The Creative Independent

Songwriter and musician Yea-Ming Chen on giving yourself permission

2026-04-07T03:00:00-04:00

What advice do you have for people who want to build a life around making art?

My biggest advice is just to keep doing it. Despite anything. Despite any results. You’ll be disappointed sometimes, and sometimes you’ll be excited. Especially when you’re younger, you’ll see stars everywhere and get one big show and think, “Oh, this is it—I’m going straight to the top.” But when you’re older, you realize it goes up and down. You have high points and low points. One moment might be the highest you’ll ever be, and then things change again.

So my advice is to be grateful for every moment—every interaction, every chance you get to explore the joy of playing and doing the thing that you love. And also, not letting the disappointments bog you down. I still struggle with that. If a show doesn’t go well, or I make a mistake, I can crawl into a hole and not play for a while. But that’s pointless. You can grieve about it, but you have to keep going forward, especially if it’s something you love to do.

For a lot of us who pursue art, it’s not because we thought it would make us famous or bring us a lot of money. It’s because it’s the thing that makes us feel human. It gives us a sense of purpose. It pushes away loneliness and depression. It’s a survival thing. So, if that’s the case, then you just have to listen to that. Your body knows what you need to do.

Between your earlier records and the new album you’re finishing now, how has your songwriting process shifted?

I just finished working on a new Rumours record called Residue. When I started writing it, I felt a little bored with my usual habits. The Rumours has always been my lo-fi, folkier project—my place for the more sensitive songs. Ryli is where I rock out more and collaborate.

With this record I felt somewhat tapped out with the journeys I usually take, so I started experimenting with synthesized drums and beats just to see what would happen. When I get stuck, I like to give myself challenges. I’ll say, “Try to write a song that sounds like Mazzy Star,” or I’ll take a weird drum beat I’ve never written to before and see what happens. Sometimes the challenge itself opens a door.

When you look back at your albums, do they feel tied to specific emotional or life chapters?

Definitely. For example, So, Bird, which was the first Rumours record Dandy Boy put out, was absolutely my pandemic record. You can hear the isolation when you listen to it. I also had a three-month-old baby at the time, so there was this feeling of solitude and identity crisis in the music. I was parenting alone a lot during that time. It was really hard, but there was also something freeing about it. The world got quiet. There were no shows or gigs happening, and that removed a lot of pressure. I grew up being compared to other people constantly, so I always have this voice in my head that turns things into a competition. During the pandemic, that voice disappeared for a while because nothing was happening. It allowed me to just explore whatever I wanted to.

You said something in another interview that really stayed with me: that you think of yourself more as a songwriter than a musician. I was curious about that distinction.

Honestly, I think of myself more as a songwriter than a musician. I almost feel like being a musician is just the gateway that allows me to be a songwriter. Songwriting is the thing I care about the most. It’s where I’m trying to grasp a very specific feeling—jealousy, missing someone, toxicity, whatever it is—and turn it into something. To me, songwriting is basically poetry in music form. My favorite poems capture a small snippet of a feeling or moment but somehow make it feel huge and universal. That’s always what I’m striving for.

What do you do when you’re creatively stuck? I ask because I’ve noticed that for me, it’s often not a lack of ideas—it’s that I’ve drifted too far into promotion, logistics, or the administrative side of making things.

I’m stuck right now, actually. Usually when I’m stuck, it’s because I’ve forgotten to read. I haven’t been reading enough. So, one of my tricks is to go back to reading again. I also journal a lot and listen to a lot of music. When I’m promoting a record or dealing with the PR side of things, that tends to drain the creative energy out of me. Right now, I know that’s why I’m stuck—I’ve been working on the promotional side of the new record instead of doing the things that actually inspire me.

That makes sense to me. Sometimes promoting work on Instagram feels more like playing a strange little video game. What is your relationship with social media as an artist?

It’s terrible for me. I have a really distractible ADHD brain, so social media can easily swallow my entire day. I actually use an app that blocks Instagram except for certain windows: a few minutes in the morning, a few minutes at noon, and a little time in the evening. Sometimes I miss those windows, which is actually fine. When you release a record, you’re expected to be on social media constantly. Before I set those limits, I’d open Instagram and suddenly ten hours had passed. So now I schedule posts ahead of time and try to keep it contained.

As someone who’s been doing this for a long time, I’m curious how you define success now?

For me, success is feeling content. There’s the outward version of success—press, good shows, whatever—but those moments are never as good as the feeling of exploring an emotion and turning it into a song. When you manage to capture something inside yourself and make it tangible, that feels incredibly rewarding. I also love practicing. Even though I’ve said I don’t think of myself primarily as a musician, working on my craft and getting better technically makes me feel really happy. Those moments make me feel like I want to go through this life.

What does collaboration give you that working alone doesn’t?

Playing with other people is incredible. When you find a group of people you really gel with, the energy becomes bigger than yourself. That’s how it feels playing with Ryli. Those guys are incredibly talented, and it pushes me to keep up with them. When you have a great practice or a great show where everyone locks in together, it’s almost like an out-of-body experience. It’s kind of orgasmic.

You also teach music. How does teaching shape your creative life?

Teaching is actually how I make most of my income. I mostly teach piano to kids between seven and twelve, with a few adult students too. The nice thing about teaching is that it allows me to structure my day, so my mornings are free for creative work. I teach in the afternoons, which means I can spend the earlier part of the day writing or practicing. It also keeps me connected to music in a different way. I’m constantly reminding my students that mistakes aren’t the end of the world, and that music is about expression, not perfection. Of course, I still struggle with that myself.

Do you feel like people are seeing and hearing you differently now than when you were younger?

I remember being in my twenties and feeling like people were looking at me more than they were actually listening. It was like, “Oh, it’s a cute Asian girl playing guitar.” That was the vibe I felt from the room sometimes. And I’d be thinking, I’m actually really proud of this song. I worked hard on these words.

Do you feel like that’s changed as you’ve gotten older?

Yes, definitely. I do feel more respected now and more listened to. At the same time, I do think the music industry takes younger women seriously in a certain way—or maybe values them differently. There’s something about youth in music, especially for women, that gets rewarded. That part has always driven me crazy, because I feel like I’m so much better now. I’ve learned so much since I was twenty years old.

So yes, I think younger women are often given more attention by the industry, but in my actual experience, I feel like people are listening to me more now than they were then. When I was younger, I felt more like a novelty. Now I feel like the audience is actually hearing the music, and there’s a relief in that.

Do you feel disciplined in your creative life?

I’m a very scattered person, but I am serious. For a long time, I didn’t like admitting that. There’s this cultural pressure to seem effortless—like you’re naturally talented and everything just flows. But the truth is I work really hard behind the scenes. Sometimes I even hide that from friends or my partner. I’ll go home and practice for hours or work on a song idea and not really talk about it. I like getting better at what I do.

I kept thinking about your album title, I Can’t Have It All. A lot of women are taught that wanting too much—career, art, motherhood—is somehow selfish. Do you ever feel that tension yourself?

That’s something I’ve struggled with. When I think about having both Ryli and the Rumours, sometimes I still feel like, “Who said I’m allowed to have this?” Like I’m greedy for wanting two creative outlets while also being a mom. But then I remind myself that for so long I didn’t allow myself to pursue what I wanted because of the way I was raised. I internalized a lot of voices telling me what I wasn’t allowed to do. Now when I look back at the things I missed because of that, I think I deserve to have these things. I’m just catching up!

Yea-Ming Chen recommends:

Severance (TV show)—I’m a science fiction nut, and if you haven’t watched this yet, you are sleeping. Also, the theme song is epic.

A social media blocker app—The specific one I use is called Refocus, but there are tons available. I have my phone set up so that I can get onto Instagram from 9:00–9:30 AM, 12:00–12:30 PM, and 6:00–6:30 PM. It’s enough to get the dirty work done, but it stops me from scrolling until the cows come home.

Beta blockers for performance—They really just maintain a physical state of calm without any awful side effects. The good kind of nerves in your brain still exist to help you stay present and locked in.

Gardens—Gardens are like curated nature. I love being surrounded by plants and trees and flowers and feeling the presence of another person’s thoughtful process in putting the pieces together.

Games with friends—For introverts (or those on the cusp) who want to be around people but get overstimulated by multiple conversations happening at once, games are a perfect solution because everyone is focused on one thing. I think that’s why I like band practice.

Author and podcaster Caro Claire Burke on reconnecting with your ambition

2026-04-06T03:00:00-04:00

Your critically acclaimed debut novel, Yesteryear comes out in April. It’s also being made into a film starring Anne Hathaway. It’s about a contemporary trad wife that wakes up one morning in 1855. An excellent elevator pitch. Did you ever in your wildest dream imagine this amount of buzz for your first book?

God, no. I still don’t believe it. I sold the book in 2024 so it’s almost been two years, and it took me a year after selling it [to fully believe it]. I would wake up and check my email because I was so certain that it hadn’t happened. I was writing for a decade before this. I used to have dreams that a literary agent finally emailed me back. I would wake up and be like, “did I just make all of that up?” So no, not even in a million years…

How has your life changed and/or stayed the same since Yesteryear?

First and foremost, I get to write full time now. I think that’s the greatest privilege a writer can have. When I was writing Yesteryear, I would get up at five in the morning and work on it before work. And so being able to actually dedicate a full amount of time to creativity is crazy. I would say that’s the biggest outcome. And then I ended up with a team of people who really believe in my work, which I also think is a really big privilege. When you’re writing, sometimes before you sell a book and sometimes after, it can be really hard to maintain a sense of belief in yourself, like when you’re dealing with rejections from literary mags or from agents or from editors or whatever. Through the Yesteryear process, I now have a team who believe in me as a writer, and not just in Yesteryear. And that makes a big difference.

Were you always a writer? Would love to hear a bit about your journey to the page. Your creative origin story.

I was not always a writer. I enjoyed writing. I read and I wrote on the side, but I barely did any creative writing in college. I got a job at a startup. I wish I had journaled, because I would love to be able to go back in time. But when I was 23, I was just like, “I want to write a novel.” I became obsessed with it. Since then, it’s become the thing that I’ve been obsessed with. Depending on who you are, that might sound like a late onset or an early onset.

What was your relationship with creativity growing up? Was it something that felt available to you, or was it something you had to reach for?

I think that I always had an inclination towards fiction in particular. Sometimes I would write little short stories as a kid, but I was not aware that it could be something that you could do as a craft or that it could be a full-time job. I grew up in an area where most people became doctors or lawyers or went into business. Then I went to a prep school in New England, and then UVA. Ironically, UVA has a great MFA program and a great English program, but UVA also is a place with a lot of mainstream strivers, the kids who are going to go into consulting, kids who are going to law school. I thought I was prelaw for a while. I just didn’t know that you could be a full time writer. That wasn’t something that I knew about until maybe 22 or 23. I remember reading a book by Emily Giffin and seeing in her bio that she was a lawyer, and she wrote books. And I was like, “oh, that’s how it happens. You have a job, and then you get to write books.” So I just didn’t grow up in that space. I enjoyed creativity, but like the NFL, I thought “you’re not going to be a professional football player,” you know? So it took me a while to realize that maybe you could be a professional football player.

We both got our MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Do you think an MFA is necessary to write professionally in this day and age?

The only thing you need to be a writer is you have to write. You just have to write a lot. And obviously, then you have to figure out how to climb the ladder. An MFA is a place that helps you facilitate writing. If you want that, that’s great. But at the end of the day, you just have to write.

For me, the biggest advantage of going to Bennington was gaining access to people who cared about what I cared about. And now I do stay in touch with a lot of those people and reach out to them and be like, “What books are you reading?” Or, “Hey, do you know anyone who knows this agent?” Or, “My book is coming out, what should I prepare for?” That stuff is great, but that’s a function of networking. Some people get that in undergrad. Some people get that just from being in a city. For me, I got that at Bennington.

I needed someone to tell me I was a writer.

The legitimacy, too. It’s not nothing to make a decision that reinforces your own sense of legitimacy. When you’re an artist, everything feels so illegitimate all the time. So anything that reinforces that what you’re doing matters and deserves carving out time, is useful.

I know you used to write short stories based on Taylor Swift songs and built a huge audience. Where did that idea come from? Was this creative constraint helpful for generating new work? What did you learn about the internet, writing, social media, and building an audience through this project?

I view myself primarily as a novelist. I was in the middle of working on my second manuscript. This is the one that came before Yesteryear. When you have a full manuscript, you’ve edited it a million times, you’re like, “I don’t know if my agent likes it.” (This is a different agent than the one I have now.) And I was just feeling really low. The folklore album came out, and I remember being like, “Oh my god, there are so many good stories in this.” Like Seven by Taylor Swift. There was such a story there. And, My Tears Ricochet. I was already a big Taylor Swift fan, and I had written some short stories and I had played around with formatting them and sharing them online, but I had never figured out a way to serialize them.

