#talkhouse | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

jucyfruit · 14 days

Text

Catching Up with Lucy Dacus and Fenne Lily

by Lucy Dacus | 11/13/20

Lucy Dacus is a Richmond, Virginia-based singer-songwriter and one-third of the folk supergroup boygenius; Fenne Lily is Bristol, UK-based singer-songwriter whose album BREACH was released in September by Dead Oceans. For this phone call, the two friends set out to dive deep on their recent dreams, and ended up taking in much, much more.

— Annie Fell, Talkhouse Senior Editor

Fenne: Before this call, I was just looking you up. Is that weird?

Lucy: You were listening to my music?

Fenne: Yeah!

Lucy: That’s so funny, I was listening to your music. “I, Nietzsche.”

Fenne: [Laughs.] You actually were one of the many reasons why I broke up with the guy that that song is about.

Lucy: Oh, my god, I didn’t like him at all.

Fenne: Do you remember? It was literally the first time I met you, pretty much, or maybe the second time. I was with him and he tried to pull me out of the conversation because he wanted to go home or something — probably to read Nietzsche. And you were like, “Don’t touch my girl like that.” And I was like, Lucy Dacus just called me her girl, and I need to leave this boy. [Laughs.]

Lucy: I felt quickly defensive of you. We had hardly met, but he was just acting so brutish. It was like, Damn, who is this guy? It was so brutish that I thought maybe you didn’t even know him, but then you were like, “No, I’m actually with him.”

Fenne: Yeah, he’s been inside me. [Laughs.] I mean, you’re someone who makes good decisions, so you’re probably not going to answer this with a yes, but have you ever been with someone that you’re like, “I can’t believe that I gave them my body, and my heart.”

Lucy: Yeah, I am easily disgusted by the idea of some of the people that I used to really have tenderness for. But then I realize, that was not a bad quality, to be able to find good things about a bad person. Even that’s tough, to call someone just a straight up bad person, but someone that I really don’t like now, I try not to be like, I’m such an idiot. That was just a part of growing, realizing that just because they have a couple good qualities doesn’t mean that they have to be my life partner.

Fenne: Yeah, I mean, I like to think of the really bad relationships I’ve been in as, like, an exercise in compassion, to an extent where now retrospectively I can see that they were manipulating me. But at the time, I was so ready to be like, You’re just an injured soul and you need a safe place, and I can be that place. But that should only be for a time. And I think I’ve definitely seen people in those relationships for a long time and it starts wearing away at them, and the way that you see yourself like personally. So as much it’s a practice in being able to see past someone’s bad qualities, I know that there’s a cutoff point for that. But yeah, thanks for protecting me. [Laughs.]

Lucy: Yeah, I think that was actually after I went through my long, drawn out, like, worst relationship. And I think that since then, I’ve been overly defensive probably. Or I just love my friends so much that I feel like nobody deserves them, and I’m just like, and I’m just like, “Go away!” to most people that my friends date. That’s not totally true, but it’s like a recurring feeling. But yeah, I hardly knew you so I was probably overstepping a bound by trying to defend you.

Fenne: It made my heart soar, and I honestly felt safe. But you have that lyric that goes, “You don’t deserve what you don’t respect,” and I always kind of thought that you were singing about yourself, but maybe you’re singing generally about people that you love also.

Lucy: Yeah, I definitely thought it about other people first, because it’s easier to defend other people than yourself. And then I realize, I should take my own advice, but I’m still not so good at that. But I think I’m better at it.

Fenne: Do you ever find yourself writing yourself as a character so that you can make clearer judgments on your own shit? Like, do you ever make yourself the third person so you can be like, “Lucy should do this.”

Lucy: A lot of people I know great as a character, but I have no such self-control. I definitely wish that I could write it as an exercise, but writing often just feels sort of like throwing up. You know what I mean? All of a sudden it’s just there, and you don’t necessarily want it to be there, an inconvenience. And I don’t really know what I’m saying until the song is written. Like, I would really love to be able to say, like, Oh, I’d like to process this event in my life, or this thought, — I will make art about it. But that has never been a skill. I feel like all my songs start as subconscious vomit.

Fenne: I agree. I thought you were going to go the opposite direction, because as a person, you seem like someone who thinks before they speak and considers the weight and the repercussions of what they’re saying. So it’s interesting that your process doesn’t reflect what I see in your character, in that sense.

Lucy: I think it’s easier to talk to other people than to myself. I think that I carry a weight of, like, you know, say-what-you-mean when I’m talking to other people, but I don’t have a practice of talking like that to myself. So it’s just kind of forced upon me sometimes, that I end up talking to myself through writing a song. Is that how you write? Do you actually sit down and say, “I’m going to write about this,” and then you write a song about what you intend to write about?

Fenne: No, I have very little foresight or planning or structure to any part of my life, and it is definitely affecting the way I work. I literally get to the point where I haven’t written in so long that I’m furious at myself for not doing anything. And I sit down, and it is like word vomit. I’m like, Something’s coming out, I’m just going to let it happen, because if I don’t, it might never happen again. And often, I’m writing and I don’t know why I’m writing from the perspective I’m writing from.

At the moment I am in a relationship that I am really comfortable in, and he makes me feel brilliant most of the time, I still feel these inexplicable periods of sadness that almost make me feel guilty, because he obviously sees me going through this and maybe thinks it’s a reflection on him. And often those are the feelings that come out when I’m writing. I think it’s a hangover from being a kid and being unable to talk about how I feel to my family, despite the fact that they’re really emotionally intelligent people and completely up fo talking about feelings, I was almost rebelling against that. So I started writing at that time because I literally couldn’t get out my feelings in any other way. I feel like I still do that, where I’m subconsciously storing up fuel to then speak to myself about songs, rather than having to vocalize it in words. So it’s never a case of being like, I’m gonna write a song about global warming — although now that I’ve said that, maybe I should do that. [Laughs.]

Lucy: I feel like it’s really rare to write about topical things and have it actually be good. I have some family members who are just like, “You should really write a song about everything that’s going on in these uncertain times!” And I’m just like, no. I just feel like my perspective isn’t necessary — just, like, as a white person, I simply don’t need to be taking up space. I’m grateful I have a platform that I can put other voices onto, with the literal easiest thing ever of resharing things.

