This Companion Stories Series features essays which look at my album The Work and each of its songs in detail, going behind the scenes to de-mystify what artists too often try to keep mysterious.

I'm Here

Listen on Spotify here.

I can’t believe we’ve come to the last story in my Companion Stories Series! What a timely story this happens to be.
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When my producer and I were deciding which of my songs to put on the album, I was adamant this would not be one of them. I had written it in an inadvertently kitschy contemporary-church-choir vibe, and the music lacked the impact of the lyrics. Truthfully, though, I was terrified. This song is so personal. I still get a lump in my throat if I allow myself to be still and listen to it.

The image that comes to mind about writing this song is driving alone in my car, slowly, down N. Carrollton Ave in New Orleans. I was working at a coffee shop after my disastrous music school experience. It didn’t feel like I could make music again, and I didn’t know what to do with my life. I couldn’t hold down a relationship, and there was so much I feared. Even though I was only in my mid-twenties, I felt like I would never figure it out, that I was already too far gone somehow. In my car, I remember thinking with tears in my eyes but with a strange conviction in my heart -

I’m here.

And for some reason, that felt important.

My producer Pete convinced me to put the song on the album, but to make it simpler. It took us an agonizingly long time to get it to the form it was released in. What we call the “bug track” – the beautiful harmony of insects, water and other nature sounds that opens and flows through the piece – is a field recording I took in the Okavango Delta in Botswana. I think it encourages the listener to sit and be still.

I eventually agreed to include I’m Here because I realized how profoundly universal the feeling is that I describe. Learning about the atrocity of the Direct Provision system in Ireland was crucial to this. Direct Provision is the country’s way of “managing” refugees which sees the vast majority of them – mostly people of color – holed up in crowded hostels, some in the middle of nowhere far away from necessary resources, without permission to work or drive, with set meal times and no food choice, with curfews and an insulting stipend for “living expenses”, and with some languishing inside for as long as eight or ten years. In a situation like that, where the past, present and future must seem largely bleak, what solace can you take but in the fact of yourself? That you are still here, despite everything? That even if no one else seems to see it, you have value?

I met Ade when he was on a panel raising awareness of Direct Provision. He lived through the system, and I was both devastated and inspired by his story. I asked if we could talk, and if I could feature some of his words in this song. He graciously agreed, and what was supposed to be a 20-minute conversation turned into hours and hours of passionate discourse on racism, nationalism and the perseverance of the human spirit. I chose the particular words for the interlude because I think they are the absolute essence of the message.

And the message is this: whoever you are, whatever happens in your life, whatever happens in the world during your life, and however powerless that makes you feel -

You are here.

Sit in that, and feel that power.

You are here.

To my friends, my countrymen and women, who are fighting for the right to exist in America right now without the cloak of white supremacy over you, you are here. There is a point to that. You are seen, even if it seems to be only by the life force itself. Let “I’m here” be your meditation, your incantation. Sometimes it’s all we have.

The last four repetitions of the words “I’m here” are simply my voice, without any instrument or effect, for the last and only time on the album. I wanted myself to be completely bare. I wanted to be ‘here’, fully. I wanted mine to be a voice in the void, singing, repeating, making meaning.

Insisting.

Thank you to everyone who has joined me on this Companion Stories Series journey. I am so grateful for your support and for you, here, as you are.

This Companion Stories Series features essays which look at my album The Work and each of its songs in detail, going behind the scenes to de-mystify what artists too often try to keep mysterious.

The Abandoning

Listen on Spotify here.

​This song is pretty lyrically straightforward. It’s about a man I dated who was abandoned by his father as a teenager. As I grew to love this man, and as he revealed to me details of the act, I became increasingly angry about it. These things leave massive imprints that generations cannot erase. Such careless acts have such magnified consequences. It clearly affected our relationship – he was self-aware enough to articulate the ways this might happen – and for it to happen to someone so kind, authentic and driven felt cosmically unfair.
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But then I was put in an unenviable position. I was moving away, starting another kind of life. I realized I had to, in essence, abandon this man, surely ripping open an old wound I had wanted to help heal, participating in the very act that had hurt him the most. And in this song, I blame his father for that. I resented being pulled into a cycle by someone who didn’t even know me and cared nothing about me. I felt like my actions were hurtful, yes, but rendered almost cruel by him. This is probably the only song on the album where pure emotion overcame, in a way, measured reason.

