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).