Week 3 of the Making of Unnamed Album - November (Songs finished: 2)

It was my third trek to Richmond and, by this point, I was a local. 

I had all my favorite spots. The health food store where I got a green smoothie every morning. The restaurant, where I found myself sat at the bar catching up with a bartender, who, during my first visit, timidly mentioned his wife was pregnant, during my second visit, was a man in wait, and during my third visit, was a first-time father. The take-out places I trusted for something good and quick, like a poké bowl or a plate of decidedly interesting yet highly addictive Greek nachos. 

The only problem was, this time around, Richmond was all but folding in on itself. 

It seemed to me every road was under construction. And, certainly, the ones I planned to be on. I’d find my way across town to the studio using one back street or another, just to wake up the following morning to find the maze from the day before was wiped clean. I’d drive to a workout class in a part of town I could only describe as detached and quiet, only to discover it too was plagued by construction, barring cars from every necessary on-ramp. And, to make matters more personal, the poké place, which I relied on for a late-night meal, closed on a random Tuesday for a wedding, leaving me to sit murderously in my car staring at that handwritten sign taped to their door like it was a lecture handed down from the Goddess herself. 

It was my quickest planned jaunt in the studio so far, and perhaps that was for the best. 

I’d picked songs I thought of as accessible and uncomplicated. They were songs I’d written long, long ago, when Blue Monkey wasn’t even on the list of monikers I was considering for a potential rebrand. I remember playing demos of the songs for my partner in a parking garage across the street from Hollywood Forever. We sat side-by-side in my tiny Mini Cooper, listening, before carrying a vegan cheeseboard from Fromage into the cemetery, eating it in the dark with a narrow view of The Wizard of Oz. 

That was a perfect night in a very uncomplicated time of my life. It was that prized moment in every nubile relationship, when you’re just so infatuated, all the things you reckoned with seemed well-placed. Even if they weren’t. I think that’s why the songs met us in the studio with little fanfare. The arguments were less. The ideas were big and naïve. In one track, I endeavored to use my own breath as a texture of sorts. A parcel of tension. 

One day, Lawrence stood at the window watching construction workers put out orange cones, grumbling in his way, which is to say, sometimes he was the epitome of youth, and sometimes he was a little old gentleman in loafers, surveilling his house for ruckus. I remember thinking the construction was like a plague. It had started on my side of town, and it was slowly spreading all over the city. 

He was deeply unmoved by this encroachment, if it only served to alert him to the fact that the side of his house, which bordered the street and was technically under his jurisdiction, had accumulated more trash, which he was then custodian of. 

We watched Good Will Hunting, Bruce Almighty, and A Beautiful Mind on mute with the subtitles while we recorded vocals and built synths as though layering paint on a printing press. The movies overwhelmed with the errant responsibility to purpose, even as they grappled with themes of free will and gratitude. I think, perhaps there is no better metaphor for the urgency we all experience in our current day-to-day, preparing for Neptune to move into Aries for the first time since the Civil War started in 1861. 

Conversely, I felt a lack of urgency about the songs. I was totally uncompromised and stimulated by it. And I can only assume it’s because art serves as transportation from one time to another. The only thing I can say for myself is that when I was first falling in love, I did not demand that I do anything of consequence outside of falling in love. That was my only true labor. I carried on with my days. I made plans to see him or to see friends so I could talk about him. And how special it was to revisit these songs when I’d describe our relationship as mature, and far more abiding than the relationship was when we were preparing for a cross-country move and hadn’t really considered the permanence of it. 

In a sense, it felt like I’d written a theory back in 2021, and over the course of four years, I’d simultaneously disproved the theory and expanded upon the theory. Which, if we get right down to it, sums up this question of love quite well. After all, it is a question. More so than I would call it an answer. Should I ever lose my curiosity about it, well then, I’ll know it’s no longer love, it’s just an obligation where love once was. 

On our final day, I sat in contemplation, making poorly received suggestions to a Lawrence who was appalled at the proposal of more vocals. And then I was packing my bag. And he was powering his computer down. 