It was a small leap for me in this song to go from quiet concern for my ex-boyfriend in the verses to heightened outrage at his father in the bridge. The whole thing is part of the same vulnerably emotional package – life, I guess. It was the most difficult song on the album to write, but it is also one of my favorites because that emotion is so honest. I can often get caught up in esoteric ideas and floods of words, but sometimes those cloud the hard emotional truth, the kind that spills out when you’re not really thinking, when it all becomes too much and words don’t really cut it anymore.

But still, there must be reason. Trauma filters down through generations, but it doesn’t do so in nice, neat funnels. We are pulled into the orbits of so many traumas, knowingly and unknowingly, and they are stubborn, manipulative, lingering beasts. We are mired in them by our histories, our families, our nations, our human limitations. And we perpetuate what we don’t understand, which is the trauma of so many others.

We should all take this to heart in this historical moment, when the incalculable wounds of slavery and racism - traumas so often considered to affect only black people – are showing themselves so bluntly. Many white people now are finally beginning to feel a fraction of the force of the orbit we are staunchly, invariably tangled in. It’s becoming clear that we cannot claim exemption from the problem or the solution. Maybe one day we’ll even be able to admit the traumas created and sustained by us and do something about them. But we MUST recognize them.

“[White people] are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know.”- James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Somehow we’ve only got one more installment to go! Check in next Friday when I will break down the final song on my album, I’m Here. Download all the songs in the series by searching for Carly Z in the iTunes Store.

This Companion Stories Series features essays which look at my album The Work and each of its songs in detail, going behind the scenes to de-mystify what artists too often try to keep mysterious.

In the Bedroom

Listen on Spotify here.

This song isn’t about sex. Not really. It’s the result of a slow realization I had about the role I fill in the world and am expected to fill, and about the misleading rhetoric around it.
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There are, women are told, “good” men and “bad” men. A good man will “never” do this, a bad man will “always” do that. But, as in my song Ideology, I don’t think such stark binaries are accurate or helpful. I used to want to believe in them, because I wanted to date good men, of course. I wanted to know which were the bad ones to avoid, and I wanted to believe that the golden heart of the good ones would lead to a deep, instinctive understanding of how women should be treated.

Yeah, it doesn’t work like that. What I kept finding, over and over and over again, is that I was dating men who would certainly fit in the “good” category, which was great because I was really hoping I was good, too, and obviously that would lead to bliss and sunshine in our lives forever, but I never quite experienced it like that. Goodness, it turns out, is no match for society, and it is no match for patriarchy.

We behave, on a cellular level, how we have been conditioned to behave. It’s so difficult to operate outside of this because most of the time we can’t even tell it’s there. When I moved out of America, only then did I realize how much of me is American. And even when I realized it, to my dismay it was clear I could never make myself un-American, no matter how many books I read about the atrocities committed in the name of the nation or how much self-reflection I did or how much time I spent abroad.

It got worse when I looked up the psychological concept of the “dismissive avoidant” attachment style . What confronted me was a laundry list of descriptors from across the internet of my behavior and the specifics of my emotional and family life with uncanny accuracy. I had really thought my volition determined my behavior, that I was an individual. But it turns out we really underestimate the programs we download from the world around us in our childhood.

This is why you can have inarguably “good” men who have never considered that good sex may not begin and end with their desire alone. Men who stand up for women’s rights and then cross the threshold of a bedroom and feel free to dismiss all notions of individual respect. Men who truly and deeply care about their partners, and who would never tolerate them being abused - until given permission themselves by a closed door and a light switched off. But we don’t even call it abuse or neglect because we are all products of a society that tells us that’s exactly how heterosexual relationships should work.

Patriarchy, of course, isn’t selective. Women don’t usually call it abuse or neglect either. We’ve got a copy of the script and we read our lines and perform our moves just as effectively as men. And it’s so hard for us to see that that isn’t the way it has to be. That the opposite of sexual neglect and abuse is not politeness, tameness or dreariness. There is an alternative to feeling like a hollowed-out version of yourself after a sexual experience during which you never considered, and were never asked, what might make a supposedly pleasurable experience pleasurable for you, how you might like to participate in an activity you are in fact a participant in.

