I’ve chronicled my musictherapyjourney on this blog quite a bit in recent years. It was a huge part of my life’s story, having been the focus of my studies for more than a decade on and off. Even when I wasn’t actively pursuing music therapy at my university, I still had every intention of obtaining that sweet degree at some point and slapping a fun little “MT-BC” after my name. Heck, if I was feeling really feisty, I could even go back to school again and throw a Dr. in front of my name as well.
Obviously, as I’ve detailed in painstaking detail on this blog, that dream died a hilariously brutal death in the godforsaken city of Fort Wayne, Indiana.
But that wasn’t my first — or only — dream.
When I was a little girl, I wanted nothing more than to be a rock star.
Now why does that sound so familiar?
After my tragic and abrupt exit from the music therapy world, I decided to refocus my energy on making it as a professional recording artist. LORE was intended to be my “Hello!” to the music world. I crafted the eight-song album to be a proper debut, with a smattering of songs from an array of genres demonstrating my abilities as a performer, songwriter, and producer. I redid my socials, pestered my besties with the demos, and even dragged my poor wife into a frozen-over forest for the promo shots. I had every intention of this album becoming a breakthrough of sorts.
Then, release day came. Friday the 13th. It felt poetic, but the moment came and went, and I found myself absolutely paralyzed at the thought of doing any self-promotion. I remembered the tragedy that was me trying to promote my ill-fated Chappell Roan cover, which was inundated with (at least charmingly creative) insults. Putting my original material out there, which I emptied my entire heart and soul into, felt even more vulnerable. Ultimately, I chickened out.
The album languished.
But here’s the weird part.
I actually wasn’t as disappointed as I should have been.
Because the older I get, the more I realize I don’t want to be the next Taylor Swift. In fact, the idea is becoming increasingly terrifying.
It’s not a secret that the music industry sucks. I literally just posted an entire piece about that yesterday. And truthfully, the more I learn about its seedy underbelly, I’m not entirely sure that’s the future I want for myself.
Maybe this is the dream I need to let die.
Last night, I had the most incredible opportunity. I got to meet my lifelong hero, Ann Wilson, the legendary frontwoman of the classic rock band Heart. And I had the chance to ask her exactly one question. Now when the time finally came, I definitely panicked. My initial thought was to ask her about her childhood and being bullied, and what kinds of things she told herself to stay strong throughout those struggles, but I didn’t want to get too dark, especially since I was one of the first in line. I ended up trying to ask her if any neat happy accidents had ever ended up in a Heart song, but I forgot how to articulate the phrase “happy accidents” and flubbed the question so bad that she had to ask me to reword it (not my proudest moment).
What I’m really glad I didn’t ask, however, was the question that was my other first instinct — what is your advice to up-and-coming musicians?
Her answer boiled down to “quit your day job and go all in.”
Which, sure, might have been decent, if a little reckless, advice back in the seventies when she was getting her start. But following that advice as a working class artist in the year of our Lord 2026 is a near definite death sentence. The chances are very slim that you will actually make it. The chances are much higher that you will wind up with this as your sick rock and roll castle:
“Hello MTV and welcome to my Crib!”
Perhaps her disappointingly out-of-touch response was the final wake-up call that I needed to stop pursuing music on such a grandiose scale.
After all, being a rock star was the dream of a child, and at some point, you have to put away childish things.
There’s a verse (1 Corinthians 13:11, to be precise) about this very concept in the Good Book, and I always hated it whenever I heard it in church. I’m a kid at heart and never wanted to grow up (and when I did inevitably grow up, I wanted to skip to the part where I got to be a lazy grandma). I thought the whole idea of having to act serious and proper and “adult” was a silly and unnecessary social convention. Who cares if someone still loves cartoons and toys and goofy jokes after some arbitrary cut-off?
What I’m learning recently, however, is that the verse in question isn’t referring to watching SpongeBob as a grown-up at all.
My wife has been without a job for a good amount of time for a number of good reasons. Because of the circumstances, our roommate and I are not pestering them to be employed at the moment. Still, bills need to be paid, and so my wife has begun to sell off their prized possession — their beloved Pokemon cards.
For years, that was all my wife asked for. Forget chocolates and Hallmark cards, if I didn’t come home with Pokemon cards on Valentines, I was in the metaphorical doghouse. I seriously gave this woman (well, nonbinary woman-shaped cryptid) a bouquet with multiple booster packs taped to shish kabob skewers tucked within it. Pokemon cards were their one obsession.
A few days ago, I was talking with my wife about the sudden change of heart. As it turns out, like many things we cherish, capitalism has soiled the card collecting hobby as well, with scalping running rampant. And more than that, they admitted making sure my roommate and I, their two favorite people on the planet, were fed and cared for was more important than some dumb flimsy cardboard.
Now that is maturity. Now that is growing up.
“Alexa, play Blink-182 ‘Dammit.’”
Maybe the childish things in our lives aren’t crayons and kids’ books. Maybe they’re the things that keep us from what’s actually important in life. No, I don’t want to be a rock star anymore. I want to be a loyal partner to my favorite people. I want to be a good mother someday. I want to build a home and a career I can take pride in. And I want to change the world through music on my own terms.
When I was a little girl, I wanted nothing more than to be a rock star.
It was all I ever fantasized about. I’d put on headphones and my favorite albums and run around the house imagining myself as the artists. I loved watching the VH1 Behind the Music specials about the bands I admired and daydreamed at length about my future episode after I’d inevitably conquered the music world myself. I had entire storylines in my head about my meteoric rise to stardom and my tragic downfall and my against-all-odds battle back to the top, when I’d finally be given my flowers and have my name added to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at last.
I was a very imaginative child.
But as a certain green-hued witch once sang, something has changed within me.
I don’t want to be a rock star anymore.
I’m done playing the game.
I was originally set out to write about the ways in which the music industry has recently proven itself to be a toxic place, but as I really began to visualize the points I wanted to make with this post, I had a dark realization. The music industry was never a decent place. Even as far back as the days of Vivaldi, the music that actually got heard by the masses was largely composed under the eye of kings and the Church and made by folks who already had money and connections. Sadly, the world is moved by whoever has the most resources, and like a lot of great things in life, capitalism had to take a shit on music as well.
In recent years, it’s become increasingly clear that much of the songs we’ve come to love and cherish throughout the years were brought to life by the worst people you know. The old adage of “never meet your heroes” has never been more true. Almost all of the musicians I looked up to have at least one gnarly skeleton in their closets, and that’s not even getting into the bigwigs behind the scenes who curated what we heard on the radio our whole lives. You know none of that shit was organic. We’re slowly finding out just how interconnected and insidious the folks in power really are. And it’s really, really disheartening. Sometimes I really do feel like Elphaba learning the true nature of Oz and the Wizard.
A charlatan with a knack for manipulating the masses? He’d fit right in with the industry.
“But Jessa,” you say, “you keep saying all this stuff about how the music world is fucked up, but you’re not giving us any real examples of why it’s fucked up.” Well, that’s the part I decided to put in a silly listicle like Cracked back when it was good. There are at least seven concrete reasons why the status is not currently quo. Let’s begin with an issue that’s been plaguing pop music since its very inception, to the point where it’s nearly baked into its DNA. And that would be…
1. Racism
Are you ready for an uncomfortable truth? All modern popular music was stolen from black Americans. From the dawn of the blues, white folks have been ganking the tunes of the very people they enslaved and oppressed. Even before recorded music, minstrel shows appropriated the sounds brought over to the US via the African slave trade and perverted them into gross mockeries. Wikipedia itself goes as far as to describe one of the most famous minstrel songs as “a key initial step in a tradition of popular music in the United States that was based on the racist ‘imitation’ of black people.” And that was pre-record industry. Once people found ways to slap music onto vinyl, the suits in charge bent over backwards to whitewash whatever music that meant. Pat Boone made an entire career out of reworking “black music” into something palatable for the mayo masses. Some of the early Caucasian rock artists did have a deep reverence for the origins of the music they made — Elvis famously attended black churches in his youth and was typically known to respect his musical forefathers. But one would have to be entirely ignorant to believe his relative success compare to artists like Sister Rosetta Tharpe wasn’t in part due to his whiteness. Record execs believed they had to sell a “sanitized” version of rock and roll to America, and that’s how we as a society collectively divorced rock — and pop music in general — from blackness.
But the truth is, nearly every genre of popular music can be traced back to the black Americans who pioneered the art. Rock owes its entire existence to black folks, as does rap. Even country, the genre damn near everyone associates with the very whitest people on the planet, has its roots in traditional African music, with the banjo being an instrument brought over via the slave trade. We would not have music as we know it if not for the black people we stole it from. That being said, racism isn’t the only ugly -ism that plagues the music industry. Sexism is also rampant, and this next point is one that seems to disproportionately affect the ladies…
2. Body-Shaming
Remember back when Britney got fat?