“It’s like each song is its own little world,” he said at we made leave. I thought nothing truer could be said. We had agreed that this was not an album being made for any particular reason. It was not going to satisfy the whims of the ordinary listener. There was only the responsibility to purpose to account for it being made. Everything else was just instinct. 

And so, I took many detours on my way back to my Airbnb, pleased to know that a song becomes a world when you forget about the world, and stop creating art to fit in it.   

Week 2 of the Making of Unnamed Second Album - October (Songs finished: 3)

After lo these many years of being chronically online, I experienced what can only be described as a catastrophic uptick in online popularity, and I was woefully unprepared for the attentiveness this incident would require of me.

In Week 1’s essay, I discussed what recording new music would mean for my ability to positively engage with my first album, Ageless, and how grinding it to a pulp on social media provided a sort of severance, whereas time would need to elapse before I could appreciate the music for what it was. At present, Ageless feels like a box of tattered rags I don’t have the energy to sift through for non-perishables before donating to some sinister non-profit like Goodwill.

The uptick came party to a sense of excruciating seclusion. In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, I transitioned an Instagram account I normally reserved for sharing dispassionate, 35mm photos of lighthouses, which I’d taken on my mission to see every lighthouse in the U.S., to controversial, politically-charged reels. Initially, I saw my follower count dip. Mostly, the downward trend came from people from my hometown in Montana, and mostly, I felt like, “Good riddance.” But there was an ineptitude that settled in, taking me back to a point in time when I struggled to relate to my high school classmates, and as a result, became, more or less, hostile towards them and towards the concept of high school itself.

As a result, I, perhaps egotistically determined to build up my follower count (I’ll show you!), let out a battle cry I can’t confidently say belonged to anyone other than my younger self, horribly misunderstood as she was by people she didn’t want to be understood by. But I guess that’s the pathology of social media, high school, and the world at large—if we want to be so impudent.

Whether purely altruistic or not, it worked. In a matter of weeks, my audience quadrupled. I had never felt so visible in the online world. It was a terrifying responsibility.

This all happened as I set out, once again, for Richmond, where I had begun recording my second album in August. I started my trip in a bed and breakfast near Point Lookout on the Chesapeake Bay, and in the three days I spent leading up to the studio, I finished seeing every lighthouse in Maryland. All the while, I churned out as much content as possible to keep the online momentum going. It was an exhausting venture.

By the time I got to the studio, the novelty of my social media pluming had worn off. My hands felt poisoned for all the time I’d spent on my phone liking, responding, and sometimes deleting comments. What was once a mostly manageable and customary addiction to social media felt totally out of control. My brain had gotten so used to this new drug, and I began to fear a time when my social media wasn’t growing like an aggressive cancer.

The studio wasn’t the remedy I hoped. In fact, being that my producer and I tended to trade off contributing to the tracks, there were long periods when he sat at the desk, working, and I was totally out of it, furiously arguing with Facebook bigots I couldn’t even be certain were real people.

I can’t say whether the music suffered because of this mania, but I can say that there was not a single morning I showed up well-rested. I managed to work out, I managed to eat well, I even managed a walk or two. But I was easily frustrated. I lacked the capacity for the mundane road bumps any jaunt in the studio would bring, especially with two minds who understand momentum and rhythm in two completely different ways.

For all intents and purposes, it was just as it was before. I overbought produce at the grocery store I pretended I would cook, I watched comfort movies on the living room TV while I did my skincare, I never got to bed earlier than one AM and I complained about it in my journal. But everything was different. I had been imagining a great movement like this for twelve years, and suddenly it was here.

I was grateful and strung out. 

The three songs we chose were inherently political. It was purposeful. The energy I’d gained online would’ve been wasted on the more downtempo songs I’d written about happiness and my relationship. I was furious at the state of things, and the timeliness of that was something to call upon.

We took a break over the weekend. I spent one day watching the Twilight series and the other seeing my 400^th U.S. lighthouse, and my final lighthouse in Virginia. In the car to Stingray Point I set up my camera to address my new audience. I told them how relieved I was that fall had arrived. True fall. With its crisp, dry air. I hadn’t realized until that first morning, when the ground looked dewy and the sky was white and cold, how fearsome I’d become of a perpetual, humid hellscape. I told the camera, “As I was sitting there this summer, weathering hot day after hotter day after even hotter day, I realized I’m experiencing my future right now.”