In the Bedroom is about my frustration over the script but is ultimately a testament to the alternative. When I finally, after over a decade, experienced this alternative, it was not because a knight in shining armor, a “good” man, was benevolent enough to treat me with a measure of respect. We both had to look down at the scripts we were holding to realize the lines didn’t fit in our mouths, that the directions did not reflect what we knew to be true, and that going through these motions yet again didn’t serve what we were trying to achieve with our relationship. It was really difficult, and I don’t know if we ever got there. But at least now I can say, in some measure, to those who come after him, “I can’t take your wounds; I’m already healed.”

Next week we take a look at my song The Abandoning. Catch it here next Friday, and download all the songs in the series by searching for Carly Z in the iTunes Store.

This Companion Stories Series features essays which look at my album The Work and each of its songs in detail, going behind the scenes to de-mystify what artists too often try to keep mysterious.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Listen on Spotify here.

I started writing the lyrics to this song a few days after Trump was elected. I was trying to find words for what I thought about him, but I wanted them to be different than what I was hearing all around me. I didn’t, and still don’t, think it’s accurate to simply call the man an “asshole” or an “idiot”. There’s more there, and I’m convinced that whatever it is gives us clues to more than just his particular pathology.

But all I really knew at the time was that I was frustrated. His self-centeredness was clearly covering up major insecurities that now the world was going to have to deal with because he hadn’t. His ego seemed impermeable and dangerously bottomless. So I started writing what his ego seemed to be saying:
 
Give me a face
And give me a name
Give me a pathway
To fortune and fame
 
But then I thought: that sentiment isn’t only reflective of Trump. There are so many rich, greedy rulers and business types in the world who embody this, aren’t there?
 
Give me a country
A room with a view
Give me a world
That owes me what I’m due
 
Give me the moon
And I’ll force in my flag
But give space to think
And I’ll give it right back
 
And then I thought: it encompasses even more than them. Lethal preoccupation with ego takes so many oppressing forms:
 
Give me a church
And I’ll pray for the lost
Get me elected
No matter the cost
 
Give me cocaine
And I’ll sing like a bird
Give me a medal
And I’ll show you my worth
 
Give me a badge
And give me a gun
Give me a slave
Or give me a son
 
And as words began to flow thinking about these kinds of people, I found that it all circled back to something. These people I denigrated because of their egos… are me. Are all of us. I’m talking about everyone. I can’t honestly talk about Trump’s damage without talking about my own, without talking about the collective damage we’ve been inflicting on ourselves since time immemorial.
 
Give me a stage
And watch me play the part
Give me a love
And watch me break his heart
 
While the verses of this song are the voice of the ego, the chorus is the voice of the unconscious, translating what the ego actually means. As I realized how universal the ego is, I had to admit that so is what it’s covering up. The verses are in a minor key - intimidating and a little scary and sad, while the chorus brightens into a major key to signify the illumination of truth in its words. The lyrics of the chorus might be my favorite of all I’ve written:
 
Oh, please
I need it
I need to feel great
I need to make profit
From somebody’s pain
‘Cause if love ain’t the horse
That will bear me away
Then let ‘em cower with the power
That’s holding the reins
 
I need you to be less
So that I can be more
For you to drown in the ocean
So I can savor the shore
‘Cause if you ain’t the target
For all of my fear
I’ll have to admit
I don’t know what I’m doing here
 
The title of the piece comes from a book by Paulo Freire, which provided the basis for a revolutionary theatre methodology by Augusto Boal in which the audience are co-creators of the work onstage. In his book, Freire questions the dynamics between those with power and those being “colonized” by the powerful. He illustrates how oppression is perpetuated, whether with “good” intentions or “bad”, by referencing education - how by attempting to fill their poor student vessels with knowledge, assuming those vessels are powerless, teachers may be rendering them so. Boal took this to art, emphasizing that audiences are only expected to sit passively and be (or pretend to be) filled with “something”, then leave. So audiences become passive. This pattern is played out in so many ways in the world. Perhaps I’m even doing it with this song.

So ego begets power begets oppression, willingly or not. And we all have egos. But we also all have other parts of us that can counteract the ego. We can, I believe, decolonize ourselves and help decolonize the world.
 
Keep your eyes peeled for next week’s installment of my Companion Stories Series when we’ll delve into my song In the Bedroom. Download all the songs in this series by searching for Carly Z in the iTunes Store.