But yeah, I think it could be useful for you to do a song about global warming, I hope you end up writing one. That’d be awesome. But don’t be tacky — it’s weird to be like, Oh, this is topical. It just it ends up feeling really tacky, I think, as a listener.

Fenne: I think to an extent, everything that I’ve written during this pandemic situation… I haven’t written a lot, I’ve feeling really unconnected to myself, and the world, and feeling really weird. But in a sense, everything that you’re writing is about the fucked up stuff that’s going on, even if it’s not directly preaching. I feel like the way you and I write is naturally diaristic, and doesn’t feel completely separate from the stuff that’s going on. You’re quite a permeable person emotionally, I think, and I definitely am. It’s inescapable that outside stuff is inevitably going to become part of the material, even if you if you don’t say, “Trump” and “Brexit” and the whole thing.

But you’re right. I mean, I’m dreading next year when all these quarantine albums come out, where all the songs are going to be called like, “Masked and Alone,” and “My Wifi’s Too Slow.” Have you been writing a lot during this period, or have you been feeling a bit dead?

Lucy: I actually have been writing a lot because, I think I end up writing to escape the present and to not think about the future. I feel like most of my creative life comes from the past. Thinking about the future is scary and living in the present is scary, and the past is certain, it can’t be changed. It’s static. I journal, so I’ve been rereading my journals and kind of remembering some emotional things that I haven’t really put to rest yet, and so that’s just kind of ending up being what I’m writing about right now. And then I might write about what’s happening in the year 2020 in, like, 2025. Do you ever have a dialogue about where you’re writing about something like many years after?

Fenne: Yeah, 100 percent. This record that I just released, when I first started writing for it, it [was] really important for me to reflect the growth that I feel I’ve experienced since the first album came out. That was kind of my first thing — I was like, I need to almost prove that I changed, if not just to myself, to people that are listening to the music.

And then as I started writing, there was a lot of stuff coming up. I was having these conversations with my mum about why I always feel angry rather than sad as my go-to feeling, and how I always feel panicky very fast. And she was telling me that when I was born, I didn’t have that big intake of breath that normal births provide — I was a cesarean, I just got cut out — and she was like, “For the first year of the life, you were crying if you weren’t held and you were always in pain and your spine was all weird and you just were not comfortable in your skin.” That was so interesting to hear that, because I genuinely feel like I haven’t really changed that much from how I came into the world. I definitely think there’s something to be said for your entrance into the world influencing how you exist in that world. So as much as I’m like, I really want to write about being 21, I feel like I also want to talk about being two again. It wasn’t a conscious thing, but it happened.

But you’re right about the past, it isn’t going to change, and thinking about the future is really scary, especially when — I don’t know how the rules are changing in the states, but especially here, it’s like we’re being run by children. It’s like “You can do what you want! Oh, no, those people died. Well, that’s a shit. Maybe we should stay inside again. Oh, no, that hasn’t worked.” No one knows what’s going on and to even try and get your head around what it’s going to be like in a week or year is impossible. And that makes you feel powerless, and then that makes

Lucy: Have you been having any of weird dreams during lockdown?

Fenne: The first couple of weeks I didn’t have any dreams. I think I was still in a state of shock, where I was like, This doesn’t feel normal. I almost [felt] like when you smoke too much weed, and your waking mind is going crazy, and then when you go to sleep, your body’s like, I literally can’t do it any more crazy anymore.

That was my brain for a while, but then come week three or four, I started having terrifying — like, not even apocalyptic dreams, just dreams when nothing was right. I had those, like. “running on the spot trying to get away from something but I couldn’t,” just really visceral, realistic horror dreams. I don’t know when they stopped, but it was dark for a bit. What about you?

Lucy: I think similarly in the beginning, I wasn’t having a lot of dreams. I did have this one dream about me and a lot of friends touring this big, kind of mansion-like house that was furnished. And they were like, “Oh, look, there’s a room over here, I found a new room!” And we were all just running around, like, laughing and loving this huge house. So I woke up and I was like, You know what, I’m just going to get on Zillow and see if there’s a big place that I could just fit my fantasy into. And there was this place that was listed, like, three days prior, and it looked so similar to the house of my dream. So I called my friends that were in the dream and I was like, “Hey, do you want to move in together? I just had this dream and I found this house and we were all in it together.” And that actually happened in July, like I live in the house with the people that were in the dream

Fenne: Oh, my god, that’s amazing.

Lucy: Did you feel you were psychic ever?

Fenne: Stupid stuff, like I predicted my brother’s birth. I was sitting with my mom on the stairs of old house, and I was, like, one and a half or two. I was like, “It’s going to be a brother, I think,” or something like that. And she was like, “What are you talking about?” And I put my hand on her tummy and said, “It’s going to be a brother, but it’s a sister I had in mind.” And she was like, “That was weird,” and then she went to get a pregnancy test and she was a month pregnant.

Lucy: Oh, wow. I thought you were saying like, “My mom was pregnant, so I predicted that she would have a baby.”

Fenne: No, like straight up, she had no idea.

Lucy: That’s much more impressive.

Fenne: She didn’t tell me for a long time — maybe until I was 15 I didn’t know, because she was like, “I don’t want to give her false power, I don’t want her to think that everything she has a feeling about is going to happen.”

But I think I go through certain areas where I get a bad feeling and try and squash it if I don’t know anything about it, and then it’s proven to me that I was right. I moved into this really spooky house… when I first moved to Bristol I was in shared houses, and then I was like, I really want a place to live with a couple of friends. We were looking somewhere and we, in the process, got kicked out of our existing houses, so we had to rush finding a place. We settled on this house that was enormous and really cheap, and we didn’t know why it was so cheap but we didn’t really think about it.