I started with all the songs in Folklore. I really couldn’t tell if there was any function to it, but now I realize that it was such a boot camp in writing. Every week you just have to write something, and you’re not waiting for the muse to speak to you. And that was 100 percent why I was able to write Yesteryear pretty quickly. I got used to a deadline, and I became much less precious about it, and that was a huge turning point for me. As opposed to being like, “each sentence has to be beautiful to get to the next one.” It was like, “No, get the story out, and then you can worry about the sentences after.” That was a massive transition for me in terms of how I thought about writing.

Your podcast Diabolical Lies covers the full gamut of contemporary takes, from ICE Raids to zeitgeist-y HBO shows like Heated Rivalry. What do you love most about this particular platform? What is different about a podcast vs. social media vs. traditional publishing? What was the initial intent of the podcast? Has anything surprised you along the way?

I never would have done the podcast if I didn’t sell Yesteryear and have a financial footing to try something new. Selling Yesteryear didn’t just give me the chance to work on other writing, it gave me the chance to ask myself, “what do you want to make if you’re not beholden to a company?” [My co-host and I] had only known each other for a few weeks. We would send each other voice notes just talking about shit. And so it was very, very much a soft launch. The whole thing is pretty lofi. We don’t have a theme song. It just started with us sharing thoughts about culture in a way that we didn’t see elsewhere. I think there’s a lot of crossover between Yesteryear and Diabolical Lies.

I have an urge to write, but more than that, I have an urge to communicate. And I think that’s why I started a TikTok. I didn’t always know I was going to succeed as a writer. Each platform has different value. A novel has staying power. I like to dream that maybe 50 or 100 years from now, someone could be reading my book. No one’s gonna be watching my TikToks. With short form, you can reach a lot of people, but it’s very ephemeral. As for podcasts, I got into it when it was already dead. I think that podcasts have mid-level staying power. What’s fun about podcasts is that we can do whatever we want. As soon as you write and sell a novel, it becomes a product. It no longer belongs to me, but the podcast, it belongs to me and my co-host, and that is a lot of fun. It has been very helpful for me as a creative, to have certain things that I know are only mine and that I’m actually not producing with a team, and that are not a commercial product.

What about the Yesteryear film project with Anne Hathaway? I don’t know what you’re allowed to say about it, but how involved do you get to be? Do you feel like your project is out of your hands?

I’m an executive producer, so I’m involved, but I’m not the script writer, and that was a decision that I tortured over for two weeks during the film rights. My agent, God bless her, was like, “Carolyn, you don’t want to be a screenwriter, you want to be a novelist and if you want to be a screenwriter, then this is going to take up all your time for years.” It was really useful to have someone in my ear at that moment. “You’ve written one book, but now you have to have a career. It’s time for you to be thinking and developing stuff.” And so I’m so happy that I am not the screenwriter. We have an amazing screenwriter. She’s a genius. I’m so happy they gave it to her. We have a script, and it’s being shopped, and it’s super cool.

I can’t stress enough the importance of a good agent. Agents become more important after you sell your book. So if your agent is not emailing you back the same day, if they are not very interested in your work, that will become more important after you sell the book. It’s so important to have someone who is genuinely invested in your career.

What sparked the idea for Yesteryear? And what did the creative process look like when writing it?

Fiction is very meditative for me. It’s like prayer.

I was working on my second manuscript. No one wanted it. Dead on arrival. I switched agents. It was the winter of 2024. I was like, “I’m just going to stop writing for a while. I just need to take a breath.” So I downloaded TikTok on a whim. None of my friends were on it. And I was like, “this is kind of fun.” Tradwives were becoming this whole cultural thing, and so I started sharing my opinion, and it ballooned until it was something where I was very much a part of that cultural moment. Because I was thinking about it all the time, I literally woke up one morning and was like, “Yesteryear.” It was such a world. Like, Westworld.

I had the elevator pitch, and I didn’t know yet how she was going to get out, but I loved the idea of pushing this woman to her farthest constraints. I emailed my agent, and she was like, “Absolutely, go for it.” I don’t know if I would have written it in the same way if I didn’t have her in that moment, because I was feeling very burned out. I was feeling like a huge failure. So I was really lucky to have someone who believed in me as a writer. It’s hard to be the sole engine of your own belief system.

I wrote it all that winter. And then we sold it that spring. It was a crazy experience, so unlike the first two manuscripts I had written. And it’s a totally different book. My first two books had been a little bit more quiet. One was a family story/coming of age, and then one was a campus novel. And so this was like, “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing here. I’ve never written a thriller, I’ve never written a comedy, I’ve never done dual timelines.” And so I think because it was so foreign, it didn’t feel like there were any stakes.

I recently wrote a craft essay about where ideas come from. I’m interested in Elizabeth Gilbert’s ideas cloud from Big Magic. How there’s this ideas cloud, and we’re all kind of sitting under it, and at any point an idea can strike you or pass you by and you have to stick around for the next one. What do you think?

Yeah, I love that idea. I think that’s true. I think that so much of writing is just not being the person who quits. I think Ta-Nehisi Coates said something like, “I only began to pick up steam as a writer at 35, but by then, most of my peers had given up.” So eventually you become the most talented person, because you’re taking the most time. I am not Ta-Nehisi Coates, but I very much relate to that, because I have been, almost to an embarrassing degree, constantly trying to put myself in the way of the moment. With Yesteryear, I felt this almost panicked push forward, “you’re finally in the right place at the right time.”

I will take your Liz Gilbert theory and give you a Cormac McCarthy theory that I recently came across. Basically, Cormac McCarthy theorized that our subconscious mind is the oldest tool we have, like it’s arguably millions of years old. We only began to communicate via language very recently, and when you’re writing fiction, you are bridging the gap between your oldest tool and your newest tool. And we don’t understand why that happens. And every writer understands you’re not in control of the sentences that come out. You might have an idea. You might get struck by the Liz Gilbert ideas cloud. But then when you start—and this is why I think it’s kind of like a form of prayer or meditation—you’re not in control. And with Yesteryear, it’s almost a combination of those two things: 1. I was in the right place at the right time. I got hit by the ideas cloud. 2. But I had no idea that I was going to write Natalie’s voice the way that I did. That really just came out as I was typing, and I was like, “Who is this woman?” There was something taking place in my subconscious that I have no control over that I don’t understand or have the words for because our newest tool is not yet able to fully bridge that. It’s a magical thing that happens, and fiction is such an expression of the subconscious in that way.

On your Instagram stories the other day you were discussing reconnecting with your old ambition. Why are women so allergic to outwardly exploring their ambitions? How have you reconnected with your own ambition?

I think ambition requires centering yourself in your own story, and I think that women are cultured from a very young age to associate that with selfishness. And as you get older, that tension becomes more and more uncomfortable, to the point of being unbearable. So, if you have children, if you want to have children, if you get married, even if you’re single, there is a lot of stigmatization around ambitious women as being selfish women or narcissistic women, and you have to kind of overcome that. Actually, it’s perfectly appropriate for me to center myself in my own life.

Yesteryear continues to be a very shocking experience. I hope people are going to like the book, but that doesn’t mean that they’re going to think that I earned it, or maybe that’s just in my head.

Since selling Yesteryear, I’ve been the recipient of a lot of attention, and now I really want to prove to people that I deserve it. And that is something that can only happen over a career. I want Yesteryear to succeed, but more than that, I want to have a successful career. It has been really scary and sometimes gives me an anxiety attack. But more often than not, it’s exciting to be given an opportunity.

Five Things Caro Recommends

A novel: Whidbey, by T Kira Madden

A podcast: In the Dark, Season Three

A movie: The Last Black Man in San Francisco

An album: West End Girl, Lily Allen

An activity: going on a walk and leaving your phone in the car

Animator and filmmaker Joseph Brett on why slowness makes you see things differently

2026-04-03T00:00:00-04:00

I’d love to start from the beginning: when you first got the impulse to pursue stop motion animation. What made you think, “I want to create worlds with my hands”?

Stop motion is something I started when I was about seven. My mom borrowed a video camera from the school she worked at, and me and my friend Glenn just started. You couldn’t even do proper stills; you had to double-click the record button to take a bit of footage. Back then, it was just that childish thing of, “Well, we can make these blobs move around.” Then we went to a craft shop and bought a bar of plasticine, and we were like, “Wow, we can do this.” That’s what got me into film: the fact that it felt accessible. Even on a tabletop, you could make these things.

Were there specific projects or moments that shaped your trajectory?

I did an art foundation and there was a textiles unit. I remember suddenly becoming fascinated with the tactility of stuff, and that made me start animating paper. I was so into the way that you could create images you could feel. And I realized that was a huge part of animation. I love that you can watch something and go, “I know what that would feel like to touch.”

Some projects are just projects, and some projects teach you a little bit more about why you’re doing it. For me, that creative process is quite instinctual. A lot of the time you don’t really know why you’re doing the thing. You just know it feels right. And then sometimes a project will explain itself to you a little bit more, you realize stuff while you’re just doing.

You use stop motion for horror, documentaries, music videos… What does working with your hands, and with this slowness, give you creatively?

I was thinking about this: why make work at all? I think it’s to be heard. You turn to creative things because you have something that you want to say or communicate, but sometimes speech is not enough. And so we reach for more.

When you’re at a table trying to explain something, you’ll find yourself grabbing a cup or a pepper and you go, “They’re here…” and suddenly you’re demonstrating it. Your language has gone into the physical space. And to me, that’s what animating feels like. It feels like you’ve grabbed the things. With stop motion, they are physical objects; it’s not up here, it’s not out in the ether. It’s on a bench or on a table. It’s physical, and I think that adds a layer of dialogue to the real world around you.

There’s a moment in The Tale of the Fox, one of the first feature-length stop motion films, where a fox takes a fish out of a wolf’s mouth, and then closes the wolf’s mouth, shuts it. And I always think the animator must have animated the fish coming out and then seen that the mouth was still open and gone, “Wait, I can get the fox to close it.” Because that shot would have taken hours. You see in that moment how slowness changes what you make. You’re sat there for hours with these physical objects, and in that moment a conversation arises between you and the material. The slowness gave him something he wouldn’t have found otherwise.

I read that you led workshops for kids. What did their way of interacting with animation tell you?

Me and my friend Glenn did a few of these workshops, 8-year-olds up to early teenagers. What was interesting was how instinctually kids took to it. These things would happen where a kid would be animating a blob of red and you’d have no idea what it was, but another kid would come along and immediately understand, “Oh yeah, so the fire engine’s doing this.” They were speaking this other language. The kids had this interaction with the work they were making, and it gave them a medium to communicate in.

That was the real lesson: it’s not about achieving a perfect end product. They’re able to create this shared language. What’s so amazing about stop motion is it’s immediately tangible, immediately present, something you can grab. You’re doing it with your hands, which is the most insane thing ever.

You once said that “effort always shows up on screen” and that watching stop motion is like seeing an “absolutely pointless amount of work condensed down into a tiny little thing.” Do people today still see that effort and still value it?

It’s a really interesting question, because with where AI is getting to now, it’s going to reach a level where it becomes visually indistinguishable. And so you really have to ask questions about why you’re choosing different ways of making work. I don’t think it’s just, “Because I do it, therefore it should continue to exist.”

There is something about human labor behind something. It manifests in the product and I’m still struggling to find the language for that. It’s been said in a way of brushing off AI that “if a person hasn’t bothered to make it, why should I bother watching it?” I think that misses something. Are you just watching because you want someone to have labored for you? I don’t think it’s that. I often think about sand mandalas. Do you know them?

No, tell me.

A sand mandala is where you pour different colored sands and make these incredibly complex images and then they brush them away. There is something kind of joyful in the fact that this isn’t the best way you could have done this. The process gives it meaning, in a strange way. It sometimes feels like that, when you’re building a set and doing all these things, and then you get a three-second shot and you’re like, “That’s all I needed from all of that.” It’s not the best way you could have done it, but there is something in that process that gives it meaning. When I say that you can see the effort, I don’t think it’s as simple as, “That shot must have been hard to do.” It comes in somewhere else. I think you feel it when you watch that stuff.

Does AI change how people receive your work?

I put out work and I go, “Is this going to mean less now because there’s an easier way of making it?” Someone might look at something and go, “Oh, that must just be AI.” You now have to have this layer where you go, “No, I did it the really stupid way. I actually spent days doing this.”

There is this fear. I think you hear a lot of blanket condemnation in the craft-based world, and I understand that. I’m actually quite anti a lot of the AI art that gets made. But I don’t think you can look at Holly Herndon and the way she uses AI and go, “She’s not being creative, there is no humanity in that.” That would be mad to say. That stuff is so evocative.

At the moment it feels so new that there’s a kind of panic to either condemn it or say it’s the future. But sometimes you do something and you don’t know why it’s right yet. And I think as an industry, the arts is a little bit there. There’s a lot of things we do but we maybe don’t know why we’re doing them yet. And AI is asking that question of us. It’s making us answer that because we need to know now that there’s another way of doing it.

Let’s shift into Jackdaw Films. One thing I noticed looking at everything you and Bec Boey have made is this quiet radicalism in how you handle representation. Is that a conscious decision you make before starting projects?