This Companion Stories Series features essays which look at my album The Work and each of its songs in detail, going behind the scenes to de-mystify what artists too often try to keep mysterious.

No Simple Love

Listen on Spotify here.

Sometimes writing songs is just fun :D
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I have tons of songs on my computer where I just played around with different instrument sounds and rhythms and layers; no lyrics, just going into my software and saying, “What does this button do?”

The musician St. Vincent (one of my absolute favorites) once said, “At some point you have to learn all you can and then forget everything that you learned in order to actually start making music.” I totally agree. I don’t think about the music theory I learned in school when I’m making songs like this, or usually when I’m making music at all. I’m sure the contrapuntal introduction is all wrong. I know I used some really wonky marks in my score to get the sounds I wanted. But what is music if, at the end of the day, it’s not about how it sounds and how it makes people feel? And this song felt weird and energetic and totally dancey, and that seemed valuable to me.

No Simple Love is certainly the product of experimentation, but with the lyrics added I think it swelled into something bigger than that. The words are my confession that, despite what seems to be a societal imperative that love be childishly simple – a game of satisfying desires and pure selflessness and eternal bliss – I would like a relationship that actually reflects human life, please. I want so much more substance and nuance than the one option we seem to be presented with. I want the flaws to be up front, not insidiously hidden away, destroying the relationship silently from the inside. I want an adult who is doing his own work. I want someone I can do the work with. I want the POWER of that. I’m sure it’s insanely difficult, but I’m saying here that I’m finally ready to show up for it.

My brilliant producer Pete added so much to this song in production. He put a music box effect on the lone piano in the intro, which for me evokes early childhood and its beautiful simplicity. From there the song gets harmonically and rhythmically more complicated, and the reverse cymbals and booms bring out the climax on the climactic words: “Give me your power!” I also wrote a shamisen part in the bridge because why not? A shamisen is a three-stringed Japanese guitar-like situation that has this intensely mesmerizing quality, and I think it adds surprise and intrigue to the song, like the surprises and intrigues of complicated relationships.

I had a lot of fun making this track and I hope you have fun listening to it!
Tune in next week when we dive into Pedagogy of the Oppressed, one of the most lyrically intense songs on the album. See you then!

This Companion Stories Series features essays which look at my album The Work and each of its songs in detail, going behind the scenes to de-mystify what artists too often try to keep mysterious.

Ideology

Listen on Spotify here.

Ideology is one of my favorite songs on the album. It is sparse and hard-hitting, using every element, including its silences, to bring home the lyrics and allow the listener to process them. The gravelly guitar part was also my favorite to play.
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In this song, I let out my frustration with the division of belief into black and white, wrong and right, my way and your way, that seems to have become increasingly pervasive. Lack of nuance, which is to say lack of humanity, has sucked in so many of us, and I feel a constant pressure to align myself with its insidious variations so I can feel better about myself and the world. With these lyrics, though, I am reminding myself and anyone who will listen that the beauty of life lies outside the binary.

The first line comes directly from one of America’s most starkly ideological protest songs: “War” by Edwin Starr. I am intentionally setting the listener up here, because I have every intention of subverting what I’ve just led them to think I believe: “War: what is it good for? Peace: when will it be?” But then the words, “But why do these have to be the only options for me?” It might seem strange to say that war isn’t necessarily bad and peace isn’t necessarily good. But it seems to me that war and peace are both essential elements of the human condition, and therefore of the world, and that clinging to the sanctity of either one is to ignore the breathtaking beauty and complexity of our experience. It is to deny fundamental facts of nature that make life, life.

The second verse posits that there is so much delicious, pliable gray area between religious belief and atheism: “Creed: a drug of conceit. Doubt: just a different devout. But why are these prisons indeed the only options for me?” Personally, I think I sense the presence of something beyond my human comprehension, the way there is a species of frog that has no ears but can feel vibrations, sensing that there exists a realm of sound. But every attempt to explain that feels feeble and hopelessly egoic to me, and I refuse to become party to the awful legacy of dogma. Similarly, the stubborn assertion that our human understanding comprises all understanding seems awfully shortsighted. What makes us so afraid of simply not knowing?

The third verse is patently political: “Right can’t see I’m alive. Left can’t seem to forget. But why is ideology the only option for me?” I see America’s binary system of liberal and conservative ideology as destructive and unrealistic, especially the way it manifests in most mainstream media, and I cannot align myself with either one. Both use ill-defined doctrines to rally and divide, and both can be comfortingly blinding.

