Something I’ve been thinking about lately is how my approach to performance has evolved. I’m a self-taught musician. Although I was in the school orchestra for a few years and have taken classes here and there as an adult to brush up on specific skills, I didn’t have a formal or professional training in music. When I started playing in a band in high school for the first time, I was, as I wrote about recently, a “frontperson” who harnessed energy onstage through my body and voice, but didn’t have a lot of involvement in creating the underlying musical structure.
This situation put me in a weirdly dissociated headspace when it came to my approach to music. In my early years of playing in bands, substances went hand in hand with creativity. I needed to be in an altered state to create music. Music was a group activity for me at the time, yet my substance use was often a solo endeavor, putting me on my own wavelength.
Part of it was just to calm my nerves – I actually had really bad stage fright in the past, which I grew out of – but I took it way beyond that, and I really enjoyed swimming in the headspace of music while being drunk and/or high. From a young age, I’d immersed myself in stories about outlaw artists, from the Beats to punk and no wave, and I came to view art as something that was akin to chaos, and which you had to be slightly deranged to succeed at. It was its own sort of disciplined ethos of being frankly unskilled and unstructured in a traditional sense, while instead existing on a totally embodied creative level that you projected intensely through your looks, attitude, and behavior.
I was influenced by the mythos of artists that I read about in the memoirs and oral histories of music scenes in New York and LA, and of the (in retrospect problematic) “bad boy” writers of the 50s and 60s. Reading about how people were magnetically drawn to certain individuals who sang in bands, and how their artistry was so much about presence, more than the sum of any practical skills, shaped my idea of what I wanted to do creatively.
I may not have trained as a musician, but I was raised by a mother who was a conflicted combination of artist and homemaker, so I was exposed to creativity at an early age. I remember being obsessed with the photos of performance artists like Chris Burden and Josef Beuys in the art encyclopedias that my mom kept on our coffee table. The tears, nudity, and bodily fluids of a Vito Acconci, Bas Jan Ader, or Carolee Schneeman were so incongruous with our neat suburban home, where we didn’t talk about politics or sex, homosexuality was mentioned only in a whisper, and my parents held to strict Boomer gender roles.
I was certainly precocious, but more than that, I think in retrospect, my wildness was not only a rebellion against my own buttoned-down upbringing, but against the buttoned-down upbringing and life of my mother, who was able to quietly live vicariously through my adventures. So I was able to push my creativity to its limits as a teenager, often unsupervised. I realize, looking back, that these semi-feral beginnings left their imprint on my creative process.
In my early 20s, I began writing and performing solo for the first time after several years of helming mostly experimental noise acts where other people wrote the music. What I felt most confident in was what I’d been doing the longest: standing up in front of a crowd with a microphone. At that time I didn’t really know how to sing, or even to write a song. The lyrics and structures were like a murky echo of familiar musical contours finding their way to the surface in a fog.
It was a certain vibe. But there was a disconnect between what I was doing, what I thought I was doing, and what I wanted to do. There was a certain amount of self-awareness in terms of presenting my work as perhaps “not music,” or as performance art. But I didn’t know how to move from “not music” to music. What I was doing was experimental, but I was frustrated with experimenting, not knowing how to just do.
People at my shows often told me I should “work with a producer” (lol). I can laugh now, but it’s sad to think how that was the go-to suggestion, rather than me perhaps learning to make my own beats. I felt conflicted about the idea. I wanted to find someone to help me with my music, but I didn’t want anyone to tell me what to do. I was in my early 20s, and I wanted to be taken seriously as an artist, not be seen as a young ingenue molded by someone else’s creative vision.
I did try to make my own beats. It went very slowly. I often would latch onto guys who did music in the hopes that they might collaborate with me and help me figure it out. I was brought up a certain way when it comes to gender roles. Though I had been rebellious, I had also internalized the structures that I was rebelling against. It was a minefield of weird vibes. Someone I took an Ableton class from tried to convince me to record some vocals for him, saying he “opens women up.” Vomit. I hired a different guy to just mix a track, and he turned into a dubstep remix for some reason. Etc.
But to return to performance: I think due to the musical origins described above, I have always placed a lot of weight on performing music live. It is definitely fun and rewarding in itself: seeing the crowd respond in real time, speaking with people afterward, being onstage under the lights. I have so many photographs of me taken by people who came to my shows over the years. There’s an undeniable look of bravery and confidence in these images of me standing at the microphone alone, facing the crowd, often wearing high heels and a skirt.
I have played a lot of shows. And at some point, I started not liking the way I was performing. I didn’t like being the focal point. I didn’t like how I was showing up onstage and the amount of emotion I was putting into my performances, singing these dark songs.
In 2019, I started playing instrumental shows. It was liberating to stand behind my equipment and not have to look at the crowd or speak into a mic. I didn’t really have to perform, I only had to make the sounds. I was also finally making, or at least mixing, the sounds in real time rather than playing clips or backing tracks.
That same year, I had to take time off playing shows while I relocated. And then the pandemic happened, and I ended up not playing a show for about 2.5 years. That was probably the longest I went without playing shows in over a decade. I was never a professional touring musician who relied on music for my income, but I had just been very prolific in the local scene, and circumstances changed that.
Since then, I’ve been writing new music, and thinking about how I want to perform it. I can write music so easily in Ableton now compared to how much I struggled in the past. Writing with my Octatrack and synths, which I now use for live performances, is a lot slower. I hope that one day I’ll be faster at it. But it makes me question why I push myself so hard to perform live anyway.
There’s definitely a sense of legitimacy and excitement associated with creating a live performance. I also feel like I’m bringing my creative process to the crowd by presenting something on these instruments that I’ve spent so many hours working with. Even though some days I don’t feel super adept at them, there’s undoubtedly a certain aura that’s imprinted on my setup and how I interact with it.
I feel like I’ve been moving toward a sense of balance in my music and performance, between the bold and raw beginnings of a feral youngster, and the more thoughtful structure that’s emerged from years of study. I’m writing my first “live” album, where I’m actually recording what I wrote on the instruments instead of writing the whole thing in the box. I don’t think this is better than Ableton or that there’s one right way of doing things, but it’s an evolution in my process, and I’m interested to see where it takes me.