On the power of honest expression

Let’s talk about your album. It’s your first full-length album, but you’ve been making music since childhood. Can you tell me about how that’s evolved over time?

I have been making music since childhood. I think what’s differentiated this moment in my musical evolution from moments and releases past is that this felt like the first time where I wrote a body of work, and where the songs felt like they were siblings that demanded a birth order and a family portrait.

I think, also, I’m in a lovely spot as an artist now, where I’ve gotten to soak up a lot of the advice of my musical mentors. I started making music very young and playing local festivals as a child, just me and the piano. And up until my early 20s, my experience of making music really was just me at the piano.

Then you moved to New York.

That’s when I met Thomas Bartlett [musician Doveman], who is now my husband. At the time, we were great friends and we were making music together. We were friends for about a year before anything romantic happened. But, in that time I met a lot of my musical heroes, partly through Thomas, but also just the kind of downtown New York music scene. I met Martha and Rufus Wainwright, and Beth Orton, Laurie Anderson, and Anohni and the Johnsons.

I was kind of awestruck by accidentally tripping into musical heaven. I started to dip my toe into playing with some of the amazing musicians that I was meeting through Thomas, but it really wasn’t until I started making this album that I had the confidence to actually ask them to play with me in a band setting. And I think it’s really brought it together in a way where I now feel like the music sounds like how I imagine it in my head.

Well, sometimes that takes a lifetime, so well done.

I’m still working on it. Look, I don’t feel like a finished product in any sense of the word. And frankly, I would go back again, and again, and again, and redo, and redo, again, and again, and again. But at a certain point I had to say it’s done.

You were also filming for “Not Suitable For Work”. Are you someone who thrives on having a whole lot going on at once? Or was this really a struggle for you?

I guess what I’ll say about shooting a show, while writing a record, is that Acting to me feels like an inhalation. It’s a lot of listening, and taking in information, and trying to process that outwardly, but it does feel like an inhalation. And music to me feels like an exhalation. A kind of release, and relief, and catharsis.

I generally feel like they go strangely well together. And I think I write my best work in a spur of the moment, not sitting down for hours at a time. I love to sit down at a piano and feel like I have to rush out the door, but I have an idea.

But I would also say the majority of this record was written in the six months after my half sister Emily passed away.

I intentionally took a break from acting. And I met Jimmy Hogarth early in that grief fog, and we wrote very quickly together. Jimmy had just made My Back Was A Bridge for You to Cross with Anohni, and they had recorded it in a way that was very improvisational and in free-time. And a question mark I’d always had around recording my music was whether I could simulate the experience of listening to me with a click.

Or if actually for it to feel like me, it needed to be in free time. And I needed to be playing the piano and singing at the same time. Which was something previously I’d been told I shouldn’t do because the bleed from the vocal mic into the piano would make mixing difficult. But Jimmy was just like, “Fuck it, doesn’t matter.”

So much of my record exists in these live takes where there’s not a bunch of vocal overdubs, there’s not a lot of comping. And I’m writing as we recorded. In that way, writing this was really special because there wasn’t a lot of preconceived ideas about what it was going to be. It wasn’t polished and I was like actively processing as we were writing together.

How much did your ability to find a character’s voice and express that physically and vocally as an actor play into songwriting for you? Did you feel that you took on a character? Or was it a totally new thing to speak from your own experience?

I love that question, and I have real admiration for writers who play characters in their work. It’s definitely something I aspire towards. But, I’d say that right now, the place that music holds in my life is a personal one, and I need it. Just getting through the day, music performs an important mental health function for me.

Making it or listening to it?

Both. All of it. Making it, going to see shows, listening to it, all three.

I love sad music. The sadder, the better. That’s definitely my bread and butter, but I need a lot of different things throughout the day… And, actually, perhaps interestingly, when I was writing this album, I couldn’t listen to sad music. It was too potent. So I listened to a lot of house music. There’s a Moderat song that I got really into. House Music I’d say was like the backing track to writing this album.

You work in a very competitive and demanding industry. How do you deal with the pressure and external validation that comes with acting particularly?

I think perhaps that was a question I needed to be asked today. The show [Not Suitable For Work] comes out tomorrow. An hour ago, I sat and opened a couple of reviews for the show, and then closed them without reading them. How do I deal with it? I think the honest answer is some days I deal with it better than others. I think that I have a really solid, healthy foundation of past experiences. Good people around me, and love of the craft that sustains me. But I’m a sensitive being. Watch me read that back and be like, “What the fuck did you say?”

I am a sensitive person and I think something I like about myself is that as much as I care about my personal output in all of the projects I make, I just holistically care about the whole thing. And I want the whole thing to succeed. And I feel very impacted when I watch something or listen to something I have been even just a small part of. If it hasn’t come together the way that I imagined or hoped it would, I really feel that impact. And making music is part of the way that I deal with the emotionality of my lack of autonomy as an actor.

You did an interview in 2021 where you were talking about the concept of being queer. You talked about the idea of being queer as a holistic identity. I read it and I went, “My God, you are so young and this is A, incredibly brave to come out and say this when you know the media is going to pick you apart. And B, to be able to articulate yourself in that way about something so sensitive.” If you don’t want to answer this, that is completely fine. But tell me how you feel about what you said then and now? And do you still feel the same way? And also just to add on: Why did you feel at that time that you had to clarify your identity in that way? Because to a degree it actually isn’t anyone’s business. Why did you feel that pressure?

I think if I was promoting Dickinson today, I wouldn’t feel any responsibility to declare anything about myself. That’s one of the wonderful things about getting older—I feel centered enough in my existence that I don’t need to prove it for anyone.

Making Not Suitable For Work has given me this lovely opportunity to reflect on being 20 in New York City. And I came to New York and was introduced to queer downtown New York. And I was in a queer show discovering my sexuality. And probably, if I was to like label my sexuality in an unfun way, I would say I’m bisexual.

But like I said back then, I love the word “queer” because it feels like it embraces so much more than sexuality. And I think some people have a problem with that understanding of queer. But yeah, it’s a word for me that encompasses so much, and has remained true for me as I’ve grown up. But it is a very funny thing thinking back to that time and thinking back to how intensely I felt like I did need to reveal myself. And I think that part of that came from this deep aversion to the assumptions that I felt that people were making about me when I was doing interviews; the fact that I had long hair and sometimes wore like femme presenting clothing. The fact that that meant to a lot of people that I was “straight” was a real turn off to me. And so I think that that was one of the reasons, but it wasn’t the only reason.

I’m really grateful for you asking that question. And it was a very emotional thing for me to speak on at the time, and still does feel incredibly emotional because I shared something so private. And I shared it without a lot of meditation beforehand. Or a lot of expectation about the way that it would be picked apart—and it was. But I can say that so much more good has come from it than bad. So, no, I wouldn’t walk it back. I wouldn’t walk back anything I said at the time.

But I am grateful to be now in a stage of my life where I don’t feel like I need to say who I am to be who I am.