The overall argument I’m making here is this: Two things can be true at the same time. “A” being true does not make “B” untrue. Nuance is humanity. Humanity is our reality. We are walking balls of complexity yet we refuse to acknowledge the power in that, opting instead for convenience. My friend Kathryn once said to me, “Humans aren’t hypocritical; they’re complicated”, and I couldn’t agree more. Ideology is entirely understandable; it makes sense to want something to hold onto, to crave rules to follow that will purify us from the stain and strain of being human. But it so often tears people apart. In trying to ameliorate the pain of life, it ends up causing more pain. The good news is that ideology tends to break down in the face of real, messy, human love. It breaks down when we engage with life.

The musical elements of this song are very intentional. The chain noises are samples I took from the production office at my workplace: picking up handfuls of nuts and bolts – simple, clear cut objects – and dropping them back into the confused pile. The percussion as a whole is meant to evoke old work songs – often songs of the enslaved – representing “the work” that belies ideology. And if American slavery isn’t an example of ideology as a perversion of humanity, I don’t know what is. The rough, mechanical-sounding guitar is the roughness and brutality of life, existing in tandem with soaring melody lines that speak of life’s emotion and beauty.

Join me here next Friday for the next installment of my Companion Stories Series where we’ll go into my song No Simple Love.

This Companion Stories Series features essays which look at my album The Work and each of its songs in detail, going behind the scenes to de-mystify what artists too often try to keep mysterious.

Nero

Listen on Spotify here.

Nero was a Roman Emperor in the first century A.D. He was apparently quite self-indulgent and a fairly terrible ruler, the enduring myth being that he played the fiddle while his city burned to the ground.
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I’ve felt like that sometimes, especially in hindsight: like a relationship was burning and I was averting my eyes, fiddling away.

The relationship I sing about on Nero was the one that inspired the title of the album and many other songs on it. This man was always trying to convince me to “do the work” necessary to heal myself and fuel our relationship. He had been doing his own work for years, and he knew what it took. He knew we weren’t going to survive unless I addressed some things. But I was new to it, and I found it very difficult.

I have such special memories of meeting him. It was one of those inexplicable encounters where we clicked almost right away. I wasn’t expecting him; in fact, I was at a community yard sale when he first approached me, my table full of household items I needed to get rid of so I could move to Ireland. He was confident and coy, and unnervingly handsome. At some point he pointed to the wall behind me and asked what I thought of the photographs hanging there. They depicted a grown woman wearing a diaper, in various poses throughout her frightfully unkempt house. Frankly I thought they were shit, and I told him so. Then he proceeded to go through each one and describe its intricate possible meanings, the depths in its details and the narratives implied by the photos’ relationship to each other.

I was stunned. But eventually, as we spent the next few months together, I realized that’s just what he did. He investigated life, honoring it with his unwavering attention. He would listen to me talk about some intractable issue, then speak it back with words that explained perfectly what I actually meant. He offered solutions based on what he had been through. And he was endlessly patient, but not with my bullshit. And because I knew he was right, and because after a short while I was so fiercely in love with him, I really had no choice but to listen and to try. When truth comes home, what can you do but release? What can you do but believe?

The relationship didn’t last, but the work has. There were many reasons why we had to separate, each as tragic and as sensible as the next, but there were many more reasons why that relationship will always be more valuable to me than any amount of money. I may have felt like Nero, fiddling away through the fire, but with even greater hindsight I can say that I was burning, too. I was being, if not purified, refined and forged. I was being made into someone who could do the work, and do it for herself.

Keep up with my Companion Stories Series right here next Friday, as we go into the story behind my song Ideology.

Tides

​Listen on Spotify here.

But there are tides in the body. Morning meets afternoon. Borne like a frail shallop on deep, deep floods… She went under.

So much of the inspiration for my music comes from literature. I read something that hits at a nerve in my body or mind or soul and wonder, “Why?”. Sometimes writing songs is simply my way of asking that question and exploring it in new ways.

