What made you realize that this particular song contained multitudes—that it needed to exist in both its angry incarnation and this reimagined, more mournful form? 

Hi, thanks for having me! There have actually always been two versions of this song in my mind, and I’ve always toyed with the idea of releasing both, so in a way it was kind of the plan from inception. Usually when I’m writing a song, it becomes clear very quickly what the overall “feeling” is going to be, but with this one I couldn’t decide which direction to take it in because both felt right. So when I began recording it, I actually started two separate projects in my DAW with the two different styles. I figured as I worked on them, whichever one really took off would be the final version. But somehow both held so much weight that I could never say one was truly better than the other, and as far as supporting the story in the lyrics, the feelings that each of them evoked felt equally valid. It’s sort of representative of two different sides to a relationship ending, but more simply, it’s a product of my own indecisiveness!

Your sophomore album “Burgundy” came out, earned you Female Gold Album of the Year at the ISSA Awards, and then… a notable silence. And now you’re returning with new songs, reimagined works, which suggests you’ve been in a period of deconstruction rather than pure creation. The gap between albums can say as much as the albums themselves—sometimes it’s creative drought, sometimes it’s intentional reinvention, sometimes it’s just life getting gloriously or terrifyingly in the way. What was happening in that space between “Burgundy” and whatever comes next? 

Since “Burgundy” I’ve focused more on singles (this one being my sixth since that album). “Burgundy” was made up partially of completed tracks that I’d been holding onto, and a few new ones I had written and recorded specifically to fill in the gaps of story I hadn’t explored yet in those finished songs. So now instead of going back to unreleased songs or re-working older ones, I’ve been recording and releasing new music as I go. I do plan to compile all of those singles into an album at some point, but I have a few more songs to finish first.

Was this silence a choice, a necessity, or something that just happened to you while you were busy making other plans? 

I’ve tried to stay pretty active since “Burgundy,” though I did take about a seven month break between “Architecture” and the release of “Villain,” so I could focus on the last leg of my pregnancy and the first few months of life with a newborn. It’s definitely been a challenge trying to get back into working on music regularly; mostly due to time, lack of sleep, and bouts of writer’s block that felt endless. It’s still a challenge to make time for it sometimes, but I just crave it so much I try to find little moments wherever I can.

There’s this fascinating lineage of artists who’ve released multiple versions of the same song—Johnny Cash’s stripped-down covers, Trent Reznor’s “Quiet” versions, even The National’s habit of reinventing their own catalog live. Are you planning to approach more of your catalog this way, mining your previous work for these alternate emotional realities? Or was there something specific about this particular song that demanded this dual treatment? 

I’m not planning on it currently, although I could imagine maybe doing an acoustic version of some songs (similar to what I did with my song “Left Behind”). This song was unique in that I really felt it had a duality from the beginning, so for that reason it was given special treatment.

You’ve got this interesting background—classically trained guitarist, music business degree, pop songwriting accolades—which means you understand the machinery of genre and commercial viability. But “Lights Out” winning Best Pop Song at the World Songwriting Awards, juxtaposed against what sounds like a much more introspective reimagining project, suggests you’re wrestling with where you actually belong in the ecosystem. Do you feel like you’re shedding a skin right now, moving away from the capital-P Pop that got you recognized, or are you just expanding your emotional range within it? 

I would say I don’t really feel like I fit into just one genre, and I really enjoy experimenting when a song calls for it. If I had to be restricted to only writing in one genre, I would choose Rock, but even then I don’t think I could help myself from blending styles together. I have moved away from Pop quite a bit with a lot of my newer releases, but it’s still a genre I enjoy and will likely do more of. I don’t typically set out to write in a particular style, I choose the style based on where it feels like the song wants to go.

You’re creating from Nashville with a husband and two kids, which means you’re navigating the impossible calculus that every parent-artist faces—how to protect the vulnerable space that art requires while also being present for the humans you’ve made. And there’s this historical narrative, especially around mothers who make music, that they either have to choose or compartmentalize completely. But some of the most devastating music comes from that tension, from trying to hold those worlds together. Did becoming a mother change your relationship to walking out—whether literally or metaphorically? 

It has been a challenge trying to juggle everything, but ultimately I believe in “having it all” and when my kids are older, I want them to be ambitious and inspired to work towards whatever it is they want to achieve in their own lives. I love being a mom, but becoming one didn’t erase the rest of me, and I want my overall identity to be about more than just one thing.

So there’s clearly a new album in the works, and “This Is Me Walkin‘ Out (Reimagined)” is presumably part of that ecosystem or at least pointing toward it. Given that you’re releasing reimagined work rather than entirely new material, I have to ask: is the forthcoming album going to be a collection of these alternate-reality versions of your existing catalog, or is this reimagining a palate cleanser, a creative exercise to help you figure out what comes next? 

So far my plan for the next album is to make it a collection of everything I’ve released since “Burgundy,” with one or two extra unreleased tracks – but there will be more singles in between for sure! For right now, this is the only one expected to have an alter ego.

You moved from Sycamore, Illinois—a place that sounds like it could be a song title itself—to the Nashville ecosystem, which is such a specific migration pattern for American songwriters. But Nashville has this way of both nurturing and homogenizing artists, and you seem to be resisting the latter while benefiting from the former. When you look back at the artist you were in Sycamore versus who you’re becoming in Nashville, do you see continuity or rupture? And does the reimagining of “This Is Me Walkin’ Out” have anything to do with reconciling those two versions of yourself—the Illinois artist and the Nashville one—or is that reading too much geographic destiny into a song about walking out? 

Moving to Nashville for me didn’t feel like leaving Illinois behind, it felt more like I was entering my next phase. It was giving the reins to the part of me that wanted to “do” instead of dream. That said, I feel there’s continuity in my goals and how I see myself as an artist, but I can also see growth in my writing and ever-evolving sound. But even my sound, no matter how the genre changes, is always still undeniably “me.”

As someone who studied audio production and presumably spent ungodly hours in studios, both as a student and a working artist, I need to know: what is your definitive studio snack? 

Usually Hostess Cupcakes or Ho Hos. I don’t know why I seem to want them during the recording stage, but I hardly eat them otherwise!

There’s this fascinating thing that happens when you’re a serious artist—people expect your cultural diet to be as curated as your Spotify playlists. Like you’re supposed to only watch A24 films and read literary fiction and eat farm-to-table everything. But some of the most interesting artists I’ve interviewed have these delightfully unexpected obsessions that exist completely outside their artistic persona. So in the spirit of full transparency and because I genuinely think these “guilty pleasures” often reveal more about us than our carefully constructed taste: what’s your most joyful, unapologetic cultural obsession right now? The thing you consume enthusiastically without any ironic distance? 

When I was in the hospital for the birth of my son, I binged a lot of reality cooking competition shows during labor and in the recovery room (Guy’s Grocery Games, Hell’s Kitchen, Holiday Baking Championship, etc.) Since then they’ve been like mindless comfort shows I like to switch on while I’m scrolling on my phone or doing chores. My husband and I especially got into Hell’s Kitchen for a while, and would place bets on who was going to win each season. (I usually lost!)

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