The way me and Bec work is very much about finding, what are we trying to say? The projects we make are vessels for things we want to talk about. What’s great about working with Bec is that we’re so politically and morally aligned that we kind of get angry about a thing and then find a place for it. That’s what we’ve been trying to do: finding ways of using the work to yell about the things that need yelling about.

The first significant thing we made was the web series. Bec is mixed heritage—her dad is Malaysian Chinese—and the experience of East Asians in the UK is a complex and terrible one, especially in terms of representation. It was seeing these repeated failures and going, “Well, let’s just make something.” With Jade Dragon, not to blow our trumpet, but there isn’t really a comparable thing in the UK that any of the main TV stations have made. There still isn’t an East Asian sitcom. There’s a complete failure there. And yet we’ve made this thing that puts a line in the sand and says, “If you do want to make it, it has to at least be better than what these guys made for £100.” Why not make work if not for that reason, to set a precedent?

An idea goes a long way. You worked to normalize diversity rather than just talk abstractly about it.

If you have strong opinions about things, it’s very easy to trap that in theory rather than practice. The industry tells you it has to be at this scale of production to be valid. But a lot of the most important political records were not produced in the biggest studios in the world. They were made in people’s attics. The agency you have as a creator to make something shouldn’t be taken away by the idea that you need to jump this high to be valid.

There’s a thing me and Bec say: you have to justify your medium. The thing you make should always feel like it could only have been done this way. With Stones, the stop motion we made, it was playing on nostalgia, all these ideas of what England looks like in childhood animations, and going, “We know what that looks like, but what if it looked like this?” You’re using the connotations of the medium as part of your vessel.

What’s next? Where do you want to take your practice from here?

With a couple of friends, we’re at very early stages of trying to develop a kids’ TV show, a stop motion project. Kids’ animation has never been something I’ve actually made, but it’s so formative. It’s still present in even the horror films I make. This project is based in folklore and Arthurian legend, stuff which for me, as a kid, was really inspiring. But now I see a lot of that “good old England” mentality utilized for a not-great space. That “knights and castles” version of history is used to represent an England I don’t relate to and don’t see as being the England I live in. I’d love to make something, especially for children, that takes that stuff and makes it mean other things.

How do you make projects that go out into the world but still hold the values you have? How do you make slower art that has high concepts? How do you make trash that elevates? You want to make the film that everyone watches, but you also want to make the film that changes people’s lives. And how do you put those two things together? Because it often feels like they’re in conflict.

Joseph Brett recommends:

Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders

The Cosgrove Hall Wind in the Willows animation

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

Near Dark by Kathryn Bigelow

Gonzo singing “I’m Going to Go Back There Someday” in The Muppet Movie

Artist, filmmaker, and writer Tourmaline on cultivating your intuition

2026-04-02T03:00:00-04:00

In your Marsha P. Johnson book, you say, “So much of my practice as an artist has been about following these dreams to find the imprints and traces, which taken collectively can profoundly inform us about past lives.” Can you say more on that?

There’s been so many moments that have really concretized my knowing that. One was having a dream about Sylvia Rivera and her friends in a bar near Times Square and waking up and being like, “I need to find that bar,” waking up with a feeling of enthusiasm and clarity that this means something.

The fact that I dreamt it while I was asleep means I was tuned to a particular frequency, a feeling, an impulse that would guide me to a next and a next and next. I was living in Fort Greene, and I took the Q to 42nd, and then I walked around Bryant Park and back to Times Square. Sylvia spent a lot of time in that area living and petitioning for LGBTQIA+ rights in front of Bryant Park before getting arrested.

I remembered in the dream, it was a dive bar from a different era of New York, maybe the ’80s or ’90s. I remember being like, “Where are those imprints and traces of it?” and following that good feeling and that knowing, the intuition.

It was the African American Day Parade, starting in Harlem, coming through down to Midtown. I ran into this Black trans elder I know from the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, Sheila Cunningham. She was so happy to see me and so happy to be marching in the parade, and she was talking about how powerful it was for girls to be loudly and proudly part of the African American Day Parade and how much that meant to her. I was like, “This must be the dream, Sylvia’s friends. I know Sheila from the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, that must be the connection. I’m so glad I got on the train this morning and went uptown.”

Years later, I was doing this event for Visual AIDS and it was about trans elders. It was Miss Major, Jay Toole, Kate Bornstein, and Sheila Cunningham. I was moderating, so I was talking to each of them about the goals of the panel. I was talking to Sheila, and we had known each other for years by this point, but this conversation, for whatever reason, had never come up. She was like, “I was best friends with Sylvia Rivera, and we hustled together, and we were living together in the ’70s.”

The pieces started to click into place that this was the person who my dream led me to have a beautiful rendezvous [with]. It took me some years to have a full sense of clarity about that. It’s been a series of experiences where I’ve started to deeply trust the impulse, the calling to go this way instead of that way, that has largely defined my creative practice.

You said something about feeling an intuition. I’d love to hear more about that.

I can tell my proximity to clarity, and a state of flow that allows for a power in my creative practice, based on how I feel. The more enthusiastic I feel, the more I can tell I’m really in sync and intertwined with my intuition, with this larger perspective that’s guiding me through. The more confused or dissonant I feel, the more I can tell I’m somewhat removed from my state of intuition. Over time, I found that my best art and life comes from being in an action place, a resonant place, with that intuition.

So much more of my work happens in a place of meditation, rest, or ease than sitting down to write a book, write a script, interview someone, or photograph something. That work is pre-paving the vibe through which I do the action. My creative practice is about tuning to the intuition so that I can pre-pave a beautiful rendezvous, a lovely conversation, a moving image, a still photograph, a performance, all of that.

It sounds like you’ve cultivated a process, if not a life, where your intuition is present almost all the time when you’re in creative mode. If it’s still the case that, sometimes, you aren’t quite in that intuition when you have to create—maybe there’s a deadline racing up—how do you handle that?

The more I can give myself a break when I’m not there, the easier it is to get back there, so I just say, “Nothing serious is going on. I’m not feeling that clear.” And that’s okay. There are times when I’ve gone from not feeling clear to feeling clear. There are times when I had to wait a week, a night, or a few hours, but eventually, it comes back, and then, the thrill is just moving in that direction. As long as I’m flowing downstream, moving in that direction, it’s all good if I’m giving myself a break. But, I mean, I’m here to have an experience where I’m not always tapped in. That makes being tapped in so much more juicy, so it’s all part of the creative process.

I think that contrast is how I supersaturate my work in a literal way. If you look at Happy Birthday, Marsha!, I work with this amazing color grader. In a literal way, I use color from almost black-and-white to technicolor, Wizard of Oz or Alice down the hole, because I love the contrast. The contrast of not having intuition, and then having it or awareness of it, is just as thrilling as moving with it.

Can you talk about archiving and preserving as a creative practice? I ask this with the notion that maybe folks don’t see those as creative practices all that often.

I think it’s a hugely creative practice. It’s foundational to my work. The creative process is the sifting and sorting across timelines for resonance and emotion that moves me. Whether that’s going through a formal archive like the New York Public Library or—so many archives were used to support the biography of Marsha. The LGBT Center has a beautiful archive. NYU has the Hot Peaches archive. Cornell has Larry Mitchell’s archive. [He] started a documentary about Marsha weeks before her body was found in the Hudson River that was finished in some ways and, in other ways, really wasn’t, so the archival process, to me, is a beautifully creative, juicy, unfolding, sifting [process] that helps me get clear on the stories that I want to tell and the importance of them.

Saidiya Hartman writes [that] the archives aren’t a neutral place. So much of the work, too, is, in these formal archives, there only being traces of a person’s life, and that is a valuing process. If there’s scant evidence of the importance of who we are, we know that’s not a neutral perspective. Archival work is deeply entangled with the work of knowing our own value and the value of our lineage, which really helps us understand our right now.

The part where you were talking about the emotional aspect of archiving made me think, what is creativity if not trying to connect emotionally? Is that what you’re getting at—archiving so you can scratch the same itch as somebody making a song or writing a work of fiction?

Absolutely. It was so thrilling to be moving in the footsteps over many decades of Marsha’s life and watch how the archives have changed with a deeper knowing of her value. For instance, in the New York Public Library in the early 2000s, Marsha didn’t have a dedicated archive. I found a lot of writing from her and Sylvia Rivera in Arthur Bell’s archive. Arthur Bell was a journalist with the Village Voice and wrote a book, Dancing the Gay Lib Blues, which has been a key part of the work. But it was in Arthur Bell’s box, because he was deemed more important, that I was able to find their writing, their very first papers like the STAR Manifesto or any of those things.

To me, it’s really thrilling, and ultimately, the reason I create art is to share an emotional experience. It’s an embodied emotional experience. That’s why I listen to music. That’s why I will watch a TV show or a movie. That’s why I’ll read a book, because I want to have something that moves me, and I hope to create in that way, too.

You’ve worked in a lot of different mediums. How do you feel that your process stays the same or varies across mediums?

It doesn’t necessarily stay the same because I don’t stay the same. I have this idea that we’re all expanding and growing, and my job is to stay up to speed with that growing, that expanded version of myself.

Going back to the conversation about feeling and intuition, if I’m moving in the direction of the expanded me, it feels thrilling, invigorating, and lovely. If I’m pinching it off, it feels dissonant. All of it’s okay. It’s not a value judgment about any of it. But that’s part of why my work changes so much.

The work of creating conditions that are a reflection of our value is art. When I was an organizer with Queers for Economic Justice and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, we were making art of our lives and conditions. It was a really creative process to say, “Actually, we deserve housing” or, “Actually, we deserve healthcare because we deserve to live” or, “Actually, we deserve freedom and ease to move about the streets.”

It’s a similar experience with making a photograph or a series. The Pleasure Garden series about Black pleasure gardens were also self-portraits and a reminder that all of us deserve to be present in any given moment, including ourselves as we caretake and cultivate for our community. The writing, the Marsha biography, was also about that. It was important to put myself in it at various moments because that was a material, meaningful representation of Marsha’s legacy and impact on the world—a life made possible because of the deep work and huge desires of someone who came before.

With my film work, those were the dreams I had when I was a child, going to the movies and being like, “I want to be doing this. I want to make my version of this thing.” It’s world-building, it’s immersive, and it’s the kind of scale that I love to play with.

I love the recurrence of dreams here from the first question I asked you. What more can you say about the role of dreaming, whether literally dreaming overnight or daydreaming, plays in your creative process?

I’m the beneficiary of so many people who dreamed before. Marsha and Sylvia, in the ’60s, would rent these hourly hotels. They used to call them “hot spring hotels” because whether it was winter, spring, summer, or fall, the rooms were boiling in Times Square in these hourly hotels. But in them, they were doing what the writer and theorist Robin D. G. Kelley coined “freedom dreaming.” They were imagining a world filled with conditions that they wanted. They were using what wasn’t wanted, the harshness that would happen immediately when they left the hotel, as a jumping off point to dream the world that they deserved. That practice is one I really have come to understand the value of. If I’m having an experience that I don’t like, I’m immediately knowing, whether I’m clear on it or not, a dream for what I do want. Dreams are a central part of my practice, and I’m also the beneficiary of all of the dreams of people who came before.

To rewind a little bit, when you were talking about your different mediums and creative processes, I was reminded that you do a lot of things. How have you managed to avoid burnout?

I go pretty slow. My work that is at the Australian Center for Contemporary Art right now is a series of photographs that I started working on in 2022 in Venice, when I was showing work at the Venice Biennale. I’ll just sit with the work and be in a real timeline so that it’s not about content production. It’s about moving when something guides me to it.

It’s, as much as possible, knowing that there’s always going to be a next iteration of a desire or dream that I want to materialize and share. The rush to get to that place isn’t—there’s always going to be a next marker. To the degree that I can remember that, it takes [away] the immediacy of, “I have to do that now,” which is the thing that inevitably leads to my burnout.

Was that a lesson you learned over time, or was it something you knew from the beginning?

I think it’s a lesson I learned over time. There were some things that felt urgent and still do, like political campaigns that I’m on around increased access to Medicaid and healthcare for transgender and gender non-conforming people. The real urgency of that is felt by so many of us. At the same time, there’s also going to be a next campaign about the conditions we want to transform. I think it’s just been a balance and a slow unfolding of that knowing.

How have you managed to pave your path toward being somebody engaged in all these manners of creativity and able to make a living off it all?

So much of it has been through the mentorship and care of community. For Happy Birthday, Marsha!, the film I made with Sasha Wortzel, we did multiple Kickstarters and Indiegogos. It was real community support.

I was part of a queer art mentorship. I was a mentee, and then for two years, I was a mentor. Those experiences—I didn’t go to film school, but I was Dee Rees’ assistant director. Dee is an incredible director and writer who wrote and directed Pariah, and I was Dee’s assistant for Mudbound. Arthur Jafa was my cinematographer for Happy Birthday, Marsha! and has been a friend for a very long time. It’s through those kinds of mentorships that I’ve come to be able to know my craft.

Tourmaline recommends:

Riis Beach in September

big career pivots

metal detecting

new theater

falling asleep to Laraaji

trusting God’s plan

Perfumers Jónsi Birgisson and Lilja Birgisdóttir (Fischersund) on collaborating with family

2026-04-01T03:00:00-04:00

Did Fischersund spring organically from being raised together or was it something you consciously created?