CALL MY 600-POUND LIFE, STAT! WE GOT A FATTY!
Like, look at all that blubber. You could hide a whole ass ham sandwich for later inside those big ‘ol folds, right? Never mind the fact that a slight breeze could probably knock over poor Brit in these pictures, she’s just so fat, right?
It probably shouldn’t come as a huge surprise in a post-Epstein world that powerful men wanted to keep their pretty pop princesses tiny and dainty and girlish. Strong men love weak women, or more accurately, girls. The minute one’s adult curves begin to blossom, young women are inundated with messages that for some reason, this is bad. That pressure is even stronger for female artists who make genres of music where image is important. And let’s be so for real right now, image is important for women in practically every genre because our society maintains that women are primarily a thing to be looked at, not heard. One of the most heartbreaking cases I know in the industry is the story of Karen Carpenter, who ultimately lost her battle with her eating disorder. We missed out on so much potential music because our society pushed a world-class drummer and vocalist to fucking starvation. That is not okay.
My Roman Empire is the way Heart frontwoman Ann Wilson was treated by the industry in the eighties. Because for some reason, the worst men on earth took a look at this woman and thought “whale.”
“OH MY GOD WHAT A SHE-BEAST!”
If you’re unaware of her story, she was bullied throughout her life for not being a stick figure, but when she hit 30 and started looking a little more woman-shaped, the record execs panicked, dressed her in all black (which was unintentionally the origin story of my goth phase, as I spent years trying to emulate her style during this era), and attempted to hide her behind her blonde, skinny, more “conventionally attractive” guitarist sister, Nancy. She went as far as using cocaine and getting fucking surgery to get back down to an “acceptable” weight, and I have no doubt that had she hit it big in the year of our Lorde 2026, the suits would be hurling Ozempic at her. Sure, whatever, maybe she reached an unhealthy weight at some point, but let’s be so for real, who the fuck cares? She’s not a model — she’s the greatest living female rock singer, and to reduce her to whether or not she’s overweight is absolutely bananapants to me. Even at her heaviest, I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world as a child, and I was not about to let some misogynistic asshole in the music biz try to convince me otherwise.
3. Payola/Nepo Babies
Did you think your favorite artists actually had a rags-to-riches story?
Yeah, those rarely exist.
I remember a few years ago when Chappell Roan came out and everyone here in the Midwest was excited that one our own “made it big” in the music scene. She was one of us. She lived in a trailer park or something and worked in a drive-thru coffee shop and fought her way to the top through sheer grit alone. She’s the crab who escaped the bucket, and instead of trying to drag her back down, we actually elevated her and celebrated her.
What you probably didn’t know, however, is that it quietly later came out that her backstory was a little bit…embellished.
A lot of details have since come out about the true background of Chappell Roan. For one, her family is not nearly as destitute as we’ve been led to believe. Her grandfather Dennis Chappell, whose name she borrowed for her music persona, was a shrewd businessman who started an insurance company that brings in around $10 million annually. Her mother was a successful veterinarian who had her own practice. And her uncle might be the worst one — Congressman Darin Chappell, whose slimy pro-forced birth policies will likely kill a lot of vulnerable women. In defense of Chappell herself, she’s been vindicated over and over when it comes to parasocial relationships in music (more on that in a bit), and has obviously been the target of several smear campaigns to dull her influence. Still, it’s not a great look to be disingenuous about your upbringing, and I would have respected her a lot more if she’d just acknowledged all the legs up she’d been handed through her birth family’s wealth and influence.
The problem is that Chappell is not an isolated case. It’s pretty well-known by now that pop music juggernaut Taylor Swift was never the “girl next door” unless you lived in a goddamn gated community. Sure, she grew up on a farm if you wanna get real technical, but it wasn’t Old McDonald’s. Her parents were wealthy businesspeople who could afford to literally take out a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal bragging about their little bundle of joy who’d go on to bring the music world to its knees. Yet fans will point to her as the “poor little girl who made it despite all odds.” The truth is, the odds were always stacked in her favor. That’s what happens when you’re born into money. That’s to say nothing of her talent, as she’s obviously incredibly talented and personally one of my favorite songwriters of all time. But it hurts my heart when I wonder about all the Taylor Swifts trapped in trailer parks whose songs will never get heard.
When you have money, you have safety nets. When pursuing your wildest dreams, there’s a good chance something will eventually go wrong and you’ll have to regroup. It happened to me with my dream of becoming a music therapist. Attempting to make it on a large scale in the entertainment business is an even riskier endeavor for a lot of folks. In many cases, you have to move to where the magic is happening, and just moving to a big city is a risk in and of itself. Rich kids get the second and third and fourth chances working class musicians don’t get, and then you factor in the sad fact that music only gets heard when you throw money behind it. Payola was the industry’s way of paying off radio stations to promote their songs, and despite getting technically banned, surprise surprise, it is still fucking happening in the 21st century. The things the radio feeds you are not organic. It’s all carefully curated, and more often than not, it’s the artists with a sizable amount of lucre who get played. Speaking of lucre…
K Financially Screwing Artists
A lot of everyday people don’t really realize what a record deal really is. The dream we’ve been sold is that when the right guy hears your music, he’ll be swept away and throw you a deal, and with it comes all the fame and fortune of rock stardom.
What they don’t tell you, though, is that all that money they give you? You have to pay it back. Or perhaps more accurately, pray the meager royalties you earn from your music offset that advance you’re given.
I know a tragic story from my personal life about a dear friend who I casually dated back in college. He was a phenomenal guitarist, one of the best I’d ever heard in person, and he joined up with a band that subsequently “hit it big” and landed a sweet deal with a relatively small label. Sadly, nothing really came of the deal. The label more or less sat on the band and did little to no promotion, and when they were all “surprised Pikachu face” at the fact that no one was streaming their music, they unceremoniously dropped the band — who still had to pay off that advance. On the off chance a “regular person” gets their foot in the door, there’s a good chance someone will be waiting right around the corner to screw them out of thousands or even millions of dollars.
Music does not produce a lot of revenue. We’ve cheapened the very art of music down to something you can stream willy-nilly at any time. There’s no upfront cost aside from the measly Spotify subscriptions we pay, and while that’s amazing for consumers, it absolutely fucks over any chance of the musicians behind the scenes actually making a living. Spotify gives you little over $2 for 1000 streams, and unless you have a ton of followers who stream your material on repeat, that doesn’t add up to much. A lot of artists have to maintain day jobs to stay afloat. When I was working at a traumatic brain injury rehabilitation facility in Ann Arbor, I was shocked to learn that one of my coworkers was the frontman of a fairly prominent mu-metal band. It’s wild how many musicians need outside income. Even very established artists are resorting to selling their life’s work for a lump sum in order to squeeze a little more money out of their songs. The companies buying these songs clearly don’t give a flying fuck about creative integrity, but that obviously doesn’t matter either, because the machine is also known for…
5. Creatively Screwing Artists
It’s not a secret that once the execs have their hooks in you, you’re at their very whim, and when the soundscape changes, you have to change. Going back to my Heart example, back in the eighties, they were basically given a deal that in order to keep being rock stars, they had to play the new MTV game. The band had to trade heavy guitars and introspective lyrics for big synths and songs written by outsiders. Ann even admitted that the music they were forced to make in that time frame was “stifling.” And they’re far from the only examples.
Music today is a numbers game. Pop fans watch the charts the same way football fans watch their favorite players’ stats. If an album doesn’t sell as well as the last one, people are quick to declare that said artist is a “flop.” Folks have already coined the term “Khia asylum” to describe female one-hit wonders, and if their favorite’s newest release don’t top the charts, that’s where they wind up. Never mind the fact that “Milkshake” is a legendary song. Khia has literally become shorthand for “not being able to follow up on your best work,” and fans are so hasty to determine that a woman has already written her magnum opus at 22. Remember how Halsey was so excited to share her deeply personal and experimental album about her health struggles, only to have the entire industry drag her for it? She’s not even allowed to release new music now because that album didn’t do as well as Taylor’s newest release. Record executives are holding our artists hostage and silencing them for having the guts to do something different. We’re punishing creatives for their creativity.
