Better

Or, how I'm almost 40 and 'what do you want' has been the hardest question for me to answer.

Happy Monday. (Let it be so.)

I wanted to share a little bit about the process of making this album with you. I’ve been wanting to share sneak peeks and document the process more, but it’s felt tricky to do so because, well…I don’t think I was prepared for how foggy and confusing and sticky and frightening it would feel to begin to not only imagine another way to have a music career, but to actually set out to *enact* it. I have been walking through my own Pilgrim’s Progress, I feel like; and I think I got stuck in the Slough of Despond for rather longer than I could possibly have predicted. I’ve found myself keeping the process very close so as to protect what’s been truly vulnerable and personal about it long enough for me to actually go through it on my own. It can be tempting to slap my experiences up on a projector to try to feel less alone in them, and sometimes that’s helpful, but in this case it didn’t feel right. Now that some of the intensity and frustration of the experience have subsided, I feel better about sharing it publicly.

Before I do, though; here is a gentle reminder that there are only 13 days left before my first songwriting clinic of the season on Feb 18. Have you cheked it out yet? There are three, and you can either come to one or all three (they’re all a bit different) and if you come to all three there’s a bit of a discount. You can find all that info (including ticket links) here if you’d like to know more.

I am also offering 1-1 songwriting mentorships starting in March. I have one person signed up and three spots left. <3 Click here to find out about this.

Okay, commercials are over, and now back to the blog.

Two years ago, in March 2021, I tried to make an album. It is a long story not worth going into, but in the end I spent $30k and came out with absolutely nothing I wanted to use; in retrospect I can see that this was rather wholly and entirely because I didn’t really know what I wanted or what kind of artist I was anymore. That confusion was reflected in the entire experience—the selection the way I set up the studio and with whom, the process I tried to outline for us to all work together, the goal setting (or lack thereof) and, to my great consternation, my feeling of utter and complete confusion anytime the team was looking to me for what to do. It was humbling, it was sad, it was scary, and it was very, very frustrating. For better or worse, though, it launched me into a discovery process out of which I am only now feeling myself emerging. And wow, have I come out with some gold from the mines. (Mainly in the form of new songs that I couldn’t be prouder of or more moved by.)  

Even now it’s hard to detail what exactly happened here. I think maybe it’s safe to say that a perfect storm arose to bring me to my knees—a storm made up of my fears about the future, my inhibitions in the now, and all the old, old stories in my own mind about ‘who I am’. Just about all of those stories had been there all along behind the scenes and I think maybe in my late thirties I was just finally getting brave enough to face them. The one that has seemed to die hardest, the one I have spend the last two years communing with (and, let’s be honest, trying to suffocate), is ye olde people pleasing standby “I am not enough.” What do I mean by this here, in this context? I mean that I felt this unbelievably all consuming pressure to be whatever and whoever ‘they’ wanted me to be—whoever ‘they’ were. Sometimes ‘they’ were a vague mass of disappointed faces I imagined to be waiting for me inside my own audience. Sometimes ‘they’ were the people along the way who have communicated to me that I am sub-par in beauty, intelligence, self-awareness, or character. Sometimes ‘they’ were just an indiscernible dark grey blob of inner voices. Whoever ‘they’ were, I had a hard time disobeying what they had to say—or, more accurately, what I imagined they would have to say.

image by Jeremy Cowart

It all felt like walking through a thick waist-high mud, pleasing nobody in particular and feeling no permission to move forward into what I wanted. In fact, when someone (like my partner, my co-producer on this album, for example) would ask me what I wanted, my mind would go completely blank. I could only stutter, ‘I … I … I don’t know.’ I felt completely paralyzed. I didn’t even know how to ask myself the question ‘what do I want’, because often it would be followed by thoughts that went something like this; “I? Who am I to want anything? How do I know if I want things because I want them, or because I think I’m supposed to want them? How do I know if what I want is actually what I want? Is desire a complex algorithmic calculation of my influences, my nurture, my nature, and my own ego’s projection of who I am? *What do I want?* What kind of question is that?!” Fun stuff. 

