a sonic photograph of falling in love

kind and honest eyes, the bittersweetness of loving someone, and hearing someone sing in the kitchen

I am writing this with my seven week old son sleeping on my chest, my arms crammed beneath him at an angle where I can peck this out on my computer keyboard, the ever-so-slightly paler autumn light streaming in through the picture window. I have a new song out today called Kind and Honest. It’s a sonic photograph of falling in love.

I love the simplicity of this song—I love the gratitude it makes me feel for feeling the essence of a person. For seeing them in their eyes, for the mind movies we play to remember them when they’re somewhere else. We shift and change and so does love, and our songs and love letters are just memorials—snapshots of moments in time. Loving someone is bittersweet, it’s dark chocolate, it’s vinegar, it’s the sun setting just below the tree line, it’s always flowing like water through your fingers and you can’t hold onto it. That’s what makes it so gorgeous.

I read a piece of writing today by Joy Sullivan, a truly heartbreaking poet, that stopped me in my tracks.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the world into which my husband and I brought this baby. (Kind and Honest is about the man I created this being with) I don’t know exactly what I’m going to teach him about college, career, politics, owning a home, the economy, or the future. Everything feels insane—perhaps reality, or perhaps reality with a hefty dose of hypernormalization. At any rate, I seem to have been hearing the electrician singing in the kitchen, because here he is. Seemingly against all odds, we keep falling in love, dreaming of the future, and sometimes even having babies.

Kind and Honest is a quiet celebration of this. The ruthless passage of time gives birth to memories we come back to again and again—a child looking down at us from a tree—swallows in murmuration—someone’s eyes, flickering in our memory like a memorial. I hope you enjoy it.

XO,

Audrey

six packs of coke & sneak watching TRL

or, just how long I've loved Alanis' song 'Thank U' and why I decided to cover it

TL;DR

I released a cover of Alanis Morissette’s ‘Thank U’ and you can hear it here!

In 1998, I was fifteen and covered in zits, probably due to the fact that I used to frequently split six packs of coke and full boxes of Entenmann’s chocolate covered donuts with my best friend at our sleepovers—this functioned almost like an evangelical kid’s substitute for booger sugar. Our trash binge kept us up til all hours as we wrote and rewrote ‘The List’ of what we were looking for in a husband. This list contained things such as ‘has nice eyes but doesn’t seem to know it,’ and ‘attempts unsuccessfully to bring me breakfast in bed, but looks cute failing.’ 🤔 Your guess is as good as mine as to why that second one in particular made the cut, tbh.

Sometimes in those days of caffeine-fueled idealism I would try to sneak down to our cold, dark basement to watch TRL. (sorry, mom & dad. or maybe you knew?) I wasn’t an idiot, so I always had my index finger poised and hovering over the ‘last’ button on the remote to navigate quickly over to the Food Network if I happened to hear footsteps in the kitchen above me. IYKYK. I’d say I was a reasonably sheltered kid. I’d never so much as watched Clueless or the Smurfs, but thanks to the magic of cable television, I *had* snuck glimpses of all sorts of off-limits music videos, from Rammstein’s Du Hast to Marcy Playground’s Sex & Candy to Korn’s Follow The Leader. Scandalous.

One day a video came on where Alanis Morissette walked around naked in a bustling city, seemingly attempting to connect emotionally with strangers. Her long, wavy brown hair flowed down her body, covering her boobs, only sort of. Her lady cave was blurred out just enough to make it safe for television. A, I was awestruck by this, because at this point I had never so much as seen The Breakfast Club, so even a blurry naked body on television was a lot to take in for me tbh. I did already know Alanis’ music somewhat. I mean who among us in that era, even MTV-starved little Plymouth Brethren kids, could possibly have escaped hearing Jagged Little Pill? I probably first heard Ironic playing over the sh*tty little ceiling speakers in the ceiling of the CVS in our tiny New Jersey town, honestly. But Thank U was new to me, and after the initial shock of seeing Alanis mostly naked wore off, I remember thinking that she sort of looked like the pictures I’d seen of Eve in my childhood Sunday School coloring sheets, and yes I absolutely practiced telling my mom that in my head in case she ever caught me watching the video. 🤣