When we first went to view it, I was like, This feels wrong. Something about the energy of this house is not nice. It doesn’t feel like we’re welcome here. And I told my friend, and he was like, “Well, we don’t really have the chance to be picky right now, and we don’t have any money.” So we moved in, and then a couple of weeks after we moved in I was sitting outside — we signed on for a year, so we couldn’t get out even if we wanted to. I was sitting outside the house and the next door neighbor talking to me, and we were chatting and she was like, “Do you know the story behind the house you just moved into?” I was like, “No, but please tell me because I don’t like it.” And basically, about 10 years ago, maybe less, this family next door, who still lives next door, the dad in the family shot some guy because they were in warring gangs — I live in a really rough bit of Bristol. He shot this guy and tried to hide the body in the basement of the house that we live in now, and then he tried to escape to the States, and his wife bought him the ticket — they both went down for a long time, and the kids were in care. Now the woman’s out of jail and she’s living next door with the kids. So I was like, “There’s been a dead body in my house.” And I feel like I knew that something was wrong and I ignored it, and then ever since that point, I had to live there for another 11 months. And I had all my practice equipment in the basement, I’d made it into a room where we could record, and then it just didn’t feel good from that point on. I didn’t want to go downstairs.

Lucy: If you felt good, I’d be really concerned. [Laughs.] I do feel like people like haunted houses sometimes, like some people really get into that. I don’t understand it. I feel like you can only be into it if you haven’t truly been affected by the haunting of the house.

Fenne: It’s the kind of thing that you want to go into for a trip, but t you don’t want to really live there. I don’t know about you, and I will ask you, but I didn’t really think I was that much of a believer in ghosts for a pretty long time, and then I was listening to this podcast where people tell real stories from their lives — it’s not scripted at all, at least that’s what they say. There’s so many stories of people moving into a house, getting a weird feeling, and then their kid start talking to ghosts. Some of the stories are so visceral and so complicated and so obviously made me see that there is another world that I haven’t personally come into contact with, but why would we not? Have you had ghost experiences?

Lucy: Oh, yeah, more recently. I feel like I’ve heard from friends that the more you open yourself up to it, the more that it comes to you. I feel like I was just kind of closed off for a really long time. Even that podcast, I’d have been like, “Oh, good stories,” like whether that’s true or not, it doesn’t really matter. But having had your own experiences and having friends tell you stories — it’s really hard to refute someone you care about saying like, “This happened,” or something happening in your life. I’ve seen and heard things that I can’t explain, and I don’t know if it’s ghosts, but certainly something has happened that is completely unreasonable and inexplicable.

I do feel like they have sort of an architectural tone — you know, like haunting, need a place for it, and I do feel like there are some places that I’ve had, like, weird experiences that feel kind of supernatural. I think that once I realized, like, Oh, this is real, life is just kind of… The possibility has been there, so more of it has just come into my life. Not really as much right now — like the house we moved into should absolutely be haunted, but I don’t think that it is. There is sort of a weird energy — and anybody should laugh at me for talking about it this way, probably — but like, the energy is benevolent. If this is a haunted house, it’s a chill ghost.

Fenne: I think there’s no reason to not think that the energy of the previous people in a place affect it. Even if you don’t think a ghost is like an actual vision of a person, an exact replica of that exact person, I definitely think some places have bad vibes, some places have good vibes. But you can’t change the feeling in a place. When I moved into my current place, it was trash — the people that lived here before that burned the carpets up and left all their furniture here, and there were scrapes on the walls and stuff, and, like, everything was painted black. It was so weird. And again, I was poor and didn’t have much choice. So I moved in by myself and made it really nice with my best friend, and actually hung a picture of your face on the wall — that’s one of the first things I did, and I think that really helped.

But then I was broken into when I was on tour, and they stole all my merch money, which was a huge blow, and my laptop which had all my demos on it. So I went back to the house and the whole feeling had completely changed. And I worked very hard to not let this be a negative place for me, and I feel like that’s just been completely invaded and disrupted. And I obviously was scared as well, so I just got three of my best friends to live with me for a month, just to reset the feeling. And it worked.

I mean, you know as well as anyone that music isn’t particularly lucrative when you’re in the beginning stages of it, and a grand in cash will see you through two months. And that was not possible because… I don’t know, I hope that it was someone that needed it a lot, because I don’t like thinking it was just some guy that was like, “You know what, I’m pissed and I want stuff.” But I think as a person, I generally kind of revert to running away from stuff that is bad. So I think if I hadn’t really thought about it and wanted to stay in this place, I would have just moved.

Lucy: I don’t know if I told you, but I was robbed in May of this year, during quarantine. So, yeah, I’m really sorry that happened to you. I have a whole new, you know, knowing what it feels like. I was actually in the house, and I woke up at 5AM and heard — but I have such a creative mind, to put it lightly, where often I’ll hear things and be like, Oh, that’s the absolute worst thing that could possibly be. And I think like that all the time, so I know not to let it take hold over my thoughts.

So I woke up at 5 and was like, Oh, it sounds like people are in the kitchen opening the window, and well, they’re probably gone if they are, and probably they aren’t even there in the first place. I’m gonna go back to sleep. But then I went downstairs and someone had taken my wallet and a laptop and all of the booze in the house, and some other trinkets. Luckily nothing so bad — we had guitars around, and the guitars weren’t taken. One time I was robbed and someone stole my journals of three years, like all my journals of my whole college experience before I dropped out, and that’s the worst. That still hurts so much, not having those years documented.

But yeah, I did move. That dream I had about a new house, it was the old house that got broken into, and then we moved to this house. I feel a lot safer, but I definitely felt like, on top of feeling isolated and not leaving the house — like literally not even going onto the porch for a long time — I just dissociated for like a month and a half, basically June and the beginning of July.

I don’t know, I think a lot of people are going through things like that, and the general state of life is so fragile that when negative events come into life, it just feels kind of harder to recover. But I definitely I feel a lot better now. Do you feel any better in your house?

Fenne: I do, although it was a while ago. But yeah, just imagining that feeling — I wasn’t in. I was abroad, so I had to wait like a week to get back. But I can’t imagine knowing. You knew something was up, but you convinced your brain that it was just doing that thing that it does, and being in and being invaded in that way. That’s fucked.

