I've been making music for 10 years! 🙀 (a retrospective)
On March 25th, I celebrated 10 official years of making music with my first official demos (the Sailor Moon tape and the phone recordings of me singing Kate Bush a Capella don't count, I am afraid!). As I get ready to release my 7th (holy shit) LP, which is my opera record, no less, I thought it would be fun to do a little retrospective of my career so far. I'll be including the major works (which includes all of the LPs and some of the truly seminal EPs that aren't just remix or b-side collections). I just want to make it a point to say that I produced, mixed and mastered all of these myself, with the rate exceptions of the tracks that were co-produced by others. I did almost all of this myself.
Genres: Dream pop, ethereal wave, avant-pop, w/ some Americana
Everyone has to start somewhere, and there are much worse places I could have started. I was really inspired by the freedom early 4AD and Song Cycle by Van Dyke Parks. I had released my EP Only the Most Valiant in 2013 just to sort of test the waters and figure out how to release things, and I was ready to make an album. White Sea had just released In Cold Blood, which had been an album I was obsessed with and had been READY for since 2011. This was done with a budget of literally zero dollars and only 50 copies of the CD exist. I know my friends will make comments like, "oh, look how far you've come from the pirate hat!" which actually makes me... really sad. (Also because it's not a fucking pirate hat!!!) I respect this era a lot. This was really, truly epochal for me, and there are a lot of really good moments on this album. I think people just didn't "get" it. The kind of music it was wasn't anything that matched the 2014 sonic landscape. It was so necessary. The first two songs I ever wrote in earnest, to write songs, "Pip and Miki" and "only the most valiant" are on this record. The photos from this record's album art were shot at the Sutro Baths (which my grandmother had actually swam in) by a friend. The hat was a nod to both Javert and Adam Ant. I couldn't have even thought about making music the last few years because my grandmother was dying and my friend had passed away the year before. There were things in my life I had to do first before anything else could happen. I did this. I did it myself and I don't get enough credit for it. Because of my limited scope of what I thought at the time could be considered "success," I thought this album was a colossal failure. I had already left it behind. But it got my my first film score job, and I am grateful for that.
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| All the Queen's Men, Vol. 1 (2016) |
Genres: Experimental chamber pop with an electronic influence
I was really, really inspired by Susanne Sundfør and Laura Jansen with this album. I loved the way that The Silicone Veil combined strings with electronic elements. I wanted to explore my relationship with men in this album. I worked with some of my favourite people in the entire world (who happened to be men) over the course of 2 years. I wanted this to be soft and feminine, but have a nurturing male presence throughout. Will (Curry) was such an instrumental (hahahaha) part of this whole process. Everyone song on this record is its own universe. I made a lot of brave choices that gave me some of my most successful moments to date. There are tracks from this record that remain some of my most streamed songs. The person I had wanted to love this record the most did not. They didn't even acknowledge its existence. That was a really heartbreaking moment for me. I had worked on these songs since before Too Posh was finished. I was truly and deeply devastated that this person whom I loved didn't give a shit about something I had worked for for so long. I think that's maybe what has tainted this one for me, if I can be honest. This album has a lot of really special moments. There's never going to be a volume 2 because I closed the whole saga on this one. I don't want to revisit this era, but I will let it live for what it was.
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| sweet talk, convenience & lies EP (2017) |
Bandcamp Spotify
Genres: low-fi, miserable
Holy shit, this era was a black hole. This was such a spiral. It is terrifying to think about it now. This is one I do not go back and revisit. It's actually one of my most commercially successful projects to date. The cover image and title were inspired by the New Order record Power, Corruption & Lies. The painting is a still life that on the surface looks pastoral and cute, but, in reality, it rotting and covered with vermin. Every illusion I had had was rotten. My entire world had shattered. I lost a bunch of my friends who sided with my abusers. A treasured friendship of over 20 years had ended because of abuse. I had a nervous breakdown from the abuse I had suffered from two people I cared about more than anything. I had written about this one that "I am vehemently opposed to this gross misconception that torture makes good art." I didn't want art, I wanted my life back together. When I got my official nervous breakdown diagnosis, one of my best friends took me to Disneyland to celebrate (which will come up later). This EP is raw, ugly and terrifying. I am so grateful for Will and Jason (Yeager) and their work on this one.
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| B o u d i c c a (song cycle) (2018) |
Genres: industrial electronic....fake opera?
A friend of mine sent me something about the legendary queen who almost threw out the Romans, and I was instantly hooked. I had never heard of her before. I consumed everything that I could about her. When I wrote "Benediction" I knew I had something. I was tired of being sad. I was ready to be angry. I had been made to feel like my body, my voice, my art, and that I as a person, were not good enough. Well, I was going to show them all how "good enough" I was because I was going to write an operatic song cycle. This was the first project where I did everything, top to bottom. I had absolutely no classical training at this point. In retrospect, this could have been and should have been an absolute disaster, and it was not. My friend Shawna Hamic shot the promo photos for it. That shoot was such a healing experience, and I think I really needed that feminine energy and touch. Boudicca had been violated in such a profound way, as had I, and I just felt like it was my mine to burn Londinium to the ground. I still can't believe that I wrote and sang all of that without any training. I had been completely retraumatized and I was going to be angry about it.
