A Year In The Garden

What I am listening to: Holy shit holy shit holy SHIT the new Cassandra Jenkins record.

What I am reading: Just this morning I finished listening to the audio book of Our Wives Under the Sea by Julie Armfield, at the recommendation of my sweet friend L. This book fucking rules - RIYL Annihilation and the ocean and loving women.

I tend to get the most blue in the summer. I like the summer, but I don’t do well in the heat and my freedom to roam being reduced to the early morning hours feels too restrictive for me to be at my happiest. My particular brand of depression thrives when it is restricted. Tired. Busy. When the manic, excited “yes!” of the spring comes to fruition in the form of commitments and plans a much different version of myself committed to. I have been shuffling through some dark lately. A static twinge at the edges of what should be joy or laughter. A sudden urge to cry in response to the question “how are you?” when I realize it may have been several weeks since I thought of how I am. It becomes hard to define the edges between a chemical imbalance in my brain I have always known and the appropriate response to a 24/7 news cycle and the state of Things. Retreating into creativity as coping has always been my favorite way to wait these sorts of storms out, and I think I’m in one of those now.

Today is one year since I released my album In The Garden, By The Weeds. It is my third album if you think about albums I spent money on and tried to approach professionally. It is my fifth album if you count the two I made in high school and self-released. It is the closest to my heart currently, because of the way the last several years have played out.

Prior to ITG,BTW I wrote most of my songs about specific events happening to me. It made it easy to point to specific spots in my history that explained the songs, and also to heal and grow and move through them onto the next thing. With the writing on ITG,BTW it felt more like capturing a way of life - a feeling and a way of existing over an extended period of time that I hadn’t done in my writing before. Most of it was written from 2020 - 2022; a strange, liminal space in my own and I believe the collective consciousness. Plagued by an actual plague, the aftermath of that collective trauma, the bravery to know ourselves when the day to day trance was broken, and so much more.

It often feels like the feelings of 2020 never went away - the white, hot, painful core at the center of a shit snowball careening down a hill that continues to collect layer after layer, when many of us still haven’t fully been able to look at what the middle means yet. So the world in which I wrote the songs on ITG,BTW feels still so present to me. It still feels like the room that I am in, though I continue to decorate it differently and move the furniture around. The floor and the walls and the windows are the same ones. It makes creating new work interesting and challenging, as someone who wants to be taking new leaps and directions with every new project.

But I don’t really want to talk about new stuff just yet, and I’d like to talk more about the songs on ITG,BTW as a way to reflect and remember and remind myself that time does pass and it does change in massive ways, even when it feels like we’re standing in the same place. Even when I have forgotten to ask myself How I Am.

When I really connect with a song, I find it is when the lyrics are specific enough to find relatable, yet vague enough for me to manipulate into the context of my own story. As is human nature, I am feel uncomfortable when we are not about me. As a lyricist, one of my favorite parts of writing and releasing music is when something I meant one way evolves into a horse of an entirely different color for someone else. I remember my mother telling me a song I wrote about devastation made her feel strong and capable. Our differences are never more stark than when it comes to interpretation.

With that in mind, I try to not be too specific and prescriptive when I talk about what my songs are about. The meaning of them changes over time anyway. I can give the context as to what I was going through and maybe what themes were swimming around in me, but for the most part, the songs stop being mine when I put them out. They belong to anyone who listens and sees themselves inside. Why take some of that great relation away by telling you that you interpreted something “wrong”? You interpret them exactly right, whatever you interpret them as. With that in mind, here are what the songs on ITG,BTW mean to me on the day that they turn one year old in the world.

YKWIM - You Know What I Mean’s opening line is a slight plagiarism from a line in the book Devil House by John Darnielle. The subject matter of the book didn’t really resonate with me, but Darnielle’s writing, in any format, always does. I was listening to the audio book in the summer of 2021 and going on lots of walks when I wrote this song, and a line about being between confidence and self-deprecation jumped out at me as describing exactly how I felt at the time. I was single for the first time in a long time, and the world was just rushing to open back up after vaccines were released. I was surrounded by people and I’d never felt lonelier or more misunderstood. The collective trauma marked by vastly different experiences of it and all of us rushing to connect to each other again was healing and confusing and messy and wild. I wanted to capture all of that lonely wild in the song.

Empty Things - After a mess of chaotic connections for all of 2021, I found comfort in one of them for a few weeks in the winter. When it came to an unsettling and harmful conclusion, I felt at a loss. Why, of all of the people I could find safety in, did I find it in someone who turned out to be unsafe? Why did I want what I wanted? Why was it so easy to be sad instead of filled with rage like I should have been? This song is about feeling disappointed in myself and my desires and wishing I could just be fucking angry without all the understanding.

The Nothing Answered Back - Another song pulled from the walks of 2021. I had two dogs during the writing of this album. Ripley, a pit-bull mutt of a perfect lady who was 12 and had been recovering from cancer for the prior few years, and Townes, my block-headed soul mate with a (now former) serious attitude problem. In 2019, the two of them got into a horrific fight at my birthday party that resulted in some permanent scars - to me and my friends and both dogs - both physical and emotional. Because of Ripley’s age and cancer diagnosis and Townes’ behavioral stuff, rehoming either of them was never an option to me. So I learned to live in a house divided. By baby gates. The fear of them harming each other again was too great, so from 2020-2022 when Ripley passed, I cared for the two of them entirely separately in the same home. Double dog walks, double dog beds, double life. I didn’t realize just how stressful and unsustainable that had become until I lost Ripley. The grief with relief was huge. All of that is to say that when I wrote this album, I was taking 2-4 dog walks a day so that both of them were getting what they needed. This song came to be when I saw a muskrat on the brink of death on the sidewalk by my house. I gave it water but didn’t move it. The next day, it had died, and I watched it decay for the next month or so. (Like I said, depressed in the summer lol). I was not being nice to myself in a lot of ways, and each of the questions in the songs were questions I was pondering for myself as I walked each day. I had begged to feel disconnected from people for a while after my previous romantic breakup. Felt that I needed space from the spark of love. And then when I no longer felt it, I couldn’t believe I had asked for that.