My inner critic was throwing a rager, too. Thoughts like “You’re a washed up, has-been, wannabe artist with nothing of value to create, and nothing to add to the world; and in fact, you always have been. This is just you realizing what everybody else already knows” and “face it—bitch you suck” became daily onslaughts. Making music stopped feeling fun and started feeling like an emotional/mental/spiritual gauntlet. I was easily triggered and really, really worried and bummed out and in my head.

Looking back, it seems to me like maybe the stress and fear of making a huge transition like the one I am making in work and in life brought on some kind of an OCD flare. However I do or don’t label it, what I know is that simple questions like ‘what do you want’ became inner minefields of existential proportions, and I couldn’t make many decisions about anything, small or large. 

Some examples of questions I found myself unable to answer:

What did I want this album to sound like? What did I want it to say? What did I want it to look like visually? What did I want to communicate to the people who used to listen to me but weren’t sure now? What kind of audience did I want to build today? Did I want to use my name or a new name? How did I want to approach social media? What were my creative principles and why? What kind of career did I want to have in 2 years, 5 years, 10 years?

…and so on, and so forth.

Whilst wandering around, verklempt, in this fog of unknowing, I was also experiencing scary financial shifts; half my income (touring) was gone overnight at the start of 2020 due to the pandemic. Then, as news of my personal shifts started to spread through my fanbase, my streaming revenue took a 30% downturn. I had a bunch of business and personal credit card debt from my divorce and moving out on my own for the first time and trying to stay afloat during the lockdowns. I didn’t know what to expect in moving forward with new music, and that terrified me too. What if I put something authentic and real out that tanked my entire business? What if I told the truth and it cost me everything I had built? I just felt absolutely and completely paralyzed. I wanted to punch Anna from Frozen in the face every time I heard her sing about doing ‘the next right thing’ because WHAT THE F*** WAS THE NEXT RIGHT THING, ANNA? IT’S EASY FOR YOU TO SAY. YOU’RE A F***ING CARTOON CHARACTER. SOMEBODY DREW YOU. WELL WHO’S DRAWING ME? DO YOU THINK I F***ING KNOW? THE NEXT RIGHT THING IS AN ILLUSION AND I AM ENTIRELY ALONE AND NOTHING WILL EVER CHANGE THAT. (No offense, Kristen Bell, you were incredible and that’s a great song.)

So how did I find myself here, with 5 songs done and 11 more in process, and a heart / mind full of fresh energy for the now—with plans for the future, with a chosen path, with a deep knowing that I *always* have a choice and that what I want deeply matters? 

If I could bottle this process and sell it, I wouldn’t; it’s precisely this sort of painful and maddening process that takes us all to deeper relationship with ourselves. In this case I found myself re-evaluating my relationship to self and my relationship to creativity at what felt like a fundamental level; and I could only get down there to the inner chambers by descending through every last layer of whatever lay stacked on top of them. I can’t bottle it and sell it, but I can write about it. Whatever that does or doesn’t do for someone else is out of my hands.

Somewhere along the way in life I seemed to have picked up and agreed with the message that Someone Else was going to have to save me—from hell, from myself, from ____________ (fill in the blank)—that Someone Else would lead me, guide me, direct me, call me good, call me beautiful, call me worthy of love, alert me to my purpose, and give me what I needed to accomplish it. I farmed this responsibility out so early and so often that I don’t even remember a time where the Someone Else was me. I don’t mean to imply that I am God. I do, however, mean to say that, whatever God is or isn’t, I believe it exists potently in all beings; and I believe that includes me. I am discovering my own portal of access to that which connects us all—and, for the first time I am honoring it as sacred; that is to say, what I want and what I believe are not NPCs in my life—they are deeply and profoundly influential in my values, in my choices, in my life’s purpose, and in my art.