Lilja: We’re all artists in different ways, and very close. Iceland is a small community. My mom has weekly dinners, and when we would come together back in the day, we felt, “Oh, it’d be amazing if we could bring all our different strengths together in one pot and create something amazing.”

That happened in 2017. Jónsi had a private studio in Downtown Reykjavik. It was a beautiful standalone black house, one of the oldest in Reykjavik, from 1875. He and his American partner decided to move to LA, so the studio was empty. We thought, “Okay, let’s just do this. Let’s make our dream come true.”

Sigur Rós had this beautiful music festival in December 2017, and Fischersund opened during that time, with one perfume, from Jónsi—with music playing and art on the wall. It has grown gradually ever since. It was intentional, this focus on combining different mediums together to create a holistic experience. It was our dream to create this, a rest in this busy world where all of your senses could be touched.

I was sad I couldn’t make it to your museum show on the West Coast.

Lilja: We also opened another exhibition in Iceland for Sequences Art Festival where we combined hand-colored photographs, 3D video flowers, musical pieces, and scents, of course.

That’s incredible. I live in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and found the brand at Teak, where the owner mentioned visiting you in Iceland for foraging trips. What are those trips like?

Lilja: Iceland isn’t a big country, and it only takes a 10 minute drive out to be in wild nature. There’s also a culture where people have summer homes they visit on the weekends. Nature is a big part of being an Icelander. When you’re there, nature is bigger than us and you really sense it with these volcanic eruptions. The weather can just be so crazy and powerful.

I’ve been twice, and on the last trip I had to get wind and ash insurance for the car.

Lilja: Yeah. When we were kids, our parents took us on foraging trips to collect leaves and a little Icelandic flower called Arctic Thyme that is dried and used for teas and spices and in food preparation. Today we work with an Icelandic distiller. Her name is Hraundís Guðmundsdóttir, and she has been helping us to distill Icelandic nature. All of our scents have Icelandic essential oils, then high quality fragrance oils we mixed together to create an Icelandic story.

Do you still lead trips or do they only organically come to fruition when the family’s all together and you’re exploring new scents?

Lilja: It’s kind of both. We have been doing events, we did two this summer, where we worked with Hraundís to distill the heart of Reykjavik. She has this beautiful copper distiller. We literally walked around Reykjavik, picking whatever grew there that had a scent and distilled on point. Everybody walked away with a scent of Reykjavik.

But it happens naturally, mostly around our summer house. And Hraundís is also really good at harvesting. She works with the forester society. When they need to cut down trees to preserve the forest, if it’s getting too thick, they send it to her and she distills it into oil for us.

In the line, each scent has its own story, and in some cases, color palette. Did you set out to create “light” and “dark” scents?

Lilja: That came later. First, we started with 23, which is inspired by old Reykjavik. Our father is a metalsmith, and when Jónsi was working with our father at the docks in Reykjavik, he came up with No. 54, which is also a rather dark scent inspired by our father’s garage in the countryside where he builds things and fixes old cars. Then came No. 8, which is a light scent inspired by our childhood growing up in a small village.

The set came gradually. We noticed that three were darker and three were lighter. that’s why we decided to pair them like that. People are often drawn to either light or darker notes.

It’s funny that you mentioned metalsmithing. I was curious about the tins your pieces come in, and found a video of them being made by blow torch. Is this something you still do or is it outsourced?

Lilja: No, we do everything ourselves. Most of the time our father does it. He also does our incense. We’re all together in the studio, and then whatever needs to be done, we do it. So it’s kind of this natural process.

Yeah, I was wondering if another sibling does the graphic design for the scarves and the bags.

Lilja: My sister, Inga, is an amazing visual artist, and a self-taught designer. Self-taught is a leading word in this family. Jónsi is a self-taught musician and a self-taught nose. When you have drive, if you’re passionate about something, you will always find a way. Inga, who is really good at drawing, designs all of our bandanas and makes us look good.

I have one of your bags. It’s actually my favorite tote. I was outside Barcelona at the top of a mountain at a monastery in the middle of nowhere and all of a sudden a man came up behind me and showed me he was wearing the same bag. It was such a nice, surprising moment of, I guess, community? When you see the logo, it’s more than just “someone likes the same scent”—they like the world behind it.

Lilja: I love that. Also, that is such an Icelandic moment because in Iceland we’re so few, so everybody knows each other and everybody’s connected. I feel that it has spread to the world. So when you meet somebody with our bag, it’s such a moment like, “Hey, we know each other.” I love that. Thank you for sharing.

Tonight, are you unveiling any new scents or will this be more of a way to meet your community?

Lilja: It’s definitely both. But we brought with us something special, of course, because we love doing limited editions where we can just go crazy. We brought a set called Quarter To Five, which is inspired by a special moment; Iceland can be so dark and gloomy most of the time, but then you have the summers, and especially in June and July, when there’s light twenty four seven. Icelandic people go a bit crazy and party a lot.

It’s all about that moment when you’re inside a dark bar, you’ve been dancing and drinking, and the bar’s closing at 4:30 AM, and it takes a bit to get outside, but then you do and the sun’s shining, the birds are singing, and you’re like, “Get me my sunglasses, get a takeaway beer, let’s find an after party.” It’s about that particular moment.

For the scent, we collaborated with an iconic bar in Iceland called Kaffibarinn. They donated an old stool that had experienced 20 years of spiltering, secrets, melted into years, kisses. We felt that was the heart of Icelandic nightlife. With that, we distilled this stool into oil that’s in the set. You really have the heart of the Icelandic nightlife in it—the bar, the wood furniture, leather jackets, rolled tobacco. But then you also have sweet drinks, aperol spritz cocktails and then the outside—the fresh Arctic air. It’s a mix of these two worlds.

Did you come up with this together?

Lilja: We all remembered that moment—it’s just such a weird but magical feeling. The source of everything we do in Fischersund is family and this bank of shared memories we’re always pulling from. Whenever we’re coming up with a new concept, it’s easy to go wild because we start the dialogue and it’s like, “Oh, remember this?…” Then someone makes a little composition that inspires an artwork and the artwork inspires the scent. It’s a whole chaotic, beautiful mess.

It’s an inspiration for everyone who has brothers or sisters.

Lilja: We really just love each other and are good friends and all really easygoing. But I think why we work so successfully together is that everybody has a clear role, their own voice, but then when we come together, it becomes something bigger. For example, my sister, Ingibjörg, is the art director and visual artist, and designs everything and does amazing 3D videos. Jónsi, of course, is a musician, artist and perfumer–he is the number one in making the perfumes.

Each scent is like a poem that tells a story. And I just really love that because scent can be so abstract. It can be difficult for people to understand what they’re smelling. That’s why they get confused if they smell a few perfumes. But when you have these hits and can visualize what you’re smelling, it helps people to be transported to a place or feeling. I love that. Jónsi is an amazing writer.

[Jónsi is patched in]

Lilja: Just in time! Did you hear me? I was just telling them what an amazing writer you are.

Jónsi: Oh, thank you. Okay. Wow. Thank you, sister.

Lilja: Sigurrós, the fourth sibling, is the artisan and hand-blends all of her perfumes and candles in Iceland, but is also a nose in training with Jónsi. Our partners are also very involved. My husband and my sister’s husbands are composers, so they are with Jónsi in the music collective. And Jónsi’s partner is with Jónsi in the perfume making.

Mom has the most important role of caring for our mental health and watching our kids and bringing home baked goods to the studio.

Jónsi, when did you become a nose?

Jónsi: I’ve been doing it for 16, 17 years. I just started collecting essential oils and smelling. I always loved scent, but never liked perfume. But then it became more intense as the years went by. You collect more and more oils, stuff like that.

Perfumes can be almost like mix tapes–you can share them and connect with people and there’s that kind of overlap between music and scent, especially in the indie scent world. When you first started, did you give away your scents or was it a private language you were building?

Jónsi: No, it was just for me personally, just the same with music. It’s like everything you do is for yourself. It’s very egocentric.

Lilja: It was actually us sisters that kind of twisted his arm and were like, “Oh my god, this is so amazing. You must fill the world in on what you’re doing.”

Jónsi: Yeah, I’m never happy with anything.

Lilja: But I like what you say about perfumes being mixtapes because I feel like especially with younger people, they’re collecting and exchanging scent and there’s so much fun culture there.

Jónsi: Younger people are getting into scents more, reading more about them, getting more interested in it. And it’s really cool I think.

How do you know when a scent is finished?

Jónsi: I never know it. And like I said earlier, I’m never happy with anything. So I just am never happy. And the scent is never done.

Yeah, I feel like it’s like any art piece—you can always keep working on it.

Jónsi: When you do music—I’ve been doing music my whole life, basically—that’s more instinctual. Like, okay, the song is done. I don’t need to add any more to it. It’s kind of what it is and it sounds good and I don’t need to add more. But scents, I have only been doing it for 16 years, so it’s not quite to the place where you feel really comfortable or where you’re very sure of yourself or something. Which is good, I think.

Lilja: One thing I’ve experienced is when you play a song, everyone hears the same thing. But with perfume, it’s so individual. When you’re trying a scent on us sisters or our partners, they all smell different depending on the Ph value of our skin.

Jónsi: Yeah, everyone’s skin is different, the Ph level of skin and oil and stuff like that.

There’s notes in music, but there’s also notes in perfume. Are there notes you keep returning to that underlie these scents?

Jónsi: I love vetiver, I’m very attracted to vetiver. So it’s probably vetiver in every scent we do, I guess.

Lilja: And bergamot. You love bergamot. You always say it kind of lilts.

Jónsi: Yeah. It’s a classic top note. It works with everything and it’s super diffusive and really great.

I imagine at this point it’s hard to hand-forage—you’re making perfumes, touring. or in the studio. Do you still make time to do a little foraging or do you have people you work with who farm for you?

Lilja: We don’t forage anything ourselves anymore that we do for perfumes, more for events. And we have Hraundís to distill all the Icelandic oils for us. But Jónsi was really good back in the day, making all kinds of things. But it is so much work and you have to be so precise and it is a skill. And we discovered quickly that “let’s just leave this to our professional distiller and we can concentrate on creating the concepts and artworks and music and the world around them.”

Jónsi: and Lilja recommend:

We have a destination for culture, the Marshall House, built with money the American government set for Iceland after World War II through The Marshall Fund. It’s a historic house and has four different galleries and museums, all free of charge. On the first floor it’s a restaurant and bar. It’s such a good destination because it’s right in the Harbor of Reykjavik.

The local food scene.

Going to the pool. It’s such a culture in Iceland because it’s often so cold, so we love our hot tubs. I would recommend the swimming hall in downtown Reykjavik. It’s also a historical house.”

The creative scene in Iceland is crazy—there’s just so much happening and we know so many amazing visual artists and musicians. Come for Design March. We have something cooking up.

Musicians Mandy, Indiana on pushing yourself physically in your creative work

2026-03-31T03:00:00-04:00

I love your new record (URGH)—I was curious how you pronounce it.

Valentine Caulfield: You need to do the face when you do it. It’s “urgh.”

Alex Macdougall: That’s how we go. But you can do it any way you’re feeling in that moment.

Valentine: I’ve seen so many Americans pronounce the “R,” which I always think is quite funny.

Alex: The name came from a few things really. This record shaped up as being much more physical than the last one. We wanted to express that in the title as something quite bodily. I think last year was pretty difficult for the band. We weren’t playing so many shows, and Val and I dealt with a lot of health issues. I think it’s partly related to a bit of that. It expresses frustration and disgust at what’s going on in the world at the moment as well.

How did writing this record remotely, with members of the bands across different cities, impact the creative process for this record?

Valentine: This record was much more of a collaborative effort, even though it was still written in fragmented pieces. But instead of coming almost exclusively from [guitarist and producer] Scott [Fair] when it comes to the instrumental side of things, a lot of the tracks here originated from drum beats that Alex came up with or by synth parts from Simon [Catling]. But I think we’ve always worked in a way that is pretty fragmented. Actually, we finalized three tracks while all together for this album, and this is the first time we’ve done something like that.

Alex: Working separately definitely doesn’t do away with the competing voices. We’re all quite passionate and care a lot about how it ends up. Our fragmented setup informed how the record ended up as well. It doesn’t really sound like four people in a room as a traditional band would be. That’s all facilitated by what you’re able to do long distance with technology. I actually think these limitations can bring about a different aesthetic.

A big part of this record for me was going into a rehearsal room on my own, just hitting record and improvising with certain different ideas in mind, and then choosing snippets as happy accidents. Imagine me flailing my arms about and seeing what happens… Well, no, it’s not quite as basic as that.

Then those ideas went to Scott, and he might build a section of a song around them, and then that would become a demo together with some of Simon’s ideas. And then it’s quite common that Val’s vocals will go over the top after that, but that might change the structure or the feeling of the track as well.

Val, is it a challenge to sing over shifting rhythms on URGH? I’m thinking specifically of a song like “Life Hex,” versus a more steady beat like on “Cursive”?