Bad Dreams (Not Broken) - In the early parts of spring 2021, I had a nightmare problem. I had gotten out of a tricky living situation and was back to living in my home by myself in SLC. Physically I was out of something that was not good for me, but my brain would take me back there every night. I dreamt of car crashes and death and sickness and gun shots and woke up sweating and gasping for breath every morning for what felt like years. It was just a few weeks, but the impact was heavy. When I was a kid, I would have horrific nightmares that stuck with me for months. A way I learned to protect myself from them would be to acknowledge, during my waking hours if I witnessed something unsettling or unnerving, that “I am not going to dream about this tonight.” It felt like if I could bring something from my subconscious into my consciousness, then I could be stronger than it. Writing the chorus in a way that felt sing-song, child-like, almost like a nursery rhyme felt like my way of acknowledging what I was afraid of and trying to keep my brain from going back to it.

cinderblocks - The first song Jordan and I worked on together for this record, before we knew we were making a record. It set the tone for the production that would become so impactful from him, and set the tone for the new era of songs I was writing after No Woman is The Sea. When I wrote this song, I was leaving a relationship where there was no bad guy. There was so much love and so much hatred mixed into our perceptions of each other. Navigating a breakup during 2020 made it so much harder. Not having our support systems, living in a house together for months after we broke up. It was a perfect storm for hurting. I remember a day that I wanted to hate him so badly, and I couldn’t. So I imagined building an effigy of him out in the yard out of the weeds we’d both let grow so tall and setting it on fire. It was so cathartic. The house was made of gray cinderblocks, and we would often talk about wanting them to be red. Wanted everything to be anything other than what it actually was.

Not Easy, Not Forever - This one was written a bit later than the others. Once we knew we were writing an album and had a bit more direction. The themes of the garden and growth and maintenance were coming to the surface. It was the summer of 2022 and I was, surprise surprise, incredibly depressed. I was sleeping most of the day whenever I could. I had gotten covid and had ended things with someone I really cared for and learned of a scary cancer diagnosis of someone I had a complicated relationship with. Every day felt like such a chore, and I wrote most of this song as a mantra, trying to convince myself to get out of bed. The bridge of this song, the part about "letting myself be known” actually was written some months later when I started dating my current partner. I was feeling very closed off to letting anyone in just yet, but the question felt like a natural accompaniment to the nature of things changing from the summer to the fall.

Jawbreaker - Oh boy it is a song about childhood trauma! And the first one I wrote of all the tracks on the album. About how when you experience something awful as a kid, it’s hard to separate the good memories from the really scary ones. I had started to pick a lot of it apart and dig around in those memories during zoom therapy sessions in the summer of 2020. I remember during an online event in June of 2020, Angela Davis said something about “pandemic as a portal.” The collective realizing and understanding of so many things - about ourselves and our culture really made it feel like that. I think that was why I picked such a stupid time to unravel a bunch of shit from my childhood that was affecting me deeply. It was the time for unraveling. In Logan, Utah, where I spent a large chunk of my childhood with my dad, there is a statue of an angel at the cemetery that “cries.” Her cheeks are wet when you look up close, even if it hasn’t rained in ages. I was entranced by her when I was a child.

Earthquake Song - Written shortly after I wrote Jawbreaker, trying to process the first half of 2020 while still living through the second half. I do not recommend trying to write a song about a breakup with a person who you are currently sharing a home with. That is a moment I lacked a lot of self-awareness in that I am not very proud of. Salt Lake City experienced a sizable earthquake a few days after Covid shut everything down in March of 2020. It was a weird time that propelled us all into the rest of a weird year. I leaned into my “I am a positive person! I can see the good in this!” parts of myself HARD even when I didn’t believe it during that year. Before I realized that finding the good in anything is not always the comfort you think it might be. Sometimes things are not good.

July - July feels like the sister song to The Nothing Answered Back to me. It was written similarly - depressed in the summer and taking lots of walks. Trying to navigate hope in the midst of it all. Doing all of the things I thought I SHOULD be doing to help myself, but having a hard time finding relief. I talked to my dad regularly on the phone and cried about how hopeless I felt so often. My favorite part of this song is a sneaky voicemail from my dad that Jordan and I put in after the lyric “I call up my dad,” - you can hear him say “HIIII SWEET PEA” before it garbles into the rest of the track. My dad helped me so much through that particular sad storm, and most of the others for my whole life as well. I loved getting to put a piece of him into this song.

Coming to the end of this, and I’m feeling like I hoped that I might. Suddenly aware of the passing of great time. Suddenly aware of the vast changes that have occurred in a few short years. I am not the same person I was when I wrote this album, and not even the same person I was when I released it one year ago. The things that keep me up at night have changes, and the things that get me out of bed have changed, too. It is reassuring to know we are capable of being so many different ways. The differences in versions of ourselves are just as stark as the ones we have with each other. Isn’t that beautiful? To contain so many ways to be? If you are in a way you do not want to be right now, hang in there. It will change with or without you knowing it is changing.