I’m not gonna lie to you, the nakedness did leave quite an impression on young and incredibly easy-to-scandalize teenage me. But what ultimately stuck with me about the song was its profound and life-interrupting lyrics, which have never quite left my mind since. I don’t want to be too specific or long-winded here about what these lyrics have come to mean to me personally, because I don’t want to risk dulling their time honored and semi-sacred shine for myself. But I will tell you that, even as a devout and pious evangelical kid who couldn’t quite yet hang with the expansive language of this late 90s gem, something about the song’s message of returning to the center of things really spoke to me even then, there in my parents’ jade-green-carpeted, wood-paneled, cool dark basement. I could feel what she was speaking of, even if I couldn’t yet understand it. That’s the power of great songwriting, and incidentally, it still floors me that Alanis wrote this when she was something like twenty two years old! When I was twenty two, I was pretty much the TEMU version of Jane Austen, writing many angst-riddled, flowery entries in my journal about young men who I thought of as perfect husband material but who didn’t even have any idea I existed, so…yeah. Color me impressed, Alanis.

As I’ve had such a long and deep relationship to this one, covering it felt a little scary. I wanted to pay tribute to it and yet transform it. I’ve even made several attempts to begin covers of it over the years, but thankfully none of those versions came into being. Because this year,  Jeremi Clive came along and truly helped me crack the code. I couldn’t be prouder or more thankful to share this version with you. It’s introspective and sparkling and trulymadlydeeply special to me. (My fellow ~*MiLlEnIaLs*~, do u c what I did there) 

Thank you Alanis (and India, and terror, and disillusionment, etc) for the chance to encounter and interpret this meaningful, gorgeous song. 

If you’ve never read the lyrics or listened to them deeply as they’ve passed you by in the original song, here they are: if they inspire any thoughts in you, I’d love to read your comment. <3

How 'bout getting off of these antibiotics?
How 'bout stopping eating when I'm full up?
How 'bout them transparent dangling carrots?
How 'bout that ever-elusive kudo?

Thank you, India
Thank you, terror
Thank you, disillusionment
Thank you, frailty
Thank you, consequence
Thank you, thank you, silence

How 'bout me not blaming you for everything?
How 'bout me enjoying the moment for once?
How 'bout how good it feels to finally forgive you?
How 'bout grieving it all one at a time?

Thank you, India
Thank you, terror
Thank you, disillusionment
Thank you, frailty
Thank you, consequence
Thank you, thank you, silence

The moment I let go of it
Was the moment I got more than I could handle
The moment I jumped off of it
Was the moment I touched down

How 'bout no longer being masochistic?
How 'bout remembering your divinity?
How 'bout unabashedly bawling your eyes out?
How 'bout not equating death with stopping?

Thank you, India
Thank you, providence
Thank you, disillusionment
Thank you, nothingness
Thank you, clarity
Thank you, thank you, silence

Thank U, my new Alanis cover, is out now!

plus, what happens when everybody's selling and nobody's buying?

new song, Thank U, out now <3 here’s a little preview.

You might be wondering why I’m singing to you from inside a bottle. Well…sometimes I feel like Instagram / TikTok etc have gotten to be like a small town where everybody and their mother signs up to be a salesperson for a multilevel marketing program. A quick scroll through my own IG feed shows a bunch of really sincere people passionately trying to sell their courses and products and music and art and coaching—is it just me, or is everybody selling while nobody’s buying these days? 

Thank U wasn’t written about this conundrum — first of all, it’s from 1998. Our sweet little baby hearts didn’t even know what Instagram sales funnels were back then. Secondly, Alanis seems to have written it about gratitude, surrender, and keeping an open spiritual mind — all things I have been learning about in my own life. 

But marketing things aimed at spreading messages like this, via music or otherwise, has just gotten plain weird at this point. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube have become personalized, open-24/7, virtual ideology shopping centers — each of us are wandering a giant virtual mega mall tailored very specifically to our own aspirations, ideals, curiosities, and beliefs. 

I get so exhausted of feeling like I’m always selling something or being sold something. I long for open-hearted sharing that doesn’t end in a hook. It’s gotten to the point for me that if I happen to be scrolling through socials and I see a (probably very sincere, earnest) human being with their eyes closed and a hand on their chest, breathing, I just keep on moving because I’m 99% sure they’re going to end their video with ‘comment ‘breathe’ to receive a free stress reduction / breath work training’, which itself will of course be a sales funnel into a full online course purchase. 

