On allowing yourself to rest

In addition to your work as a musician, you have pottery and knitting practices. Tell me a little bit about what it’s like to move between those mediums.

Having a tactile creative practice has been grounding for me, especially during the transitions between musical endeavors like touring or recording and life at home. When I’m home from tour, I spend at least three hours a day working on ceramics, and that has been really helpful for my mental health. I find knitting really helpful for when I’m recording. It gives me a task that I can do that lets me be in the room while [partner and Babehoven collaborator] Ryan [Albert] is working on production. I love making fun, wonky looking pieces. I also draw and paint and write poetry, and I try to approach my life through a creative, playful lens as much as I can.

Are there moments where you’re engaging in those other mediums and something musical comes up?

Absolutely. Especially with knitting, because I’m often doing it in a musical context, so I’ll switch back and forth a lot. I was just at home for two weeks between tours, and I was working on ceramics every day. I would sometimes break and play organ for a while or write a song on guitar and then come back to ceramics. I’m definitely finding that I’m doing a lot of switching between those.

Outside of those creative mediums, what other practices nurture your creativity?

Hiking for sure. I hike as much as I can, and I live in the upstate New York area, so I have a lot of access to hiking. It definitely helps me to feel creatively in tune. Dancing can make me feel that way, too. I’m always trying to do more dancing, so this is actually a good gentle reminder to self to seek more of that out. I love playing with clothes. I love colors and patterns and texture and find that even just wearing something that makes me feel fun and cool helps me to feel more creatively inspired. I love how clothes allow us to embody and present ourselves to one another. Clothing can really make me feel super inspired and aligned with people around me.

What’s your relationship to rest look like?

We just finished our tour a few days ago, and we have COVID, so we’ve spent the past couple days resting. I’m actually really not feeling very bad, but I just feel tired and also feel grateful to be able to have the chance to rest. Ryan has a harder time resting. He’s going all around the house and getting things done, and I’m like, “I’m just going to stay in bed and listen to my book on tape and take a shower.” I think rest is really important, and I feel sometimes it’s hard for me to take rest, too.

What has the process of allowing yourself to take rest looked like? Has there been anything that’s helped you get to that?

What it looks like for me is coming home from the last tour and carving the two weeks out where I’m like, “I’m going to stay home, and I’m going to really focus on going to bed early and getting at least nine hours of sleep every night and eating really well at home, making a lot of nutritious meals, and then spending at least three hours a day on ceramics.” And that’s my day. After tour I really need at least a week or two of basically complete isolation, and I feel really grateful for the fact that in my life I’m able to take that rest. Often when I’m working on ceramics or knitting, if I’m not in the studio with Ryan, I’m often in silence. It’s nice when I have a book on tape going, but it’s not constant. I like to be just completely quiet and let my brain get off.

When you are in the process of making something or following an idea, do you ever abandon ideas? And if you do, what does that look like? And if you don’t, why not?

I try to not pressurize my creative process–especially with music. I would say I abandon most things that I work on, but not out of contempt or frustration. I write stream of consciousness, so for the most part, I allow the song to come out of me all at once with my voice memos going. Most of the time I just let the song be in voice memo form, and I don’t really think too much about it for sometimes months, sometimes years.

“Twenty Dried Chilies,” is a good example of a song where I wrote it three years prior and then just let it exist in this liminal voice memo form. Sometimes I go back and I’ll listen to those recordings and be like “Oh, I actually really like this song, let’s take it out.” In that way, I abandon some of my songs, but I don’t really think of it as abandoning them. I think of it more just as letting things just be what they are, and then if I want to explore them further, I have this whole cache of music that I can dip into.

With ceramics, I don’t really abandon pieces as much. There’s a few pieces I haven’t wanted to use or show anyone, maybe I just don’t like the way they look, but there’s a different process. I’m intentionally working on every piece with the goal of making something that I want to see in this world, whereas music, I’m allowing it to come out of me. Similarly with knitting, I don’t really abandon my works unless I’m like, “What the hell did I just make?”

Is there a certain quality that you can identify that exists in the songs that you continue developing? The ones that end up in the live show or on the record?

