It's Wednesday, December 11, 2024.  It's 5:47pm, not too cold, very dark, and very rainy.  Im sitting up in my loft bed and my cat snoozes to my right.  I have the window cracked open a little and can hear the rain fall, heavy gusts of wind passing by and all the trees they cause to sway, as well as numerous cars and sirens continuously driving by.

I've been feeling pretty awful lately, in every sense of the word, so my inner doctor is scrambling to find a tested and true remedy.  

"What ails you, today?" asks inner doctor.

"Insurmountable hopelessness," I inform them.  "The terrifying sensation that where you are now is a place where you are "stuck" and will never be "unstuck" from again.  And these are just two of the main layers on one of those fabulous Carvel ice cream cakes.  Let's not forget that rocky center that divides the two ice cream flavors, in this case: everything you could possibly fit into the self-loathing suitcase.  Also the delicious icing on top: a loneliness beyond belief, accented with that red or blue, sugary gel to spell out every horrible misunderstanding you ever did have."  I am locked in direct eye contact with inner doctor this whole time.

Inner doctor checks their notes and compares it against my chart.  Their eyes scan all the available data in a most clinical way.  They reach for a device - it looks very sanitized, very stainless-steel, very durable and reliable for something that seemingly gets used every single day, several times a day, without fail.

There's a switch and a knob.  They flick the switch on and turn the knob until the box receives as clear a picture of a sound as its sterility can muster. 

It's literally just a radio.

So I'm filling my prescription right now and administering my meds.  I am thinking of songs that I had created with others in some capacity throughout my life.  Some are from random jams with friends or lovers, some are band recordings we worked hard on while others not very hard at all, some were just a quick, nearly-forgotten blip from a band rehearsal.  They are all of varying sound qualities, but for me, they are ones that I continue to revisit in my head often because they are songs I could never possibly forget. 

[an incredibly loud thunder just pierced through mine and my cat's reality just now]

This song was written either in 2001 or 2002 by my punk band in high school. We were called Johnny Panic and we liked to shit on other people a lot lol so this was our song making fun of "typical punks".  It's called TPS ("typical punk song") and I think we "released" it on a CD of our demos that we sold at our high school's battle of the bands one year (we didn't win the battle btw). We had another song making fun of straight-edge kids too {insert eyeroll-emoji}.  I no longer have contact with the other two bandmates but damn do I wish I did because this shit was golden.

This track is from a jam session in my basement when I lived in South Philly. This was either sometime in 2011 or 2012. I was messing around on guitar with my partner-at-the-time's Vox amp and multi-effect pedal. One of the effects on the pedal allowed the expression pedal to pitch-shift and I was OBSESSED with the raging SQUEAL of it all. Sunny (my partner at the time) played drums during it so expressively, that we had to revisit this piece of sound. He later recorded some vocals over it, which is what you can hear on this track, and then years later turned it into a fleshed out song with his band.
But that day, I distinctly remember my housemate Sally coming home from work saying: "DUDE yall NEED to turn it down. I could hear that shit down by Pat's & Geno's!" (which was bout two blocks away lol)  Many times in life I went searching for that guitar sound but I could never find it or recreate it again.  I'm pretty sure it only lives in that one concrete-walled basement at the bottom of that one South Philly rowhome during that one specific moment in time, only at that one excessively loud & intolerable VOLUME, and never to be heard from again.  Bless Sunny for having the foresight to record and save that jam.

This song was part of a set of demos released in 2012 on bandcamp by a garage-punk band I played drums in when I lived in Philly. I had literally just moved down there and didn't know anyone other than my housemates, had just picked up the drums and barely knew how to play, and answered the first craigslist post I saw that was seeking a garagepunk drummer. My bandmate who wrote the songs - this human was completely unhinged. But I do wonder maybe that's why I always loved his songs so much? I don't think he ever came to practice with a new song that I disliked. Have you ever played in a band where you literally thought every single song was a banger? Me neither (at least never before or after this band). I remember at the time trying to really zero-in on the laid-back vibe I experienced everywhere in Philly, especially among ppl born & raised there, which was in direct contrast with all the other environments I had inhabited up to that point. I wanted the drums to be slightly sloppy, slightly delayed, kinda off but always finding their way back. I mourn this lost project more than any other even though it absolutely had to die. Tho I am grateful to it for at least teaching me how to play drums and the sheer joy it provided me at some special times.