I finally seemed to accept this somewhere near the end of 2022 or the beginning of 2023. I honestly can’t pinpoint a moment or a day where it happened, or refer to a mystical experience. I just know that there was a day a few weeks ago where I sensed a difference all of a sudden. I couldn’t be sure if it had only just arrived or if it had been slowly creeping in for a while; but I knew I felt like all of a sudden my mind was a little quieter, and my heart was a little more content. I listened to the songs I’d been working on with my partner-and-collaborator-in-multiple-life-arenas-including-music, and all of a sudden I could see the through lines, I could sense the connections between the songs, I could sense myself in them. I’ve not perhaps been the most adventurous artist out there in the past; though it could maybe be argued that “for Christian music” I was a little bit exploratory / left of center. However, out here in the rest of the wide world, my creativity level could safely be termed ‘vanilla’. Don’t get me wrong, I love vanilla. It’s my favorite ice cream flavor. But there’s a reason I like to put sea salted kettle chips and dark chocolate sauce on it — for me, vanilla ice cream is almost perfect, but it is missing the roasted depth of cacao and the quiet, earthy tang of salt. And yes, I’m going to make a cheesy analogy right now out of this, dammit. The new music I’m working on is me putting sea salted kettle chips and dark chocolate sauce on the vanilla ice cream of my art. 

For a while there I was so afraid to make any new music that reflected the “me” that I was, because I worried it would render me unrecognizable to the people who had been listening for so long. Well, here’s the thing; it just might do that. So in order to move through my fears and into choices/action, first I had to realize that other peoples’ opinions of me are not very important when it comes to my own desires and personal / creative decisions. Then I had to actually go through a process of finding out what kind of artist I was now, not ten years ago, trying new and challenging things, and confronting all my own artistic and creative insecurities for the first time because I wasn’t letting the opinions of others be my boss (insert snotty noses, swollen eyes, and many, many crying jags in the bathtub). And then I had to make decisions to either accept or change whatever it was that I discovered in that process. 

All this has felt a bit brutal at times, I’ll be honest. I am not going to say that I have always ‘handled it well’ or that I have had a good / easy time bending in the winds of change. I haven’t. I have resisted and I have stayed stuck and I have pouted and I have wanted to give up and I have given up and I have woken up and I have tried again and again and again. And all of a sudden it’s like…it’s working. Imagine that. I feel so contented with all of it now, because I can see how fruitful and how needed this adorable little mid-life-dissolution has been. 

I truly cannot WAIT to share these songs with you. It’s kiiiinda making me feel like I’m crawling out of my skin not to, tbh. But I’m only holding out just long enough to present them as beautifully and curiously and strikingly as I can. I’m close. It’s coming. I can’t wait. :) I don’t know what will happen, and I’m finally okay with that, maybe because I’m working diligently and consciously to do it all with as much clarity of intention as possible. I know what matters to me as an artist, I know what I want to do and (roughly) where I am trying to go. The rest is up to ______________. (Fill in the blank) 

Can I ask you something? It feels vulnerable to ask this. I do feel concern sometimes about how it will go when the music comes out. When you hear it, if you like it, will you tell your friends? I’m so weary of trying to hack social platforms to get the word out about new things. I’ll keep doing it as creatively, curiously, and lightheartedly as I can—but if you like the new songs when I release them, or if you don’t like them but think you know someone who would—just telling somebody and shooting them a link would mean more to me than almost anything. Thank you. And please always feel free to share my social posts, this blog, etc. — I know the world is bombarded with commercials from every direction, so anytime somebody shares something of mine I practice and feel such gratitude.

For now, here are some new lyrics that I want to leave with you, from a song I am so excited to share very soon called ‘Better.’

Until next time,

Audrey

Better

I used to run when it might hurt

I used to lay there waiting for a savior

Pushing it down so I couldn’t feel what needed to heal

Now I just know better

I used to say yes when I meant no

I used to stay there when I wanted to go

I was an island so I could see that it was just me

Now I just know better