This whole phenomenon of personal and professional work blurring together is kinda f***ing crazy in the first place anyway, isn’t it? Late stage capitalism seems to have turned us into little hungry rat people, trying desperately to make livings off our passions and/or beliefs because we have gotten (rightfully!) sick of working our whole lives to support the profits and greed of huge corporations — so we take what could otherwise be really rewarding practices and hobbies in our personal worlds and we try to package them into salable things so we can ‘work for ourselves’—only to find ourselves bowing and scraping before the algorithmic gods. (Which, may I remind us all, are owned, built, operated, and capitalized on by the same huge corporations we quit working for in the first place.) Content creators and online artists haven’t really escaped the system at all. We’re still participating and perpetuating them from the comfort of our own couches.

I’ve done all of this myself. I’ve marketed courses and seminars, and I market music still — and the older I get, the more that I live, I feel more and more uncomfortable with the whole lot of it. On one hand, I’m so unutterably thankful that I can make a living doing something I love. I know a lot of people would really love to figure out a way to do that and haven’t yet been able to, and the privilege I enjoy in that regard is not lost on me. On the other, the sales and marketing grind that it takes to help me make a living at being a musical artist is making it alarmingly easy to…well, to love it less. 

And when you intersect selling music with themes of *healing?* Woof. (Shoutout, by the way, to @healingfromhealing, one of the only accounts on Instagram that makes it feel worth logging on for me anymore. They hold mirrors up to the spiritual and esoteric trends of our time. (and usually it’s funny) What I appreciate most about their content is that they are not outright denying the validity of all spiritual experience, or making blanket statements about all spiritual practices; rather, they’re successfully highlighting just how complex and strange the intersection of spirituality, pop culture, tech, and money has gotten—and how worth examining it is.)

I drift around an online world that’s stuffed so side-splittingly full of sales funnels, it can get to feeling like I’m just caught in a never-ending giant labyrinth of spiritual / creative pitches and bids for my money and my attention—and that is what I’m scrolling before bed and when I wake up in the morning.

As I am neither rich nor determined enough to make like Wendell Berry and eject myself entirely from city life and social media and the systems that keep us here, I hope to at least put out content that acknowledges this burnout and exhaustion, which I’m certain is very real for a lot of us. 

And that’s a little context as to why I’m singing to you from inside some prescription bottles in the video we just put out. 😂

Thank U is out now. I hope you can hear how much these words mean to me. They feel like some kind of an antidote to all of this. Even if I have to sell you on listening to the song. #priorities

Feel It All

or, the unbelievable oddity that is watching strangers crying on Instagram

“Feel It All” is out now.

I find myself wanting to organize my emotions like flatware; disappointment and grief and joy and excitement all in their little separate compartments so I can pick up the ones I want to feel and leave the ones I do not sitting there in the drawer. It does not work, yet for some reason I still want to try. Maybe *this* time it will work, I keep thinking. But it never, ever does.

As an elite-level and experienced emotional avoidance athlete, I am now easily able to construct elaborate scaffolds of ego, shame, distraction, people pleasing, scrolling, overfunctioning, underachieving, overspending, binging, and more. I would never posit that avoiding my feelings is the singular root cause of any of these issues, but what I *am* saying is that ‘feeling it all’ isn’t always my favorite option; and when I DO want to avoid whatever it is I might be feeling, I have many, many coping mechanisms available to help myself do just that. 

Suspect #1? Instagram. What makes Instagram the best example of this for me is that it is a strange and terrifying funhouse of weird mirrors; it makes it all too possible for me to live passively and vicariously through the experiences or thoughts of other people (or even worse, through my judgments of them) and somehow I am able to convince myself that I have done something with that time. Let’s take the other day as an example. I wake up, immediately reach for my phone, flick open the app and suddenly I am watching a video of a young woman crying in her car, holding the phone, saying she’d like to ‘share what’s real, and not just the highlights.’ At the end of her heartfelt and verbose caption about feelings: ‘comment ‘_____’ down below to receive more information on my course about feeling it all.’ 

