On accepting that we're only human

How are you?

Great. A little behind. My son’s home and he wanted a thousand things. And I was like, “No, I have to shower.” You might see cats. You might see kids. I have a play date arriving at noon. I don’t know. We just don’t know. But whatever. I love when things just naturally work out.

Maybe that’s a good place to start: How do you balance creative projects and parenthood, and how have things changed since becoming a mom?

I feel like it’s a subject that could be studied in depth for one hundred years, and we still wouldn’t know… Obviously the body changes a lot. The brain changes a lot through that beautiful fire alchemy of becoming a parent, becoming a mother. You lose, like, 10% of your gray matter in your brain or something. I have this poetic hunch that by the loss of that gray matter, it allows an elasticity or an eagerness of the brain to want to build muscle where there had been none before. So I feel like my ability to multitask and jump into going from zero to one hundred is better than it’s ever been.

Prior to kids, if I was going to be in a creative space, it would take up my whole day. Maybe three weeks. I would get so lost and people wouldn’t hear from me. It was such a luxurious self-exploration. But the caveat to that is that it was hard for me to let it go. It was hard for me to oscillate, to go from creation into errands, or creation into work meetings. I was not being the best client sometimes—as an actor, or whatever I was doing, if I was creating music or I was writing. I would just fall off and everyone would be like, “Well, Jena’s gone from the world now.” span class=”highlight”>Whereas now I feel like if I get 15 minutes and I have even the smallest burst of, “This is a creative space for me,” I utilize it. I jump in 125%. I set a timer. I’m in. Let’s go. And then it’s sucked out, like an extraction.</span>

It’s easy to romanticize what you don’t have or what you have lost. The sort of luxurious languidness of stepping into a space for weeks and weeks, in some ways I miss that. But then I’ll go and I’ll work on a film for three weeks, and I won’t have my son, and I won’t have my partner, and my cats won’t be there. All of my day-to-day stuff, of my house and my things, are gone. All of a sudden all I have to do is focus on creation, and it’s mind boggling. I can’t stay in it. My brain just operates on such a different level now. I have to really respect her exactly where she is and find what she loves. And take her out and be like, “Okay, you love that 15-minute cycle. Let’s do that for you today.”

I don’t know if selfish is the right word, but being creative tends to involve thinking about yourself a lot. It’s so easy to lose sight of other people. But when there’s someone literally depending on you for their life, you can’t be completely selfish.

Potentially it’s a cultural reframe that is necessary. As a creative indie girl or whatever, in her 20s, moms were the least interesting people to me on the planet. I didn’t know any cool moms. I thought it meant you lose everything. It felt like this non-creative job; that’s how it had been painted.

I remember the first year [of having a child], I was like, “This is one of the most wildly potent creative things that I’ve ever been a part of, and why is no one talking about it?” It’s one of the most punk rock creative endeavors. Operating a home, input-output—that’s government, that’s politics, that’s running the universe. Also, you’re building a tiny human. You’re helping them orchestrate awe. You’re witnessing behavioral patterns that lead towards poetic understandings of the universe. I mean, there’s just so much input-output that is rewarding if you can see it from an artistic lens. Parenting is one of the most wildly artistic jobs on the planet, but we don’t give it that respect.

Relation is creation. Being in a relational space is the most juicy, the most creative. We just don’t get much byproduct from it. We can’t sell it. We can’t put it on Etsy. We can’t put it on our resume. But myths and books and all of the good stuff come from relational input. It’s weird we don’t think of it like that. It’s not our fault. I think it’s just the cultural lens. Our creativity has to have an output; it has to have a number next to it.

Well, you did have an output today, which is your new single. How is it feeling? What excites you about the album rollout?

I love high-risk, vulnerable moments. I love the metaphor of being naked in public. It’s such good work—not only for me, but epigenetically, to be able to be vulnerable. I think it’s such a good practice that I love getting to be a part of. You make something you love, you put it out into the world. You see how it’s received, or not, or whatever, and you get to stand naked in front of a few people and just be like, “Yeah, I love my body.” Or, “I love this song,” or “I love this story.” We don’t get that kind of feedback loop so much. Sometimes I wish it was more in person. It would be so fun, instead of living in such a digital world where we’re releasing singles and I’m spending my whole day on a black mirror. It would be so cute if we could just have, like, parks where it would be a “musicians park.” And everyone signs up for little slots, and you’re like, “Okay, this is my new song today.” And you could go and listen to new stuff, and cheers and high five and build community, and let the first birthing day be somatic instead of digital.

How is it different to stand in front of a crowd naked when you’re in the role of an actor versus the role of a musician?

It’s similar expressions. The vulnerability in film is so holographic. I’ve already done the work. I’m so far removed. I didn’t choose the edit, I didn’t choose the color, I didn’t choose the language. I’m part of the quilt. It feels less vulnerable in a thousand ways, to me… With music, what I love about it is that I get to enter this sort of dark space of nothing, and then, very much like in theater, you build the whole thing. You build how it feels. What’s the temperature? Is there water? Is there sun? Is it burning? Does it scorch? Are these characters that we hear? Are they antagonistic? Do they love us? You get to build everything from the ground up without any need to be biologically accurate. I can be a leaf. I can be an 80-year-old man. I can be a dragon. There’s no need for me to have to explain myself, as a musician, if I want to take on the lens of another body. I find that as a film actor, it’s very hard for me to play a 60-year-old race car driver. I’m a body. It’s such a specific art form that lives in your physical skin. Music is a disembodied moment. It’s so spirit alive. It has nothing to do with your body, and I find it so freeing in that way.

How does being in love change your art or change how you make it?