Valentine: I think this is going to be a very disappointing answer, but most of what I do is rhythmic, so I just have to find reference points. There’s still a track that we’ve been playing live now for two years where I still have to count in my head in places. I know that if I don’t count it down, I’m going to miss my actual starting point.Because I come from classical music and this is the way that my brain is wired at this point, I think I see things as being in specific places, even if you might not necessarily be able to get that from listening to it. So in my mind, it is completely rhythmic. Well, except for a couple of tracks here and there, and they are the ones that I struggle with the most because I need things to fall into a specific spot.

On “Magazine,” you imagine violently confronting your rapist directly. Were there any challenges you faced when writing about personal narratives like this on this record?

Valentine: I don’t think of it as a challenge to overcome. I’ve said it before, but I don’t write songs for other people. I just write about the things that I want to write about. In the case of “Magazine,” my therapist was like, “Hey, writing is a great way of channeling your anger. You could put it into words.” And so that’s what I did. But I feel like a lot of the things that I write about—well, basically all of the things that I write about—are just things that I want to be talking about. I don’t think of it as this challenge to do something that was tricky for me. I actually just got the words out that I really needed to get out.

There are some heavy lyrics here about watching the world burn. Did you intend for this record to have a political message?

Valentine: That’s just my general outlook on the world. I think it’s difficult for me at this point in time to think of anything other than the fact that we are just burning our planet to shreds and killing each other over the most trivial of things. I’m at a point in my life where if you consider yourself to be non-political, I don’t trust you. Everything we do is political. Being a woman, a person of color, a queer person existing on the public stage is a political act, whether I choose to acknowledge it as so or not. It’s things that I need to be talking about because it is what is occupying my mind most of the time.

Do you find performing this material to be helpful in processing these horrors, or is it difficult?

Valentine: Honestly, I’m not sure. It’s very fun to perform with this band and there’s something really cathartic about playing that music. When we started this band, we made the decision for me to sing in French. It was obvious that it would mean that not everyone was going to be able to understand what I’m talking about. If you look at the themes of all of the music that we have ever made, they are always the same. It’s about the state of the world. It’s about violence against women. It’s about all of these things. Playing the music, it feels great, but I’m also conscious of the fact that a lot of people don’t necessarily understand what I’m talking about.

We live in a world where people are pretty stuck in their opinions, especially if they’re not fact-based. Usually they are the hardest people to convince. So I don’t think anyone is necessarily going to listen to music like ours and be like, “Oh, maybe there is something about this.” But at the very least, I hope that we can provide a space for people who are also feeling destroyed about the lack of empathy that is around us at the moment or the state of the world burning. I hope that we can provide a space for these people to get together and reaffirm that some people still do believe in empathy and some people are still here understanding that we need to change things.

Maybe the change is going to come from effectively like-minded people being reminded that there is something worth fighting for and that we can all stand together. I don’t think that if you play our record to your MAGA uncle, he’s going to stop voting for Donald Trump.

I think that would be a really good react video though, “MAGA uncles react to Mandy, IN.”

Valentine: I’ve always wanted to watch someone burn my music.

Do you feel like speaking in French has the shielding effect that you initially thought it would?

Valentine: I don’t want to say we’ve reached such a fantastic level, but I think we’re in a place where the people who listen to us and care about us as a band are pretty aware of what I talk about because they have done the work of trying to look into it. Also, I’m not shying away from anything in interviews. I’ve been pretty open about my beliefs and the things that I speak of.

Using French for this project has also become quite fun for me. I’ve spoken mostly English for close to 15 years now. Even though French is my mother tongue, I feel like English comes to me much more naturally. Singing in French allows me to relearn how to use my own language. It also means that I have to do more work to try and pass on the emotions of what I’m talking about through the performance of the words rather than just the meaning of the words themselves. In a sense, I use words as instruments rather than just to say things in the most obvious way. Of course, if people want to look into what I’m actually saying, I’m always happy for people to discover what’s being said. I do still put quite a lot of effort into that. But I think it’s just a different approach to writing.

How are you translating this record to a live audience—it’s full of so many layers of sound, and there’s only four of you.

Alex: I think we do try and do what’s on the record live. I think our music is meant to be heard and felt live. We were talking the other day about when me and Simon and Scott went to see My Bloody Valentine recently. I’ve been a big fan of theirs for ages. Since that show, I’ve felt like listening to their records is a very vague representation of what they’re actually trying to do, and what they’re actually trying to do can only be experienced at high volume and in a live situation. I think that’s something we try and strive for live, to move people’s bodies. It’s a very physical thing. I think part of that physicality is definitely contained in the record, but you’ve got to see us live, I think, to really understand it properly.

Valentine: It’s always a fun game trying to translate the music that we’ve written into a live song because I don’t think this is something that we necessarily take into account when we are writing the music. Because it is so often written on computers, there’s always a fun few weeks before we start playing a track where the boys have to find a way to translate all of that insane music into a live setting. You can tell that none of us really think about that when we are writing because I have just written an album of songs that I physically cannot sing unless I get an extra pair of lungs. There’s three tracks on the album where I genuinely have no clue how I’m going to do this. It’s going to be a fun little kind of experiment. I think maybe if I stand very still and I don’t move and I have one of those oxygen bottles in my nose, maybe I can get through. Maybe.

Alex: Scott also writes drum parts that I then learn. He writes them on the computer as you would maybe as an electronic music producer. Then when I have to come to learn it, I somehow have to spawn a couple extra limbs in order to make it sound similar. There is a challenge there, but it’s cool because I end up playing the drums in ways that I would never choose to normally. So it does push me in ways that I like.

There is this one track on the album called “Ist Halt So,” and the three instrumentalists of us started learning that to try and put in our tour that’s coming up. We made it through one time. It’s just the most crazy thing to try and make it through from start to finish, logistically, physically. I think it’s going to be a good song live because of that, if Val can manage it as well.

Valentine: Literally, there is not a single place for me to breathe in that song. I need to learn to do the entirety of the first part without breathing. I should probably start training now. I don’t think there is enough space in my body to fill up my lungs enough to go through this entire track.

You’ve also both had very intense medical issues during the creation for this record [Caulfield underwent surgery for her eyes; Macdougall for a hernia and a thyroid issue]. How did the physical limitations of the body impact your creative process for this record?

Valentine: I would personally say that the issue with this record is that we did not allow the physical limitations of the body to impede the creative process at all. As such, we both ended up in quite sore spots. A lot of the album is influenced by the truly harrowing body horror that we both went through throughout the last couple of years. But I don’t think we really let it limit us in any kind of way, which was probably part of the problem. Realistically when you’re recovering from surgery, you probably shouldn’t be recording drums for three days.

Alex: I have reflected on this since. I feel like I’m not very good at telling when I need to rest. I went into a three-day recording session for the drums and I thought I was fine, since my surgery had been two months before. By the final day I was really pushing through on the takes to try and make it work. I don’t want to glorify any of that, but I do genuinely think that it kind of imprinted something onto those drum takes. But I don’t want to do that again.

Valentine: The surgery I had last year was my first ever surgery. I got all the way to my fourth surgery last year, which is exciting. You live and you learn. I didn’t realize how much it impacts your body. Like you said, even two months later, even when you feel like you fully recovered, it’s still lingering sometimes. It’s really tough, especially as people who struggle to not do anything. It’s really hard to really take in when your body is done recovering from everything that it’s gone through.

Guitarist and producer Scott Fair recommends:

Persona (1966) dir. Ingmar Bergman: A masterclass in cinematic language. So much evocative imagery and so much said outside of dialogue. Two all time great lead performances. Made me question my humanity and the nature of reality.

Children of the Corn - The Single: Definition of cursed music. Mesmerising.

Alex Macdougall recommends:

Anastasia Coope - Darning Woman

Jim Whiting

Outer Space (1999) dir. Peter Tscherkassky

Painter Veronica Fernandez on finding your version of ambition

2026-03-30T00:00:00-04:00

So your painting studio is upstairs in your house? How does that affect your process?

I make really big pieces, and when I sort of consolidated—I now have my studio upstairs, which is basically just a normal-sized bedroom—that’s actually what inspired me to make really small pieces. I never work small. For this show, I had to reteach myself how to make small pieces. So I was struggling a lot at first, because I was like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know how to make super small paintings,” and I wanted to challenge myself. But sometimes I’ll take a pillow and now I can work on my stomach in the living room. [*laughs*] And I have a mini easel, too, that I take around the house if I want to do something while I’m painting.

I feel like that’s an inversion of what you would expect. People usually find working bigger to be challenging and expanding. What are the challenges or the difficulties of learning how to work on a smaller scale?

Some of the figures in the works are literally the size of my finger or my pinky! Doing face details, doing the anatomy of the figures, doing clothing—any sort of detail—and just adding texture in general. Trying to learn how to use space properly and having to use really tiny brushes, and getting used to using a brush with a few hairs on it, as opposed to my big brushes where I could just be like, whoosh, put that everywhere, add movement everywhere… Because it’s just so tiny, I have to step back or I’ll get a headache.

Something different that I noticed, working smaller, was the use of color in general, and also not overworking the pieces. I only had limited space, so I didn’t feel the need to add something. When I was doing the small paintings, it’s kind of forced to be done. I mean, what else am I going to add? Not that I wasn’t intentional before, but I felt a lot more strict with being intentional about things, and leaving things out, and leaving open space where I can.

So some of the decisions are being made for you now, in a way?

Yeah. It feels like they’re these little trinkets almost, and I’m being very careful with them—being very careful with all the little details and how I paint the figures, and where I put emotion in the painting. It’s kind of just picking and choosing where the magic happens, where the psychology of the figures comes in, because it can’t just be everywhere. There’s no space for that.

Veronica Fernandez, Before the Light Goes Out, 2026, oil on panel, 12 7/8 x 18 7/8 inches.

When you’re sketching, are you usually starting with references, or are you going off the dome and improvising?

Depending on the painting, I’ll go straight off the dome. But usually, if I already know maybe something’s under the umbrella of a body of work already, I’ll have a few references of what I want to do. A lot of my sketchbooks are all full. When I start a painting officially, it’s usually two sketches that were combined, and that’s the idea. So my sketches aren’t necessarily for one painting. It’s mostly a bunch of different sketches of different things happening, and then they combine, sort of like layers like PhotoShop.

Can you give me an example of you using that process in the current show?

So I have this mini painting, and it’s a diptych. The painting’s called Before the Light Goes Out, and there’s just a kid standing there. He has a pot full of water, the roof is dripping… So the sketch was that kid looking through the door, and then a couch next to him with the pots, and then another sketch I had was this shelf with a cat jumping off of it, and things falling off the shelf.

The painting has the kid looking at the shelf and all these things are falling. It kind of just adds to the room, whereas before it was just a door that he was looking out at. Now there’s furniture in the room, there’s the shelf there, there’s movement there.

I noticed that there’s always motion and action happening in the paintings, or a sense that the scene you’re depicting is in between two other scenes. How often is that a conscious choice?

I feel like it’s more conscious for this show, because I’ve had some paintings where they felt so still and I looked back at them like, “This painting’s so stiff.” This body of work, it talks a lot about things changing over time, things fluctuating, a lot of different emotions and things happening at once. I try to add this sort of movement to set the tone for the piece.

You already talked about this a little bit, but how does a painting begin for you?

I have a folder called “references” on my phone and it’s full of old photos that my family members have sent me. In my studio, I have a giant stack of my own memorabilia, or objects that I appreciate. So I usually look at photographs and I’ll do the sketches in pieces, like I said, where I take one sketch and add another to it, or just try to do as much brainstorming as I can. And I also write. Those three different things will create a piece. I have a lot of poetry that I write, and sometimes I just look at the lines that I wrote or the different themes in the poetry, and that’ll set the mood for a piece and give me the idea of what reference I use.

Are you writing poems to finish them and have them be their own thing, or are you using poetry as a springboard for painting?

This is so silly, but I’m a little embarrassed about poetry. I think it’s because I just started and I’m not used to it. So it is very raw. I have some finished poetry that I have included once or twice in shows that I’ve done, but then I also have these pieces of poetry that are super quick or super long, and they’re just rambling thoughts, but I like them a lot. I’m just so… not ashamed, but I feel like I’m just scared, and get some sort of anxiety about them because I’m not used to them. So they are a very exciting part of the practice that contribute a lot, but they’re hidden.

Veronica Fernandez, Close To Power, 2026, oil on panel, 18 3/4 × 24 3/4 × 2 1/4 inches.

Tell me a little bit about your day-to-day, your routine around art making. Are you pretty strict with your time? Are you structured? Are you a little bit more scrambly, sprawly?

I work really, really early, and I love working really, really late. I hate afternoon. I just feel like that’s a dead time. It gets really hot during the day, and I’m just confused. [*laughs*] So during the afternoon, I kind of wander around. But when I wake up, I always make sure that I at least start by 8:00, and so I’m getting ready by 7:00, getting my food together. All the background noise gets set up for exactly 8:00.