This might seem off topic, but I wanted to offer a look into the artist’s brain as the artist endeavors to create. I was sitting with an enormous amount of panic. I was working in the studio wondering about the end of the world, and how everything I had made would go out with it. I showed up optimistically in sweaters and winter coats, only to step out in the midday sun and long for short sleeves. I sat at Stella’s bar in conversation with a man who hated AI but was employed by a construction firm in the business of building data centers. There is so much to account for, and I was exhausted by it all, by the mammoth feelings I had and the implausibility of ever being able to sort through them.

I had started to entertain the idea that I may never accomplish everything I want to. I have myriad dormant ideas and projects, so many millions of ways I could imagine expressing myself, and so, only recently, I started to really appreciate the ideas that made their way through the fold. It was a grand triumph to hear these songs in the studio speakers as we speckled them with arpeggiators, drums, and bells. Sitting there in my overwhelm, I understood these works to be representatives of the collective, of all my ideas and hopes, and that what I could do was honor all the music and words that may never make it into the domain by pouring myself into what had as though this album, alone, could set the rest of them free.

I was relieved to wrap these three songs when we did. Our final day in the studio was spent, in part, making up for our first day, which saw me at my most strained. I had suggested an early night so I could go back to my Airbnb and create more content. I did a lot of self-battering that evening. I was there to work, not argue online and fight for a universal understanding between me and people who were unreachable, and especially in the comment section of some silly post that had “broken through.” Over the next few days, I tried to be gentle, to remind myself that it was okay to be a little caught up in the hysteria. Eventually, this would become a normal part of life, and I would cease to be this impacted.

My final morning, I managed a walk to the coffee shop before driving to the airport in D.C. I was lax as I drove along the highways, through the trees, and eventually the Potomac River. It was a beautiful, wintry day.

Week 1 of the Making of Unnamed Second Album – August (songs finished: 3)

When I was considering a second album, I felt totally shackled to my first album, like I owed it to Ageless to pummel it to death on social media until it all but became unrecognizable. The great tragedy of social media is that while your efforts result in listeners, people who are hearing the work for the first time the way it’s meant to be heard—all shiny and new—you’re hearing it for the millionth time. And though some art may resist this pulverization, in general, I think it’s fair to say, even the greatest works are minced by this type of overexposure.

Weeks into the social media push for Ageless, I’d stopped understanding it altogether. These tattered rags couldn’t be the same songs I made on the loom. What was I even singing about? Why did I feel these messages were so urgent? Is it true that I once imagined a great movement around these songs?

This is why artists need distance from their work.

In any case, enough time hadn’t elapsed between releasing my first album and getting started on my second album—that was the consensus. Why was that the consensus? Well, I simply don’t know. It’s interesting how many rules and guidelines we, as creative free spirits, silently abide by. Like there’s this place you’ll be sent if you genre-hop or release an album without at least one conventionally upbeat song. I sometimes think it’s fair to compare building an audience to the snake eating its own tail. The fans I collect with the clever content I make are the same fans I annoy with the clever content I have to keep making. Why any of them stick around is beyond me. This isn’t self-pity. I do know the work is good, but all good things sour in time.

Recording the work, making assets for the work, performing the work—it’s all transactional. And when you don’t make money from it, when it’s just a sunk cost, you feel irresponsible if you don’t then devote yourself to the work like some drafted soldier on the front lines of a war you didn’t start. You’re in it, you decided to put art out in the Age of Aquarius, might as well make it all worth it.

I don’t know how I overcame this compulsion. I guess it could be that I’ve done this before, many years prior. I followed all the rules, and I didn’t “make it” if there was ever such a thing. The textbook didn’t work. Being prim and proper about silly things like timelines, treating artistry like it was mathematical—none of it churned out the abstract results I was looking for.

So, I just decided, to hell with it then.

