Tag: suicide

Country Star Chely Wright Brings All of Her Life Experiences to a New Corporate Role

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

From growing up on a Kansas farm, to building an award-winning country music career, to a groundbreaking coming out in 2010, to now. As Senior Vice President, Corporate Social Responsibility and New Market Growth at global workplace experience and facilities management company ISS, Chely Wright has followed a simple but effective mantra: “Plan your work and work your plan.” Her parents instilled this ethic in Wright and her siblings, and to this day it guides her trajectory.

“My parents raised all three of us kids to be problem solvers,” she says. “When you live on a farm, you’re poor, and you have to fix things with duct tape, you get really good at problem-solving. It’s in our DNA, and I love that they raised us to do that.”

A singer and songwriter, she moved to Nashville in 1989. Awarded the Academy of Country Music’s Top New Female Vocalist of 1995, her steady ascent led to over fifteen chart singles — including her first hit, “Shut Up and Drive” (1997), first number one, “Single White Female” (1999), and “The Bumper of My S.U.V.” (2005) — and eight studio albums.

Wright came out in 2010, making history as the first country star to publicly do so — at great personal and professional risk. At that time, she could not have anticipated that her courage and authenticity would not only reverberate and empower countless others, but would eventually lead to a high-level position.

“When I came out, I wanted to do it well,” she says. “That included embedding myself with organizations that could inform, educate, and help me be a good voice in the LGBTQ community. In doing that, I gained tremendous understanding of the power of storytelling and, essentially, culture work. I began having opportunities to do that work with corporate organizations, higher education, and faith communities. It became what I called my ‘side hustle,’ in addition to my work as an artist.”

When COVID-19 lockdowns brought touring to a halt in 2020, Wright continued her “side hustle” through virtual events and workshops. One of her clients, global design firm Unispace, brought her on full-time as chief diversity officer, working in DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion). This year, she joined ISS, whose international reach includes over 320,000 employees worldwide.

Moving into corporate social responsibility was an organic transition, as CSR intersects with DEI. “We think about creating access and opportunity for Black- and Brown-owned businesses, women-owned businesses, locally owned businesses, LGBTQ-owned businesses, veteran-owned businesses,” she says. “We think about procurement, sustainable sourcing, and ethical supply chains. Our clients have their eye on mindfulness around who works for them. They know there’s an employee value proposition. Those employees want to know that the company they work for is not only being good corporate citizens, but also ‘What are they doing for my community? What are they doing within a twelve-block, twenty-block, hundred-block radius of where I go to work?’

“Especially in the past five to ten years, companies are seriously asking themselves, ‘How do we not only protect our shareholders, our stakeholders, but how are we making sure that the people who work here know that not only do we need and want to give them health insurance, and economic security through a 401k and a paycheck, but what are we doing to use the monies we are making as a company to make the communities outside the four walls of this business, this office, better?’ That’s how I see the shared space between DEI and CSR.”

Wright works in the ISS New York office, sometimes telecommuting from home, and often traveling to meet with clients onsite. “I keep having opportunities to use my story,” she says, “and I cannot think of a single thing more gratifying than doing that now in a corporate space, in a global organization. I get to use that on their behalf and on behalf of our clients.”

In time for Mental Health Awareness Month, Chely Wright spoke at length with BGS about what she calls a move “from C-chord to C-suite,” how the landscape on Music Row and beyond has and hasn’t changed in the fifteen years since she came out, and how she balances fear and caution about the current climate with innate hope and optimism.

So many of us, especially women, experience impostor syndrome in our careers. Did you experience this as you moved into corporate spaces?

Chely Wright: Yes, a hundred percent. “Am I good enough? Am I smart enough? Do I belong here? Do I actually have the goods to deliver?” Making a dramatic life pivot, impostor syndrome bubbled up and it wasn’t my first bout. I dealt with it when I came out. I dealt with it when I left Polygram and went to MCA Records. I dealt with it in 1989, when I went to Nashville to get a record deal. I know now that when impostor syndrome scratches at my back, I just turn around and say, “Okay, I have things to learn.”

There is nothing more exciting than taking on a new skill set and dipping my toe in a body of water that I never thought about being in before. I have 10,000 sunrises left, if I’m lucky. So it’s not “What can I do?” It’s “What do I get to do?” Why wouldn’t a person like me have a second and third life, take the leadership/communication/radical listening/storytelling/execution skill set, and go into corporate spaces?

We take a myopic view of the music business, but it’s business. The artists who have staying power and choices are iconic not just because of their talents. They do open their mouths and something magical comes out. But when you look at what they’ve done with their business and marketing and the protection and stewardship of their brand, it is business.

When Rodney Crowell produced Lifted Off the Ground [2010], he asked me, “What is your goal as an artist?” I said, “My goal is to be able to make music as long as I want to, when I want to, where I want to.” Because I’m in a corporate role right now does not mean in any way, shape, or form that I’m not going to make more records. I know I will. I have the choice to do that when, where, and how I want to, and having that choice is a blessing and a gift.

What changes do you see in the music industry? How does the big picture look today compared to when you came out?

It looks different than it did fifteen years ago. The music industry, as a whole, obviously is making progress. And I think it would be safe to say that the country music industry is making its own progress at its own pace.

All I know is this: change happens, whether we want it to or not, and there will never again have to be someone who says, “Do I jump first?” I jumped and several others since then have joined me in raising their hands, owning their narrative, and saying, “I am a writer, a producer, a picker, and I happen to be a queer person.”

That said, a lot has changed in the world that makes it more difficult to raise your hand and say who you are. Certainly in the last few years, politically, it’s gotten, in some ways, more dangerous to do that. In some ways, the stakes feel higher right now. But change happens. That’s the thing about time: you can’t slow it down. It’s coming.

Does country music have quite a ways to go to be known as a bastion of equity, fairness, justice, and safety for all? Of course. So does banking, construction, and tech. They’re all on their respective journeys and it takes courage. It takes courage to be a holder of a unique story that people might not be ready to hear. It takes courage, tenacity, and a sense of self. God bless those who raise their hands and say, “I am also this.”

 

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Change is not always a forward or positive step. Change is happening now, but in ways that many of us feel are going backward and becoming increasingly frightening.

Change is happening in some terrifying ways. I won’t gaslight and say, “It’s not as bad as it seems,” or, “It’s just rhetoric,” because even if the thing itself doesn’t happen, the terror that it might is the damage.