From there I usually only pause for meals or for contacting people, and then I kind of work until night. I just love working until, like, 12 or 1. I wish I could pull all-nighters. I can’t anymore. I did it too much in college, and now I feel like I might die if I do it again.

You weren’t getting started at 8:00 in the morning then, were you?

No, I was! I used to stay over at my school, because I was a commuter and they let you have your own studio during your thesis. So I had crusty eyes, just waking up. I’m like, “Okay, go home to shower, come back from Jersey to New York.”

Have you always worked long hours?

Yeah! I didn’t start painting until college; I didn’t know oil painting existed until I became a student in college. My school and my upbringing, I didn’t even know you could be an artist. I thought all the artists were all dead and we just saw their work in museums.

I got to college, I learned how to oil paint, and that’s when I started painting. From there, I just worked nonstop all day, every day—when I could, because the materials were expensive. But I worked at the school, so I was able to get people’s scraps. Leftover canvases international students threw out, or oil paint they threw out, and so forth.

Do you have periods where you rest and don’t work?

Yeah, someone told me once, it’s called the post-show blues. So sometimes that’s my rest time, when I finally met that deadline and pressure and I’ve almost exhausted myself. That’s when I start doing a lot more poetry and a lot more sketching, and I don’t work on a painting at all. When I want to get back to work and I have severe “art block,” what I end up doing is I’ll have a bunch of canvases and I’ll just paint them all different colors and see which one excites me the most, and just sort of go painting-hopping, and then work on the one that I’m the least bored with until I get a groove again.

I’m curious about your approach to working with the raw material of memory, or memorabilia, things from your past. You’re not just painting it in a photorealistic way, you’re playing with it creatively. How do you think about it?

I actually have every card anyone’s ever given me; I never throw a card away. I love rereading them and keeping them in mind for my words and keeping in mind the connection I have to that person, kind of pocketing these emotions. When I start a piece, when I think about the tone I want to set, I always turn back to cards or advice I get from family members or old photographs. I’ll have this page in my sketchbook that looks like columns of lists, and it’s all almost titles or sayings or advice someone has given me, or a sentence a family member said that I thought was interesting or special. I’ll take those things and I’ll add it to the work at some point or let it be a catalyst.

Veronica Fernandez, Highway Laundry, 2026, oil on panel, 10 7/8 x 8 7/8 inches.

Do you find that the emotion is there from the beginning and you are just clarifying it, or does it evolves as you work on it?

It evolves as I work on it. A lot of works in the new show are all kids or families in motel rooms, going through different circumstances. I feel like that’s all evolved over the past year, and doing this show was [about] working with my own personal memories and thinking about my circumstances that I’ve gone through in my life.

There’s this gas station painting and the woman’s holding her kid. I don’t know if you saw that piece [Highway Laundry]. Basically, this woman has her kid piggybacked on her, and then her other kid has laundry, and they’re walking past this Denny’s and this vagabond motel. There’s a guy on the floor who’s homeless, and there’s a bunch of garbage on the floor, and all those little elements that I add to make it more realistic. Those are all things where I’m like, “Oh, my family had to walk down the highway with all these laundry baskets, because we didn’t have a laundry near us.” All those little details I add from different memories and points in time to make it feel more present and more open-ended for the viewer who sees it, so they’ll think about, “Oh, what kind of environment is this person in and why are they there?”

Totally. There are broader stories and systems at play. They’re not flat scenes, they’re very dynamic scenes. Could you tell me more about the Ignite the Hearts Foundation that you work with and how that is connected to your art practice?

When we were younger, my dad was struggling a lot and we lived in a shelter, but when we got out of that transitional housing, we lived in this small apartment. For years, up until my sister and I took over, my dad would always give out food vouchers for people and have these boxes where he filled it with Thanksgiving dinners and so forth, and would give it out to families. It’s his way of paying it forward. He instilled it in us, and even at a young age, I was decorating the boxes, because I was the art one. And so my sister and I, every year, basically take over that sort of tradition in our family. We look up any shelters with families. We work with nonprofits on Skid Row. What do they need and what can we collect and how can we get our neighbors to help us get all these things? How do we get the community together to make it happen for these people? What do you need? Let’s make it happen. And so Ignite the Hearts—my dad named it—is just my family. Me, my dad, my brother, my sister. Basically, we just help anyone that needs us.

When it comes to that tying into the work, I was living in Sylmar in San Fernando Valley, and down the street from me was the motel that’s in a lot of these pieces, a vagabond motel. Every day I would see this line of kids waiting for school outside the motel. It just struck a lot of emotion in me, because when I was younger, I did the same thing: I would take a bus from the shelter to my school, because I lived in another town, and that was the school I went to. I wasn’t sure why I lived in a different place and why I was going to school in a different place, and I found out that motel was full of families that were living there that were in a transitional phase. All their lives of where they were before are packed into this room. When I was doing this show, I thought about how to evoke this feeling in the works: this suffocating, curious feeling about what it’s like to have your life in this space, because I’ve been there before. I was thinking about it for a while, and I knew what I was going to call the show and what I wanted to incorporate, but I didn’t know what I was going to paint.

I get the clear sense of an insider perspective on these scenes. I get the sense of you relating to these sort of outsider subjects. Is that also something that you’re trying to represent?

Yeah. One thing I really struggle with, as an artist, is imposter syndrome. I grew up not knowing about art. When you grow up poor, you don’t know about a lot of things, and when you get into the art world, you realize a lot of artists have access to so much. Maybe their parents have collections, or maybe they knew about art from an early age—which is great for them, not knocking that—but I struggled a lot. When I make pieces, and when they’re personal and I have to express them, I’m able to. But sometimes it makes you feel very vulnerable. It’s something that I want to express because I want people to see the places that are being highlighted in the works, and the little feelings and little details that are being highlighted in the works about an everyday life that may be overlooked at times.

I’ve always told my friends, sometimes I feel like I was born five feet under everybody else, where you feel like you’re always playing catch up. Even a lot of my family members, all the adults that I know, they’re still playing catch up. They feel like they don’t have the things they want at the age they are, or they feel like on the outside. I feel like that’s why being an artist feels so unreal, because it’s not something that I thought I could become. I’m Latina and I want to be an artist, and I want to be able to express myself, but there’s this weird feeling where I’m like, “Oh, should I be doing this? Should I be doing something else to support my family more, to support myself more?”

Luckily, I come from a family where my dad has always pushed me to do what I want to do, regardless of what the risks are. But I still feel like I’m putting myself in a very vulnerable state… But maybe that’s just how it is. It’s okay. I don’t want to always feel comfortable where I am because my upbringing was uncomfortable. Nothing’s comfortable. [*laughs*]

Veronica Fernandez, Vagabond Holiday, 2026, oil on panel, 11 7/8 x 14 7/8 inches.

Everyone suffers and everybody has obstacles that they have to overcome, and it’s both awful and beautiful.

Yeah! It’s so weird too. I feel like when I finally started going to school, I was blown away just seeing an art museum. Contemporary art was just the weirdest, coolest shit ever. I was like, “What the fuck is going on? Where has this been? Where has the culture been?”

It sounds like you’ve been able to keep in touch with that feeling of loving it and caring about it without it getting stale. Is there a secret to that?

I think you have to find ways to keep yourself motivated and ambitious. I’ve always been the type of person that I’m like, “Oh, I have to do this and I have to do that and I have to do this. I have to try to do it.” I’d rather try and fail than not try at all. I think you have to try your best to find your version of how to be ambitious, and you know that there’s a bunch of people doing the same medium as you, and maybe people make similar paintings to you, but you have to keep loving what you do—what your version of that is.

People always ask me, “Why are you so motivated all the time?” It’s not just because I’m making a career out of it. I’ve also had years where I’m not the most wanted artist on earth and I can’t make money off of it, whatever. That’s not the sole motivation. It’s having to motivate yourself and find it interesting. Don’t let the fire die out. Feed it. Put gasoline on it.

That’s a good final quote I think.

Put gasoline on that shit!

Veronica Fernandez recommends:

Binge-watching the entire Studio Ghibli catalogue

Mannequin Pussy’s album I Got Heaven

Fort building in the living room. Crawling in and out of it for a week.

When you see someone and think something nice of them, tell them.

For you beautiful ones my thought is not changeable by Ambera Wellmann, 2023

Author and publishing professional Joel Miller on making an effort

2026-03-27T00:00:00-04:00

What was your journey into the world of books?

It started in utero. My dad was—still is—an English teacher. He’s 82! My mom was a massive reader. The house was full of books, and I read a lot growing up, but only casually. My parents never stressed it; I just did it. I followed my interests, but there was nothing programmatic about it. As I got older and books became a part of my professional life, and my personal interests developed down particular tracks, books were usually the first place I went to learn and think about things. They are a companion. When I think about fiction or spiritual titles, those are books that have been with me and have anchored me for a long time.

You worked with a Christianity-focused imprint, and have now written The Idea Machine, which goes into how books were shaped by Christianity and vice versa. Has faith always played a big role in your interest in books and literature, or do you think of those two things separately?

I grew up in a Christian household, and my faith has evolved, for lack of another word, over the years. I’m Eastern Orthodox at this point—have been since 2009. Books were a part of that journey. But I don’t really see them as separate at all. I probably tend to read everything through something of a Christian lens. I evaluate the characters I’m reading from two vantage points. I’m looking at it from what’s true to that character: why is this character acting the way that they’re acting, given how they’re presented to me? Then there’s also the sort of larger moral universe where they fit in, that is informed by my faith, for sure. Is the way that they’re acting healthy, helpful, conducive to human flourishing or whatever?

So I read a book like Crime and Punishment, which is explicitly Christian in a lot of ways, and I can also read a book that is not explicitly Christian, and I’m still importing a bit of that moral lens as I’m asking, “Why is this character doing what they’re doing? Would I solve that problem that way?” One of the things I think is most fascinating about fiction as an enterprise is taking and recruiting my neural synapses towards the projects of this character. I’m saying, “Don’t do that—do this instead,” or I’m puzzled by what they’re puzzled by, and I’m in the turmoil that they’re in as I’m reading. What I bring to that are the resources that I have, like any other reader, and some of that, for me, is my faith.

Do you like being challenged when you read?

Oh, yeah. I expect every book to stretch me, to one degree or another. I’m always hoping to learn something from a book, fiction or nonfiction. I’m always hoping to encounter something I hadn’t considered, or a way of thinking about the world that I hadn’t considered.

I just read Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth trilogy, and that was a fantastic set of books. I read her book The Emissary right before, and those four are in a conversation with each other. It was great to encounter how different the experiences of the individual characters were, and how different all those individual characters were to me. Yet some of the very same concerns I have about cultural openness, and the willingness to entertain novelty and newness in people and ideas, are present in those books, including the opposite—especially in The Emissary, which is all about closedness. It’s all about what happens when you shut yourself off from the world.

You’ve played so many different roles in relation to books. Do you engage with them differently depending on if you’re editing, reviewing, or acquiring?

I only acquired nonfiction, so when I read nonfiction, I often read it like an editor. When I read fiction, I don’t read that way exactly, but I still read pretty critically. In both fiction and nonfiction, I tend to read with a pencil in hand. I mark up my books. I try to figure out the relationship between the characters and the flyleaf for the back of the book. I’ll sometimes jot down family trees if it’s necessary. When I read A History of the Island by Eugene Vodolazkin, keeping track of all these characters and the timescale of the history required that I keep this family tree in order to keep it all straight. So I try to read critically whatever I’m reading and be engaged with it—intensely.

Even if you think you’re not going to review it?

Yeah. If I know I’m going to review it, then I’m definitely going to, but I tend to read everything that way. I’m trying to get something out of each book I read, and I figure I’m only going to get as much out as I’m willing to expend in my effort.

This reminds me a lot of what your book, The Idea Machine, is about the fact that books have something very specific and special to give. So what do you think that books can provide to the reader that other mediums can’t?

An immersive experience in the mind of an author, or another person, period—outside of a relationship with someone that’s ongoing. You just don’t have access to people’s minds outside of something like that. In a book, you can actually reorient your thinking. In a movie, it’s over in two hours and the likelihood that your thinking has been changed is pretty slim, unless it’s a very profound movie. But with a novel, that might happen, because you’ve been with it for, say, 10 or 12 or 20 hours.

That’s also true with nonfiction. In history, in philosophy, you’re entering into a world of arguments or facts or both, and historical details and so on, that enable you to get oriented to a perspective on the past that you otherwise have no access to. In the world of philosophical engagement, you’re entering into a pattern of thinking that you don’t naturally have on your own. If you open up a philosophy book and already have those thoughts, congratulations—you don’t need to read that book. But the reality is, you don’t have those thoughts. That’s why you opened the book. You have the privilege now of sitting with somebody who’s teased through a complex set of ideas for a long time, and has spent the time to carefully present them in a digestible format that enables you to entertain new thinking that you couldn’t have entertained before.

Your book makes the case that books are an extremely powerful and lasting technology. What do you think it does for a reader to change how they think about books in that way?