I know it’s not totally polite to say but, what the fuck? Since when do we feel like we need to be so cheeky about everything? Art is art. Some of it comes pouring out in a wild rush and some of it lingers and annoys and pulls at us while we’re trying to do other things. There is no behemoth as burdensome as the dormant project. I carry many around with me all day long.

What it is is guilt. It’s guilt guilt guilt. I felt guilty going back to the studio so soon. Like I was being selfish. Taking something for my own. Trying to reignite that spark of recognition. Oh, there’s the artist I once knew myself to be. For a while there, I felt like I was nothing more than a fish in a bowl of stale water, swimming in circles, making the rounds. Doing my voyeuristic duty.

The non-artist will never understand the disdain the artist has for their old work when they’re creating new work. When I was really young, and I played my first major show, I remember fans coming up afterwards asking why I hadn’t played some of my biggest songs, which were years old by that point. I feel a bit stupid admitting this, but it hadn’t even occurred to me. I just liked the new music more. I don’t know why I thought my own hits didn’t apply to me. Just a couple weeks ago, when a cousin passed me a potential setlist for Lorde’s Ultrasound World Tour, I was up in arms that “Buzzcut Season”, a song that was, by that point, nearly twelve years old, hadn’t made the cut.

So, there I was, day 1 in the studio in Richmond, creating something new. And, oh, what that meant for Ageless.

I will get over the general repulsion I feel for the old music I’ve ground to dust with my mortar and pestle. Not any time soon. But eventually. And I think that’s why, the night after my first session, I felt a great void opening up in my AirBnB. I sat on the leather couch, looking across the small living room at myself in the mirror, that vacuous tear yawning before me, and all there was was nothing. I was numb. Art does that sometimes. It acts as a severance. I was in the era of Ageless, and then I was not.

I’d written almost all the unnamed second album in my home in Nashville, and a few songs in my old bedroom in Hollywood. The experience of recording away from my little woman duties, my dormant projects, was necessary. As an artist, I’d built up the coveted artist retreat in my mind. A cabin in the Adirondacks, or a chateau in the French countryside. Virginia didn’t quite fit that archetype, but it was other. It was somewhere else. Somewhere new.

I started and ended each day in a little walkup in Carytown. Nobody prepared me for the idleness of my vacant hours, but I will be the first to say how crucial boredom is. Boredom is where the self is confronted in full force. I was unsettled. What better pad to launch from.

My co-producer, Lawrence, and I had worked on Ageless together in an East LA warehouse studio almost exactly five years before. I remember in the days leading up to our reunion that I was nervous it wouldn’t be like it was nearly a half decade ago. And it wasn’t. We still clashed, laughed, and created in the exact same way. But there was a level of polish and abandon to the sound, which we’d timidly poked at in LA. Where Ageless was an experiment, this felt like the result. This felt whole, understood, deliberate.

I don’t know that I’ll find another person I collaborate with in the same way we do. If there was even a hint of reticence on that first day, it was quelled when we wrapped the first song. I sat back on the couch, the space we had to work with nearly tripling from that of the East LA studio, a little mystified by what we had done. That first song was an epic told in four parts. I’d never loved anything I’d made more.

So, of course it should follow that the second song was a test of wills. And the third song was a lesson in scaling back.

Before each session, we sat at his dining room table with his wife. I drank the last of my cold brew, and they made coffee and tea. We talked about whatever—their one glutinous cat, the ridiculous speed limit of the bridges from downtown to the south side, my general disdain of Nashville. And eventually we looked at each other and said, “Well, should we get started?

There was no urgency. And that was the most notable thing during my first week in Richmond.

I can’t say for sure, because I’ll never know for sure, but losing the sense of urgency to get things done as fast as humanly possible felt like the final act of my artistic revolution. I was not interested in pulverizing anything anymore. I could continue to support a culture that rewards quantity over quality, or I could choose to engage with my art in a way that was meaningful to me, that preserved my relationship with the art, so this song that I was so profoundly in love with would never become a song I heard first thing in the morning, when my blood sugar spiked, rousing me from sleep in a fashion that has become typical in modern America.