Some of these things we fear might not come to pass for certain populations, but we look at our brothers and sisters who are in the fight as well — Black and Brown people, immigrants, trans people — they are my family, and very real things are manifesting for them that aren’t just rhetoric. My wife is Jewish, we are an interfaith family, we are two moms, we are women, and we feel under threat in a lot of different ways. People in our family, and in our circle of love and trust and chosen family, are under threat.

American democracy is, by all intents and purposes right now, very close to being disabled. When we hear we’re in a constitutional crisis, in farm terms, we’re hogtied. As a mother of Jewish babies, as a queer person, as a person who has traveled the world and believes America is the greatest nation on the planet, the importance of America and democracy surviving this — it’s not just America at stake. It’s everyone. It’s the human population. We need to find a way to become un-hogtied, because democracy and freedom, real freedom for all, has to stand. I shudder to think what the world would look like without an American democracy.

In a 2010 interview with Entertainment Weekly you said, “It’s the secret haters who do the most harm, historically.” Those haters are now loud and proud. Is that better or worse? Knowing the enemy versus not knowing who and where they are?

Yes. They’ve become unburdened by any concern of being seen as homophobic, anti-Semitic, misogynistic. The power of gang mentality is real and negative gang mentality scares me a lot. There’s danger in it and people are very easily pulled into the vortex of those energies. When these people group together, form coalitions, lock arms, and move, they take on a new and exponential energy that can suck others up into it.

That scares me. I almost wish they would stay in their closets. But it’s also helpful to know who’s with us and who’s against us. That is really powerful information to have.

You said earlier that you have 10,000 sunrises left, if you’re lucky. There was a point in your life when you no longer wanted those sunrises. The Trevor Project’s 2024 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People cites, among other things, that 39% seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year. What is your message – and how is your mental health today?

Coming out as gay when I did was the only way I could survive. On the morning after I didn’t end my life, on that cold winter day in my house in East Nashville, I was afraid I was going to go back downstairs, grab that gun, and do it. So I got on my knees and said, “God, if you have a way for me now, I need to know it.” Hand over my heart, in an instant I knew, “You’re going to come out, you’re going to come out well, and you’re going to tell the whole story.”

I had a responsibility to my maker to tell that story, which included a successful, relatively well-positioned person who always had a ton of confidence, love, friends, health, and resources. I had all those things, and I found myself with a loaded nine-millimeter gun in my mouth – a gun my parents bought for me for protection.

I had a responsibility to say, “This is how bad it gets when you don’t get to be who you are.” It was important, and I’ve said this many times, for the 14-year-old kid at the foot of their bed with their dad’s gun in their hand. It was important because we have to raise our hands in spaces where representation does matter, like in country music. Somebody needed to say, “I love the Grand Ole Opry, I love our troops, I love having grown up in a farm town in Kansas, I’m a person of faith, and I am a queer person, always have been, and always will be.”

My mental health, ever since that morning after I didn’t end my life – I’ve never had another thought of doing it. I’m often asked if the day I came out was the best day of my life. It wasn’t. The best day of my life was the day I decided I was going to come out, because for the first time since I was 9 years old I had hope that I could be me – the whole me.

So my message … I don’t say “It gets better.” I never liked that campaign of “Just survive junior high. Just make it through being bullied in high school, because once you’re an adult and have resources to change your zip code, it gets better. Just hang on through the shit because it’s going to get better.” I don’t like it. Our job as grown-ups is not to ask young people to survive the shit until it gets better. Our job is to roll our sleeves up, reach out, go to the shit, and fix it for young people right now. It’s incumbent upon those of us who have power, position, and resources to make it better now.

What can each individual, those of us who don’t have “power, position, and resources,” do to help make it better?

What I realized after coming out and having conversations with thousands of other queer people, whether it be on the phone, or they’d write a letter, write to me on Facebook, or stand in line after an event and talk to me and share their story, I understood that everybody has a fan club. That fan club may be your neighbors, your colleagues, your family, your congregation. It may be one person or a collection of people that notice what you do, what you say, how you express yourself. Everybody has their own personal story and presence. How will you use your respective power, position, and resources to do good?

Power means your personal influence – and it may just be with one neighbor or coworker. Position means, for example, if you’re really good at swinging a hammer, then do a little work with Habitat for Humanity. Use your skill. Resources might be, “I’ve got some extra ‘this,’” so use it.

Everybody has power. How will you wield it? How will you use your skill set? How will you use your unique resources, your influence, to make things a little bit better for an organization or a single person? That might mean swinging your hammer, or it might mean helping someone in a crosswalk when the light is about to change. There are a thousand ways we can use our power, position, and resources every day.

You wrote your autobiography Like Me: Confessions of a Heartland Country Singer “to tell the story of who I am.” Who are you now?

I’m exactly the same. I have new experiences to add, my CV looks different, but I am exactly the same person. Still a person of faith, a person who loves country music and the Grand Ole Opry, who loves to meet and talk to people. I’m still really curious, proud of who I am, and as hopeful as I always have been.

And I’m still strategic, as evidenced by the way I came out. If you look at the way I’ve lived my life and evolved my career since then, it should surprise no one how strategic I was in how I came out. I wanted to come out well, and that required strategy, because the people who will and do malign people like me, the Focus On the Family [kind of] organizations and the far-right fringe, who want to tell stories that aren’t true about people like me — you better believe they’re strategic.

I’m going to meet and match their strategy with how I tell the real story of me and people like me. It goes back to what [my parents] Stan and Cheri Wright told me: “Plan your work and work your plan.” I did that when I came out, and I’m doing that now.

Photo courtesy of Shorefire Media.

Palmyra Shakes Off Anxieties With Oh Boy Records Debut, ‘Restless’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Palmyra is a bit restless. Their emotions knot into a mangled ball, almost suffocating them.

“Early hours in the morning, tossing and turning/ Everyone else in this house is asleep,” Sasha Landon pours into the microphone. “Palm Readers” emerges integral to the band’s new musical chapter. Aptly titled Restless, this album marks their debut with Oh Boy Records. It’s like reintroducing themselves to the world.

The trio – rounded out with Teddy Chipouras and Mānoa Bell – pounces from the get-go. Similar to The Lone Bellow’s tightly wound vocal work, their harmonies exude a vintage richness throughout as they do on the title track and opener. It’s quite evident that they take their work seriously, down to the lilt of their voices as they glide through the air. Palmyra makes you believe they’ve been singing together for decades, their harmonies are so electric and full of life.

“We definitely put a lot of effort into our harmonies. It’s something that always feels super important when we’re arranging a song,” shares Landon. “The three of us weren’t people who sang with others a lot before this band. When we formed, we learned a lot from old recordings of other bands and all sorts of stuff. We did a lot of transcribing harmony early on in the lockdown. The record needed to start with our voices and we wanted that to set the tone for the album.”