It just hurt me so deeply that you had your journals stolen — that’s like taking a chunk of someone’s whole brain. And they don’t have any use for that stuff. Like the way that I was trying to frame the break in when it happened was like, OK, that’s cash, that’s a laptop. If they need them, those will provide for them in some way. But I was almost like, Why couldn’t they have left my memory stick with my demos on it? Because that wouldn’t benefit them. They took a packet of photographs, which was, like old family photos.

But there is so much bad, life ruining stuff happening at the moment anyway. And granted, it happens always, and I do think that the BLM protests in Bristol came right at the perfect point where everybody was angry about how we are being governed as a country, generally, through the corona stuff. And then the BLM stuff came at a time where everyone was so ready to be unhappy with the way that the world is run.

It was almost like, I’m aware that racism hasn’t just arrived overnight, and everyone was just like, “Oh, no, racism exists.” But it happened at a time when everyone was really open to the possibility that stuff is bad still, and we really need to make an effort as a community to change that.

I mean, this is completely unrelated to the health stuff, but there are so much bad, bad shit going on, and it’s a conscious decision to, daily, allow it to come in in a way that you can process in a positive way. It’s just so easy to doomscroll and be like, Fuck, this is really bad. You need to kind of police yourself as to when you let that stuff in, because it’s so easy to just constantly be tapped into this modern hellscape.

I recently got locked out of Instagram for no real reason, and initially I was like, Damn, that’s where I get all my stuff from. And then I was like, Actually, this is great for me because I can focus on the closest things to me and how to change the things that I can change. And not just think that the big picture is unattainable and so badly ruined that I don’t feel like I have the power to change anything.

Lucy: So maybe just to close, we can each tell a recent dream that we had.

Fenne: Weirdly, when you said that we should talk about dreams for our theme, I just typed in “dreams” in my notes on my phone, and I screenshotted a bunch of them, but two of them are so, so similar that it freaked me out, firstly, and then I realized that they’re exactly a year apart.

Lucy: Woah, that it so weird.

Fenne: The second one was when I was in Chicago recording, and the first one was a year before that.

So the first one, all I’ve written is, “Dream: Breastfeeding on a beach thinking, This would make a beautiful photo. Shiny sticker, little Game Boy, tiny nipples, holding hands while a wave rolls over.” And then the second bit is, “Nana is hosting a Halloween party. Me getting skateboard advice from a kind, kind man.”

I would like to pay the main attention to the breastfeeding part and the Halloween part, because exactly a year later in Chicago — I think around the time I was seeing a guy over there from Tinder, who was a skateboarder, so that’s kind of cool too. So the Chicago dream is, “Mum pregnant, me also pregnant. Letter writing to get better in school. Buying Halloween costumes with tall people and a beautiful woman on a minimum wage budget. Didn’t go for the white outfit.” And then the last line is,”Pour whiskey in my ear to unblock me, please.” [Laughs.]

Lucy: [Laughs.] Do you type these as soon as you wake up?

Fenne: Yeah, so they’re literally just key bits. I like to think I’m quite a stable person who’s got q handle on how they deal with their feelings, but it seems that there’s a lot of breastfeeding, pregnancy, weird kind of mom-daughter problem stuff that maybe I need to work through. And Halloween seems to be something I hold close to my heart, strangely.

What’s your most recent weird one?

Lucy: I almost never have any sort of, like, motherhood type of dreams. I mean, I’m also adopted and have pretty much no desire to ever be pregnant, so I guess I my subconscious just doesn’t complain. Like, Yes, that is true.

I’ve been having a lot of dreams set in Russia, which is a complicated setting because, as I said, I’m adopted, and my parents told me I was Russian when I was growing up. Actually when I turned 18, I got my file and found out that I’m genetically Uzbek, like from Uzbekistan, so not Russia. I took two years of Russian in high school to get connected to that part of myself, and then it’s like, I’m not even Russian.

So I’ve been having all these dreams set in Russia, and I had one a few days ago where the entire staff of Matador was swimming up an icy river and Rennie [Jaffe], who is both of our managers, and everyone that works at Matador was swimming up an icy river — freezing, and like chunks of ice floating by — because we were on our way to a show. We really wanted to see this girl sing.

Only four of us survived: Me, [Matador founder] Chris Lombardi, and Rian Fossett, and Malcolm Donaldson, who all work at Matador. We get to the shore and the promoters are there and they’re like, “Hey, we have blankets for you, thanks for making the trip, we know it’s such a hassle getting here. We have vodka and we have tea and blankets and heaters in this trailer, and we’re so happy you can make it.” And they have this little trailer set up next to this sports stadium where the show is going to be. They bring in the girl who they’re scouting, I guess to sign, and she’s so nervous. I’m trying to talk to her an be like, OK, it’s gonna be OK, you know, I was happy when Matador reached out to me, I think it’ll be fine, you seem really sweet.” We listened to her record, and the first song was the most beautiful song I’d ever heard. You know in a dream where you wake up and can’t remember what it was, but you know in the dream the supreme beauty was apparent to you? We all cried and were like, “We’re just honored to be here with you, you’re going to be a star,” everyone was so emotional. And then a couple of songs in, we were still liking it, but towards the end of the record, everyone got really bored and tired. So in, like, 20 minutes, it was just this beautiful, elated feeling to everyone sort of unspokenly getting really tired of her voice, the most beautiful voice in the world. And she noticed, and I noticed, and it was clear that everyone kind of just wanted to go. like when a party has gone on too long. She just started crying, and I just wanted to say, “I don’t know how to explain it, the feeling just left.”

And that was the dream, where I just had to console the best musician in the entire world that everyone just labeled not engaging enough.

Fenne: At the beginning of this dream, I thought the main part of it was — because this is way more detailed than I remember anything, like even real life — when you said that only only a few of you made it, I was like, Is this icy river a metaphor for the long road to being able to do shows again? And that a lot of people that we work with will just die after the market being ruined? But that’s so, so sad!