If I’m allowed on my soapbox for just a moment, I just want to say that music should never be about numbers. Music is not something that should be quantifiable. Music is highly subjective and deserves to be regarded for its quality rather than how many average Joes one can dupe into listening to it. This is how we’ve devolved into a place where AI can take over. Who cares about artists anymore? We can just beep-boop anything into existence instantly without the hassle of managing a fully human musician with wants and needs and personalities. That’s what executives want. Notice how you never see bands anymore (except Geese for some reason). That’s not an accident. The more people you have signed, the more liabilities you have. People fuck up, and in our current zeitgeist, that’s not allowed. Which leads me to my next point.
6. Parasocial Relationships
This is more on the fans than the industry itself, but it bears noting that the industry does little to curtail this phenomenon, and in some cases even encourages it. People get obsessed with their favorites. I’m not talking my childhood obsessions with Shania Twain or Bon Jovi or the aforementioned Heart. Those were innocent fascinations stemming from the fact that I was a lonely undiagnosed autistic child with no friends, and the music became a sort of surrogate friend to me.
But that’s not what this is.
I hate using her as an example again, but fuck it.
I mean, she is the music industry.
It’s not a secret that Taylor was madly in love with Matty Healy of The 1976. But when the Swifties found out that their beloved mother was seeing a skeevy dude who did some questionable shit in the past, they had the entirely normal response of writing an open letter to her explaining why she, a grown woman, should dump him. It, uh, did not go over well with her. She’s lucky her fans didn’t go even further, unlike one of Bjork’s fans back in the 90s. He was pissed his sweet little innocent muse was dating (gasp!) a black guy, and that was enough to send him into a violent spiral. He ended up killing himself on camera, but not before sending a bomb to Bjork to punish her for her transgressions. Mercifully, the package was intercepted before it could reach its final destination, but the case is a cold, bitter reminder of how dangerous these parasocial relationships can get.
I blame my fellow Michigander Eminem for some of my fears regarding parasocial relationships in music. In case you’re too young to know the real origins of the term “stan,” “Stan” was the name of a song that essentially told the tale of a young man who was obsessed with Eminem. He begins the song with a simple request for a letter back from the rapper, but it soon escalates into the fan committing murder-suicide — and blaming Eminem. That was my worst nightmare for years as an artist. I never want my music to contribute to human suffering, and it’s so easy for one unhinged person to latch onto you and your songs. Charles Manson took Paul McCartney’s innocent little ditty about a playground slide and interpreted it to mean “slaughter a bunch of people.” If Paul’s not even safe, I don’t know who is.
7. Grooming
I saved what might be the most disgusting part about the industry for last. The music world is brimming with predators. From the earliest days of rock and roll, the greats were busy dating, raping, and even marrying little girls. As a former little girl myself, and one who was really into classic rock, I spent years turning a blind eye to the fact that my heroes were out there hurting kids like me. It’s hard to think about the fact that famous groupies like Sable Starr were literally just children who were taken advantage of. So many rock stars were complicit in the abuse of her and so many others. It’s almost easier to list prominent rockers who haven’t had liaisons with underage girls.
Jonny, please, don’t let me down.
As hard as it is to admit, some of my personal favorites have been under fire for their relationships with young girls (although thankfully not Jon Bon Jovi). John Frusciante is hands down my favorite guitarist, but it’s difficult to divorce his music from the fact that he made a great chunk of it with admitted PDF file Anthony Kiedis. I love the lyrics “Show love with no remorse” from the song “Dosed,” but a part of me is glad I never tattooed it on myself because I know in my heart of hearts that the line was penned by an absolute creep. Brand New was one of my favorite emo bands for years, but after hearing about Jesse Lacey’s controversies, I feel icky revisiting them. I’ve never heard a song, Christian or secular, that quite sums up my faith like “Jesus Christ,” and I can’t even listen to the song without feeling gross anymore. Even the female musicians aren’t immune. I admire Sia as a songwriter, but you gotta admit her relationship with Maddie Ziegler was weird as hell. This is the kind of stuff that rightfully got Michael Jackson scrutiny. And speaking of which, while I love the man’s music and feel for his experiences as a child, that’s not an excuse for the way he behaved with children.
And the list goes on and on and on.
We have our Diddys and R. Kellys. We have our Phil Spectors and Dr. Lukes. When you give people unbridled power and access to vulnerable folks, abuse happens and the cycles continue.
That’s part of why I wanted to write this piece. The music industry is a dark, seedy place, and the older I get, the more I want no part in it. Let’s be clear — this is in no way a statement that I want to discontinue making music. Rather, it’s a statement that I’m done chasing “rock stardom,” whatever that even means in this day and age. It’s a trap, full stop.
So if we’re saying “fuck the music biz,” what even is the alternative?
Real music.
The future of music isn’t in the music industry. It’s in the hands of everyday artists who use their instruments to tell stories and move hearts. It’s in open mics, karaoke nights, and punk shows. It’s in some kid opening up a MacBook for the first time, screwing around on GarageBand, and discovering a passion he never knew. It’s in a small girl picking up a guitar for the first time and finding the way the notes fit together.
The mainstream media can have its robots and nepo babies. Real, authentic music will thrive in the dark recesses of every small town with a dive bar or coffee shop.
Prime example, my childhood autistic obsession band was Bon Jovi, and it proceeds to get worse. I primarily listen to podcasts that are a guy reading scary stories to fall asleep to. The television shows I tend to watch skew toward crude adult animation — Bojack Horseman is as introspective as I usually get. My favorite film is the cinematic masterpiece A Goofy Movie, starring the esteemed character actor Goofy.
I have certainlytriedmyhandat music criticism, but there is good reason why I title those articles “Music Reviews Nobody Asked For.” I am well aware that my recommendations don’t hold a lot of water solely based on the fact that my preferences in music are notoriously awful. Pitchfork would laugh me out of their offices if I ever attempted to contribute anything to their publication.
My point being, I am not a bastion of good taste.
But I had a realization recently. Perhaps art doesn’t have to be necessarily objectively good to be entertaining.
I wrote a little recently about the phenomenon known as outsider art, art created by folks whom the established industry has decided to exclude for whatever reason. Perhaps the creator is wildly mentally ill, which is an unfortunate situation a lot of creatives find themselves in. Maybe they’re not rich or attractive enough to break into the business proper, or perhaps they don’t even want to be famous. Whatever the case is, there is a wealth of art out there that many people will never experience because it’s not being promoted by the taste-makers with money and influence.
And that’s really kind of sad, honestly.
How many Taylor Swifts are trapped in a trailer park somewhere? How many amazing film ideas will never get made because they’re stuck in the noggin of a burger flipper? How many paintings, how many books, how many podcasts will go unfinished because the creators behind them have to work three jobs to keep their homes?
Creativity is our birthright as human beings. I work with autistic children as part of my day job, and one of the first things any kid autonomously does is create. As soon as a child can hold a crayon, she is doodling all over everything she owns, and as soon as she can speak, it won’t be long until she starts singing too. But then life happens. We get that sense of creativity kicked out of us eventually, between unsupportive parents and closed-minded teachers. I’ll never forget when I was working as a paraprofessional with children with special needs, and I helped a little boy color his snowman pink. That was the color he chose. But his teacher punished both of us for thinking outside the box, and my heart broke for that kid. We punish creativity.
In a world where we can just beep-boop anything that comes to mind, human creation is even more precious, and the beautiful thing is that it doesn’t have to be good to be entertaining. A week or so ago, my wife, roommate, and I went to a secondhand electronics store and found a strange DVD collecting dust. The film was called Gypsy Vampire’s Revenge, which is not exactly the most politically correct title, and the cover was, well…
But something compelled us to grab it. And when we popped it into the DVD player at home, we were presented with one of the most bananapants movies we’d ever laid eyes on. It made The Room look like an Oscar winner. It looked like it was filmed with a first generation iPod and the plot was damn near incomprehensible, but something occurred to us while we were watching it together. People made this. Someone put their heart into this film, and even if it’s not a masterpiece, it’s human.
Maybe that’s what we need more of.
I feel like people hesitate to make anything because it’ll never measure up to the output of major studios with all the financial backing and big names attached. But if that godawful movie could hold the attention of my entire household, maybe you don’t need fancy shit to make something cool. All you need is a vision and the determination to make it happen.
More than ever, we need human art. It doesn’t have to be perfect. All it needs is heart.
As a burgeoning bisexual, I didn’t really have any bicons to look up to.
Like, I loved Freddie Mercury, but growing up, his story was so sanitized, I really didn’t have a clear idea of his queerness. The most any of the adults would tell me was that he was “a little fruity.”
“Yeah, I can totally see him rocking that hat. What’s the issue?”