Perfectly performed harmonies underpin the album’s emotional currents. The trio builds guilt, frustration, and hope into the project’s backbone to create a coming-of-age story. “There was a moment when we understood what the album was about. There were separate songs that we found homes together through playing them live,” says Chipouras. “‘Palm Readers’ feels great right after ‘Restless.’ And those songs then became a pair. Their energies matched. The coming-of-age narrative emerged from the time period that the songs were written.”

Restless sprouts from the cracks between each song. Where “No Receipt” meanders through sun-caked uncertainty, the cheeky “Dishes” sees the band accepting domestication and finding peace. Along the way, they agonize over being present while time yanks them this way and that – the pressure that comes from being a working musician crushes their shoulders. The album, based on a “period of leaving college, going out on our own, starting a band, going out on the road, and just trying to figure out what the life of a musician looks like,” captures brutal truths of living, loving, and losing time.

Hopping on a Zoom call, Palmyra spoke to BGS about feeling restless, reenergized creativity, and mortality.

What is it about the title track that made sense to be the opener?

Sasha Landon: It made a lot of sense for us to have this song that starts with the three of our voices kicking off the record. Also, it is a song that has a through line to the record from the jump. The emotional center for this record is pretty heavy. And that’s not to say that there’s not a lot of light in the record. I think there’s a lot of fun on it, as well. But the overall emotional center is pretty heavy and restless, felt like a good way to jump into that.

In “No Receipt,” you lament that there just isn’t enough time. As you’ve gotten older, what’s your relationship with time been like?

Mānoa Bell: That’s the central theme of, not only the record, but questions we’re always asking ourselves. Specifically, the last line there about finding those quieter moments has proven to be such a challenge, to put it all to the side. Being an artist is such a consuming experience. Every moment of your day is a part of that journey and it can be hard to have separation from it, which is a really beautiful thing, but frustrating at times as well. You can’t get away from it.

“Can’t Slow Down” deals with a similar thematic thread. How did this one come together?

Teddy Chipouras: This one was a song that I wrote after a couple of years of not writing songs. I don’t think I wrote hardly any songs during COVID. This tune kind of came out all at once after being fed up with not writing anything for a while, and I think we had just gotten off the road. It was kind of like just throwing words at the page of how I was feeling at the time, just feeling exhausted.

That one’s funny, because it was a really big moment for me and I felt very accomplished that I had written something and finished something. I remember being nervous to send it to the band and then really not thinking anything would come from it. I did not think we would be playing that song every night. It’s one of those tunes that has changed meaning, or it means more to me now than it did when I wrote it.

“Buffalo” roots itself in a phone call during a show in Buffalo after one of your friends had taken their own life. Was this song a necessary cathartic exercise?

MB: There are songs that you try to write and then there are songs that you just have to write. I remember very clearly writing the beginning of it and immediately feeling better. It was a very therapeutic experience, not feeling good but feeling better. It’s a song that’s still hard to play. I feel a responsibility to try to connect emotionally with it every time we play it and not just phone it in. Sometimes, when you’re on stage, you’ve done something so many times, there’s a muscle memory aspect to it. But that song never really feels like muscle memory.

When someone dies, you begin questioning your mortality. Did that happen to you?

MB: I think suicide, specifically, when it’s someone who you see yourself in, and someone who you grew up with, makes you wonder what life would be like without them. It’s not just suicide. It’s just about loss and grief. There was never a point where I was like at such a level of grief that I didn’t want to continue living. But it definitely makes you wonder what life will be like moving forward.

The closing track, “Carolina Wren,” feels like a big sigh to let all the things on the record go. Why does it appear as primarily the demo you recorded?

SL: [Producer] Jake Cochran did such a great job of trying to make sure that the songs sonically matched their emotional core and that the version of the song that we were putting out felt really authentic to the lyrics and our live performance of it. This was a tune that I hadn’t played for anyone in the band yet. I wrote it right before we went to the lakehouse [to record] and played it on a whim. I think Teddy was out getting groceries or something and Jake pressed record. Mānoa is holding the bass and I think plays one note on it, and I am playing guitar and singing. We just felt, after hearing it, there was a consensus that that’s how the song is supposed to exist. It’s how it’s supposed to sound.

And Jake helped us get there, too. With some songs, like “Shape I’m In,” for example, we had to be mindful of how many performances we gave it before we exhausted it and weren’t going to get any more. When you have a song that takes a lot emotionally to perform, you can only do it so many times before it loses its meaning, or becomes muscle memory, or just wears you out from overuse. We had one take that felt earnest. It speaks to the song. It honors the song in a good way and it belongs as it is. Then we decided that it made sense as the last tune on the record. It is a nice little breath at the end.

What have been the biggest realizations you’ve had of being working musicians?

MB: I think maybe for me, I’ve learned that there’s kind of an endless amount of resilience needed. You’re constantly faced with just things you need to get through, to solve. I don’t even know if I would call that a music thing, though. I think that’s just like a growing-up thing.

TC: One thing for me is I didn’t realize how hard it would be to find creative time when you’re a full-time creative. We are full-time musicians, we’re on tour a lot of the time, and then we get home and there’s a lot of work to do. It’s almost harder to schedule the creative time than it is to schedule the work. I never thought it would be hard to find that balance.

Did this album change you in any way?

MB: This record showed all three of us that there was another level to get to and that there are endless places of growth that we will find. I think we dug deep as a band and it has continued to be rewarding for those reasons. The further we dig, the better it is. It does just keep getting better.

With the release, the songs no longer belong to you, but the world. What’s that experience?

TC: It will be interesting to see how this one feels, because this one feels bigger than our previous projects. We talk about this a lot with our songs going through different phases of us letting them go. I think the biggest one for me of letting songs go is starting to play them live. We’ve played all of these songs live before for a while. That moment, for me, is the biggest in terms of feeling like releasing full control of it, and it becoming the world’s and not ours anymore.

MB: We haven’t released something at this level before, so I don’t know. I’m excited to see how it feels releasing the whole project. Last year’s release was an EP. I think that if I’m defining what feels different about an EP versus an album, it’s like Teddy saying that this feels bigger than anything before; it’s the amount of energy we put into creating the music – the amount of energy we’ve put into getting it out to people. It’s just like we’re putting so much behind it.

SL: I’m so excited to see, to know that a listener’s first experience of Palmyra could be Restless, that the first thing that they hear is something that of all of the music we’ve put out, we have been proud of, and has been a really good snapshot of where we are at the present time.