Lucy: I felt grief when I woke up. I have this problem where I wake up from dreams and I feel so deeply for everyone that I met in the dream. I thought about her the rest of the day, where I really felt bad for her even though she was a figment of my imagination. Like I had such sympathy for her position, and I really couldn’t understand and wanted to understand why we didn’t keep loving her music. I don’t know, it felt like something dark and sad going on there.

Fenne: Oof. I want to meet her. I want to climb in your brain and meet her.

Lucy: I could draw her. I wake up from dreams and I could tell you all of the architecture, I could tell you the fabric on the furniture and what makeup people are wearing, and shoes people are wearing. A lot of info.

Fenne: For a split second when I wake up, it’s like that, but yeah. There’s an artist called [Zdzisław] Beksiński — he trained as an architect and then he became a photographer, and then eventually he became this incredible painter, and his paintings inspired, like, black metal artwork. It’s like a lot of huge, imposing buildings draped in flesh, spiderwebs, and they’re beautiful because of how intricate they are, and they kind of glow. But he said that often he’d have the idea that — it’s not a theme, but it’s actually the picture itself, and then he replicated from this picture in his brain. So maybe you should go into Russian hellscape painting. [Laughs.]

(x)

#this interview is full of gems #‘‘don’t touch my girl like that!’’#i love her sm #the bit about her dream is fascinating i can’t imagine dreaming so vividly #lucy dacus #fenne lily #interviews #talkhouse #archival #2022 #november 2022

15 notes · View notes

allnightlongzine · 8 months

Text

Finding Love in Mall Goth Purgatory

"I will ride for My Chemical Romance to the grave, because, from 2002 to 2012, they rode for both you and me."

Horror Movie Marathon | September 26, 2018 | talkhouse.com

On October 16, 2005, my sister and I put on our eyeliner, slid into our mall-goth armor, and drove an hour north to Hartford, Connecticut to see My Chemical Romance for what would be our first time of many. It was still a year before their magnum opus, The Black Parade, was to be released. When the lights came down and the show began, a spotlight emerged at the center of the stage, illuminating only a microphone stand ornamented with a bouquet of dead roses. Gerard Way, the band’s flamboyantly morbid ringleader, stepped out of the stage’s dark abyss looking like a corpse priest, adorned in heavy white makeup and full-on church robes. The band opened with “Interlude,” going right into “Thank You For The Venom.” If you’re an MCR fan, you know how fucking sick of an opener this is. My life changed forever after this concert.

Do you have any idea how satisfying it feels to look a DIY-hipster-judge in the eyes and tell them, in all honesty, that in 2018 your favorite band is still My Chemical Romance? You can learn a lot about someone by their reaction to such an admission. Perhaps such a statement makes me an obnoxious judge in my own right, but the truth is, I will ride for MCR to the grave, because, from 2002 to 2012, they rode for both you and me.

MCR, in all their macabre glory, were unwaveringly dedicated to an ethos of inclusivity and honesty, love and compassion, death and rebirth—the kind of virtuosity that was frowned upon in the popular music of 2005, yet now celebrated in 2018. They flew their freak flag high and encouraged others to do the same, all at a time when that breed of non-judgmental sincerity was viewed as sin by every taste-making music critic in an Animal Collective t-shirt. Now, in 2018, I find myself a 26-year-old musician who has been deeply influenced by their music and message, getting into one intoxicated conversation after another, hoping to spread the gothic gospel of MCR to the remaining non-believers.

When MCR played live, their dedication to the audience was palpable. Like an explosion of wicked cats jumping out of a witch’s cauldron, each band member would erupt with raw energy to give an over-the-top performance of catchy goth punk songs. I believe one of the reasons MCR has retained such a loyal and dedicated fan base is because their wildly emotional performances never felt like a façade; they were keenly aware that it was a privilege to be on stage, and this cognizance of respect manifested itself through the messages of love encoded in their songs and live performances.

This respect for their audience was also evident in Way’s interviews and onstage monologues regarding mental health, accepting other people for who they are, and the hypocrisies of masculinity. Throughout the press surrounding both their major label debut Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge and The Black Parade, Way candidly discussed his struggles with depression and addiction, and his hope that their music could help save other people’s lives as it did his. MCR were always vocal that they wanted their music to save people, which admittedly sounds cheesy at first, but it’s a pretty admirable statement when you know that the majority of the band’s fan base were depressed kids experiencing the world from suburban mall goth purgatory.

The band has earned such respect from their diehard fans that even they don’t want a reunion, unless the band feels that it’s right. As seen in the article recently published by Noisey about MCR’s still very active fan base, some even go so far to say that the band reuniting would be antithetical to their message of death and rebirth, and the positivity of change therein. Literally, how many international superstar bands have fans that are this aware and respectful of the complex relationship band members can have to their music and the message it projects? Most fans of world famous rock bands will sound off in the YouTube comments section with blustery statements of aggravation and entitlement, demanding a reunion show or a new album. But MCR fans? They prefer the band stay broken up because they want to respect the band as much as the band respected them.

Very few of MCR’s peers from the mid-‘00s gave or earned the kind of respect from their fans that MCR did. Rather, many bands that tried to align with MCR’s message and image were essentially selling counterfeit emotion in the form of trendy Hot Topic t-shirt designs, insincere stage antics, and utterly benign, and frequently misogynistic, pop music. In 2018, it is sheer fact that many of those bands were full of shit and exploited the vulnerability that their scene implied to enact gross and predatory behavior.

This is one reason why taste-making machines like Pitchfork and BrooklynVegan were justified in ignoring and condescending the mid-’00s emo cesspool as it germinated throughout malls and low-capacity venues across the country. However, that’s not to say the overly-abstracted, pseudo-intellectual ramblings of mid-’00s Pitchfork hype bands weren’t totally absurd and problematic in their own right. Both music scenes postured a kind of moral code through songs, images, and fashion that signified a certain perspective towards culture and its problems at the moment. But, the reality is that bands from both scenes hardly ever posited their morals or virtues unless the sign of the times directly requested it from them.