Needless to say, having roots in the evangelical church, I didn’t embrace my own identity for a long time. I realized I was bi when I got weird feelings from both the covers of Heart’s Dreamboat Annie and Peter Frampton’s I’m in You (yes, I’m probably the only Millennial who can credit classic rock with her sexual awakening). And I’d publicly come out after the conversion therapy controversy at my old church. Still, it was only after watching the biographical film Bohemian Rhapsody did I get the full picture, and it changed everything.
Freddie loved men. He very much enjoyed the company of men. He really liked banging men. He even fell for a man. Hard.
Giggity.
But he was also madly in love with a woman.
At the time, bisexuality was not really understood, so his female lover was essentially like “Dude, you’re gay, what are you doing?”
But he absolutely, one hundred percent, without a doubt loved her too.
Watching the way Freddie owned his sexuality even in a time when it was widely frowned upon lit something up inside me.
Sometimes the bravest thing you can be is yourself.
It’s a scary time to be queer. Politicians are making laws at breakneck speed trying to outlaw our very existence. I’d link to all the recent developments, but it’s honestly too depressing to even search right now. I’ll just let this terrifying map speak for itself. Everything the blue touches is our kingdom. But that shadowy red place? Don’t fucking go there, Simba.
Maybe ten years ago, it was fun and trendy and “yay rainbows!” to be queer, but the time for merriment has passed. We have more battles to fight. And if they’re going to try to silence us, that just means we have to be louder. Silence is letting them win.
Now is the time to live out loud.
When you live authentically, it gives the people around you a pass to be themselves, and from there, it just envelopes more and more folks. Once that first match is lit, everything around it catches fire. And that fire has the power to make real, tangible change in our world. What if Marsha P. Johnson hadn’t had the courage to be herself or stand up to her oppressors? We owe it to our queer forefathers (and mothers, and nonbinary parents) to stand in the freedom they bought for us with their bravery, and in some cases, their lives. Never forget the tragedy that was Alan Turing’s story. A celebrated scientist who set the foundations for modern computing and helped the good guys win WWII, he took his own life after the humiliating and inhumane way he was treated by the British government. All for the terrible sin of loving another man. Like, we foughtlike hell so that shit never happens again, and in the year 2026, I feel like we often take for granted how far we’ve come as a community.
And we better not lose sight of that, because now more than ever, we risk losing all of the progress we’ve made as a society.
I’ll end this with a story from about a week ago. I was in South Bend with my beautiful girlfriend, Olivia, and we were itching to do some karaoke. My schedule is wonky, so I had to come down on a weird night, and the only bar offering karaoke was a sketchy little dive bar on the decidedly less-gay side of town. My girlfriend is a trans woman, although you wouldn’t automatically assume this when meeting her. I hate the whole “passing” thing and I know a lot of my trans friends understandably do too — you don’t “owe” it to anyone to look “girly” enough to pass as cis, and there’s no right or wrong way to be a woman anyways.
Well, I can think of a few wrong ways to be a woman.
But still, I get why passing is a concern, especially in a red state like Indiana. It comes down to safety, and if some bigoted fucker deems her just a little too tall to be a cis girl, it becomes a very real threat. She didn’t want to bring too much attention to herself, lest the wrong transphobic fuckwad be there.
In short, she was not performing.
So, content to settle into her seat for the night and just watch me sing, we went to this little bar together. We get there, dude starts singing Kid Rock, all around not good vibes. I have it in my mind to sing one song, finish my nonalcoholic beer I’d already committed to, then get the Chicken McFuck outta there before anybody noticed the awkward lesbos in the corner.
I get offstage after a half-assed Bonnie Raitt tune and this gray-haired man with kind eyes approaches me, hand extended, telling me I did wonderful. I smile, say thanks, and start heading back over to where Olivia was seated. Then, he says something else:
“My name’s Randy, and this is my husband.”
With that one simple sentence, the floodgates opened. I smiled and introduced myself and my girlfriend, no longer worried we’d get hate-crimed in this bar, because now, we had friends. We had folks we knew were on our side. They assured us they had a “rainbow family” — many of their close relatives were also members of the LGBTQ community, and they’d cultivated a loving and supportive environment. They also mentioned that it hadn’t always been that way, and that when they’d first come out, some of the older kinfolk weren’t as accepting. But through living and loving authentically, they were able to change the entire vibe of their family.
I signed up for a selection from Rent with Randy, and Olivia finally felt the courage to sign up for one of the like two Caroline Polachek songs Karafun actually has. What started as a night of uncertainty became a night of celebration. That’s the power of living your truth. That’s the power of living out loud.
Let’s first set the stage by meeting the star of the show. Behold, Teenage Jessa:
My hair is as straight as I was pretending to be.
Teenage Jessa was very different from the Adult Jessa y’all know and love. For one, Teenage Jessa was the goodiest two-shoes that ever existed, long before Adult Jessa learned the hard way that following the rules doesn’t land you the world on a platter. Teenage Jessa would have never cussed or had sex or smoked the devil’s cabbage, that’s for sure. She spent most of her free nights at church events, for fun! She still loved music, but her dreams were a lot bigger back then. Teenage Jessa wanted to be the next Taylor Swift; Adult Jessa would crumble under that kind of pressure. And perhaps the starkest contrast is my state of mental health, because Teenage Jessa had to contend with some of the worst of my OCD and anxiety, while I’ve learned to control a lot of it these days.
It’s funny that I got this prompt today because I often think about what I’d say to a younger version of myself if I ever got to meet her. I consider myself to be very in-touch with my inner child — she’s running the show half the time — but my inner teenager is another story. Maybe it’s because I look back at that stage of my life and cringe a little. It’s easy to give Child Jessa some grace as an undiagnosed autistic little girl who just really loved parakeets, but in retrospect, Teenage Jessa seemed absolutely insufferable. Good little church girl who gets straight As and served as senior class president? I’m surprised I wasn’t voted “most punchable face.” (In reality, I was voted “most gullible,” which is…not much better.)
So what would I do different if I could relive my teen years? Well, this is the advice I’d give Teenage Jessa if I ever got to speak to her:
Be Bolder
Sometimes I think of all the lost opportunities I left unpursued. I could have moved to Nashville or LA or New York and made it big in the music industry. I could have posted more diligently on YouTube or promoted myself better on social media. I could have asked Chase Johnson to prom with me. Looking back through my life, I very seldom regret things I have done. Rather, I tend to regret those things I haven’t done. If I could go back, I’d take so many more risks. As the saying goes, shoot for the moon — even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars. In a lot of ways, I feel like I never even left Earth.
Be Gayer
It took me a long time to come to terms with my bisexuality. Compulsive heteronormativity is one hell of a drug, okay? I definitely flirted with the idea of liking girls as a teenager, and I remember some complicated feelings arising around some of my close female friends, which I confided to my mother and absolutely no one else. Unfortunately, I was very steeped in an evangelical church that frowned upon all things queer, and so I convinced myself I was as straight as my artificially flattened scene kid hair at the time. I wish I’d given ladies a chance sooner, as I probably would have avoided quite a few less-than-stellar hetero relationships.
Be More Open-Minded
I’ll admit I parroted a lot of the bullshit my adolescent friends preached. All that “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” crap. I didn’t really mean any of it, and a part of me knew it was wrong to believe that stuff, but I wanted my friends to like me, and most importantly, I wanted God to like me. I thought I had to check a bunch of boxes to call myself a Christian. I thought I had to be conservative and marry a man and pop out some kids and live the white picket fence life to make Jesus happy, when that’s not the truth at all. There’s no “wrong” way to be a Christian, unless you’re flying in the face of what Christ stood for (like a good amount of prominent evangelicals).
Develop Your Talents
I’ve always said that if I’d had even fraction of a crumb of an attention span as a youngin’, I’d probably be a virtuoso guitarist by now. Sadly, my ADHD remained undiagnosed for nearly three decades, so I feel like I wasted a lot of time I could have used on productive things, like practicing my instrument or learning another language. It sucks to think of all the potential I could have had. As much as I embrace my neurodivergences, there are aspects of my brain I really don’t like, and this is definitely one of them. If I could talk to my younger self, I’d tell her to pester literally every adult in her life until they get her a damn ADHD assessment. I was literally treading water with a disability I wasn’t even aware of.
Get a Car
This one might be on Mom and Dad, since I was the youngest by a lot and I always got the feeling that they were hesitant to let me “adult” on my own. That being said, it took until well into my twenties before I finally learned to drive, and so I didn’t really gain that sense of independence you should feel as a teenager. I didn’t get my Hilary Duff “Sweet Sixteen” experience of driving around with my blonde hair everywhere, and that’s sad. I wish I’d annoyed my parents about getting a car more than I did, and while I know some of it wasn’t their fault — we were a working class family without a lot of extra cash — I could have totally like, saved up for it, ya know?