Photo Credit: Rett Rogers

Jett Holden’s Dreams Come to Life on ‘The Phoenix’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

For years, Jett Holden dreamt and dreamt about making a living through music, but everywhere he turned he was met with doubt, subtle prejudice, and closeted racism that left him running on empty and searching for something new.

Following a journey to rock bottom, Holden is back stronger than ever on The Phoenix, a 10-song collection that catalogs his rise from the ashes and spotlights the community that embraced him when it seemed nobody else would. Told through a mix of countrypolitan, rock, punk, metal, and R&B sounds, the record is proof that there are no boundaries to who, where, and what good music can come from – and that we all benefit from everyone having a seat at the table, sharing their stories and perspectives.

“This album reflects who I’ve been throughout my entire life,” Holden explains to Good Country. “It’s been really cool to look back on when and where my different influences come from while bringing these songs to life. For example, ‘Karma’ is definitely Paramore meets Stapleton, while ‘West Virginia Sky’ harkens to my Tracy Chapman and Jim Croce influences.”

Fresh off a move to Nashville, Holden spoke with GC over the phone about the doubt and prejudice he’s faced along his musical journey, his work with the Black Opry, using music to heal past trauma, and more.

There’s a lot going on in your song ‘Scarecrow,’ from exploring your family’s reaction to coming out to masking the crippling weight of other’s doubts of what you’re capable of – along with a slew of Wizard of Oz references to the scarecrow, tin man, and cowardly lion. Mind sharing how all those ideas coalesced into one?

Jett Holden: It’s the first song I finished for the album. I wrote it back when I was 25, and at that point my family and I didn’t really have a personal relationship. It had gotten to the point where I came out 10 years earlier and wasn’t sure where I stood with them. I wasn’t disowned, but I also didn’t have anyone to turn to – they all pretty much told me they didn’t want to hear about it. I didn’t want to keep living in limbo, so a few years later I skipped town and moved to East Tennessee, which is where [Black Opry founder Holly G] found me in 2021.

You also had a brief stint living in California around this time that left you on the brink of quitting music for good. What all transpired out there?

I moved out to Long Beach after dropping out of community college. I was in talks about a development deal and during the “get-to-know-you” phase I let it slip that I was gay and they responded by saying that I wasn’t marketable as a Black, gay man doing the kind of music that I wanted to do. Things fell apart from there, which is why I left California and moved back to Virginia before eventually relocating to Tennessee.

Aside from that moment, were there any other circumstances that contributed to you feeling so defeated about your music prospects?

When I first moved out West, there was a very steep trajectory that isn’t common for most people, but it quickly deteriorated after I mentioned being gay, making for a really high peak and a really low low. When I returned to Virginia things got stagnant and didn’t progress at all, even moving backwards at times. It was a frustrating time of trying to figure myself out that culminated in the move to East Tennessee where I was roommates with a close friend before coming home one day after she committed suicide.

Another of my friends got cancer around the same time and just recently passed too, so those were very traumatic years for me.
By 2020, I just couldn’t do it anymore, so I started going to therapy right before the pandemic hit and the world shut down. Suddenly [music] was just too much to deal with, so I stopped making it. Being online was toxic so I shut down, got a stay-at-home job with AT&T, and accepted that as my future, working my way up in the company.

Then Holly — and the Black Opry — came around?

Exactly. I’d already called it quits when she found me on Instagram through a video I’d posted of my song “Taxidermy.” I only had that and a couple other covers posted, but it was enough for her to take interest and slowly pull me back into the industry. A couple months later she launched the Black Opry as a blog and it’s crazy to see where things have gone since then.

Within a year I’d gotten to tour all over the country, appear on The Kelly Clarkson Show, and I recorded my first single and EP through a grant I received from [Rissi Palmer’s] Color Me Country. Holly has made so many things possible that had been unavailable to me for my entire career until then, fighting for me in ways nobody else had before. She took chances because she wasn’t an industry person, but rather a flight attendant who was just a fan of country music and wanted to feel connected to it and the artists she was listening to, which is something a lot of others were in search of as well.

When I went to the first outlaw house she threw at Americanafest in 2021, I was expecting a bunch of Black country fans to show up, but it was also the queer community, the Latin community, and the women in country music that didn’t feel like they were getting a fair shake of things. Everyone who felt “othered” in country music showed up and it felt like immediate family. Seeing the excitement around that is what drew me back in.

Speaking of your song “Taxidermy,” I remember you being brought to tears while singing it during a Black Opry panel at Americanafest that same year. What’s that song meant to you, both in its message and what it’s meant to your career?

That song relaunched my career essentially, because I wasn’t chasing music when I wrote it. In fact, when I posted it online I only had one verse and the chorus. Despite it not being complete, Holly still sent it off to Rissi Palmer and got me the grant and I finished writing it the day we recorded. It’s a song of frustration that I didn’t expect many people to watch when I posted it, but Holly really connected with it, spread it around, and helped it blow up into something bigger than I ever imagined.

I was just singing about my frustrations with what was going on around our country at the time concerning police brutality, which was a big reason why I quit social media and music altogether in 2020. Instagram was the [only] online account I had when Holly found me. That song allowed me to vent about those things, but it also helped me gain the community I needed to break myself out of the news cycle that we were constantly absorbing, because we had nowhere to go. The song came about out of all that negativity, but had a huge positive impact on me that I never expected.

In addition to the support you’ve received from the Black Opry, you’ve also got a helluva team behind you for this record including the folks at Thirty Tigers, [producer] Will Hoge, and collaborators like John Osborne and Charlie Worsham (“Backwoods Proclamation”), Cassadee Pope (“Karma”), and Emily Scott Robinson (“When I’m Gone”). I imagine that, after everything you’ve been through, having folks like that working alongside you is incredibly validating?

Definitely! Emily was the first person I asked, since she was a very early supporter of the Black Opry. We both connected over “When I’m Gone” and our similar stories [around] suicide, so it was a no-brainer to have her sing with me on it. Holly ended up reaching out to Cassadee after I mentioned wanting someone similar to Hayley Williams featured, and she nailed it. It’s very cool seeing all these people I’ve looked up to legitimately wanting to work with me. I still haven’t met Charlie or John, but it’s wild knowing that they’ve heard my song and wanted to be involved in it.

Regarding “When I’m Gone,” is that a reference to your friend in East Tennessee that you walked in on after committing suicide? If so I’m sorry for your loss, but I love how you used the song to memorialize them and bring attention to the plight of suicide. It’s an awful thing to experience, but putting your feelings from it to song is a great way to bring beauty to an otherwise unimaginable situation.