I don’t know this woman, and I don’t know what she is going through; but I know that in an age branded by the phrase ‘authenticity is king,’ laying in bed casually watching a stranger weeping in her car feels voyeuristic and uncomfortable. I was just sleeping, but now I am suddenly a peeping Tom, looking in the window from the metaphorical back yard on a moment which certainly may have been extremely real for her. Somewhere between the part where she felt the crying jag coming on and the part where she picked up her phone to record it, what was going through her mind? We are all seemingly caught in this labyrinthine maze of capitalistic authenticity. If we are not selling our bodies for labor, we are often selling our inner worlds instead. That video was both a journal entry and an advertisement—a sales pitch for a course, along with being a vulnerable revelation of her inner world. What a complicated intersection of conundrums and dissonances and needs and passions all this is. 

Anyway, all that thinking about a stranger’s motivations and psyche first thing in the morning when I never would have encountered her had I just risen from bed and made a coffee and taken some time to think about my day…that’s just one of the expert ways I have of avoiding feeling it all (while also finding a code for an online course about feeling it all.) 

I fully recognize and acknowledge the inescapable irony in this. I am here, blogging about feeling it all in the first place, because this is all my very long winded way of telling I have a song out today called … you probably guessed it … ‘Feel It All.’ 

I save my long-windedness for this platform because it’s an essayist’s platform in the first place, but in light of all this—what am I even going to say on Instagram to promote this one? Should I post a crying in the car video??? Let me know in the comments. 🤣

Hope you enjoy. I started this as a song of affection for a loved one and, as it often goes, found that I needed its message just as much or more. From my heart, I hope it feels like a hand held out to you too.

xoxo

Audrey

PS. as ever, it’s massively helpful if you share this newsletter, my social posts, or just the song in a text to a loved one. To make it simple for you, here’s a link you can copy and paste: https://ffm.to/feelitall

Your support means so much and I do not take it for granted.

Fallout, despair, and looking for the good stuff.

plus, new music coming very soon.

Firstly, I’ve got another new single coming out June 14 called ‘Feel It All,’ and you can pre-save it by clicking on the cover art. <3

If you haven’t heard Hope You Know It (or any of the rest of the other songs I’ve released lately, for that matter) you can click on the cover art below to find them!

Okay—now let’s talk about Fallout please.

Have you seen it? I’m not much of a gamer so I had no familiarity with the game that inspired the (apparently record-smashing) Amazon hit series, but…ask me how much I love Walton Goggins and you’ll get some version of a real life heart eyes emoji, so I had to at least give it a two-episode college try. I was a little shocked by what I saw, since I went into it knowing next to nothing, and those of you who have seen it will probably understand why—it’s more than a little bit brutal at times, and the premise is certainly bleak af. (Don’t worry, no spoilers here, beyond laying out the premise of the show which is explored in episode 1)

Fallout is set in a fictitious (but realistic) 1950s California town at the height of nuclear war panic; Walton Goggins plays a flourishing movie and tv star who’s been hired to shill for a prominent nuclear vault technology company (ever-so-creatively named ‘Vault-Tec’). His wife is an executive at said company, and naturally, the intersection of commerce and war panic and marriage is full of … shall we say, surprises.

When the worst happens, some people go into their vaults (mainly privileged/rich people, naturally) and others are left to survive the…you guessed it…fallout. The show explores what happens when people eventually emerge from the vaults several hundred years later and begin to interact with the hardened, desolate world of survivors. Walton Goggins plays the former movie star turned ‘The Ghoul’, and I’ll let you go ahead and google that rather than reveal anything about his character here.

Anyway, anyway, anyway…why am I writing about all this? Well, I’ve been finding myself feeling a little more contemplative lately about the state of the world and its systems and governments, as well as about my place in all of it. Fallout may or may not have been meant as a catalyst to that type of thought, but I like to think there was some intention put into it in that respect; if everything as we know it were to fall apart, who or what would we become? Who are we as a species *already*, while still living in the fever dream of these societal experiments? I well know that I am unable to fully divest myself from the systems that both help and harm me. I am typing this reflection on a keyboard attached to a computer whose technology wouldn’t be possible at this time without the sacrificing of children to hard slave labor (and death) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I am sitting in a house on land that was once tended by Cherokee, Yuchi, and Shawnee tribes and subsequently taken over and settled by force. I am a part of all of this. I cannot escape that, and no amount of righteous thinking or belief will absolve me. As a lifelong seeker of absolution, a longtime shame addict, and a dedicated pursuer of ‘doing the right thing,’ my complicity in the reality of the world’s corruption and greed and violence has finally hit home.

