I live in Brooklyn, New York. I was born in Virginia.
I am interested exclusively in LIVE MUSIC.
As musicians, as artists, I do not believe we have as much control over The Music as we think or wish. The Music, to me, is in fact a well, a reservoir of sent inspiration. Yet still we try every day to wrangle it, lasso it into submission and perfection, bring it down to earth and into many ears all at once. We flatten it out, we smash it in a computer, we go into The Studio hoping for heaven, hoping for the moment Springsteen writes “I’m On Fire” or Albini and Harvey get “Rid Of Me” or Antonoff cracks open another million pop hits. Is that the point? Is the point your private discovery? Is that what we’re doing now, making music in private and hoping the mystery and how cool we are and how smart our innovation is translates over the .wav file and through to a million listeners, but a tasteful million, and released on a big indie label of course, we aren’t sellouts, and by “million” we mean a packed Warsaw in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, never more than a thousand at a time but somehow bursting at the edges, limited and exclusive and yet everybody’s there? Is that what we want? Is that the point?
I have a new album that changes everything, it is called SUPER TENDER-
Super Tender is a set of 12 songs about when I was 25. It is about when you were 25.
(To give you a glimpse, when I was 25 I had just moved to Bushwick, I had been living in New York for around 3 years. I was working a music teaching job that eventually I would become excellent at and would make into the start of a small but meaningful day job/career. I had just broken up with my first serious boyfriend. I was blonder than I am now and interested in things like microdosing mushrooms at the club and drinking coffee in the afternoon and playing a lot of shows and getting famous and being skinny and calling out of work and artists like Phoebe Bridgers and Robert Altman. I was desperate in every respect, completely young and immature.)
Super Tender is about moving on. It is about being a slut or wishing I was a slut. It is about thinking all of what had happened so far in my life was so important, it is about realizing none of it was important literally at all. It is about cutting myself, it is about stopping that, it is about breaking up with my ex, it is about being so over that, it is about thrashing out of the swaddle of my youth and into my fucked up adult life, my fucked up but way-better-than-before adult life. I began to learn, like we all do when we age, how to feel and move on, how to take control and let go all at once. My mother made a comment on the change in my person and the way I carried myself this past April. She said I was more serious, she said I was quieter. I think she meant I am more tender. I feel tender all the time, stuck inside myself with no tears to show for anything.