You’re completely right. When I play songs like “When I’m Gone” or “Scarecrow” live I always have people coming up to talk to me about them afterwards, whether it’s someone who’s come out, dealt with religious trauma, or a person who’s just lost somebody close to them. There’s something very cathartic and heavy all at once that’s led to a lot of crying, but more importantly a lot of growth. It’s been great feeling like I’m not going unheard – which I did for over a decade – and having interest in what I’m doing where there wasn’t any before.

We’ve talked about a lot of the trauma captured in these songs, which brings me to the album’s title, The Phoenix. Is that reference meant to reflect how your life — specifically your musical dreams — have been reborn in recent years?

That was the intention. It was about the resurrection of my career, plus I also referenced the phoenix in “West Virginia Sky,” so it felt appropriate. Then, weirdly enough, just after recording the album I had a friend, also named Holly, give me a phoenix bolo tie for Christmas. It was a very kismet occurrence and a sign that that was the correct title to move forward with on the project. It makes for the perfect project, one where I have creative control and wrote every song (besides co-writing “Backwoods Proclamation”). I put my heart and soul into it, and am really excited for people to hear it.

If you could go back in time to speak with yourself when you were about to call it quits, what would you tell them?

Prioritize the relationships you build, because those are the people that will help you get to where you are supposed to be.

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Photo Credit: Kai Lendzion

Ben Sollee’s Renewed ‘Long Haul’ Perspective on Earth, Life, and Music

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Seven years have elapsed between Ben Sollee’s last studio release, his 2017 album with Kentucky Native, and his new one, Long Haul (arriving August 16). Much has happened in Sollee’s life since ‘17. His family has grown by two children. He worked on a number of soundtracks, even winning an Emmy Award in 2018 for his score on the ABC special, Base Ballet. The Kentucky born and based singer/songwriter/cellist, who has long been an advocate for environmental and other social causes, also helped launch a nonprofit named Canopy, which helps businesses in his home state positively impact people, the planet, and the future.

When COVID hit, it hit Sollee hard. “I was one of the early folks to get COVID in fall of 2020 and it stuck with me in a way that didn’t stick with other people.” During his prolonged recovery, he had to change how he ate, what he drank, how he slept, and how he exercised. “It turned into a journey of inward exploration and changing my external life. I really changed pretty much everything… It wasn’t until I started emerging from long haul [COVID], I was like, ‘Oh, I think I’ve got something to say about this.’”

While this album grew out of Sollee’s personal health crisis, it also was greatly affected by the death of his close friend and long-time collaborator, Jordon Ellis, who died by suicide in early 2023.

Always ready to blur genres, Sollee felt more free to expand his sonic palette on Long Haul, which includes a gospel-style choir, a Little Richard-inspired rock ‘n’ roll rave-up, West African rhythms, and Caribbean grooves. He purposely wanted to have lively, rhythmic melodies to balance deeply thoughtful lyrics.

“The same way,” he explained, “That Michael Jackson would have these big statements in the middle of these dance songs.” Sollee also recorded a special Dolby ATMOS Spatial Audio version for this album – a first for him – to underscore Long Haul’s immersive sound quality.

Part of what the title Long Haul refers to is your serious battle with long COVID and it also addresses life as being a long haul. How did the two interrelate for you, personally?

Ben Sollee: [COVID] definitely put me in relationship with my body in a way that I had never been before and once you start that relationship with your body, you realize just how interconnected everything is. I mean, we’re all on this long haul together… and I realized that maybe the most radical thing that I could do was to care for myself. That really shifted how I think of my live performances and really my purpose for being out on the road, [which] is to help people connect with themselves. Because once they connect with themselves, then they can have the capacity to be in relationship with nature, other people, animals, you name it. How I be in the world has shifted. It’s subtle from an external view, but internally it’s pretty profound.

How did this all affect your approach in making this album?

I realized that I had a very exploitative relationship with my creativity over the years, where it was just like: Here’s a project, just make stuff. And that was just really eye-opening.

I took a couple of different approaches in the making of this record. The passing of my friend and musical collaborator, Jordon, in the process of writing this record was really profound, because he was such a keystone to my creative process. It kind of forced me to think about how I was approaching music-making in the record without him.

So, I tried a couple different mantras, and one of them was “follow the resonance.” If it said something to me, I didn’t need to figure out why it said something to me, even if that is Polynesian flute playing or this sort of strange Tejano Caribbean groove – just follow it. In the past, I would kind of hedge; like I would hear something, I’d be really into that sound, but I wouldn’t feel like I could, for whatever reason. Like it’s not part of my cultural heritage. I would come up with a reason to be like, I shouldn’t make music with that sound or influence.

Another mantra was “show our fingerprints.” The way that we recorded the record – it was about hearing the hands and the strings and hearing the breath. I chose instruments that would really feature those human aspects of breath and touch. We incorporated woodwinds, which you can hear prominently on the first single, “Misty Miles.” We incorporated choirs in this record for the first time, because I really wanted that breath and sound. Much of the percussion is hand percussion. It’s a very tactile record… very high touch record.

You produced Long Haul. What was the recording process like?

It was a very intuitive, collective approach, and it meant that not only did the music turn out as a surprise to me and others, but it also meant that it was a very engaged, emotional journey. Adrienne Maree Brown [author of the book, Emergent Strategy] is really the inspiration for this – instead of having a singular artist’s vision, you really bring together a group of people in a facilitated way.

It made me maybe a little bit more brave and confident that wherever things went, we could execute that… I mean, musicians left the sessions crying, because they had such a good time and they felt seen and heard. And that, to me, means as much as the music that came out.

Did your experiences composing film soundtracks serve at all as an influence?

[Film work] also inspired me to explore Atmos. I really wanted this record to be an immersive experience, kind of like a sonic film. In keeping with that, there are a few songs that actually have sound design incorporated into them. It’s the first time I’ve done it in such an intentional and immersive way where we’ve got cars driving by with “Hawk and Crows.”

There is a real stylistic diversity to the sound of this album, like “Under The Spell” is one song with a funky dance groove to it.

[Laughs] I wasn’t trying to make a dance track. It started with that cello lick that you hear at the beginning. And it’s sort of this hypnotic West African loop of a lick that really began as kind of me trying to figure out some old-time banjo, like clawhammer music, on the cello.

The words are referencing this kind of duality… dealing with identity and self and how often we are under the influence of the stories that people tell of us. Every time I have this ambition, desire, and even just like the idea of me having something, it sets me down a path of being unsatisfied, which causes a lot of harm to other people and myself in the world. So, the words can go as deep as somebody wants to, but it’s also if people just want to release and have some sort of existential-like dance experience – then let’s go, let’s dance!