Advocate For Yourself
I think this is a running theme. I needed to advocate for so many things for myself. Honestly, I’m a pretty assertive person nowadays. Like, I told off a whole man in the karaoke bar once. Teenage Jessa would have never. But I wish she would have had that energy. There were so many things she needed in order to be successful, and yet she was too afraid to speak up and make her needs and preferences known. It’s why I never got a car, never got ADHD meds, and was basically strong-armed into the uglier side of Christianity despite my gut not aligning with it. It took me a long time to find my voice, and even longer to learn how to use it.
Stop Straightening Your Hair
Seriously, you’re frying the fuck out of it. Someday you’ll appreciate your natural mermaid waves.
So unless you haven’t spoken to me in the past half-year or so, you probably know I’ve been hard at work making my first real full-length album happen. And soon, these songs will see a proper release on all music platforms, which is absolutely bananas to me. As a kid, I always assumed in order to record a song, you had to be famous, which is why I assumed from the old tape of my brother singing “Wild Thing” at karaoke that my brother was, in fact, Tone Loc. (He is very much not Tone Loc.) It never really occurred to me that I could learn to record and produce my own stuff until well into adulthood, but once I discovered the power of my college newspaper’s office’s computer’s GarageBand, it was over, man. I knew what I had to do. In fact, for my first EP, Oceanography, I holed myself up in that office the entirety of spring break, including my own birthday, and did nothing but record songs. That was an experience I’ll never forget, and over a decade later, my love of music production and songwriting has endured.
Which leads me to Lore.
Lore is a collection of songs that I feel both demonstrate my abilities as a producer and musician as well as my range as a lyricist. The songs are all very different, but reflect various aspects of myself and my life. There is nothing on this album that isn’t autobiographical in some way. I consider myself a follower of the Swiftian school of songwriting, where any and every relationship, good or bad, is potential song fodder, and each song written is deeply confessional. I drew a lot of inspiration from my interpersonal relationships, which in this context means everyone from my mom to my cute cruise fling to my cat and the asshat who threatened my girlfriend (more on that later). Relationships are what make us who we are — we are defined by our relationships to each other. I’m a musician, but I’m also a wife, girlfriend, daughter, sister, and cat mom. My relationship to myself was also an important factor. I’m Christian, queer, neurodivergent, and mentally ill. I’m learning to accept the various parts of myself, and all of these things contributed to what eventually became Lore.
Sonically, there’s a pretty wild mix of styles. I consider myself “genrefluid” and this album certainly reflects that reality. My music has always drawn a lot of influence from the classic rock, emo, bubblegum pop, and 80s synth-heavy pop I listened to a lot growing up, but I really wear my muses on my sleeve on this project. And every instrument, with one exception I’ll mention, was hand-played or programmed by me. Everything on this album was my own design. And none of the tracks utilize AI in the production or songwriting, a point I was sure to make after the Almost Icarus debacle that I wrote about as a cautionary tale. Everything on this album is raw, real, and most importantly, human. (Full disclosure: I did use an AI app to master the songs for the final release, but I made sure not to outsource any of my creativity. I’ll learn how to properly master by hand when I actually make it back into audio engineering school. Tuition’s brutal, y’all.)
I wanted to do a track-by-track breakdown of the track listing to explain some of the lyrics and give a bit of backstory on each of them. Like I mentioned, they’re all very different from one another, and no two songs are about the same situation or person. Let’s start with the title track!
1. Lore
I love stories. I’ve always been a storyteller, from the day I could hold a pencil and form words. I was the kid who breezed through lessons so I could ignore the teacher for the rest of the day and just write stories. And that was the initial inspiration for this song — my own story. I even snuck a literary reference in the chorus for good measure. (Shoutout Shel Silverstein!)
In the first verse, I talk about my childhood and hometown, “a blue-collar Midwest town with a river running through.” That would be Flat Rock, Michigan, and the river I’m referring to is the Huron River. I also mention my father, who passed away last year and whose memory I dedicated the song to. On his deathbed, I told him about the song, and while I’m sad he never got to hear it, I’m happy his legacy will live on through this tune. The second verse is about my love life, past and present. In the second half, I introduce “the first girl I kissed” in college, who later became my wife. My brother was initially not thrilled that I married a woman, but as of my father’s death, he’d started coming around to the idea of having a bisexual little sister. The original line was “My brother found out and man, was he pissed,” but I changed it to “for a while he was pissed” to reflect the character development. Sometimes people change for the better!
Recording this song, I started with the acoustic guitar, which felt like coming back to my roots after playing almost exclusively electric for some time. I wanted a “pop-punk meets heartland rock” vibe, a la The Gaslight Anthem, one of my favorite bands. The lead guitars harmonize in the main lick I play throughout the song, which was really fun to record and definitely made me feel a bit like Iron Maiden. There’s also a Truck Driver’s Gear Change at the final two choruses, because 1. I feel like it adds to the triumphant feeling of the song and 2. I just really like key changes. I had to modulate it down from the original key I wrote it in so I could sing those last choruses in my chest voice, though.
2. Vinyl
This is probably the oldest song of the batch, as I initially started writing it years ago and only finished it when I was living in Fort Wayne a few years back. The melody came to me out of nowhere, and the lyrics were inspired by a handsome French-Canadian man who resembled the title character of Howl’s Moving Castle, with whom I had a very short-lived flirtationship. Sadly, he was quite a bit younger than me and I was starting to feel a little Anthony Kiedis, which made me uncomfy, so I amicably called it off. (He was legal at least, but man, I had all 150 Pokémon memorized by the time this dude was born.) At least I got a total banger out of it.
I was always really fascinated by vintage media since childhood, so it’s a wonder how I never used records as a metaphor before. There’s something so sexy and intimate about sharing your favorite music with a partner. Needless to say, this song is one of the hornier ones on the album, rivaling “Rain Check.” It’s not as explicit, but it toes the line at times. It’s cheeky if nothing else.
Did I gank the chord progression from The Maine’s “Right Girl”? I plead the fifth. In my defense, Taylor Swift has like twelve songs that utilize that exact progression, so maybe popular music is just derivative as hell. There’s a whole slew of harmonies, since I was going for a kind of Queen sound. I wanted a glam rock feel — this is the spiritual successor to “Sweet Honey,” the single I released with Wake Up Jamie, after all. I consider it her weirdly hetero brother. Oddly enough, I don’t have a single sapphic song this time around, as all my muses were men. I guess I need to write another batch of love songs for my femme partners for the sequel to The Librarian’s Daughter.
3. My Cat & Me
Anyone who knows me knows Ann Wilson of Heart is my queen, and I was autistically obsessed with Bon Jovi as a child, but Freddie Mercury was the rock star who finally gave me the confidence to start pursuing music for me. He never played by the rules. He was living proof that one could write a catchy song about damn near anything, and a perfect (purr-fect) example of that is one of his final songs, “Delilah,” dedicated to one of his beloved cats. When I first heard that song, I knew I had a mission. But I never had an animal “get me” the way Krubby does, and that’s what finally prompted me to compose this little baroque pop piece. Krubby is my feline soulmate, my “best friend on four legs,” so to speak.
The song starts out pretty cheery, and it maintains a sense of whimsy the whole way through. But I did want to mention the emphemeral nature of pet friendships in the final verse, since I had to slam y’all with the feels somewhere. “Someday I know you won’t be there/So I’ll treasure every day we share” hits me so hard every time, and I wrote the damn lyric! Even though he can’t catch a mouse, I love that cat anyways, and I’ll miss him when he someday crosses the Rainbow Bridge. It’s a shame we tend to outlive our animal friends.
I may have ganked this chord progression from an country/Americana artist named John Hiatt, whose song “My Dog & Me” served as the other main inspiration behind this track. I was struck by how heartfelt the song was and wanted to create my own take on the topic of beloved pets. This track is one of two that are entirely MIDI, containing no “real” instruments at all. But trust me, I agonized over this one just the same. Have you ever programmed MIDI without a MIDI controller?! Also, the rhythm was tricky because there’s an extra measure of 3/8 right before the title drop, which gives it a bit of a disorienting feel. Overall though, it’s a very sweet, whimsical song.
4. False Prophet
Now we’re getting to the first of the angry ones, and I did not pull any punches on this album. I won’t get into too much detail about who specifically this one’s about, but we’ll just say it’s about certain religious leaders who I truly expected better from. I grew up in an evangelical megachurch because many of the friends I had in my youth went there, and I found myself looking up to so many of the folks involved there. After the advent of Trump in the US, I found myself confused how these people who once taught me to “love my neighbor” and “fight for the oppressed” were now siding with the oppressor. So that was the initial inspiration behind this one.