The other side of this is — I also can see how little control I really have over any of it. My place of birth, my upbringing, and my privilege are all things I did not choose. I simply happened to be born here and not there, then and not now, to these people and not those people. And if I were to spend the rest of my life trying, I could never right a fraction of the wrongs in the world. All the rightness in the world, all the honesty about my own complicity in oppression, can’t save the world—or me.

Did you know that the reason Red Lobster is going out of business isn’t, as meme culture would have you believe, because they were tanked by their all-you-can-eat shrimp promotion? It’s at least partially because they were bought by a hedge fund company who, after purchasing what essentially amounted to the Applebee’s of seafood, began charging each franchise rent on the properties they now owned. I know there’s more to it than that, but the reality is that deals like this are going on all around us, all the time. From something as relatively innocuous as fast casual shrimp to the maniacal arms trading and profiteering going on via the Israeli government’s assault on Palestine; little old me and little old you are kind of just mayflies having our one day in the sun, while the systems keep on keepin’ on.

If you can’t tell, I haven’t felt much optimism lately. “Despair is the luxury of the privileged,” I have told myself until I’m blue in the face. But it’s begun to dawn on me that privilege is a spectrum, and although I do enjoy a LOT of privilege in this world I am not privileged ENOUGH to impact billionaires or global economies beyond whatever measly little boycotting or protesting or tweeting I might find myself compelled to do.

The back of history is pock-marked and littered with cysts of war, brutality, greed, and corruption. In many ways, none of this is new. That used to lend me a crumb of comfort, but these days, I just feel grieved. In the absence of belief in a planned-for future heaven where all these things are made right, I am left to deal with the fallout of what has been and the reality of what is—and the uncertainty of what is to come.

We all have things we say to ourselves at the end of the day to help ourselves fall asleep. For some, it’s “when I die, hallelujah, by and by, I’ll fly away,” and for others it’s something more akin to Cormac McCarthy’s “the point is there ain't no point.” These ideas, opposing though they may be, seem to me to be little more than pacifiers to put ourselves to bed with. Neither of them is provable. Neither of them is ultimately knowable. And yet…we all have to make our peace with things — and ourselves — somehow. So if I sort of imagine that these ‘pacifiers’ are less like ‘silly little implementations of comfort’ and more like ‘methods of making peace with it all’, I find myself feeling a little more free to figure out what my pacifier is. Because gosh dammit, I still need sleep. And whatever the harsh realities of the world may be, I’d like to continue showing up for my family, my friends, and myself.

One thing I’ve been doing to (successfully, I might add) keep myself from succumbing to despair is following the oft-suggested and at this point, cliché, advice of one Mr. Fred Rogers—looking for the helpers. That phrase may be imperfect, but it reminds me that maybe keeping my mental lens zoomed out so far isn’t helping my emotional health very much. I do look around and see that people everywhere are committing random acts of kindness every day — that there are humans putting themselves in positions to help where they can, who they can, and how they can. And maybe if I spend a little time focusing on them, I can spend a little less time focusing on how terrible everything is. Hope, for me, is a choice—an act. It’s certainly not a feeling.

In that spirit, I wanted to share a few good things with you that I’ve seen lately.

The Camps Breakerz Crew have spent 20 years bringing hip-hop and breakdancing culture to the Gaza strip, offering psychological relief to children growing up in war through movement and dance.

Glennon Doyle’s nonprofit Together Rising has raised over a million dollars to send in aid to Gazans, via the local feeding work of Anera.

Ruthie Lindsey is doing a free online event on Thursday, May 23 for women who want to cease to define themselves by shame and suffering. If that sounds like you or someone you know, you can find more information here.

Tim Letts donated a kidney to one of his Uber passengers.

If you have any good news to report, please feel free to share your comments (along with any thoughts on this topic, as always.)

Hope you’re all staying well out there.

xo,

Audrey