It touches on an evolution that I don’t expect anybody to notice in my music and career. My early records had a lot of direct social and political statements in the song. I realized that they were a little bit superficial and surface-y. They weren’t really getting it to the core of those issues. So, I’ve kind of moved into, I guess what I would call like a “post-activist” stance. My music has moved away from direct political commentary most of the time to more of a foundational, fundamental idea of togetherness, of connectedness.

“One More Day” stands out as a key song too.

I guess the original seed of that song emerged as I was beginning to travel again after Jordon had passed away – to places where he and I had traveled so many times. I started thinking about what would I have said had he called me in that moment of decision before he took his life? But the only thing that I would have really said to him is, “Listen, I hear you, I respect your decision, but what’s the rush? Like, if you’re going to do it, you’re going to do it, but you don’t have to do it right now. Just give it one more day, give it one more sunrise. Just get one last look.”

I think that’s what I would have said to him. And the song makes that case through different vignettes of our time together on the road. And, it does it over this Caribbean, Tejano groove that must have come from some jams that he and I did together. It must have. It just feels like a very Jordon groove. What I love about that is it has this real joyous, almost like early Police kind of vibe to it. There’s some really tough content in there and I just love the idea of people dancing at a festival – and just saying, “Give it one more day.”

The closing song, “When You Gonna Learn,” features a rousing gospel-style choir and addresses following your inner voice. It launches the listener out of the album and into the world in a very uplifting way.

I wanted to end with that message, because as a father I watch my four- and six-year-old who have yet to really settle into a sense of self or identity, and they are just so connected to their world and just basic truths about caring for things and protecting things and love and justice. And I think that it’s just more proof to me that there are things we know that get taught out of us. This song just is like: When are you going to learn that you already know?

You address a lot of tough issues on the album, but do so with a sense of humanism and spirited music that offer a hopeful way out of these challenging times.

I often reflect on that “Pale Blue Dot” image that Voyager took looking back at Earth and it’s just black and there’s just one little, tiny dot. And that dot really says it all, because it’s all there, as Carl Sagan says: every love, every heartbreak, every war, every church, it’s all on that one little dot.

So, we got to make it work here. And I think that’s the biggest challenge that we have right now. How do we make this work? I get that we’re going to make some big mistakes along the way. I sure have in my life. That’s where the grace comes in, but we got to make it work here. We don’t have another spot.

Photos courtesy of Big Hassle.

LISTEN: Chris J Norwood, “Good Guy With a Gun”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Chris J Norwood
Hometown: Dallas, Texas
Song: “Good Guy With a Gun”
Album: I Am Not Cool
Release Date: August 20, 2021
Label: State Fair Records

In Their Words: “I struggled with whether or not to include this song on the album. I’d already written several songs about my father’s suicide that appeared on my last album, so I worried that I was rehashing something lyrically that I’d already covered. But I realized that losing a parent at a young age is always going to be a part of me. It’s part of my story. It’s tangled all in my roots. And it’s good for me on a personal/spiritual/emotional level to keep talking about it, writing songs about it, and singing about it. Truth be told, we as a country need to talk more openly about suicide. Especially as it relates to the gun debate and gun culture. This song also happens to be one of my kids’ favorite songs off the new album. They love the music, and they’re too young to understand all the nuance in the lyrics. The only part they really like singing is, ‘Daddy was a good guy, and always did the best he could. He’d do anything to protect the ones he loved.’ And honestly, that’s how I chose to remember my father.” — Chris J Norwood

Photo credit: Alyssa Leigh Cates

LISTEN: Selena Rosanbalm, “Can You Really Be Gone”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Selena Rosanbalm
Hometown: Austin, Texas
Song: “Can You Really Be Gone”
Album: Selena Rosanbalm
Release Date: October 9, 2020
Label: The Balm Records

In Their Words: “My ex-boyfriend took his own life four and a half years ago, but I still see him all over the place. I thought I saw him driving a van the other day, thought I saw him in a coffee shop. But I was especially struck when I saw a photograph of his niece some months ago; I could see his face so clearly in hers. ‘Can You Really Be Gone’ is about the suspension of reality people often experience after losing a loved one, when the logical mind knows the person is gone, but the emotional mind doesn’t want to give in to that fact.” — Selena Rosanbalm

Photo credit: Daniel Cavazos

Letting Go of Time: My Soundtrack for a Year with Cancer

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Many of the facets of the music industry are the way they are simply because they are the way they are, but there is one pillar of melodic and lyrical art-making that remains extraordinarily arbitrary.

Time.

Records are released on Fridays now. Except when they aren’t. Some release days are packed with albums and others are desolate. Festival season coincides with the weather-outside-is-bearable season — except when it doesn’t. Holiday records are recorded in the summer. Lead time is inflexible, though ever-changing. Deadlines are always drop-dead… until they aren’t.

Time has gone from being regarded as something that inevitably passes to being framed as a commodity that can be “spent.” Time is money, especially in this gig economy era and in creative spaces where sentiments like “If you love what you do, you don’t work a day in your life!” rapidly devolve into a workaholic culture. We’ve seen the dissolution of boundaries between professional and personal lives, and made constant comparisons to those we perceive as more productive and ambitious.

My relationship with time — from each basic, incessant twitch of the clock’s second hand to my holistic understanding of existential time — changed fundamentally and cataclysmically in August 2018 when I was diagnosed with rectal cancer. In the earliest days my doctors told me that I would “lose a year of my life” fighting the disease. Being naive, new to the realms of life-threatening illness and the omnipresent physical, mental, and spiritual alterations of such diagnoses, I believed them.

Over the months that followed, time passed not linearly, but as if it were a roller coaster operating in many more than just three dimensions, with twists, turns, and corkscrews I never considered possible. The associated cognitive impairments of cancer — from chemotherapy, an inordinate amount of prescription drugs, and the related traumas of fighting the disease — exacerbated my willy-nilly tumble through the twelve months that landed me here, writing this. Now, just over a year post-diagnosis and almost four months in remission, I am free of cancer (though not technically “cancer-free”).

Cancer is an arbitrary demon in and of itself, and as such, it’s very good at reminding: If something need not be arbitrary, perhaps it ought not to be. A rectal cancer diagnosis in an otherwise healthy 26-year-old is a perfect example. Humans cannot help trying to force such a thing to make sense, to have a direct cause and effect, but in this case and in many, many others it doesn’t. And it never will.

