We want our parents to be the norm from which we deviate.
It’s hard to express how profound it is to have your experience broadcast back to you for the first time, how shocking it feels to be acknowledged, as if your own sense of realness had only existed before as a concept.
Eventually, I started to cringe at the elitism that was often paired with punk and the like. A movement that professed inclusiveness seemed to actually be highly exclusive, as alienating and ungraspable as many of the clubs and institutions that drove us to the fringes in the first place. One set of rules had simply been replaced by new ones, and they were just as difficult to follow.
A certain kind of exhaustion sets in from having to constantly explain and justify one’s existence or participation in an artistic or creative realm. What a privilege it must be to never have to answer the question “How does it feel to be a woman playing music?” or “Why did you choose to be in an all-female band?” The people who get there early have to work the hardest.
My favorite kind of musical experience is to feel afterward that your heart is filled up and transformed, like it is pumping a whole new kind of blood into your veins.
I still see music as an act of defiance as much as it is an act of celebration.
Nostalgia is so certain: the sense of familiarity it instills makes us feel like we know ourselves, like we’ve lived. To get a sense that we have already journeyed through something – survived it, experienced it – is often so much easier and less messy than the task of currently living through something.
In these cases, fandom is contextual and experiential: it’s not that it happened, it’s that you were there.
She’s high,” my dad said to my mother, laughing. And I was. It was a moment I’ll never forget, a total elation that momentarily erased any outline of darkness. There was light everywhere I looked.
It’s easy to feel sated when all you’re asking for in life is food, water, and some gentle petting.
To this day, because I know no other way of being or feeling, I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman in a band – I have nothing else to compare it to. But I will say that I doubt in the history of rock journalism and writing any man has been asked, “Why are you in an all-male band?” –.
Perhaps this was depression, a murkiness that distorted and disabled connection. I drifted in and out of this darkness, pulled away, then reappeared.
I don’t want to know what’s going to happen. As frightening as that is in real life, it’s a crucial aspect in creativity. Being predictable is boring, and it’s also disheartening and usinspiring.
It was not about strength in numbers nor in size. It had nothing to do with volume. It was about surprise. It was about knowing you were going to be underestimated by everyone and then punishing them for those very thoughts.
Nostalgia is recall without the criticism of the present day, all the good parts, memory without the pain.
I realized my yearning had little to do with place and more with the fact that I continually made a ritual of emptiness. No matter where I was or what I was doing, I would always feel a certain deficit. Like before, as a way to fill the hole, I began writing songs. Music began to restore me again.
Anyone we truly love should come with their own dictionary.
Sometimes I think that the best you can ever feel in a photo shoot is like a sexy clown.
Yet I felt it was unfair to be labeled when I had yet to find a label for myself, and when binary, fixed identities held no meaning or safety for me.
Books grounded me, helped me to feel less alone.