I think the art that you want to make when you’re alone is completely different. It’s a brain chemistry thing. I had such a humbling experience when I was pregnant, and I’m so glad I did: the chemical transformation that happened in my body meant that my sex drive lowered almost to zero, as did my creativity. My creative impulse went almost down to zero. And prior to that, I felt like I could will it, like I was in control of those things. Like I could get it up if I just got in the right space and made myself do this thing. And it was a really cool, sci-fi, humbling experience to realize none of that is true. We’re bodies. We get chemical washes. We either react to them or we don’t. Love is a chemical wash that if you let yourself react to it, you will only ever create something different, because it’s such a different space. I find it can be a little disingenuous to be deeply in a loving space and making hateful art. Our artistic whatever—hormonal impulse, or who knows what it is because we’ve never fully studied it—she’s a loner. She likes pain. I feel like maybe the only reason we pick up a pen is to alchemize. The only way we pick up an instrument is to alchemize, to transmute. And if we’re in a loving, joyful space, why would we want to change that? Why would we want to alchemize that? We get to live that. I was joking with my fiance and I was like, “You know, at some point I might have to break up with you, just so that I can write the next album.”

And he’s like, “Totally valid.”

Yeah, he’s like, “Cool, awesome.” I wish in another life I was a scientist so that I could study these things.

Thinking about bodies, is it weird for you to be able to watch yourself through many years of your life on screen, since you started acting as a child? How do you conceive of the past and the future, having that ability?

I think potentially it all came to a pinnacle when AI was created and my son sent me a YouTube clip where it’s my face as a 10-year-old transformed into 12, 14, 18 years old, all the way through—and I was like, “Oh, I don’t think anyone’s supposed to see that. I don’t think your brain is supposed to see that.”

I love that film has this eternal shelf life, and so does music. I think it’s really rare and special that there’s little pockets of tiny embodiments that I can go and peek into. But they’re also not real life. I don’t think it necessarily feels like I get to experience those ages again through film. It’s like reading a poem that you wrote when you were younger. You’re trying to figure out, “What was I feeling then?” You get all the pieces of it—the nose and the hair and the body and the shoulders, but it’s still not you. It’s such a wild thing.

How much are you drawing from your own life and your own experiences when you’re making work—in general, or regarding this particular music project—and how much is pure imagination and creating brand new worlds?

It’s all from my lens. It’s all from my lens, and yet… I’m sure everyone’s had this experience, where you’re walking through a field and this idea comes to you that you’ve never thought of ever in your entire life. And you’re like, “That’s not my idea. Where did that come from?” But then all of a sudden it becomes your idea, and you’re like, “Oh, I love this idea.” That’s my idea of what a ghost is. Someone died and had a thought in that field a hundred years ago, and it was such a potent thought that they were just waiting for another brain to come through and get to witness the same thought. As much as I know that everything is through my lens, I think I’m also really aware that we are these kind of clumsy, open channels that like to receive.

My favorite practice to do as an artist is to receive without judgment, receive without filter. I love the practice of morning pages or free association, those kinds of things where you can just let it all come in. Who knows where it comes from? Not necessarily me, but it sort of is me. You can never take yourself out of it, though we try so hard. Do you feel like you struggle removing yourself from your writing?

Definitely. I am so prone to the “I” voice, and I think sometimes it serves the work to tamp that down, but the personal is always how I initially approach something.

But that feminine “I” is so bold. We haven’t had as much time with that feminine “I.” So I think that’s a good space to be in.

This is your first time releasing music under your given name. Why was that important? What does that mean for you?

I think it was a wound space, actually. When I was tiny, just starting out making music, I was so like, “Fuck the world. I don’t care about what anyone thinks.” But also that is such a wound space, a reactive space—you really do care. I think I was really not immune to people’s judgments of being an actor that makes music. When I was on that path of little 20-year-old me, it felt like I needed to have an umbrella to hide under. So I was always like, “I would never put my name on that.” It felt dirty or something, which is so weird. I felt like I always needed band names to add legitimacy to what I was doing. Another gift of parenthood is you just stop giving a fuck. I really don’t care what anyone else thinks. And so when I was like, “I think it’s just gonna be my name,” I was like, I should just do that, because it’s mine. I feel like it was a little inner child healing, potentially.

What is your relationship to the aesthetics of the album, and to a retro visual language in general?

Again, you have to be so appreciative of your lens. I feel like sometimes when I try to define it to myself, like, “Oh, am I being nostalgic?” I’m 41. I got deep downloads from the world, culturally, at different points in my life. I’m less receiving artistic downloads from the universe, and more like, political “save the world” downloads. A lot of my artistic ecosphere was built in a certain time that sometimes I feel like it’s where I want to live. It’s a space that I instantly step into, good or bad.

The “You’ve Been On My Mind” video, that’s all T. I mean, T, Marsh is this incredible animator, and they have this whole style that I was just like, “Yes.” I barely gave them any direction besides explaining that it’s a love song about a female scumbag. They just came up with all of that themselves. So that’s potentially more their world building than my direction.

What is important to practice in a creative collaboration? What do you value about that kind of relationship?

I think being each other’s fan girls really helps. You really need to want to build and lift—and in that same mouth, when we need to alter or alt or edit, to still be able to do it from a cheerleader’s tongue. Feedback is this gift, so I love working with people where we are obsessed with each other’s art, and we also feel comfortable to be able to say, “What if we do this?” Particularly on this record, with Jennifer Reeder and T Marsh, I just feel like it’s been such a fun non-binary, femme energy. My producer’s femme. It’s just been so much easier to be in that space. I find that sometimes, when I was younger, working with different random producers, with more of a masculine energy, it was harder to step into the world of, “What about this?’

Right, there’s a barrier that’s automatically removed.

We already have our shoes off. We’ve already set all of our weapons down. We’re just there to work.