Before the final months of the 2010s elapse and we find ourselves reliving the year — and the decade — in music; while I find myself emerging from the fog of a year of pain, loss, and grief, a year fighting for my life and coming out ahead, I offer you this year-end wrap up. Not of 2019, but of a year fighting cancer. This is a soundtrack. For a few more than 365 days (and many more to come) of a queer banjo player, songwriter, and music writer holding onto life and letting go of time.

“Soon You’ll Get Better” — Taylor Swift feat. Dixie Chicks (2019)

In my eyes, the single most resonant line of any song released in the past year must be, “You’ll get better soon, ‘cause you have to.”

There’s this general, almost universal understanding of cancer, from a societal standpoint, that often does more harm than good. Almost everyone has a simplistic, rudimentary handle on what cancer is, what it means, and how to operate in relation to it. We’ve been fed countless narratives on the subject in the media, in fiction, non-fiction, through science, by the Hallmark Channel — you name it. One of the most frustrating outgrowths of this well-intentioned, though often tactless and somewhat misinformed understanding is that fighting cancer is noble. That it’s a holy war, a righteous baring of the teeth in the face of mortality and abject suffering and the quickened unraveling of existence.

But that is not how it feels. At least not to this survivor. Fighting cancer isn’t honorable. It’s necessary.

There is no choice.

It is exist or cease to exist. Because we romanticize storylines, dynamics in which “pulling the plug” seems like an actual option; because of faith systems that predicate moral truth on the existence of an afterlife; because we have heartbreaking, gut-wrenching tales of friends and family who opted for less pain, without treatment, than more time in misery with it; because there are all too many folks who shine, choosing joy against the odds, facing terminal diagnoses with bravery and aplomb, we think that the battle is wholesome, good, and virtuous.

I can tell you it is not. We get better because we have to. Sadly, there are too many who don’t. Because they can’t. Not because they are any less “noble” than those of us who “win” the fight. Not because they made a choice to give up the fight.

Choosing between being and ceasing to be is not a choice.

“The Capitalist Blues” — Leyla McCalla (2019)

Besides pain, discomfort, fear, and grief, the most present phenomenon to accompany cancer is bills. Piles and piles and piles of window envelopes. Emails. Push notifications chiming, “YOU HAVE A NEW STATEMENT.”

Each time my health insurance denied a claim on the grounds of some aspect of my care not being “medically necessary” — is the contrast used in my CT scans truly not necessary? — each time a prescription fell outside of coverage, often to the tune of hundreds and hundreds of dollars, my body and visage would grimace as if twisted from the pain of a 5cm mass in my colon.

To know, to see in plain daylight, that other human beings are getting rich off of my fight for life, causes such visceral anger and, in the wake of that anger, something that can only be described as the capitalist blues. Leyla McCalla’s wonky, off-kilter, Big Easy sound herein is a perfect wry smile in the face of a daunting, insurmountable task such as holding capitalism accountable. We’re all swimming with sharks and it’s a cold, cold world — even at the doctor’s.

“Anyone at All” — Maya de Vitry (2019)

As if to mock me, the electric guitar joins the band with a tick-tocking hook. Maya de Vitry’s narrator (however autobiographical) hasn’t been seeing anyone at all, hasn’t been drinking much at all, hasn’t been crying in the mornings, and she’s tired of hearing folks tell her it’s going to get harder.

Believe her. (Believe me.) It’s always been hard.

I spent the majority of a year at home, in my apartment, in bed, alone. Which is not to say I haven’t been supported throughout this journey by my friends, family, peers, colleagues, et cetera. It’s just that cancer is isolating in many, many more ways than one, and each of those sly, constituent methods of enforcing solitude conspire together to relegate us to these lonely spaces. Hearing de Vitry rejoice in them, embracing them, laughing in the face of what others, outsiders, might perceive as weakness and wallowing is not only redemptive, it’s liberating. I’ll see your “Have you been seeing anybody?” and raise you an “It’s been a couple of days since I’ve seen anyone at all!”

“Fixed” — Mary Bragg (2018)

The world teaches us how to regard ourselves, our bodies, our minds, our personhoods. We often don’t even realize this dictation is happening, but it is. Let me tell you, cancer brings out the worst in these tendencies, these trained reflexes. While Bragg’s message seems geared toward a childlike listener faced with society’s beauty standards, with dynamics of insiders and outsiders, cool and uncool, conformist and eccentric, I found myself returning to that refrain, “You don’t have to be fixed” over and over.

While my body image issues and low self-esteem run amok, fed on a glut of internalized ableism and materialism and superficiality and shame, the reminder in those lyrics that there is no one right way to be human, to be embodied, to be hurt or to be healed, was simply uncanny. Packaged with Bragg’s pristine, orchestrated arrangement and her powerfully tender voice, it’s a mantra in a song that we could all add to our quiver of weapons with which we face the world.

“Bad Mind” — Erin Rae (2018)

This song sounds like Ativan feels. Glossy and ethereal. The panned, double-tracked vocals, just distant enough in the mix, giving the impression that her voice is nearby, but out of reach. I was prescribed Ativan after being hospitalized due to complications from my first round of chemotherapy, namely that my nausea medications didn’t seem to be effective — until we brought Ativan on board.

That’s right, Ativan is prescribed for nausea. It’s also an effective anxiety medication, a strong benzodiazepine that’s often taken recreationally, but it’s a depressant. A strong, unyielding, psychoactive drug that guarantees dependency as a result of regular use. For months I was on an astronomical dose, without knowing it was considered high, to curb my incessant nausea.

I took two “cancer break” vacations during treatment. During the first, a country music cruise in the Caribbean, I cried myself to sleep every night. On the first night of the second trip, a solo getaway to the Bahamas, I wrote in my journal, through tears, “Perhaps I’m too depressed to enjoy an island paradise?”

As the lyrics in verse two reference indirectly, growing up gay in a conservative — and in my case, evangelical — family teaches you quite rapidly that your mind is bad. Very bad. Which, in quite a predictable turn, caused an anxiety disorder and clinical depression that I’ve been battling for more than a decade now. At times I was convinced that the problem of my erratic and burdensome mental health was simply due to my bad mind.

Ativan sank me to depths beyond those that I thought were possible. At its worst, beneath every word I spoke, beneath every layer of my thoughts, there was a constant suicidal hum. My prior struggles with suicidal ideation couldn’t even prepare me for the surprise of realizing, in some deep, hidden catacomb of my psyche, that I was fantasizing about taking my own life.

After chemo and radiation, when my nausea began to subside, I made getting off of Ativan my number one goal. I didn’t want to have a bad mind anymore. After seven months of three pills a day and after weeks of titrating, lowering my dose bit by bit to wean my dependent body and brain off of the potent, depressing, stomach-settling drug, I took my last Ativan in the hospital, after surgery to remove the mass.