This was not the case for MCR. They were just a band of five dudes from New Jersey, but they vehemently promoted equal rights on- and off-stage. Their pop-gothic world of vampires and ghosts, octave slides, and tri-tonal harmony always served a greater message at hand. Their comic book and horror movie-influenced narratives always represented a power in owning the trauma of the past and moving forward towards hope. In being themselves and helping others be themselves, MCR transcended both the hip arena of art-rock coolness and the sewage of Warped Tour residue, flying high in the black sky as one of the greatest rock bands of our time.

Now, it’s 2018. The lot of mid-‘00s hipsters and scenesters has mostly evaporated and come back as other representations. Most of the members of MCR are parents and focus on their own projects: Gerard Way is about to launch a Netflix show based on his comic book series The Umbrella Academy; Mikey Way has been performing as a voice actor; Frank Iero has a punk band that records and tours; and Ray Toro is helping other musicians shred to hell and back as a producer and engineer in his New Jersey studio.

For me, and many fans like me, I am no longer just a fawning teen, but a 26-year-old musician. I use the passion, conviction, and love I learned from MCR as fuel for my own project, Horror Movie Marathon. Very few of the people I collaborate with or know are big fans of My Chemical Romance. Sometimes, people will tell me one of my songs reminds them of this pop group or that folk artist, which is usually very accurate—I essentially make pop-folk music. My admission of MCR’s influence on my music will either be met with a resounding “Hell yeah, ‘Helena’ is tight,” or a recoil and a facial expression that says, “I wish I didn’t just give you the honor of comparing your music to Jon Brion.”

I can’t hide my love for the band, and why would I? Their songs meditate on the horrific beauty of tragedy, and in the tradition of true tragic storytelling, there’s always a viscerally moving message gleaming through the metaphoric language. MCR worked their asses off to make those messages as potent as possible; it was an energy you could hear in their songs and see in their live performances. Through all the morbid metaphors, spooky stories, and dazzling stylizations was an indestructible foundation of love and gratitude for the life-saving spirit of music. Even though the externalities of my music don’t resemble MCR’s very much, their message of love and respect will forever influence the core of what I create.

#personal #2000s #talkhouse #outside

2 notes · View notes

justzawe · 2 years

Text

Three Great Things: Zawe Ashton

The actor and writer, who's currently starring in the new movie Mr. Malcolm's List, on some of the stuff that makes her life richer.

By Zawe Ashton | July 1, 2022

Three Great Things is Talkhouse’s series in which artists tell us about three things they absolutely love. To mark the July 1 release in theaters of the new period romantic dramedy Mr. Malcolm’s List, starring Freida Pinto, Ṣọpẹ Dìrísù, Zawe Ashton and Theo James, fan-favorite actor and writer Ashton shared some of the things she loves most in life. — N.D.

The French New Wave

I love the films of the French New Wave. I was a film geek growing up and I worked in an independent cinema for many years. It was the first real job I had. I literally applied for it the day after my 18th birthday, because you had to be 18 to see all the movies.

I remember the cinema I worked at screening Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless; I don’t think I’d ever seen a film that felt like it articulated my own internal rhythm, with its disregard for traditional editing or linear storytelling. For a teenager who was looking for a filmmaking tribe and didn’t necessarily know how to find it, I felt like it was speaking immediately to me. I subsequently found out that Godard actually deliberately cut up Breathless to make it unreleasable, because producers had loved the original so much that he’d thought, “This doesn’t really feel like the agitative filmmaker I wanted to be. I don’t actually want producers to like what I do. I’m going to go and take a pair of scissors to this roll of film!” And then, of course, once he did that, everyone loved it even more and he became the genius he is today.

Watching French New Wave films, I was confronted with a whole new vocabulary for myself as an artist, as well as a new vocabulary of film. And then when I started to really dig in, I was in the land of Truffaut, Rohmer and Bresson. I came alive and I found my artistic voice, I found my true love, and I found a true allowance of loving an anti-hero – or an anti-love story or just an anti-anything. Those films created a real expansion inside of me and gave me a cinematic language I would never have had otherwise.

The Names of Paint Colors

I’m letting you into the weird crevices of my mind with this one … Often when I’m asked, “What would you be doing if you weren’t an actor?”, I will say something like a poet, a teacher or an athlete. But actually, I think I would be someone who makes up the names of paint colors or nail varnish colors, or the names of lacquers of any nature. There’s an irreverence and sometimes a depth to them. It would be my weird specialist skill to be able to look at a shade of off-white and not see just “off-white,” but instead see “Vintage Wedding Veil.” Or a type of yellow that was meant to go on your nails that indeed should not just be called “yellow,” it should be called “Buttermilk Afternoons.” With shades of green or blue, don’t try to compare them to anything in nature, for God’s sake, let’s call them something like “She’s Got to Have It.” I get it. I absolutely get that. That’s the shade of dark blue that you want to put on your nails!

I think I inherited a surrealist nature from my dad. Growing up, when I was playing I Spy in the back of the car, we just always went on unusual tangents with it. For me, naming these colors is about different ways of seeing, or just finding the surreal or the bizarre in the mundane – that has always been something that’s got me through life, to be honest. I am the person in CVS who’s turning over the lipsticks just to read what the name is, and often I will choose colors for myself, solely based on the name. I mean, why would you ever choose a lip color that’s just called “Rouge” over another called “Built to Kill”?

New York City

Because I’m here now, with Central Park outside my window, I think I’m going to have to pick New York City as my third thing. As a Brit, when you come out to New York, you’re so threatened by the iconography of it – everything looks like it’s from a movie set and people just seem so unbelievably cool, just because they’re here in the context of the city. As I’ve spent more and more time in New York over the years, I’ve found there’s something unbelievably special about the energy here that has ultimately made it my favorite city in the world. And I’m a Londoner, so I know people will get very annoyed with me for saying that!

