It was writing about music for NPR – connecting with music fans and experiencing a sense of community – that made me want to write songs again. I began to feel I was in my head too much about music, too analytical.
I felt that first awareness that there’s a whole set of species whose sounds and calls you’ve never heard – the wonder of realizing that people are growing up with an entirely different sensory experience from yours. This whole country seemed so shiny to me.
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.
At that age I thought apartments were built specifically to house the single or the newly single, a divorce dormitory of sorts.
They were like really loud librarians. And as the audience, you better shut the hell up because you’re in the library of rock right now. When.
I could turn up the volume on their songs and that loudness matched all my panic and fear, anger and emotions that seemed up until that point to be uncontrollable, even amorphous.
The more comfortable you get, the more money you earn, the more successful you are, the harder it is to create situations where you have to prove yourself and make yourself not just want it, but need it. The stakes should always feel high. Stephen.
It’s important to redefine what it means to be ambitious. I think that ambition doesn’t have to be married to consumerism or materialism or capitalism. Ambition can embody compassion. It’s not just about the most for yourself. It’s about creating the most for everyone, and pushing forward so that other people can come along or take over.
I’ve always felt unclaimed.
Nostalgia is so certain: the sense of familiarity it instills makes us feel like we know ourselves, like we’ve lived.
I felt like no one was really looking out for me, that I was marginal and incidental. I compensated by being spongelike, impressionable, and available to whatever and whoever provided the most comfort, the most sense of belonging. I was learning two sets of skills simultaneously: adaptation – linguistic and aesthetic – in order to fit in, but also, how to survive on my own.
Anything that isn’t traditional for women apparently requires that we remind people what an anomaly it is, even when it becomes less and less of an anomaly. I.
As much as the person onstage is performing, so, too, is the audience.
Art communities and music scenes want to pretend like they don’t care, but they will also tell you louder and more frequently than anyone that they DON’T CARE.
Plus, it seemed inconceivable to give someone money for a job we were capable of doing.
The notion of “female” should be so sprawling and complex that it becomes divorced from gender itself.
If someone didn’t feel included, if someone felt marginalised, they would form their own band, write their own fanzine, or just call you out on what they deemed racist or classist, sizeist, sexist, body-ableist.
People think that the digital age and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter nurture oversharing, but in 1992 there was nothing stopping me from treating any piece of paper like a personal diary.
It was about having a box in the attic or basement or attic or garage, something we could return to over and over again, something that said, this is us, this is where we were last year, and this is where we’ll stay, and this is where we’ll pile on the memories, over and over again, until there are so many memories that it’s blinding, the brightness of family, the way love and nurturing is like a color you can’t name because it’s so new.
The inexplicable is its own form of freedom. Belonging is not a form of restriction. We can’t name the feeling but we can sing along.
A male loner is a hero of sorts, a rebel, an iconoclast, but the same is not true of a female loner. There is no virility in a woman’s autonomy, there is only pity.