What I'm Up To?

To try to write about what is going on with my music these days is to admit to you all that I have no idea what I’m doing ever.

Since I was 13, writing and recording songs has been something that I am compelled to do on a cellular level that has yet to cease. The only time I’ve ever gone more than a few months without writing a song was when I was 26 and in a deep, hollow, grief-fueled depressive episode that started with a death and ended with a divorce and even then - I was still writing fragments of lyrics in my journal and on my notes app that would eventually become fuel for the songs on No Woman Is The Sea. Everything around and about the songs I write has always just sort of happened without a lot of thought or intention on my part. Even on big projects, like when I wanted to form a band to record my first studio album - I wouldn’t have done that if the guys at Lavender Vinyl hadn’t have told me they’d help me put it out on vinyl if I did it.

This is not to say I haven’t worked super fucking hard. I always have a project in the works. I have played hundreds of hours of original songs in restaurants and on street corners and backyard birthdays and weddings and funerals for pennies and sometimes beer and sometimes listening ears. I have worked at this for a very long time.

But having put a lot of hours into something doesn’t always mean you know how to do it. At least, not in a way that is easily translatable to people that understand musicianship to be a certain way. The thing I have worked hard at is my songwriting. That’s always been my north star in all of this. Everything that being a musician contains in this world now besides trying to write good songs has never been my priority. Before my last album, I never thought about PR or radio or management or anything. I’ve never looked at this other than the way I exist without exploding or dying.

Which is why now - with some weird level of attention on the internet from my last few releases and from being unable to shut up on there in general - I feel this weird and goopy expectation that I should know what my next “move” is. That I should be more intentional about the timing of things and how I plan to promote things and how I get people to hear those things. An ex of mine once said that I’d be “huge with the right dedication and PR.” In the moment he meant it as a compliment, but it’s morphed into a bit of a ghost in my life. One that floats around every time I feel too tired from my day job to work on music, or too comfortable in my routine to say yes to a neat gig somewhere else.

That ghost has been especially present in my life lately. For the last five years, my music writing/creation/production has been in a comfortable yet exciting place with my bandmate/best friend/producer/fellow divorced bisexual - Jordan Watko. We met when I was starting to record No Woman, and we clicked in a creative way that I didn’t think was possible with another person. We spent every weekend over the last five years writing and recording and working on our live set, playing our indie rock songs without a bass player or a drummer. What had started that as a necessity of the pandemic, but I think it morphed into a comfort for us both. It helped that we both had a M-F 9-5 job so our free time was often overlapping. It was really nice to be two, especially us two.

The impact and effort of that creative space and time we spent together felt really special on our last record, In The Garden, By The Weeds. Before we were finished with it, we sat in a room at my house and said that the goal for the record was to get it heard by people whose music we loved and that was it. We had no one in mind, but because neither of us had ever chased music professionally, it felt like the right measure of success to us. When it came out, the record got some NPR attention by a twist of twitter fate. Some long time heroes had such kind things to say about it, and friends were giddy to tell us how much they loved it. By our own bar, we had an incredibly successful DIY record.

For my entire musical career, I have been a big proponent of “I am doing this for me and I never want to rely on it to pay the bills.” I’ve always had a full time job, sometimes two, on top of playing shows and writing, and I’ve never really entertained any thought of “making it.” Which honestly doesn’t really mean anything anymore because even my musical heroes have to work a bunch of jobs on top of constant touring to make ends meet.

But because of that fucking ghost of mine, I started feeling that feeling of “dang, if we were to DO this like all the time for reals for money, now would be the time to do it.” It felt like we were making music good enough to do that, and I had never felt that feeling before.

But while we were working on the record, Jordan decided to start planning his move to a new country to be with his long-term partner. Following his big, brave, beautiful heart to his next adventure. If you’ve spent any time around me for the last 18 months, you know that this has been a tricky thing for me to wrangle my emotions about. I’ve spent a lot of time in therapy trying to detangle grief from fear from jealousy from just the pain of “gonna miss my best friend.” Though Jordan and I never planned to stop writing music with each other, this geographical distance would certainly change our ability to play shows and tour and just wing it any weekend.

Jordan moved in the middle of April, and we spent so much of the weeks prior talking through feelings about fear and expectations and how this wasn’t going to be the end of us. But boy howdy, I have been a bit of a mess through it all. It’s felt like a breakup in ways that I never expected. We talk over facetime still and text as much as we can, but it’s been a change. Change isn’t a bad thing, but sometimes it is holding a lot of grief while also trying to be thrilled for someone you love doing something that makes them happy. Sometimes it’s a fight to find that happiness for them, and I’m eternally grateful to Jordan for sitting with me on multiple occasions in which I simply could not find happiness for him yet through the weight of my own shit.

It’s hit me incredibly hard because I think a lot of my musical identity has been connected to Jordan these last five years. Things started to change in my music for the better when I met him. People were taking me more seriously as a songwriter because my words had been married to these incredible productions through Jordan’s art. And a part of him being so far away now is me detangling a lot of what was mine to continue working on by myself, and what is ours to continue to work on from different parts of the world.

I have been told a lot that I’m an over explainer. I feel like I need to give you every bit of information and context in order to understand what I do and why I do it. I recently had a therapist stop me after 45 minutes of “setting the stage” and ask me “Are you ready to talk to me about how you’re feeling yet? Because none of these details are that.” I think with the internet and oversharing in general, this can be a dangerous mindset to have. And it’s at odds with what I want out of art. When I’m watching a movie and the filmmaker doesn’t trust me to infer something and has to explain it through the script? I hate that. Why would I approach my own life that way? Why would I think you need to know every detail of I am Going Through A Change, when I am so absolutely certain that you, dear reader, are mostly likely also Going Through A Change and can likely infer that on your own.

So when the question comes up of “what’s next?!” I feel like I need to explain grief and change and every step that got me to this part of what is next. But ultimately, my what’s next is that I’m just trying to experience things and live my life in a comfortable way. I think that I got to this point in my life by doing the best that I can and following my heart, so I think I’m just going to continue to do that.

That being said, if you are reading this newsletter you might have an interest in what I’m up to with my music. So here’s the nitty gritty: what I am doing now is planning a fun release. I’ve released two of them already, but I have a handful of remixes that my internet friends did of songs from In The Garden, By The Weeds. The ones by Pacing and Color Temperature are already out, and I’ve just got to get the others mastered and a release day picked. I’m planning a very, very small first ever tour in August, and playing a really fun show in December in a place I’ve never been. I’ve been thinking about maybe working with some other musicians and starting a band, but for now I’m just playing things solo because I’m not ready to connect with others creatively just yet.

Before he left, Jordan and I talked a lot about change. About how the painful part of it is mostly what happens when you don’t allow it to happen. When you try to hold something so tightly that you don’t get to see what even better, more beautiful thing it can be. I had five years of incredibly easy, comfy, magical music making with someone I love deeply. Isn’t that so incredibly lucky and beautiful? What a joy to have had it, to get to learn what else it could be, and to learn what sort of life a distance so great could breathe into it.

Jordan and I are already working on new songs when we’re awake at the same time, which I’m incredibly excited for. He told me he saw himself in some lyrics I wrote for the first time. Isn’t it so magical to create change in each other?