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.