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| Make Believe (2019) |
Bandcamp Spotify
Genres: musical theatre, low-fi
During this period, I was still determined to prove myself. I know this seems silly now, but then it was very important to me. I HAD to prove myself. I had been treated as though I wasn't good enough, and people looked down on me, talked down to me, and I was out to show them who the best was. I worked on this for 2 years. If you know, you know--the track listing reads like a book. If you don't know, they're just pretty songs. I kept this as low-fi as possible because I had gotten lots of comments asking if my voice were "real." No effects, no textures, just me. There are a few moments of being arty because I still wasn't comfortable not being weird--I was known for doing weird shit. My friend Michele took the cover photo, of me looking into my grandparents' emptied house before it was sold. It's such a cool and arty photo of SUCH a deeply and profoundly sad moment of my life. Every part of my life now from that era was gone, so it just seemed like a good fit for this collection of songs. I cried through the entirety of making this record, so I don't ever go back and listen to this one, either. I was so unfulfilled by making this record, I ended up making 4 albums in ..18 months? (*edit DateCalculator.com says it's18 months, 20 days).
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| I Know What You Do On The Internet (2019) |
Genres: dance pop, new jack, chillwave, shoegaze
B o u d i c c a was the first project I did exclusively by myself, but this was the first album. This came out in October of 2019 just a few months after Make Believe. I was left so unfulfilled by Make Believe. I felt like I had failed. I was trying to run away from trouble (lol, okay, there, Brer Rabbit) and out-run this feeling. During the entire duration of working on Make Believe, I had been experimenting with vintage and analog synths, drum machines, and samples. I wanted to sharpen my skills as a writing and a producer whilst working on classical and legit material. I really, really love Forever Your Girl by Paula Abdul and Let's Get To It by Kylie Minogue and I wanted to make music that made me feel like that. I had been watching the Vox series Earworm, and became obsessed with these timeless pop conventions. The episode about the fade out really left an impression on me. This is the most direct approach to writing I had ever had and I wanted it to sound timeless. I wanted it to sound vintage. I wanted people to not know when the album had been made, to have double takes. I still want to make a video for "Liar, Liar," I have not let the idea not the ambition go.
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| The Course of Empire (2020) |
Bandcamp Spotify
Genres: art pop, synth pop, folktronica, chillwave, synthwave, 1980's sci-fi soundtracks
I just want everyone to know I started this before Covid hit in 2020. I had no idea that when I started writing this, that I would be writing about the apocalypses. True story. No joke. I had been so inspired by the CrashCourse histories series on YouTube--and how we obsess over the falls of empires and the failure of relationships in the same way. We go over every single little detail of why they've failed, but we never do anything about it, and just continue to fail in the same ways again. My friend who took me to Disneyland in 2017 to celebrate my brain collapsing in on itself introduced me to Allie X in 2019 after Christmas. I discovered the painting series by Thomas Cole. I immediately became obsessed with all of it. I wanted to make better music. I had spent all of 2019 being tortured by The Rat That Wouldn't Leave. The Rat That Ruins Everything. Will (Curry) and I had had a conversation in November of 2019 about using "the opera stuff" for electronic music and something inside my brain just CLICKED. Between Odesza and Allie X, I was determined to make better music, to really push myself. Unlike everyone else, I didn't get to shelter in place because I am an essential worker, so this album wasn't made as a result of being isolated. I was already setting out to make a better record than I had ever made. I was also bored and I wanted to dance. "Tell Her Before I Do" was written in February and released in March, and the entire album was released early on Bandcamp in May. It had its official release in June of 2020.I basically wrote the entire album in 3 months. Maybe that's why it's my most thematically cohesive and complete record. Odesza has a lot of instrumental music on their albums, and I wanted to be brave enough to do that. I was also inspired by the soundtracks of films like The Orion Loop, Dune, Tron, The Last Starfighter, and Blade Runner. There is something taunt, lean, and isolating about all of those films, and I wanted to capture that sound with this album.
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| Sweetest Tongue, Sharpest Tooth (2020) |
Genres: 80's pop, New Wave, synth pop
The single "Halcyon Phantasm" came out on July 3rd of 2020, when The Course of Empire came out on June 8th. I was truly insane during this period. I worked non-stop. I was so desperate to out-run my disappointment. Whilst other people had spent their 2020 quarantines baking bread or doing TikTok dances, we were stalking Next Door for mountain lion updates and driving town listening to 1st Wave on XM radio going to the sites of all of the sightings. I wanted to write my own lion-hunting soundtrack. In October of 2019, I saw The Company of Wolves, and realized I had seen it before. During the very wee years of my childhood, I had been straight up neglected and left for hours in front of the television. The Company of Wolves was once of those films I should have not seen. Seeing as an adult had a profound effect on me. It unlocked something really primal within me. This is my dorky homage to werewolves and my very earliest formative years. We thought March through May was terrible, but June and July were the months where everything really hit the woodchipper. There were a lot of changes that so many of us were not ready for. This to me is the second most cohesive album I have ever done. It has all the things that make me feel safe, and all of the things that really scare me. It has werewolves, Brer Rabbit, 80's music. It has "Halcyon Phantasm" which is a song that I knew the worth of and stood up for myself. Of all of my albums, I think this one is truly the most "me."
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| I Suit Me EP (2021) |
Genres: an electronic...something?
Speaking of Brer Rabbit *nervous laughter*... I took a break from writing music in 2021 to focus on the opera record. I also got sick of every release I put out being ripped off; there's even a track on here that references it. I had saved the very special experience of the 2017 Disneyland trip and one of the very special solo moments in the Rolodex cache of interesting experiences, and I finally go to use it. I think this has been my most successful release to date? I reject the idea that the most tortured artist makes the best art, because I am having the most fun of my life and I am making my favourite music I've ever made. "Out of the fire, into the briar patch."
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Wow, that is a lot for the last 8 years of releasing music and the last 10 of writing and making music! What a retrospective! As I gear up to release my opera record in a couple of months (if I finish, hahahahaha).
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