Coming to NYC and performing on Broadway was a mind-blowing experience, just because of the dynasty of that area. There’s also something extremely liberated about the city – I was at Gay Pride over the weekend, having the absolute time of my life. There is a rebellious spirit here that I find unbelievably infectious. And an authenticity that’s infectious, too. The city should feel extremely jarring and noisy and too much, but it doesn’t to me. And maybe there’s a thematic throwback to how I feel about French New Wave films, in terms of my being comforted by chaos. There’s a comforting chaos in New York that makes so much sense to me, and I love it here. (x)

#zawe ashton #talkhouse #article #mml promo

24 notes · View notes

nonesuchrecords · 5 months

Text

“This week’s guest is a trailblazer, a musical activist, a multi-disciplinary, multi-genre artist who has truly carved her own path of both honoring and celebrating lineage and creating a new one for generations to come,” Carmel Holt says of the guest on the third-anniversary episode of her show Sheroes. “Now nearly two decades into her career, Rhiannon Giddens has become one of the most awe-inspiring and influential artists of our time.” Holt talks with Giddens—who was also the radio show’s first guest three years ago—about her Grammy-nominated new album, You’re the One, and more. You can hear their conversation here.

#rhiannon giddens #you're the one #carmel holt #sheroes #talkhouse #nonesuch #nonesuch records

0 notes

mattygrigio · 2 years

Photo

I’M HOME TONIGHT @talkhousebar w/ @king.yellowman & @_k_reema Would love to see all my friends there! • • • #tour #ontour #tourlife #touringmusician #talkhouse #talkhousehamptons #longisland #nomorewartour #kingyellowman #yellowman #reggae #reggaemusic #reggaeroots #reggaelovers #reggaemusicforever #reggaelegend #dancehall #dancehallmusic #keyboard #keyboardplayer #mattgodfrey #musician #musicianlife #nycmusicians #sessionmusician #livemusiclongisland #explore #explorepage✨ #exploremusic (at Stephen Talkhouse) https://www.instagram.com/p/CetvHjtJSw9/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

0 notes

angstics · 1 year

Text

THE BAND FUCKING GLASS BEACH!!!!!!!!!!! i often forget that my chemical romance has had a profound impact on us culture and music

#i forget because there's still a layer of shame surrounding liking the band #like another essay published by talkhouse said: admission to liking mcr results in either 'helena rocks' or a recoil #(which is really profound since that essay starts with how the writers first mcr concert they started with interlude into thx for the venom #-and that youd know how awesome that was as an mcr fan)#mcr

7 notes · View notes

riotactmedia · 2 years

Text

Katy Davidson introduces you to 'human futures', premiering early over at The Talkhouse today! The album drops this Friday, Oct. 28th on Orindal Records:

"I’m just gonna come right out and say it: This is the best one.

Everyone can go ahead and disagree with me, and dig in their heels re: their sentimental attachment to Mountain Rock, Skulls Example, or the Three States compilation (and don’t get me wrong, I love those albums). But time will be the ultimate authority, and when we’re all old, and/or whenever our fanbase reaches middle age, which could take quite a while since the majority of them appear to be quite young (the analytics support this), or whenever we’re all dead and these recordings are basically forgotten, but then some esoteric reissue label in 2090 will discover them while sifting through the dusty corners of Spotify or whichever streaming service (or futuristic music-playing platform we haven’t thought of) is dominant then, that’s when people will agree with me."

#the talkhouse #dear nora #essay #orindal records #premiere

0 notes

stimtickle · 1 year

Text

#body parts #talkhouse #collage

0 notes

dreamsister81 · 5 months

Text

Stephen Talkhouse: Miami, FL, December 4, 1994 (📷 Merri Cyr)

#jeff buckley #29 years ago #mylove #supremebeing #favorite #music

31 notes · View notes

the1975attheirverybest · 9 months

Note

Hello. Since Matty posted new song, he posted a photo from drive like I do account, fans are getting excited about it but I am late what is it about drive like i do? Matty created it ? I'm sorry I need someone to explain it to me 😩🖤🖤

hey babe!

Drive Like I Do is The 1975. It's a band and its members are Matty, Adam, Ross, and George. Here's a very brief over view of the main facts for any new fans.

Before The 1975 became The 1975, they started several bands that had different names (same primary lineup. same 4 boys). "The Slowdown," "Talkhouse," "Bigsleep," and "Drive Like I Do."

They made a lot of songs under the band name "Drive Like I Do." Check them out here.

DLID was mostly an emo-pop band, or, to be fair to them, "emo inspired." as you can probably imagine, they put their own spin on things, as always.

Several DLID songs became 1975 songs. Examples: Sex, Robbers, She Way Out, Chocolate, among others. Mostly the same songs but re-arranged/ re-produced. You can still find the originals online and compare between versions!

After The 1975 became recognized, a lot of fans went back and listened to their DLID songs and enjoyed them very much. Popular DLID songs include Penelope, Lost Boys, One Wish, and Wolves.

Fans expressed interest in an official release of these songs, or potentially even more/ newer DLID songs, and Matty has always promised he'd do it.

Matty often refers to DLID as a "separate project" from The 1975. That is, its aesthetic, artistic influence, the band's philosophy is slightly different, so it wouldn't make sense to just re-release the songs as 1975 songs. They did that with the only songs that they thought would still be compatible.

Over the years, Matty has hinted at having made newer DLID songs with a plan to release a 6-track EP.

In fact, there was a time a few years ago when he contemplated ending The 1975 after making a final "Music For Cars" record, and then potentially doing solo stuff and/or DLID stuff. (that changed shortly thereafter though.)

Of the 6 new DLID tracks that Matty mentioned releasing as an EP, one got reworked, and one was given to Bea (Beabadoobe) called "Pictures Of Us." So now there are 4 tracks. One of which is potentially called "Nice Sweater," that he once posted a snippet of online.

Every year, rumors re-surface that The 1975 is finally planning on doing a DLID record. It never happens, lmao. But we can dream.

It seems like this might be more legit than a rumor this time though...cuz he did just release something? who knows.

I hope this helps!

#Drive Like I Do #The 1975 #Matty Healy #George Daniel #ross macdonald #Adam Hann

54 notes · View notes

allnightlongzine · 8 months

Text

Role Models: My Chemical Romance Showed Glass Beach a Healthy Kind of Angst

The LA band pays tribute to their emo heroes.