I loaded the lyrics up with Biblical references. As I always say, the only people who can fight Christian nationalism are progressive Christians who actually paid attention to the words of Jesus. We speak their language. And that’s why when I release the lyric video for this one, I plan to color the text that directly references specific Bible verses in red (itself a reference to how Christ’s words are often colored in red in certain Bibles). I’m particularly fond of “You’re so lost in the white Jesus sauce and I don’t have a doubt/That if the brown Jesus came back tomorrow, you’d be the first to ICE him out.” I never get political in my music, but there’s a time and a place for speaking up when injustice is happening.
This one, alone with “My Cat & Me,” is entirely MIDI-programmed, but like I said, don’t let that fool you — I put just as much blood, sweat, and/or tears into those two as I did the more guitar-driven tracks. The bassline that carries the song is reminiscent of “Stand By Me,” something I did not realize until nearly everyone I showed it to pointed it out to me. I have to laugh because it really does sound like a minor-key “Stand By Me” (“Stand Back From Me”?). I really love the harmonies toward the end as well.
5. Every Emo Song Was Written About You
This is the most recently written and recorded song of the batch, composed whilst on the emocruise. As fate would have it, I was able to weasel my acoustic gitfiddle onto the boat, which was very serendipitous as I found plenty of inspiration on the journey. My cruise fling was a cute lil emo guy from California who stole my heart and had me feeling as giddy as a high school girl again. I stole away to my cabin to write this little ditty as an ode to both my sweet paramour and the genre that I adored as a teenager and college kid. True to emo tradition, the title is a full sentence.
I hid a ton of references to various emo-adjacent artists in the lyrics. The second verse “I could be your punk rock princess, your heroine” refers to “Punk Rock Princess” by Something Corporate, “Your Call” by Secondhand Serenade is referenced at the end of the second pre-chorus, and “Hands Down” gets a mention in the bridge. Those are just the less-obvious ones. I wanted the lyrics to reflect that hopeful, wistful feeling of wanting someone badly and not knowing what to do with that. I really did want to capture that teenage longing.
Originally, I’d planned to have a fellow musician I’d met on the cruise play drums for this track, but due to scheduling conflicts, he wasn’t able to be on the final version. I’m still pretty pleased with how my programmed drums turned out, though. I tried to ape the some of the stylistic hallmarks of emo with this track, but sadly my voice isn’t exactly the whiny male tenor that’s typically associated with the genre, so I’m scared at times it falls flat. But perhaps that’s just my insecurities talking, because if I’m honest, this song goes hard. I’m not exactly Hayley Williams, but I feel like I did alright in spite of that.
6. Jeremiah
The heaviest and angriest song of the batch, this one comes with a disclaimer. This song is not about Jeremiah Mack, whose sweet, sweet sax saxohoning you will hear momentarily. I have never once wanted to chop that wonderful man’s dick off, so lest there be any confusion, let’s clear that up immediately. This is one hundred percent about a fucko who DMed my lovely girlfriend Olivia to send her all kinds of threats and other transphobic bullshit. To Jeremiah Mack, you are a fantastic human being and I love you. To a certain Jeremiah of South Bend, Indiana — watch your step.
The lyrics are truly some of the most rage-filled I have ever penned. I took a lot of inspiration from Ann Wilson, who invented feminine rage when she wrote “Barracuda” back in the 70s. I wanted them to be kind of sing-songy and almost nursery rhyme-esque, like I’m making fun of this asshat, which I definitely am. “You’re not a real man,” is me flipping the transphobic “You’re not a real woman” battle cry on its head, and the allusion of cutting this dickwad’s manhood off is poetic in a way. Oh, so removing your penis won’t make you a “real woman”? Wanna test that theory on yourself, big guy?
I put so many guitars on this track and turned the distortion up to the max. The main riff almost sounds like a much more overdriven “Bebe le Strange,” another Heart song from the 70s, which was again not my intention, but my music is nothing if not derivative. And I love, love, love the dissonant guitars in the instrumental section. At first I wasn’t sure I could pull off as heavy as I wanted to go for this tune, but I’m pleased to report I achieved the intended effect I think.
At least we’ve reached the song I plan to release as a single, the 80s-inspired “Rain Check.” This one is so unlike anything else I’ve ever recorded or released and it was honestly a really fun experiment. That being said, this one is definitely the horniest track on the album. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. It is highly sexual (and saxual). I wrote it as a challenge to myself to pen something that would make Sabrina Carpenter herself blush. The lyrics were inspired by a cancelled date with a lawyer who had to bail due to an important case the following morning, which I totally understood, but man, I was bummed. He’s also the lawyer I mention earlier in “Lore,” for what it’s worth. Because he has such an important job, he couldn’t be featured on the album cover, so that’s my Detroit partner whose lap I’m sitting in.
The lyrics are somewhat cringily blunt at times, and I still can’t say the especially awkward line in the second verse with a straight face (you will know which line I’m referring to). I do a silly rhyme dodge in the first verse (“…cause ya girl needs some…fun”), which isn’t the first time I’ve done something like that in a song. In “Taco Bell” off The Librarian’s Daughter, I say “I know that it might be quite crass, but I can’t help but stare at her big fat…grin.” I borrowed that idea from The Maine and their signature song “Into Your Arms” — “I’ll state something rash/She had the most amazing…smile.”
This is another very MIDI-heavy song, although there is some real guitar. There’s also a very real saxophone! I didn’t trust myself to program a realistic sax, so I brought on my old drummer, the aforementioned Jeremiah Mack, to play a little solo. The rapid fire sixteenth note synth is reminiscent of “Dancing On My Own,” the quintessential club hit from Robyn, but that wasn’t my inspo initially, weirdly enough. My “blueprint,” so to speak, was actually “So Emotional” by Whitney Houston. I wanted this song to be giving 80s Whitney. I utilized Linn Drums for the drum machine, which really gives it that throwback vibe.
8. Grandma
Finally, we end the album on a wholesome note. “Grandma” was my own personal manifesto that despite the odds being stacked against me as a queer, mentally ill Millennial, I will live into my geriatric years and I will become a grandma someday. I refuse to be a statistic. The inspiration came to me when I was working at my old job as a caregiver for old people, and I actually wrote the chord progression on the organ at the facility. I had this realization that the folks I worked with were quite literally living the dream. They’d lived long lives and were now spending the rest of their years in peace. The photo was fun to shoot because I ordered an old lady kit and used an instant aging filter to get the desired effect. Eventually I’d like to get a big group together and film a music video where we’re all just wreaking havoc around town dressed as grandmas.
Lyrically, I drew some inspo from my own grandmother, Joyce, who I derive my name from. She was the kind of lady who enjoyed the simple things, like watching game shows from her La-Z-Boy all day. (Though she would actually drink cornbread soaked in buttermilk, which was truly atrocious, so I took some artistic liberties.) The “My Way” reference is a double barreled reference, since I’m not just referring to Frank Sinatra, the original artist. I also wanted to pay homage to Bon Jovi, whose song “It’s My Life” makes the same reference.
This was another acoustic-driven one, and I really only used electric guitar for the lead parts. The ending is cool because I did what my old bandmate called a “terraced ending,” where each of the instruments drop out until all that’s left are the guitars. Aside from that, this one is pretty standard fare for me. This is probably the most quintessentially “Jessa” track on the album, which is also why I felt like it was the best song to end the project on. Writing it really took me back to my roots, and that’s what Lore is all about.
Which of these songs are you most looking forward to hearing? I’d love to hear your feedback!
As of writing, it is day two of the fourth annual Emo’s Not Dead cruise, and ya girl is having the time of her life. Like, you have not lived until you’ve watched Hawthorne Heights from a hot tub in the middle of the ocean. I can’t believe I almost elected to not do this cruise, and while it’s set me back financially waaaaaaaay more than I’d like to admit, I don’t regret this trip at all. Knock on wood, the voyage has been quite literally smooth sailing.
There are activities at practically all hours on this boat, but one particular event caught my attention — a panel on the history of emo, hosted by the guys from the aforementioned Hawthorne Heights. I wasn’t super familiar with the band before the panel, but I am a bonafide music history buff, so I’d be remiss if I missed out on the discussion. So I set my alarm alarmingly early for someone who’s supposed to be on vacation and hauled my ass up to the deck to catch it. And I’m so glad I did, because it was a reminder of how much this genre and this music scene has meant to me throughout the years.
