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 once again. 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 reserve 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 dramatically 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, let out a battle cry I can’t confidently say belonged to anyone other than my younger self, horrible 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 in Maryland, and in the three days I spent leading up to the studio, I saw my final lighthouses in Maryland. All the while, I churned out as much content as possible, to keep the online momentum going. What 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 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 used to a new drug, and I began to fear a life 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, and 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 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. 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.

On “The Great Undoing” Song and Video

As regards the era of Ageless, I feel "The Great Undoing" is less the ending of a chapter and more a dogear on one of its pages—something to circle back to. As needed.

It already felt ridiculous to me to still be stuck on that relationship when I wrote “The Great Undoing”, but to be putting the song out now—seven years after the fact—well a lot of self-validation had to happen.

The way life manifests in a series of movements that aren’t always strictly forward, healing is so open-ended and non-linear. Shit is always coming back up. I prefer the gentle approach of allowing for things to, sort of, stick around. If they need to. Overstay their welcome. I think there’s a tremendous amount of guilt that accompanies grief, in that we feel it’s necessary to get over something as quickly as possible. It’s counterintuitive, if you ask me. To feel obligated to move past something. I remember being angry at myself because the amount of time I spent grieving that relationship far outweighed the length of the relationship itself. Who cares? It’s not science. It’s relative.

In a way, sharing this song so many years later feels like an affirmation. I was so concerned back then with what people thought of me. Whether they were whispering behind my back, calling me dramatic and obsessive. I was convinced my hurt was annoying, that I just needed to “get over it already.” But more likely, nobody was thinking about me at all.

The thing was, I wasn’t just tasked with getting over the breakup, I was tasked with getting over myself. Getting over the insatiable urge to center myself in the lives of others. If, by putting out this song, I’m dragging something out, or unearthing something that’s long since been buried, that’s news to me. I’m not so self-obsessed that I think it’s going to make waves in the lives of anyone. If it does, bully for me.

I used to be first in line to pick apart any one thing I did. Now, I dare say, I’m last. With the video, my aim was to play out the very big and fanciful ideas I once had about the relationship, and to memorialize the future I’d imagined for us, almost in apology. I can’t travel back and tell my younger self it doesn’t matter, there’s no such thing as being unnecessarily affected, what you feel is what you feel. But I can acknowledge that this was no ordinary ache. This was a great undoing.

So, I built this dream world for her, as if to say, “You got to the other side. Does it matter how?”