Glass Beach | June 28, 2021 | talkhouse.com

I think we all got into My Chemical Romance in middle school or high school. My cousin went to college in another town, and she had been dating this guy who sort of got me into playing guitar. I would go over there, and the thing I loved about visiting them is they would let me stay up all night just doing whatever I wanted. And I was a kid, so I had unlimited energy. This was on the very cusp of when MTV was phasing out music videos, and I remember staying up one night and seeing a bunch of videos — I had no idea what they were called, but there was this one with a very pretty lady in a church dancing down an aisle. I later found out that was “Helena” by My Chemical Romance.

From there, I scoured YouTube for every song that I could find of theirs. I liked them, but it was my first burst of getting into them. The moment it went from, Oh, this is a really cool rock band, to, I think this might legitimately be a big influence on me for the rest of my life, was when I was 13: The Black Parade came out, and that was the same year I found out my mom had cancer. Songs like “Welcome to the Black Parade,” and another one that doesn’t get talked about as much called “Disenchanted,” were super powerful, because they were all about dealing with the process of death and grief and the idea of what you’re leaving behind. It made me think about my mom and it got me through a lot of tough shit. From that point forward, I knew My Chem was one of my favorite emo bands of all time.

There was a bit where they were definitely a guilty pleasure band for me. When I was first getting into the emo scene, the line was always, “Oh, I like emo, but not like My Chemical Romance. Like real emo.” I always liked them though, and I think recently we’ve come into an era where guilty pleasures are barely a thing, and anyone into emo is willing to listen to any kind of emo — even the mall emo stuff that was written off basically just because teenage girls liked it.

Most artists are subject to the mentality that if you don’t have stuff figured out by the time you’re 25, you’re screwed and you’ve gotta resign yourself to this life of not doing anything you dreamed of. I remember going through a phase as a teenager where I would look up, When did these guys get big? I have to get big by the time these guys did, otherwise I’m not on the right path! And My Chem started when Gerard Way was 24. By the time that “I’m Not Okay” came out, Ray Toro was almost 30. As a kid I was like, Oh, my god! I’ve got more time than I thought! It definitely helped me toward the mentality that just because you’re an adult doesn’t mean you have to stop pursuing your dreams. Especially the ones that people view as childlike, which sadly I think is how music is viewed by many. Like, “Oh, you and your little band!” You mean, the thing I do for a living?

I think of the bands I liked at that time, and My Chem is the band I liked the most and never stopped liking. Part of that could be that they did take a six-year break to stop releasing music, so they never released bad music. But also, I think that there are a lot of mature themes in their music, beyond just that they talk about death. The emotions that they write from are so heavy and full — the older I get listening to it, there’s more to connect to. When you go back a look at the way My Chem started and how their music has evolved, there’s so much that you hear change as they were growing up as people.

If you listen to a song like “I’m Not Okay” and this song by Black Veil Brides called “Knives and Pens” — on the surface, they seem the same, but “I’m Not Okay” feels a whole lot more like a personal introspection rather than this get-back-at-the-world-because-you’re-an-outcast thing. It feels like, “Yeah, I’m an outcast, but I kind of just want to express that — and I don’t care if I get back at the world, I just want to be okay.” It’s a healthier way of processing it. There’s a level of depth that My Chem achieved that a lot of similar bands didn’t quite hit the right chord on. It also doesn’t seem to glorify the idea of being overtly depressed. That’s one line that I feel like some emo music had trouble with, the line between accepting and expressing real feelings of sadness and turmoil in yourself, and beginning to glorify the idea of depression.

There was this aspect of the emo subculture at the time of embracing the feminine. I think that’s a big part of why the look and the culture as a whole were so stigmatized at the time. The 2000s were a fucked up time, being involved in the Iraq war and the prevailing attitude of “being strong and getting back at the people who hurt us” — this whole culture of toxic masculinity. Emo was a reaction to that: Allowing yourself to embrace the “feminine” side and be sad about the violence going on. Allowing yourself to mourn and accept tragedy for what it is, rather than acting like the response to tragedy and death and bad things has to be a violent one.

The feminine expression probably connected to what a lot of queer youth were feeling at the time, whether they fully realized it or not. A few years ago, Gerard Way said some non-binary-y things — I’m still not entirely clear as to what extent he may identify as non-binary, but he expressed a relationship with gender that is not totally aligned with the binary, surprising no one and inspiring a lot of people. I will say, a lot of non-binary people maybe jumped on it too hard and claimed him as a non-binary icon, and saying “Gerard is using they/them pronouns,” which he never said. So there is a point to where I think people got a little too excited and took his own agency away — which is not nearly as harmful as the counter to it — but I think that just kind of speaks to those feelings of inspiring people to express their feminine sides and be more vulnerable. Being okay with having these emotional thoughts and thinking about your own emotions critically and feeling it, I think, often can lead to gender discovery.

Just being able to say “I’m not okay” was very powerful for a lot of people. Especially queer people, whether they knew it or not. Even if you have internalized homophobia, or transphobia as a trans person, that can be a powerful step towards being comfortable in your own body. If you’re raised in a very conservative household and taught your entire life that being trans is a bad thing, and you realized that you’re trans at some point, there has to be a mourning period for the way that you existed before that point.

I think The Black Parade especially hits on those feelings. They say, “Though you’re broken and defeated, your weary widow marches on” — it isn’t “I am depressed, I am sad, I regret who I am and that defeats me.” It’s “I see all of these things, I see the mistakes, I see the failure and the things that could hold me back; I accept what they are and that they do hurt me and that it is difficult, and I will then continue forward.” That kind of falls in line with the way we’ve talk about queer people forever. I feel like My Chemical Romance is a more nuanced and effective It Gets Better campaign.

I think it’s important to see your depression and negativity reflected, and feel seen in that way. The last line of “Famous Last Words” is “I’m not afraid to keep on living, I’m not afraid to walk this world alone.” Not that queer and trans people end up walking alone after coming out, but sometimes it can feel like that. It’s such a powerful message for that record to go out on — you can still live on and find joy in life even if you’re the only one left.

As told to Annie Fell

#glass beach #queer #talkhouse #personal #Youtube #outside

3 notes · View notes