I read the line above in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and, like with Baldwin, I remember the moment vividly. I looked up from the book and had a whole series of thoughts: if the moon orders the waters of the earth, and if humans are 60% water, are there tides within us also being ordered by nature? Does that explain our emotions or instincts or innate knowledge or sense of purpose? Is there a bigger picture here, in the way we are so connected to nature? Does it tell us what we need to do? If so, are we listening?

It made me think about “finding your passion”, “living your purpose”, and “achieving your dreams”. I like to think of inner tides as the intuition we have about which directions to go in life. But while I’m drawn to this ideology, I’m also terrified by it. It assumes that humans have innate demands placed on them to find and do one or a very limited number of things, and if they don’t do those things, they’ve wasted their lives. I’ve felt this pressure acutely. If there are tides within us, pushing and pulling below the surface, shouldn’t our lives be spent trying to follow them?

This song exposes my fear of what happens when the tides are ignored. If I can’t figure out what they are trying to tell me, or if it’s too hard to try, does that mean I will necessarily succumb to a meaningless life? I’m scared that its demands should be obvious, and that I am a fool for not following them. And that one day I will regret so much of my life because I wasn’t brave enough to try.

But honestly? I’m not sure I believe all this anymore. In some way, it seems, we do have tides within us. But the song portrays everyday life as a kind of betrayal of them. It assumes that people who haven’t “figured it out” have done it wrong, as if anyone could ever figure it out. I wield purpose as a weapon and ascribe meaninglessness to people who do not follow my ideology.

If there is such a thing as hypocrisy, if humans can ever really be faulted for failing to live up to ideals they were never made to reach, then I hate hypocrisy. I strive to be aligned, ultimately with whatever it is inside me compelling me forward. But living life isn’t meaningless. Meaning is made, whether we know we’re doing it or not, whatever kinds of lives we live. Tides, though powerful, are also mysterious.

And maybe it’s okay if the mystery eludes us.

Tune in next Friday for the next installment in my Companion Stories Series for the song Nero.

This Companion Stories Series features essays which look at my album The Work and each of its songs in detail, going behind the scenes to de-mystify what artists too often try to keep mysterious.

​Weakness and Truth

Listen on Spotify here.

In the fall of 2018, my friend Chuck and I were driving through the Namibian desert. On the road trip of a lifetime, we had recently left the capital city of Windhoek and were headed north to a remote campsite in Kamanjab. Chuck, expert traveler that he is, had suggested before the trip that we download some good songs for our long car journeys, as we couldn’t count on internet service in most places we were traveling throughout southern Africa. As we rolled through the bush, one of Chuck’s chosen tracks started playing.

You know when a song is so good you kind of lose the run of yourself? You sort of squint your eyes and turn down the corners of your mouth and start grooving your whole upper body involuntarily? That was this song. It was bassy and funky, with a hip-hop beat at just the right tempo and a total earworm of a top synth line. “What is this?!” I demanded of Chuck. “It’s a band on John’s label,” he replied, John being Chuck’s former roommate, a consummate guitar player who had recently moved into the business, and a mutual friend of ours from New Orleans. “I think they’re called The Grid?”

About a year earlier, I had written my song Weakness and Truth, leaving a long instrumental in the middle where I envisioned a rap break. I was about halfway through recording my album when we left for Africa, and parts of it were heavy on my mind. Since my own rapping leaves a little bit to be desired, I knew I needed to find a collaborator, but I was worried because my standards can be almost impossibly high. Whoever was going to rap on the song needed not only the right vocal tone but also words that spoke meaningfully to the theme and the ability to deliver them in a powerful, compelling way. I had been searching for many months.

The first song ended, and a second gem started. Chuck, bless him, had downloaded The Grid’s whole EP Evasive Maneuvers (link at the bottom of this post). The first verse surged forth: a clever, immaculately paced rap from a velvet voice with exactly the right timbre for cut-through. I pointed at the radio and turned to Chuck. “That’s that guy. Whoever that is, that’s the guy.”

I did some investigative work and found the voice belonged to Tampa rapper and producer Mike Mass (he got bonus points for the fantastic name). I didn’t have his contact details, so when we got back from Africa I messaged Mike on Instagram. To my delight, he agreed to hear the song and see if he could contribute. I told him what the song was about – a former relationship in which I felt my authenticity was being rejected, and my will, though fallible, to keep my integrity even when others seem to think of it as weakness - and asked him to respond to it in his own way.

