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Hi Tumblr

I’ve recorded an album about a difficult time in my life and I’m very proud of it. It’ll be out next month and I’ll be playing an album release show in SF. There are a couple tracks out already on my bandcamp and wherever you stream stuff.  CW: Sexual assault.  I wrote it to work through my personal experience of sexual assault by a close friend of mine. I couldn’t really talk about it and I couldn’t write about it directly so I wrote music about it, structured around the myth of Persephone. 

As you may know, the myth begins on a lovely day when Persephone was gardening with her mother Demeter. All of the sudden, Hades burst through the earth and grabbed Persephone and dragged her into the underworld where she would be his queen. Demeter was so distraught at the loss of her daughter that she caused all the crops to fail and the world to descend into famine. The gods eventually made Hades release his captor, but he tricked her into eating some food from the underworld, which bound her forever to it. As a result, she is obligated to spend 3 months of each year in the underworld with her hated abductor, where there is no sun or moon, while the crops of the world above die. This is what we call winter. 

As I tried to work through my own experience, I was (and still am) constantly frustrated by the sheer amount of time and energy I was devoting to this one awful night in my life. The winter in the myth came to represent for me the ways in which we are helpless to revisit past traumas. It felt like I would dwell in those painful memories for the rest of my life. 

The title of the record is from a Tennyson poem about the myth, referring to the time Persephone spends with the gods and her loving, vengeful mother the goddess of the harvest. 

I’m trying to keep my perspective on the time when I’m free of trauma, when I’m loved, supported, and can put my energy into things I care about. 

"I Like to Watch" is a four-minute music video which explores the connections between the September 11 attacks, professional sports, and pornography.