It’s worth mentioning, for my sake and others’, there is no such thing as a bad mind.

“Sleepwalking” — Molly Tuttle (2019)

This year truly felt like sleepwalking. Through a world that disappeared.

In the Bahamas, after a month of daily radiation sessions and a mere handful of weeks before my operation, I walked straight into the Atlantic until the cold, steel blue water covered my head. I pleaded, I begged the sea to carry me away. To be allowed to float away with my fears. I cried into the saltwater.

Each time, as I listen to Tuttle’s voice — not angelic, no, but cosmic — grasping for the highest altitudes of her breathy vibrato, I hear my own personal flailing. My desperation to find an anchor, to not be woken up, to be left fantasizing about drifting away on the waves and the sounds of a voice that is that anchor, that is the one thing coming in clear through the static.

Another lesson learned from cancer: sometimes, you have to be your own anchor.

“Sit Here and Love Me” — Caroline Spence (2019)

My own helplessness over the last year was somewhat expected, but I was surprised that it wasn’t simply typified by the inability to help myself. There’s a deep, despairing helplessness found when you wish you could help others help you. To alleviate their helplessness. And I couldn’t. So often all I could do to help others help me was to ask them, with all of the kindness and compassion I could muster, to just sit here and love me.

I did not anticipate the hot, searing pain of telling my mother — a kind, generous, selfless woman who would admit time and time again, “If I could take your place, I would in a heartbeat” — telling her not merely once, but time and again, “This isn’t a problem you can solve. I just need you to hear me and love me.”

I know you hate to see me cry… and to hurt, and to fade into the nothingness of a round of chemotherapy, and to face doctors telling me my life and my body will be forever changed, and to know that there’s nothing you can do to step in, to interrupt the deluge pouring over me.

… But I just need you to sit here and love me.

“Keep Me Here” — Yola (2019)

Going through cancer when you’re single is difficult and complicated, but especially so as a young, gay man experiencing colorectal cancer. In the darkest moments, in the loneliest hours, when I craved physical affection, a hand to hold, a big spoon to lull me to sleep, a shoulder in which I could hide my eyes from the world — and with them, all of my worries and cares — I had nowhere to turn. Hook-up culture and the apps that have come along and monopolized queer entry to romantic and sexual relationships aren’t built for finding a security blanket for a battle with a lethal illness.

And so, in those moments, I turned to my ex. The reasons for our relationship ending notwithstanding, I think we’d both readily volunteer that we don’t think we’re a match. At least, not with a capital M. We live in that strange, queer space of happily being more familiar than platonic friends in that precipitous, somewhat intangible realm of deep connection — predicated on almost three years together — and unspoken boundaries.

He’s an entertainer, traveling the globe for work, ducking back into my life between contracts, each time leaving me with an ex-shaped chasm in my heart. My visceral yearning for closeness, for affection physical and emotional and spiritual, is a cacophony in my head each time, defiant against being denied these needs after having them finally fulfilled. Even if by someone who was not mine, nor could be, nor really should be.

Every time he left, I would love him a little more. It’s a strange thing to give love to someone so dear without being in love with them. So, I cried along with Yola, led by her expressive, assertive, grief-stricken vocals. I shouted along with Vince’s harmony in my car, trying to drown out the maximum volume. I waited a long time, for the right time to tell my ex how much I needed him, how much I wish I didn’t have to need him, I wish cancer didn’t require me to, but it did. I’m not sure the right time has happened yet, but I’ve tried — and I’m still holdin’ on.

“You’re Not Alone” — Our Native Daughters (2019)

Context matters. Circumstances matter. Privilege matters. It’s nearly impossible to listen to the stunningly timeless music of Our Native Daughters without considering these things. Songs mined from the experiences of women of color, of enslaved peoples, of folks categorically and systematically oppressed might seem like the last place a cisgender, white man like myself could seek comfort, but the salve here is twofold. First, to see and be seen. “None of us is here for long / but you’re not alone.”

Second, even in the extreme misfortune and despondency I’ve faced through my journey back to health, I ought to be reminded — I want to be reminded — of my privilege. Of how fortunate I am. Of the ample opportunities and advantages afforded to me by my race, my income level, my geography, my access to world-class medical care, my ability to work and continue working through my diagnosis and treatment, my support system, and on and on.

Yes, we all face our own trials, our own sorrows, and they are no less valid or troublesome because someone else in the world may have had it much, much worse. But the reminder is helpful, it’s cathartic, it’s therapeutic. And, while these injustices continue, while thousands and thousands of others are left in the shadows, we mustn’t take our privilege for granted.

Our Native Daughters use their platform to remind us of this, and no set of circumstances — no, not even cancer — is such that any one of us ought not hear that message. In the process, we might just uncover something limitlessly resonant that we didn’t expect to find.

“Everything’s Fine” — Jamie Drake (2018)

Maybe tomorrow we’ll find / everything’s fine.

Maybe tomorrow…

Maybe tomorrow…

Maybe tomorrow…

For 365 days. And more. Longer. And longer. And looooooonger. But you know what, the cinematic feel of this exquisite, arty folk-pop isn’t coincidental. It’s a deliberate tease. It’s dangling the carrot, leading you toward the conclusion that this is just part of the story. There is a tomorrow. You can hear the future in the sigh of the background vocals, in the whimsical harps, and it sounds good. It sounds like we might just find that everything is fine. And if we don’t (we won’t. At least not always), that’s fine too.

I hope in that future I’m able to option the rights to this story of mine and make a movie, if not for the sake of monetizing the misery I’ve endured, at least so that we can include this stunner on the literal soundtrack. Because that’s where it belongs.

Roll credits.

Photo courtesy of the author

LISTEN: Mouths of Babes, ‘Brighter in the Dark’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Mouths of Babes
Hometown: Atlanta, GA
Song: "Brighter in the Dark"
Album: Brighter in the Dark
Release Date: Januray 27, 2017
In Their Words: "I wrote this song about my friend Heather. I got to know Heather because she often volunteered to sell CDs at Girlyman (my last band) shows. She was very shy and very sweet, an amazing poet, a violin player, and an artist with a huge heart. And she struggled for years and years with chronic lyme disease. Over the years, it broke her down physically and psychologically. Eventually, she sold her violin to pay for medical bills. And then, one day, I heard through a friend that she’d taken her own life. I was devastated and, like so many who lose others to suicide, I wished I had done more or said something that could have helped. So I wrote this song directly to her. It was my way of acknowledging all of what she had faced — her pain and struggle, her bright light, and her lack of options — and wishing something better for her." — Tylan Greenstein