Feral As Folk

This year has been filled with a lot of closed doors. Opportunities that fell through, relationships that sputtered, partnerships that I depended on floundering. It’s hard to have EVEN ONE of these things crop up a year, much less a kind of monthly crisis.

I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to bulldoze over my feelings.

“This is ok. I can fix this. I’ll figure out something”

But right now, more than half way through the year, I’m realizing when I repress my feelings I also tamp down my creativity.

It HURTS. It hurts like hell that things are so hard right now, when I have this delicate trust that I am trying to establish between me and the mystery that I am worthy of a good life. It hurts like hell that right now all evidence feels like it’s pointing to the contrary.

It hurts every time I see another musician playing a gig at someplace I contacted but never heard back from.

It hurts every time someone is celebrating their success, because it feels like just more proof of what I haven’t been able to do.

It hurts every time yet another door gets shut and locked because I am terrified, ultimately, that nothing will ever go my way again.

I’ve been running and running and running from this pain so hard that I haven’t stopped to be creative. I haven’t paused to feel where I feel inspired. What might feel good to do in the abundance and time and quiet and space that I have right now. I haven’t paused to even contemplate what doors I would LIKE to open.

The void is pregnant with possibility, but very often we are so afraid of the pain of loss that we never let ourselves get past it. We want to solve the problem of the closed doors, force them back open, MAKE IT HAPPEN, not because we necessarily want what is on the other side, but because we’re afraid ultimately of the unknown.

Fear is always the impetus behind control - it’s behind industrialization, domestication, and ultimately colonialism on a grand historical scale. It’s the jealous boyfriend. The hustling “girl boss” filling your feed with sales pitches. It’s the micromanager at work.

We seek to control, because we think it is safer, but instead it is death.

Nothing moves if there is no room for entropy, mystery, the void. No matter how inspired and brilliant you are, nothing new can come from the vacuum of total control.

When I write, I avoid listening to music for long stretches of time. I want to let myself “hear’ what is naturally occurring in my head. I need quiet, and long expanses of time to noodle on the guitar, and a certain amount of emptiness in my head so I’m not thinking about problem solving, I’m just allowing whatever it going to come up to come up.

I’ve never been super into award shows, but I remember watching the Grammy’s growing up with a sense of trajectory. I remember thinking “That’s what success looks like”, even as I kept my musical aspirations somewhat close to my chest as a young kid. The truth is, though, the Grammy’s always felt like it was about entertainers, and I’ve always felt uneasy with the title of entertainer. 

It’s the line that all creators debate – ultimately what makes art? And is there an equivocal difference in value between “art” and “entertainment” (or crafts or decoration in the visual art world)

It’s not so much that art or entertainment provide more provide meaningful contributions to society, for me the difference between entertainment and art is in the metrics of success.  Entertainment is about audience size, whereas art is about impact.  To make it even more confusing, it’s not always either/or.  I keep thinking of Shakespeare and his ability to reach beyond the class divides and create plays that were both meaningful and accessible. 

However, in this capitalist driven corporatized society the focus on numbers can really put a damper on creativity and originality.  In youtube’s early days it was a platform where innovation and playful creativity could find an outlet.  Here’s this open platform where people can put ANYTHING THEY WANT and it is profoundly cluttered with the latest “challenge” videos and the same kind of content focused more on what key words are trendy and most likely to attract eyes. Sure, there was ALWAYS trash in with the treasure, but now you have to dig through the creative equivalent of plastic McDonalds toys to get to something remarkable.

 When success is about the amount of attention that you get, then attention becomes a core influence on what you create.

In 2010 I went to ASCAP’s I Create Music Expo in LA, and a lot of the DIY marketing advice came down to “post covers”. Great advice if you want to play covers for the rest of your life. No so helpful if you’re a songwriter.  Covers can be wonderful when an artist has a personal connection with the song, but not when it’s just a cheep attention grabber. Not when it’s a business move.    

When numbers are the primary indication that you are “making it”, it’s easy to ignore your own creative impulses. It begins to feel crazy to take the time to develop originality, much less take creative risks or break the established rules.  But risk taking, originality, and rule breaking are essential to making anything meaningful or intereseting.

There is an alternative (ancient) metric of success: to plunge the depths of our souls and know every shadow and light; to create community around the resonances of our best selves; to experiance as much joy throughout this frantic and fragile existance as possible .

There are no award shows that show you that you’ve arrived, no charts and comparisons, but in the end, when you are enjoying the accumulated memories of a life well lived, I imagine an award would just feel like a trinket in comparison anyway.

-In love and rebellion,

Sometimes I feel like just by being a woman, and especially being a femme presenting woman, I am committing some sort of false advertising. Anytime a man enters into a relationship with me I feel like I should make him sign a waiver or something.

I hereby understand that the woman that I am dating has no interest in settling down in any form and especially not in having children. I understand that she has ambition hooked in her rib cage that is pulling her towards something, and that will always take priority until it is achieved.

  Just to alleviate my own guilt.

That’s probably part of why music appeals to me so much as a career.  I want to imagine there is a certain “proceed with caution” energy that comes with musical notoriety. People seem more willing to accept eccentricity and independence if you’re rich and famous. Maybe, at the very least, it wouldn’t raise as many eyebrows when I said that my music always takes precedence, that I can’t imagine myself in a traditional future. Rock stars can be "bad" on stage and "good" at home and no one really blinks an eye, but even as liberated as they seem they are often oscillating between the two extremes.  

Honestly, there was never a chance in hell that I would be able to maintain good girl status. I have always been too passionate, too opinionated, too unapologetically sensual to pull it off. So I identified as a “bad girl” (and occasionally still do if it’s on a particularly smart t-shirt), but it came with this subconscious belief that I deserved to be treated differently than “good girls” or “marry-able girls”. That I would always be less-than. An outsider and dirty secret who would ultimately be left for a woman who could better conform.  I let myself get treated terribly because I thought that was all I could expect, all I was worthy of. (I wrote a little about my plethora of relationship baggage HERE for context) So I decided to claim my own word for my non-position in the paradigm.

                                                  When I wrote Feral Queen, I was claiming my own narration as a woman returning to my natural wild state; whole in all my passionate, sensual, intense, intellectual, raw, messiness. Feral is a revocation of the myth that women belong in the domestic realm, or even more so that anyone else can dictate where a woman belongs other than her own self. It's a song about knowing the game but refusing to participate. It is a small thing, a miniscule thing, but something that means the world to me.

We all deserve the space to claim ourselves. There is this mythology around true names that extends beyond what we call ourselves. How we define ourselves is how we show up in life. How we identify in our own stories affects how they evolve and who we become.

May we all find the words to name our truths.

xoxo