Reminding people—or letting them know possibly for the first time—that the book has enabled civilization to develop the way that it has is a reminder that you have access to that, and you have already benefited from all of that. We’re standing on all the books that have ever been written, that have contributed to our lives right at this moment. We can reenact that same sort of discovery and engagement in our own lives by pulling out a book and reading, which is a very enriching thought.

Do you have other books planned?

The Idea Machine took me, depending on how you count it, either 10 or 13 years to write, from when I got started to when I finally finished. It was very consuming. And I’ve written several books. My first book came out in 2004. I wrote a second book in 2006. I wrote a biography in 2010, and then a short, sort of religious-themed book in 2012. Every one of those books was hyper-demanding. I knew that when I got into writing The Idea Machine, but I had no idea it would be as demanding as it turned out to be. I figured I could knock it out in a year or two, and that turned out to be not remotely close to the truth. When I think about writing a new book, I’m like, what do I really want to give a decade to? I can think of all kinds of great ideas, but I don’t want to do them right now.

Is maintaining your Substack also demanding? You’re putting out two posts per week. How do you divvy up your time between writing and your other responsibilities—and, hopefully, having fun?

Well, I have one hobby, which is to read and to write. I’m pretty good at optimizing my time for that hobby. I look for chinks in my day where I can write, and I listen to audiobooks and read physical books, sometimes simultaneously. If it’s a really demanding book, I’ll actually listen while I’m reading, which I find is a nice way to stay engaged when I’m struggling with a book. I just use the available time I have, and I think I use it productively. Reading is my primary activity outside of work, or hanging out with my kids. Even then, I try to read to them. At night, my almost 7-year-old loves nothing more than for me to read to her.

Where do all your ideas come from? And what happens if you don’t have an idea for a whole week?

A couple times I’ve recycled an old post, or I’ve gone back to an old essay and retooled it. Mostly, one of the reasons I thought writing a book review-themed Substack would be somewhat “easy” was that I had blogged off and on since before they called it blogging. I always went through periods where I was really intense, and then some periods where I’d be really lax and not have ideas for three months.

I figured the great thing about reviewing a book is that the author has done all the work about giving me what to think about. I just need to figure out what I think about what they think about. I don’t tend to find times where I don’t have something to say, because I’m always filling up with new stuff from the books I’m reading, and my responsibility to the audience is to deliver what I’m thinking about that particular book.

You said you like books that can change your mind a little bit. After so many years of intensive reading, how have you changed?

I am pretty introverted, and I’m one of those people that probably feels my feelings a lot later than the events that might have provoked them. But fiction actually helps me feel my feelings. I get a lot of emotional processing through the books I read, or I have access to my emotions in a way through fiction that I don’t have on my own… When I read Shūsaku Endō, for instance, there’s an emotional valence to the way he writes that I don’t have any natural access to. That’s just not how I feel or how I think. When I read him, I find myself feeling much more expansive about other people, the world, the fragility of the world, and other people in it. I don’t have that sort of empathy on my own. Endō makes a really wonderful crutch for me in that way. Every one of his novels I’ve read, I start and I find myself completely swept away, accessing feelings that I don’t have on my own, and I find that to be life-giving and really powerful.

Did anything surprise you while you were researching and writing The Idea Machine?

All through that book, I had one overarching realization: I might be writing literally the most obvious and boring book that has ever been written. The only way to make sure that a reader goes from page one to the end is to make sure it is full of weird and funny and fascinating stories. Whenever I would encounter anything that felt like it might go in, I would just grab it. Almost always those were things that delighted me or surprised me, and I thought that if it delights and surprises me, odds are good it’s going to delight and surprise the reader. I just need to figure out how to tell it.

For instance, in the chapter on writing and editing as a type of thinking, I ran into this article about writing tablets found near Athens. They contain some of the earliest written Greek we have evidence of. The thing that made me the happiest was the detail that the poet had smudged out the line and corrected herself. Instrumentally, it supported what I was trying to argue: when we’re in the process of writing, we can see what we’ve written, and therefore think about and rethink what we’ve thought, and therefore have the chance to revise what we’ve thought. All productive thinking is a process of gesturing out with something and then getting feedback about it—whether we’re entertaining it in our own minds, or seeing it on a screen, or looking at the response in somebody’s face when we say it—and then knowing if that idea is worth going to the next idea with, or not. Writing is a way of objectifying our thoughts such that we can analyze them and improve them.

Do you like being surprised?

One of the great joys about research and writing is you discover stuff about yourself, and the world and what you think about it, that you just didn’t know before.

Joel Miller recommends five books by C.S. Lewis:

The Allegory of Love. For Lewis, the book that first made him famous was an academic work on the courtly love tradition in medieval poetry, published in 1936, long before his later fame as an apologist and children’s author. The book opens with a trenchant observation, which modern people (me among them) often forget: we are not so different from our forebears as we suppose. “Humanity,” says Lewis, “does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.” And yet we are different in important ways, and we fail to understand the past—and our present selves—if we don’t appreciate both the similarities and the differences.

The Discarded Image. Lewis positions The Discarded Image as a survey of medieval and Renaissance literature, but in many ways it is an introduction to the medieval mind itself, which he conceives as a complete Model harmonizing diverse philosophies, poetry, histories, homilies, and satires inherited from Christian, Jewish, Greek, Roman, and barbarian sources. As with all of Lewis’s work, he’s delightfully opinionated; he calls Isidore’s Etymologies “a work of very mediocre intelligence.” But he’s also willing to take the medieval world on its own terms—an exercise in the point above about appreciating the differences.

Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. This book picks up the thread of The Discarded Image. Lewis compares reading old literature to traveling to a foreign country. You can do it as a mere visitor—or you can go deeper. “You can eat the local food and drink the local wines, you can share the foreign life, you can begin to see the foreign country as it looks, not to the tourist but to its inhabitants. You can come home modified, thinking and feeling as you did not think and feel before.”

Studies in Words. To inhabit medieval and Renaissance literature requires understanding the words its authors used. And we don’t. What linguists call false friends (words whose meaning we think we grasp but don’t) abound. “If we read an old poem with insufficient regard for change in the overtones, and even the dictionary meanings, of words since its date . . . then of course we do not read the poem the old writer intended.” He attempts to fix that by studying common terms such as nature, wit, free, world, life, and simple.

A Preface to Paradise Lost. Why does any of this matter, besides Lewis’s books are enjoyable to read? Lewis addresses that question in an attempt to salvage the reputation of John Milton’s masterwork, which his predecessors (such as the Romantics) had misunderstood and his contemporaries (especially T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis) had not only misunderstood but devalued. The problem was that readers had lost touch with Milton’s world and—unable or unwilling to find their way back into the technique of epic poetry and seventeenth-century theology—failed to understand what Milton was doing. Lewis’s contention is that we only get to judge a work if we judge it on its own terms, including the world of its creation.

Singer-songwriter Maya J’an on finding your soft side

2026-03-26T00:00:00-04:00

Can you tell me a bit about yourself?

I’m Maya J’an. I’m a singer and songwriter. People say I’m a downward spiral documentary.

When did you start making music? What are your creative aspirations?

I was born and raised in Los Angeles. Music has always been a huge part of me. My mom was a big support and put me in a band when I was really young with my sisters. I was about 6, and I started playing drums then. My sisters fell out of love with the band pretty quickly; I was only 7, but I realized I wanted to keep doing it. I started writing songs around that time. They weren’t very good at all. I had a song called “Birthday Cloud,” another song about mermaids, but I always dreamed about something.

What kind of music did you play with your sisters? What was the name of your band?

Oh gosh, the name of our band was ATM because it’s our names. We played all types of stuff. My dad is from Belize, and my mom grew up in Texas. So we listened to all types of stuff, from reggaeton to country to alternative to pop R&B. We were pretty genre-less as a band. We were kids, we just did whatever we felt like. I remember practicing a lot of my drumming to One Republic. Do you remember One Republic?

Yes, of course. It’s too late to apologize… At what point in your life did you know you wanted to become a musician?

I went into high school and just started posting on SoundCloud. Writing’s like therapy. It always has been. My mom lost custody of me when I was 9, and that made writing more of a lifeline. It felt like my last little thread to her, in a way. I became a recluse. At school, my favorite part was just to come home and sit in the garage and noodle on the piano. That’s kind of where I started. Growing up in LA and seeing the entertainment part of it from a closer range, I never really wanted to do anything else. I knew that I wanted to make music. I wanted to be a writer and share my story.

I can tell you are very devoted to music, but also to your feelings and how these are translated through your craft.

It’s almost like you don’t really know what else to do with your life [other than music]. It’s the only thing I’m good at. It’s the only way I can express myself. I went to college, and I tried to do the more by-the-book route for my dad’s sake, but I knew that there would always be a hole in my chest if I didn’t actually try. When I was 17, I asked my dad, “Hey, I’ll do one semester in college, but if I’m going to try and work on this music thing, and if nothing happens within a year, I will stop.” After six months, I was discovered, and I signed my first record deal with Capitol Records.

Did you have any mentors growing up?

Yeah, Soulshock & Karlin. Soulshock is this amazing Danish producer, and Karlin is his partner. They found me when I was 17; I was going to the library skipping school, sending people my music. I met with them pretty early on. I’m laughing because my dad actually came to the second meeting with me, even though he wasn’t a big believer in me going into music.

What it was like growing up in LA? How does the energy of LA show up in your work or your creative process?

LA is a bit of a void that you get sucked into… Even though I’ve been here my whole life, I can still find things that inspire me and bring me back to life on days when I’m not feeling great. The history here is so deep and special. Old Hollywood, all the writers and filmmakers, all the stories layered into the city. My vintage apartment sounds perfect for that energy. Just driving up Mulholland or going to the Beverly Hills Hotel, or spots like Musso and Frank—those classic places feel iconic. Even that Mexican restaurant in Studio City that Tarantino loves. It’s like you’re surrounded by creative history all the time.

Yes, I can feel that energy. Everyone comes to LA chasing something. All that ambition and hope.

I wonder if I could live somewhere else, but I’d always fall back here because it’s all I’ve ever known. I’ve been to some amazing places. I love Denmark, Nashville, and other places. But I don’t know. LA is just a part of me now.

You describe your song “cul-de-sac” as a love letter to your hometown. What does the song mean to you personally?

That song is really emotional for me. I poured a lot of memories into it, and it was actually hard to write. I’m really excited to share my music, especially my writing style. I can get very detailed, and I usually write songs like they’re pages from a diary. “cul-de-sac” feels like my most vague song, and I think that’s because it was such a hard thing to put into words. At the beginning of last year, a family member’s house burned down in the fires. Three houses were damaged, and one was completely gone. It was a multi-generational home, so we had so many childhood memories there. It was a really strange and heavy time for my family. I’m very sentimental and nostalgic, so it paralyzed me for a while. About a month later, after I had been sitting with everything, I went into a session with my producer, Jonas Jurström. I told him what I had been going through and said I wanted to create something that felt like being inside a memory. That’s where “cul-de-sac” came from.

What about the title?

I actually grew up on two different cul-de-sacs, so the title feels really personal to me. There’s the literal meaning—the actual streets I grew up on—and then there’s the more figurative side of it. That feeling of not really having anywhere to go, of hitting some kind of dead end. Not in a dramatic way, not good or bad—it just is. When I went back to see the house in Pasadena that burned down, it was really hard for me to even go down the street. I’m really visual and sentimental, and I didn’t know if I wanted to see it like that. I didn’t know if I was ready for that version of the memory. I think a big part of it for me is holding onto memories and not wanting to rewrite them, but realizing that I have to. As we get older, we’re constantly rewriting our past, intentionally or not. We get wiser. We start to see our parents as people who were just figuring it out. All those perceptions shift over time. I’ve become really protective of that as I’ve gotten older. I’m aware of how things can change the way I see my past. So a part of me chooses softness. I choose to stay sentimental and a little romantic about things that could easily feel harsh.

There’s a real vulnerability in your voice. It made me wonder, as a singer-songwriter, how does it feel to expose yourself like that?

My only goal is to show up as authentically as I can. It’s funny, when I dropped my last single, “pocket knife,” I literally lay in the fetal position on my bed because I felt so exposed. As a writer, I’m not hiding behind anything. I’m choosing to be honest and not add any frills to make it more digestible. It really is just my diary. I also try to write for myself first. There are times when I play songs for friends, family, or the label, and I catch myself digging my fingers into my legs like, oh god. But that’s how I know those songs are meant to come out. It’s because they mean so much to me. I want to look back and know I gave real pieces of myself. The artists I connect with most are the ones who feel pure and transparent in their writing. The Mitskis, the Lanas. Angel Olsen, Father John Misty. That kind of honesty.

I can hear Lana in your work. Being at the heart of the music industry in LA, do you feel pressure to fit a certain mold or to shape your career along a specific path?