Right before the pandemic hit, I started a new band with some friends.  It was beautiful because there were absolutely *no men* present and we would spend entire Saturdays just lounging around my basement chatting, joking, and playing music that had no pre-described rules or regulations.  I think the spontaneity of it all is what made it feel so healing, so naturally collaborative, and so cathartic.  We only ever played one show and it was only because we knew we were disbanding.  This was now a year into the pandemic and people were moving away and stuff.  I guess it was our little 'last hurrah' to honor what was probably most treasured about that project: the magical band practices we spent so much time in.  It's impossible to pick just one song from our few recordings (one of my favs we never even recorded properly!  I think it was called "Miss December").  Everyone should absolutely listen to everything off of "Dislocated", but I am direct-linking to one of our first songs: "Cat Call".  I love this song a lot because, having grown up playing music being a girl, I've heard ALL the takes on that subject (and am annoyed at ALL of them, I assure you, mainly because I don't understand why the situation even warrants 'a take' at all anymore).  I love how in this song, we make an obvious gimmick and run with it: putting that cat-call whistle on repeat and just playing the song over it until we drown it out completely.  (These were all spur-of-the-moment decisions and this recording is just sliced out of a regular band practice recording).  I'm sure girl bands have done these "gimmicks" since the beginning of time lol, but this one hits different to me.  Because suddenly Steph Stroud comes in with those combative drums.  Hearing them always makes me feel like an assault is def about to happen - but *not* the one you think!  Then Amber's bass line creeps in - like footsteps that were already following you, but just came into your awareness.  Then my guitar part comes in, which I truly tried to make sound as sleazy and slimey as all the men that Sherell so vividly describes in her vocals throughout the song.  The authoritative voice takes the place of the men - “Why u got those BODY PARTS?? ON MY SIDEWALK??” She yells, exuding the entitlement a man who would cat call a woman on the street probly feels when he engages in invasive/aggressive behavior like that. Her vocal delivery alone turns all the tables.  As far as bandmates go, I miss this chemistry more than any other still.

A year ago, I had a little song-writing retreat in my basement with a good friend.  There were no expectations other than that we were probably gonna come up with a song.  It was based off of a voice memo I found on my phone of this same friend playing their accordion so sweetly, a melody so absolutely touching that it would make me cry.  They added lyrics and we added instrumentation.  I vocalized their lyrics to the best of my ability and we took our demo to a friend for "proper recording".  One of my favorite songs of all time, no lie.

Last December, my sweetie and I went into the basement music room one night to mess around and he started playing this very simple and effective bass line which caused me to think about the longevity of fallible structures around us. So I later wrote/recorded this demo based off his bass line. I eventually hit a wall when it came to coming up with a chorus, so I asked my sweetie for input since he was the source of the inspiration.  He said very randomly, off the top of his head: "what if someone was just repeating the line: 'who's driving?' "   I loved the idea so much that I recorded that for the chorus, which lead to a whole tangential, borderline-spoken word-type chorus that still sounds like *such* an "anti-chorus" to me if anything.  None of this would exist without my blessed sweetie and their boundless creativity. The kind that is so unassuming it’s legitimately SEXY to me lol. Like when Jim Carroll describes playing a game of basketball with the graceful, effortless movement of a cheetah in The Basketball Diaries.

Do you ever hear a question that is *totally valid* but strikes you as ABSOLUTELY WILD ? (that meme about someone asking "do you ski?" comes to mind lmao, which is def on par in STRANGENESS to me but not what im talking about right now)

When people ask me "how do you write a song?"

idk how you're supposed to answer that because I have no idea what other people do, all i know is what i do

and what i do is just kinda open my heart to all possibilities (a practice similar to when i walk into a giant thrift store; maybe the purpose here is not that YOU find a thing you're looking for; it's more like you being OPEN to ANYTHING else finding YOU), listening/perceiving carefully to anything seen/heard/felt that is based in organic authenticity, and NOT PASSING JUDGMENT, only expressing pure acceptance and maybe even devotion to the thing that hath found you.

But most importantly, you should then try to jot it down/voice memo record/document *as fast as possible* because for me, it works similar to dreams.  As soon as u even try to remember them in detail - they're GONE.