Prior to high school, all I listened to was classic rock. I never even entertained the idea of seeking out music that had been made after I was born. To younger me, the best stuff had been already made and all new music was garbage and inferior to my heroes. But something unusual happened around tenth grade. My good friend at the time was dating her now-ex-husband, who turned out to be a total fucko, but he had great taste in music. So I was over at his place one time and, knowing I was a music lover, he offloaded all his old CDs on me. Among them was Jimmy Eat World’s follow up to their breakthrough album, Bleed American. It was titled Futures and it had a dark, ominous cover featuring a telephone booth. Something about it drew me in. So on a band field trip to Chicago, I put on my headphones and loaded it into my portable CD player.
And I’d never be the same.
Everything about their sound captivated me in that moment. I was playing cinematic movies in my head to the moody melodies and desperate lyrics. Every word and every twinkly guitar riff was soaked in pure emotion. The music sounded like what feelings sound like. It was a strange sort of synesthesia. And it made me realize that there were still bands out there making great music. In a way, JEW (which is a hella awkward abbreviation for a band name) was my conduit to the emo genre as well as the 21st century of music as a whole.
Funnily enough, Hawthorne Heights cited JEW as their conduit to the scene as well, and they talked in great detail about how they had similar journeys to mine. They were Midwesterners too, Ohioans to be specific, and they didn’t have much in the way of record stores or places to discover new music. But a friend had gifted one of them Clarity, the precursor to Bleed American, and that was that. Like me, the guys were drawn in by the music and the deeply emotional lyrics.
And that’s why they call it emo — it’s literally just emotions set to melodic punk rock. The guys from HH (a much better band abbreviation, by the way) brought up the fact that the word “emo” has a lot of baggage. In the beginning, it was almost an insult to be called emo. Bands didn’t want to be known as emo. Hell, I remember the slight moral panic in the MySpace era where authority figures assumed emo was shorthand for self-injury and other self-destructive habits. In schools, guys in the scene were often called f*gs and other cruel slurs, and girls in the scene were characterized as sluts or posers. But as the years have progressed, the “emo” label has since been reclaimed. Millennials like myself proudly wear the title “elder emo,” and younger folks are adopting the name and subculture as well.
I think fondly about the emo and emo-adjacent music I listened to as a young woman. I’ve had a lot of memories in the music scene, going to multiple Warped Tours and other festivals and making connections with the other attendees and artists. Live music is so important, and I’m glad I got to experience so much of it throughout the years (although I’m sure my ears aren’t so glad). I’ve written quite extensively on here about my fears regarding AI and the future of music, and those fears definitely still stand. But you can’t engineer away live shows. You can’t beep-boop an experience like the one I’m having on this cruise. That’s something the robots can’t replicate — the real, authentic human connection that comes with screaming along to your favorite songs with your 100 new best friends.
When the panel wrapped, the guys opened up the floor for guests to share their “coming to emo” moments. I hesistantly raised my hand and introduced myself as a fellow Midwesterner, albeit a Michigander (they forgave me). I shared my story of discovering JEW as well and how their music spoke to me like nothing else did. I also told them I appreciated how HH had come up out of Ohio of all places, because I get it. When you grow up around nothing but cornfields, finding beauty in the everyday isn’t easy. You have to make your own beauty, and that’s something else I love about music. I love the way folks can alchemize pain and hardship and even boredom into something lovely, something other people can appreciate too.
As an elder emo and a musician myself, this cruise has been a reminder of why I am in this game. It’s why I find guitar picks in my washing machine. It’s why I have callouses on my fingertips and can’t get baddie nails. It’s why I chose classical guitar over pre-med in college. It’s why I agonize over every word in every song I write. And it’s why I still believe in beauty in this world, even though I’ve seen so much of its ugliness as well. Music truly is what emotions sound like, and there is so much power in channeling those feelings into song. It’s a form of emotional bloodletting. It shows you that you’re not alone in this world. It saves lives.
That’s what emo is about. That’s what music is about.
Mind you, I have never been on a cruise, and I kind of always assumed I’d never even have the chance. I vaguely remember my much-older sister saying she’d take me on a cruise when I got my high school diploma, but after graduation, it changed to after I got my bachelor’s, and after that, it was my master’s. So I just assumed that was a nice thing she told me so I’d stay in school and not run away to join a rock band or the circus.
Both options are very within the realm of possibility, for what it’s worth.
But last year, I was playing in a band with a truly cool frontperson who, despite us not being close anymore, is still someone I respect greatly. They told me about the cruise and how it’s great for networking because you’re basically trapped on a boat with music industry folks and fans who care enough about music to drop a cool few grand to see their favorite bands. That was enough to convince me to exercise my poor credit card and join the excitement. I bought my ticket and a flight down to Miami, where we’ll be sailing off to Mexico, a place I have not ever been to and, again, was never expecting to actually see.
But if playground rhymes taught me anything, it’s that there are REALLY HOT GUYS AT THE DOOR DOOR DOOR.
I’ll be honest, I came close to attempting to recoup what money I could and bailing on the trip many times. My friend who inspired me to buy the ticket and I had a falling out, which made me question why I was even going. Then, rising political tensions made me wonder if it was even safe to travel outside of the country, and I kept getting nightmares that I’d be detained trying to re-enter the country or something. I got as far as posting an ad stating that I’d sell my tickets in the main Facebook group for the cruise, and I almost had a buyer.
Then my dad died. Suddenly, I was standing face-to-face with my own mortality as I watched the single closest person to me fall away into the afterlife. It hit me that I may never have the opportunity to do this kind of thing ever again, and I could hear my dad whispering to just jump in. I remembered his last words of advice to me: be yourself, take care of yourself, and enjoy yourself. He wouldn’t want me to cower and hide away. He’d want me to live in the light. He’d want me to enjoy myself any way I can in this hellhole.
And so that’s why I have my big purple suitcase packed to the brim with all my outfits for the trip and I’m panicking making sure all my reservations are in place. This is certainly the most I will have ever travelled on my own, and while I have some trauma regarding travelling alone (major trigger warning for that link, by the way), I feel much more confident now. Last year, my bosses sent me multiple times to St. Louis, Missouri, to train up some new trivia hosts, and I ended up getting very familiar with the TSA and travel etiquette. So I feel a lot less nervous with that experience under my belt.
Still, it is nerve-wracking, especially since I don’t have any of my partners or friends with me this time, and it’s my first time out of the country in a really meaningful way. I took a train through the mountains of Canada in high school with my family, but that was just a day trip, and I had my parents there the entire time. I’ll know my former bandmate on the cruise, and I’ve been in communication with my cabin-mate, a cute emo dude from California who likes Pokémon too, so there’s that. But I’m trying to view the journey as an opportunity to make new friends. It’s poetic that most of the Warped Tours I attended in my younger years were attended alone, because now I’m very familiar with now to navigate shows and music festivals as a solo audience member. I plan to use my extrovert powers to make a few connections on this trip at least.
I met one of my closest friends for coffee this evening, and I showed him the meat and potatoes of this post before I shared it with anyone else. We agreed to meet because we were both world-weary and desperate for the ear of someone who “got it.” After one read-through, he goes back to the part I wrote about what my dad would have said if he were here, his last words of advice to me. He found it reassuring, in a strange way. And I think I get it now. I think that’s the best way I can honor my dad — by living so vivaciously and so fully that the darkness of the world cannot extinguish my light. That’s how he wanted me to live, and that’s how I want to inspire others to live as well.
And if that involves setting sail on a fuck ass boat with a cute emo guy, so be it.
I realize this blog functions as something of a barometer of how my life is going at the moment. When things are great, you get fun travelblogs and reviews of Taylor Swift’s newestreleases. When things are not so great…well, that’s this post, sadly.
I feel like I’m sending a letter in a bottle to whoever is willing to listen. My life has been on a solid downhill track since Charlie Kirk had to get shot and ruin my entire plans for the future. Did you know my wife was the Office Depot girl? We were in the process of buying a house when the controversy went down and she lost her job over it, tanking my credit score and requiring us to drain my wife’s entire life savings to survive. Now I never liked Kirk, but I don’t think he deserved to die, and I’m especially pissed his smarmy ass got capped now because it literally avalanched into fucking with my well-being. Every time I walk by the house we were supposed to buy for our future family, I die a little inside.
A while back, I wrote this song. It’s called “Grandma.”
Now when I wrote this song, I wrote it as a personal manifesto — I will reach old age, and I will become a grandma someday. Even though it hasn’t been very long since I wrote it, with each passing day, it gets harder to sing it with my full chest. Because truth be told, I don’t know if I’ll ever reach senescence. I can’t help but feel either that either I’ll be gone in the next few years, or the entire world as we know it will be gone.