I did. When I was 18, I signed to Capitol, and that whole experience taught me a lot about expectations and how not to give a fuck about them. Now I wouldn’t say I think about it too much. Especially as a Black woman making… I don’t even know what genre I make. I just make whatever I feel like making. But as a Black woman not making what people might expect me to make, I’ve definitely been told I don’t do things the way people assume I should. That’s unfortunate, not for me, but for the people who think that way. As a Black woman, as a woman of color, even just as a writer, I’m allowed to be soft. I’m allowed to be honest. I’m allowed to do whatever I want. When I was first starting, I was having so many panic attacks because I wasn’t at ease. I was constantly bending to other people’s expectations. It got to a point where I didn’t even want to do this anymore. So I stepped back and started writing for other people, and somehow slowly found my way back to being an artist, almost by accident.

This time feels different because I actually know who I am. I’m not as scared. People are always going to project their own ideas onto you, especially in art. It’s such a delicate thing, and everyone has an opinion. That’s okay. I’m almost grateful for what I went through because now I know what feels good and what doesn’t. The only thing that’s ever worked for me is wearing my heart on my sleeve. That’s why I’m so committed to it. It’s the only way this works for me.

I’d love to talk a little more about “pocket knife.” I can share what I took from it, and you can tell me if I’m completely off? When I listened to it, I felt this sense of playing with fire. It felt like a story about loving someone who embodies risk. The line about “sleeping on a pocket knife, dreaming about your life” gave me this feeling of being with someone who feels a little unsafe, but who’s also very intoxicating. You choose to fall in love.

I love hearing how you interpret it. It’s really close to how I intended it. “pocket knife” is a story about trust. Can we have love without trust, and can you have trust without love? Are they interconnected? Is it a package deal? I’ve always had trust issues. “pocket knife” is just me saying, “I love you. I see things with you, but I’m already preparing myself for you to stab me in the back. If you do that, I’m going to be prepared and stab you back.” Emotionally, of course, not physically. “pocket knife” is just a story of love and trust. You can have either one without the other. Whenever I trust someone, that’s how I know I love them. Whereas love can be a little harder to define. I could love someone and not trust them… Love is such a complex thing, but trust is explainable. It comes with its own set of rules.

Were the lyrics part of your diary?

Yeah, for sure. The verses come from real experience. I was in a relationship that defied the norm. It was during a time when I wasn’t sure if I was going to keep doing music. I was writing for other people, but I wasn’t really pursuing my own artistry. I started thinking maybe this music thing isn’t for me in the way I imagined, and that’s okay. The person I was with was kind of reinforcing that. He was gently pushing me toward a smaller life, wanting me to settle down, be a housewife. At the time, I thought I loved him. But there were parts of me that were fighting it, and now I understand why.

It’s funny. As an ambitious woman, or just someone with a little fire in her belly, you have to believe in yourself, almost blindly. Not everyone is going to see the vision. There have been so many moments where I had to choose my own belief in myself over something that looked stable and made sense on paper. It really messed with my head. But in the end, I trusted myself more than I trusted him or that relationship. I mean, if you have to sleep on a pocket knife, how safe are you, really?

Have you been working on your EP?

The EP is almost solid. We’re 90% there, I’m excited to share.

If your EP had a color, a flavor, and a scent, what would they be?

For color, a vintage baby powder blue. I would say the smell of your hometown mall—how it just smells like all the foods, all the people. Flavors, I’d say it’s a mix between two different things: something that your grandma would make you that’s super nourishing, and you just feel loved, but also Jell-O.

Where do you see yourself in five years? You don’t need to be humble about it. It’s not that kind of interview.

I definitely see myself with a handful of Grammys. I see myself writing for myself and other friends, constantly in the studio and inspired, traveling with Ms. Yoko, my dog. And happy.

Musician and DJ Avalon Emerson on the value of sharing space with other people

2026-03-25T03:00:00-04:00

You very intentionally wanted to replicate the energy and dynamics of your live performances on your new album Written Into Changes. Can you talk about how exactly you did that?

Kind of the other way around, actually. The first album was very studio-y, kind of bedroom-y, a little bit quiet. For this album, I wanted to explore sounds that would feel powerful on a bigger stage.

What do you see as the value of live music these days? I’m asking from the perspective of, a lot of people consume music digitally and stream it, but maybe they don’t go to shows as often.

I was just having a chat about how it feels like we’re so atomized from one another in our everyday—and everything is so personalized, and everyone has their own algorithms of doom that we all scroll—that getting together in a real space is…it’s one of the last places that we can get together around a shared experience. There’s something to be said for sharing a room with a bunch of other people. If it’s in a dance club, you’re kind of in a nonverbal communal space, sharing the same sweaty air, and being reminded that we’re pack animals.

When you say that, are you saying it from the perspective of you being on stage, you being in the crowd, or both?

Both. I see it a lot when I’m DJing. People need to get it out. There’s a lot of pressure pushing down from every angle these days, and especially looking at your phone, you’re assaulted by such a scale of horrific shit that it’s important to be reminded that we’re also existing in physical space and need to be communal with one another. I help facilitate that, I guess, as a DJ, and coming together for live music feels very similar, too.

To what extent do you see your recorded work, & the Charm, and your DJing as similar or different?

When I write music for the club, there’s a function for it, and I’m also just more experienced with it. When I’m looking for music to DJ or I’m making music to DJ, I have a pretty clear idea of the thing it needs to do, and there’s a structure that I know works, and there’s a way that I DJ. I set my music up in a way that lets me do that. There’s also an iterative process where I’ll go through, like, 40 different versions of a dance song or an edit. I’ll play it in Dublin, then I’ll change it a little bit, and then I’ll play it in London, change it a little bit, and I’ll play it in New York, and then I’ll go back to a previous version, and it’s this live iterative process.

With these albums, it’s very different in that I kind of go away for a couple years, make music with some people that I’ve worked with a lot before, and there’s a confidence and a familiarity, just a pure joy doing all of that and working with really brilliant studio musicians and expanding who I make music with. It’s this closed-off secret garden, and then you build a visual world around it, and it’s produced and the songs go through different versions, but it’s kind of in private. And then, you have all these songs done, and you’re kind of putting together the concept of the album and releasing this large project that’s been cooking for a couple of years.

I think my taste, and the roots of what I like and how that affects the music that I make, inherently come from the same place. That’s a little bit more abstract and hard to describe. It’s more of an inspiration rather than a process difference, but there’s a lot of things that are different and similar about both [& the Charm and DJing]. I feel lucky that I have this side of my career that I like, DJing, that I still love to do, that I can do, and that it’s not as beholden to album cycles.

When you talk about DJing, it sounds more intuitive and solitary. Do you find that, when you’re pivoting away from the solitude of DJing to the more collaborative space of making & the Charm albums, it shifts something in you?

I think music is inherently communal, whether it’s the interaction of the stage or DJ booth with the crowd. When you’re playing a live set, maybe you can have a spur of the moment and be like, “Let’s play this song. It’s not on the set list, but let’s go.” With DJing, it’s very open-ended, and it’s a conversation between the dance floor and my ideas of what I’m going to do from the DJ booth’s perspective. It’s more of a live muscle that I’m exercising when I’m DJing, and it’s like a conversation. I’m constantly getting new music and filtering out some old songs that I’m not playing as much anymore. I’ll have ideas and do some live re-editing, like different layering and experimentation live.

With the band, it’s this building-up of a project and a work, then displaying it for everyone and hoping everybody likes it. There’s different challenges and fun parts to each of those, but in the way that everything is all learning and all creative expression, I think it’s tied together and orthogonally related, and there are connections that happen that you don’t expect.

Did you have to learn how to have that conversation with the audience while DJing, or did it come naturally to you?

I think people use the shortcut of “comes naturally” with things that you like and things that you have an inherent drive to keep doing, and anything that you keep doing, you get better at. So much of making music is about listening to a lot of music and being conscious about what you like, why you like it, and what are the more zoomed-out traits that you’re responding to about listening to those things and learning how to create them from the artist’s perspective. DJing is also about paying attention, listening to the dance floor, and feeling where there’s a pull toward a certain sound or vibe or whether something needs a change-up.

That’s also why I like playing long sets in places that I feel comfortable in, like Nowadays or at Panorama Bar. Panorama Bar is usually four hours. If you’re closing, it’s around eight sometimes. Nowadays is also open-to-close, around eight hours. I played six on New Year’s.

Imagine playing a live set for six or eight hours. It can’t fully be planned, you know what I mean? The length and the breadth of it is a very open field to go play around in, and you want to make sure you have as many, to use conversation terms, words and turns of phrase to communicate with as possible, because there’s so much music out there and it’s always changing, it’s always exciting. My friends are always sending me new things to road-test, and I’m always making things, and I want to try new things. You eventually get bored of yourself, so it’s always a new experience to keep it feeling fresh and still connect with people while not repeating yourself.

You talked about being comfortable in Panorama Bar and at Nowadays. How do you get comfortable with a space, or if that’s too hard to articulate, how do you realize you’ve become comfortable with a space?

I think those places have done a ton of hard-earned work to develop a set of expectations from the crowd and from DJs where, every time anybody DJs at Panorama Bar…their first time they go, they’ve been stressing about it, and they’ll play their idea of their best set, and the people that go there expect the best, and they have very strong and informed music tastes, but it’s still primarily a place that people go to have fun and let loose. You can do that, and the club is open from Saturday night to Monday morning, so it’s a long journey.

[As for] the idea of, when do I know that I’m comfortable? When I’m just way more excited to do it than anything, because the DJ booth sounds good, it feels good. The crowd is there for a good time, but I can play with a lot of different sounds and vibes, and I can go in a lot of different directions and know that the crowd is going to trust me, and they’re not [passively] just going to the local club to get drunk, do drugs with their friends, or go see some DJ that they saw a five-second clip [of] on TikTok or whatever. You can do your thing there and experiment, and that’s the dream, and I’m very happy that I have that for a lot of places.

The shortcut that I realized is that usually, right before I play Panorama Bar or Nowadays, I get an idea for a song or edit hours before I get there. I’m on the plane landing in Berlin like, “I’m going to make a crazy Kate Bush edit.” I make it on the plane and then go play it at Panorama Bar. That happens a lot, and it’s indicative of, “I’m excited. I get to debut something there.”

On a time management level, since you’re making studio albums and you’re DJing, how do you balance it?

It’s hard. I haven’t played since New Year’s, and I won’t have played until late February. This is the longest time I haven’t DJed in years, I guess since COVID. I’m not that amazing at blocking off time to not do anything. Even now, the reason I took it off is because I’m preparing the live show [for & the Charm]. I’m bad at doing time off, but I feel very comfortable with DJing. I have my processes of finding music, preparing my library, and making edits. This is kind of a machine that runs, and it gives me space to do these longer-range leaps of creative projects like making & the Charm albums.

I definitely relate to you saying you’re bad at time off. A lot of The Creative Independent’s readers are going to relate to that.

I know. Everyone is pushed from every angle. There’s pressure everywhere. We all have to fucking hustle around. It’s just late-stage capitalism.

Do you have any other sense as to why you’re bad at time off? Because yes, it’s late-stage capitalism, and yes, it’s nobody getting enough money for the work they do, but why else specific to you do you feel that you’re bad at taking time off?

I don’t know. Maybe something happened in my development, or it’s just the way I’m wired. I think that the world is a very interesting place, and I wish I had many lifetimes so that I could get good at all the things I want to get good at.

Recently, moving up here [to the Catskills], the house we live in had a garage, and it came with a table saw and a workbench, so I was like, “Okay, I’m going to start making things out of wood.” That’s my downtime stuff that I like to do, because it’s also just like music. It’s like a skill and an art combined, and there are techniques that you can learn, techniques on YouTube, but it kind of takes a while to develop them, get good at them, then use them for your specific project.

I think it’s important for me because it’s a hobby that I’m not ever trying to be professional at. It’s just for me. I’m making my little lamps and whatever, and I’m not going to have to push them in the open marketplace, and I’m not trying to be a woodworking influencer. It’s just for me, and I need to go out in my garage and listen to music and make some sawdust every once in a while. That’s a very restorative experience for me.

With & the Charm, Bullion was your main co-producer, and that’s also true of Written Into Changes, but it has two songs that Rostam is also a co-producer on. How do you know it’s time to bring in another collaborator when you’ve already got a reliable one?

I love working with Nathan [Jenkins of Buillon] so much, and I hope to for as long as we both can, but…I guess I started & the Charm making music and being like, “I want this to be collaborative.” All of my favorite and, I think, the best artists in the world are good at collaborating. David Bowie, Björk, whatever, right? You can create something that’s greater than the sum of its parts by working with other people.

If they’re fun people and they’re interesting, and you can sit in a room and talk for hours about different influences or just chat about—I’ll talk about reverb for hours with anybody, and making music with somebody else is like opening up the interiority of lyrics and talking about kind of intimate relationship things or heavy life headspace realizations. That’s why we make music. Connecting with an audience is one thing, but connecting with the people that you’re making music with is the function of music also.

That’s everything I wanted to ask you today, but if you have anything else you want to say about creativity, or anything more you wanted to add to any of the questions that I asked that you didn’t get to say when I first asked them, feel free to take a moment.

Being creative is an output of learning, and that is where it happens, so anything that can cause you to learn will cause you to be creative. Honing those muscles is the same thing as being creative: learning, gaining new skills, woodworking, writing code, being a better communicator.

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