Mike came back the first time with exactly the rap that’s on the album. He blew my standards out of the water and brought nuances out of the song I didn’t even know were there. It occurred to me that this is part of the essence of creativity and artistry: two people travelling different paths coming together to express a common idea with the utmost respect and imagination.
The idea of collaborating was probably the scariest part (among many scary parts) of creating my first album. All the writing of it took place practically in secret; I was terrified to let anyone hear my work, afraid they would think it was bad or wouldn’t “get it”. Mike totally got it, and he drove home the importance of letting other people in creatively. We’ve still never met (modern music-making is such a trip!), but I’m so happy with what we were able to achieve.
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Be sure to check out The Grid, Mike Mass, and John's label Bubble Bath Records. Stay tuned next Friday for my next Companion Series installment for the song Tides.

This Companion Stories Series features essays which look at my album The Work and each of its songs in detail, going behind the scenes to de-mystify what artists too often try to keep mysterious.

The Void
 
Listen on Spotify here.
 
On Christmas Day 2016, I unwrapped a stack of books. I am a huge fan of literature and had asked for a lot of reading material that had been recommended to me. I picked one arbitrarily out of the stack that night, sat on the sofa facing the Christmas tree, and began to read The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin.
 
I remember that scene vividly because it was such a huge turning point in my life. I sat there with Baldwin for hours, looking up from time to time too stunned by something I’d just read to continue. I made notes of all the immaculately articulated ideas I wanted to process fully later. I felt like Baldwin understood parts of me that I couldn’t yet face - and he had no interest at all in whether I was ready to hear it or not.
 
That book began a soul-shifting journey of self-reflection that would later include The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and all the personal development work that eventually resulted in this album. I devoured other books by Baldwin, one of which was called The Devil Finds Work. In that, I found this line: “…when the prisoner is free, the jailer faces the void of himself.” A version of it became the opening line of The Void and the album overall because, as Baldwin taught me, the art (and extremely difficult work) of knowing oneself is where everything begins.
 
The Void consists of three verses and no chorus (unless you count the percussive motif). I did this to evoke the feeling of a book instead of a song so the listener might pay more attention to the lyrics. I wanted the words and ideas to build on each other as they would in a written work. So the first verse is a presentation and extension of Baldwin’s metaphor. By the way, “the shattered glasses of Bemis” line is a reference to the famous Twilight Zone episode about a man who hates people but loves reading. When the apocalypse comes and he’s the only person left, he’s overjoyed, surrounded by his books. But then his glasses slip from his face and shatter. What has Bemis left to do than face the void of himself?
 
What happens to so many jailers
When the prisoners all are set free
What happens to shepherds for saviors
When gone are the penitent sheep
 
What happens to time-honored masters
When they hear the chains rattle and fall
The shattered glasses of Bemis
With nothing but time after all
 
Imagine these men for a moment
Looking and finding no help
And for the first time in their lives
Facing the Void of themselves
 
In the second verse, I go deeper: I consider Baldwin’s exhortation in the context of my own life.
 
And what of myself in my bedroom
When all men have come and gone
With no one to tell me who I am
I realize I never have known
 
When I tire of calling myself victim
A coat I have worn like a skin
Still none of the things that I yield to
Can heal the unyielding within
 
There are so many cures for this ailing
And hundreds of ways to stay dumb
Thousands of empty distractions
And millions of ways to be numb
 
When I wrote this song, I had recently read Shelby Steele’s book White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. Like Baldwin, Steele emphasizes that a lot of us hide behind ideologies and addictions and excuses to prevent exploring the void within us, creating a sort of cage for ourselves within which we never live our lives fully. After moving from the theoretical to the personal in the first two verses, I wanted to tie it all to the universal:
 
The light in a dark place is painful
It shows what we can’t bear to see
But most of us patch up the rupture
And take darkness, its sharp-edged relief
 
The scariest thing about freedom
You can no longer cry to be free
The source of your strength has departed
And taken your identity
 
So tell me what have we to bind us
When freedom grants each one his own
Without duty or demon to blind us
Who the hell are we alone
 
These ideas have been so powerful for me, and writing and recording this song was my way of processing and expressing them. There are a lot of musical Easter eggs in here, too (the vocal hanging in a musical void at the end of each verse, for instance) that also made it such a joy to create.
 
Join me next Friday for the companion story for my song Weakness and Truth (it’s a really good one :D).