My entire life, I’ve wanted to follow in the footsteps of the rock stars I’ve looked up to growing up. Now, we barely have rock stars. We’ve got Taylor Swift, a shit ton of political talking heads, and a smattering of microinfluencers that like two people actually care about. That’s it. Those are your “rock stars.” If you’re lucky, you’ll have a song blow up on TikTok for a second, but then what? There’s no gaining fame and fortune from music anymore, especially with the advent of AI. Why would anyone seek out new music when you can just beep-boop three thousand pirate metal songs about kanagaroos? I probably sound like “old man shouts at cloud,” but having played with fire and seeing how destructive it is firsthand, I think I’m justified in feeling a little paranoid.
Now, I don’t even know if I want to go public with my music, or anything for that matter. I’ve seen how quickly things can go south. You can get cancelled over the slightest transgressions, and I don’t know if I could handle that kind of scrutiny. Not to mention the litigious nature of the music industry as it stands today. Music is and has always been a derivative art form — musicians are constantly aping other artists they look up to. But in a post-“Blurred Lines” world, you can get slapped with a lawsuit over songs that share a similar vibe, regardless of whether or not they have any commonalities on a theory level. It’s enough to sue over a song that’s inspired by someone else’s. That’s right— you can’t even have inspirations anymore. Why the fuck would I want to keep writing music when there’s a chance my heroes can slap me with a suit? I’d put down my guitar forever if that happened to me. I’d rue the day I picked it up in the first place, in fact.
And not to mention that a bisexual white woman who was near my age was just fucking murdered by the state, and what is the general public’s response? Instant character assassination. I can’t even share some of the shit I saw people post about the late Renee Good, who was, by all accounts, a great person. But according to the shitheads online, she was a terrible mother who had it coming. Never mind the fact that she could have been like, Casey Anthony levels of “terrible mother” and she’d still deserve a fair trial. How the hell are we letting these armed thugs wander the streets acting as judge, jury, and executioner. This is America. Where the fuck was her due process?
I don’t know where I’m going with this. I’m just scared. The political violence is ramping up and I don’t know if I’ll be the next victim. And if I am the next victim, what will the world write about me? Will they say I’m a slut who deserved it? Will they bring up my divorce and say I was a bad wife? Will they make up even worse for me in order to justify my murder? I sincerely don’t want to be a martyr. I always dreamed I’d be the next Ann Wilson, not Anne Frank. I wanted to change the world through my music, not be slain with such casual cruelty and thrown away like garbage. I always dreamed of better for myself. I sound like I’m suicidal, and I promise I’m not, if only because the only thing that scares me more than this life is the thought of what could come afterwards.
I don’t like the direction the world is going, and I sincerely wish I could get off this ride. I don’t want to die, but I don’t want to keep living like this.
Chappell Roan is simultaneously living my dream and my nightmare. Imagine being some random ass girl from the Midwest one minute, and in the next, the eyes of the entire world are on you as if you’re Lesbian Jesus. On paper, she has the exact life I’ve fantasized about for decades. She wrote that one hit song (or two…or three) that will immortalize her for generations to come. She gets to wear some of the most extravagant outfits I’ve ever seen on a performer, stuff I’d die for a chance to wear.
Imagine getting to wear this in public.
And her infinite coolness has even been acknowledged by my own childhood heroes, the Wilson sisters of Heart. Nancy Wilson accompanied her onstage for a cover of “Barracuda,” and she even got to sit down and talk with Ann Wilson on her podcast. Needless to say, when I wished upon a star all those years ago, I’m pretty sure the wires got crossed somewhere and my wish went to Chappell instead. And let’s be real, the girl deserves it. She does have talent. She’s an incredible performer, and her songs are catchier than anything anyone’s else has been doing in this boring-ass pop music landscape. But there’s one aspect of Chappell’s life I’m so glad I don’t have going for me:
The scrutiny. God, the scrutiny.
So Brigitte Bardot died recently. Don’t reach for your tissues just yet, because she wasn’t really someone worth mourning. She actually kind of sucked. Like, a lot. She was literally so racist that the government of France fined her over it. She basically called the entire #MeToo movement bullshit. She called queer folks “fairground freaks” and blamed the destruction of French culture on the gays (as if French culture isn’t already, by definition, pretty gay). That last point is probably the most important to note, as Ms. Bardot has become something of an unwilling lesbian icon thanks to the aforementioned Chappell Roan.
In the opening lines of her song “Red Wine Supernova,” Chappell croons “She was a playboy, Brigitte Bardot,” paying homage to the cinema legend’s exquisite looks. Obviously, it’s a shallow reference that doesn’t address the fact that Brigitte would flick her nose at the kind of fairground freakiness Chappell gets up to. Nobody really took issue with the throwaway line initially — it was understood that Brigitte’s name was simply used as shorthand for the kind of glamour that only existed in a bygone era. She could easily have used Marilyn Monroe, or Greta Garbo, or Jayne Mansfield, or even Elizabeth Taylor, as a certain other frequently sequined starlet recently did. But “Brigitte Bardot” just fit the rhyme scheme better, and as a bonus, Chappell gets to put on a sexy lil French accent when she says it. Everybody wins!
But then, this happened.
To be fair, Brigitte would hate this for herself.
If my Threads and Reddit feeds were anything to judge by, the Pink Ponies (Is that what we’re calling Chappell Roan fans?) were livid at the sight of the tribute, which entirely glossed over Brigitte Bardot’s checkered legacy. To be fair, a little while later, she’d post this:
To a lot of folks I encountered online, though, the damage had been done. Her reputation had already recently taken a hit from partnering with MAC Cosmetics, a company that notably supports Israel, after she famously passed on a White House performance over Palestine. But eulogizing a certifiable asshole was a step too far, and Chappell had been officially…cancelled.
We cancel a lot of people. Taylor Swift, who I alluded to earlier, even wrote a catchy ass villain song about it. Sometimes, the cancellation is justified. For example, Bill Cosby? Pretty fucking justified if you ask me — I can’t see a situation in which it would ever be acceptable to name-drop him as anything other than a predator and creep. Same with guys like Diddy and the absolute monster from Lostprophets. As the intro to that one Law and Order spinoff says, sexually charged crimes are especially heinous and should be weighed as such when considering uncancelling someone. But take, for example, Snoop Dogg, who recently came under fire for some questionable remarks regarding same-sex relationships in media. Is it time we retire “Gin and Juice” as a feel-good anthem forever?
We still got this bluegrass cover!
But here’s the thing — Snoop apologized. And he acknowledged he is still learning. In fact, I’d say his apology was damn near spot-on: “Teach me how to learn,” he said in his statement. “I’m not perfect.”
There’s the difference. That’s what separates the rightfully cancelled from the flawed human beings who sincerely want to do better. It’s right there — that self-awareness that you are imperfect, and that willingness to improve. That the secret. It’s completely understandable to want to hold people accountable. That’s the only way advancements will happen in society. But we can’t keep pushing away potential allies for every transgression. We’ll always stay divided.
I think very few people are beyond redemption. Honestly, if Kanye and Nicki wanted to have a massive heel-face turn and walk away from the right-wing grift, I’d welcome them back with open arms, and not just because I want to listen to the indisputable banger that is “Monster” guilt-free again. But they’d need to show some remorse. Grace should be given freely and abundantly, but the person receiving that grace needs to be legitimately sorry for what they did too. It’s a two-way street.
I think the folks trying to cancel Chappell for her Bardot post don’t realize they’re shooting us in the foot by dividing us further. We already don’t trust each other as a society and we’re falling deeper and deeper into isolation. Community is scarce, and there really is an epidemic of loneliness wreaking havoc on our society. What we need now isn’t some puritanical litmus test. We don’t need a “perfect ally” — we just need folks who are willing to stand up for us, and sometimes those folks aren’t perfect.
It’s funny, just this evening I got into a verbal tussle on that godforsaken social media site we all know and hate over whether or not “rest in power” was an appropriate phrase to say in remembrance of a white person. Never mind that said white person, Renee Good, was oppressed in other ways (being queer and a woman, for example) and was literally killed by her oppressor. This person, who I imagine had good intentions, maintained that the phrase can only be used for people of color. That is the kind of over-the-top policing that hardens hearts. How does that black-and-white mentality make us any different from the conservative evangelicals who dictate that we have to do x, y, and z to be saved?
I’m not saying we shouldn’t call people out for egregious screw-ups, or even smaller transgressions that maybe came across wrong (Chappell’s memorial post is a great example), but there needs to be some grace delivered alongside the message. Otherwise, we’re going to cancel each other into the fucking ground. We need to begin viewing each other as people again — beautiful, deeply flawed, and capable of change.
JESSA JOYCE 
