More live shows coming in 2026!

Opening for The Village Bicycle on April 4th at the Little Rose in Cleveland!

I fully intend to book more live shows coming up in 2026, but I have to admit I might be getting in my own way a bit... I've been dragging my feet on making a demo reel to actually show to venues so they can book me... In my head, it seems like nothing I've done is quite good enough. I've taken multiple full videos of my show, but I feel like for one reason or another none of them is quite good enough. I know this is somewhat self defeating, but I do believe that being your own worst critic is also a strength. Once I get my stuff set up to start rehearsing for my show in April, I will make more recordings and try again to make a demo reel that I'm satisfied with. Perhaps updates on this will make their way to my Patreon? 👀

In other news, I've been recording again this week and last week. I had a somewhat strange experience that suddenly brought a ton of eyes to a piece of music I was in the process of writing... and for the first time it felt like the project wasn't entirely my own- it felt like someone else in the world had some stake in it, like someone else wanted to like whatever it was I was making, so I have some obligation to complete the thing and actually make it good.

I know my process much better now. I feel like I have a much more of a solid understanding of the steps in the recording process. It used to feel like a complete mystery what should come next and how to land the massive unwieldly undefined transformer spaceship that a song can feel like. But now that I've had the experience of carrying an album of songs all the way to completion, I feel much more aware of what should be happening at each step, and what kinds of things can/will happen in the later phases of production.

I've grown a lot as a songwriter since my first album. When I'm writing a song I try to analyze it through three or four lenses simultaneously. Usually those lenses end up being Love/relationships, politics/the broader world, gender/queerness, and art/artmaking.

I've started to see myself as a very slow songwriter. I appreciate having lots of time to make edits and fine-tune a song till it feels just right. Sometimes that takes months. In a sense, I get to be my own collaborator, working with my past self to clarify and edit the raw material that felt foreign to me back when I first started writing it. If a song speaks to me in both the past and the present, I generally believe that means it has some staying power.

I'm never sure if anyone is looking at me or the stuff I make, but the last two weeks have made it abundantly clear that people can see what I'm doing if I put the work in the right places... and they might even like it if they do see it. It feels weird to have eyes on the things I've been doing in the dark for so long, but that's also kinda the point, isn't it? I remember Remi Wolf at one of her first bigger shows in columbus in 2022 said something like "-without you all, I'm just working in the kitchen with no one to feed." I have to trust that if I truly endeavor to make art that speaks to my human experience, there might be an audience of humans who feel the same way. "Artist exist to help people live their lives", after all. The work I do to process my thoughts and feelings into something clarified and experiential... It's not nothing. Whether I'm conscious of it or not, it's not just for me.