I think the quality I’m looking for is something that puts me into a trance. I really like to be swept away by music, and something that I notice in my songs that I appreciate is that I’m very interested in repetition. I really like to be taken into a song. I actually describe this to Ryan sometimes, but I don’t like bridges in music, and part of that is that I don’t like being taken out of the feeling that I’ve been building up in a song. I really like things to just stay constant and grow in a sonic landscape, not shift really suddenly into a whole other vibe.

I think it’s a mix of this emotional sloughing off of things that I can dig into lyrically while also feeling like I’m being held by a constant musical landscape. I don’t like when things are boring, so that’s a tough line, whereas something, is it too repetitive? Is it too predictable? I would like to be somewhere between those things.

That’s a juicy place, and I absolutely think that your music inhabits that. Has anything surprised you about your career trajectory? Does anything feel different than maybe you were expecting it to? Pleasant surprises, unpleasant surprises?

So many surprises. I never really intended to do music full time. My plan was to go into environmental law school right after graduating undergrad, and music was doing semi-well for me in Portland when I was in school there. I thought, “Okay, well, I’ll just try to play music.” I’ll take a year off and see how that goes and just explore, but not take it too seriously. Those years have just added up, and now it’s gotten to the point where I’m in music so much that I can’t really hold other jobs. I’m so grateful for it, but I also feel like I fell backwards into that. I love to play and share and see music, but I just never anticipated that it could be what it has become in my life.

There are times where it is such a hard career path. Financially, it’s very, very difficult, and I wouldn’t have been able to continue doing what I’m doing all these years had it not been for family support. I am surprised that I’ve continued on this path where it is just very difficult to make it work. I’m 28 now, and it’s just now starting to do pretty well for me. We just finished our first big headlining tour, and it was excellent. It was packed every night. I feel so, so grateful, and also I feel a little bit trepidatious still. I know how much the music industry can chew you up and spit you out because I’ve experienced it many times already, in my small ways. The attention economy is so difficult. You’re always trying to have something in the works, and as soon as something comes out, it feels like you’re swimming upstream to get the next thing out, and you become irrelevant really quickly.

You mention the pressures of the attention economy and the music industry always needing something new. At the same time, you’ve been pretty prolific. Tell me more about that?

We try our best to constantly have things in the works. Partly for our own creative pleasure, but also because we know that that’s what’s worked for us thus far is just to always have things locked and loaded. Though I think that I would classify what I experienced in late 2022 as burnout.

We toured for four months straight, I booked everything myself with the help of my manager, Kelly. We had barely done any touring before, only on the West Coast, so we did the whole country. We went into it very green, expecting things to just work out, and they did in the sense that we met a lot of friends and played with some really awesome people. The community of the DIY music scene is so strong that we always had a place to stay when we needed one, and people would really show up and take care of us. But it was just shockingly hard and very, very difficult financially. It did not work financially, and we came home. Between then and when we left for tour in 2022, we released an EP and an album. As soon as we got back, we dove into recording Water’s Here In You. And I felt like 2020 had taken my soul and stomped on it.It’s hard when you work so intensely on something, and you don’t see the immediate benefit or growth.

At that time I felt truly 10 out of 10 done with doing what I was doing. I wanted a steady job. I didn’t want to take music seriously anymore. I thought, “ I’m always going to be writing music. This is my heart. This is what I was born to do, but I’m not able to make the music thing as a career make sense long term.” And I was like, “I want to go back to school, or I want to get a steady job.” I don’t want to be dealing with these constant transitions anymore because that’s what being a musician is.

You’re always in transition from one thing to another. I don’t like transitions. I like stability. I like to be very constant. I think I would describe this phase as burnout, but then what came out of it was Water’s Here in You, which I think is an album that both Ryan and I feel that truly we popped off on. We put every ounce of that creative angst that we were feeling into the record.

We put our minds together and wrote, collaborating on writing for the first time. We look back on it now as something we’re proud of, and I think we’ll look back on it for the rest of our lives as something we’re proud of, especially given that we were really at the end of our rope. From there, things picked up, and I feel like we were inspired so much by the writing and the recording process that we were like, “All right, let’s get back. We’re going to go on tour again.”