Welcome! Three Steps You Say?

Step One: At a 10-day meditation retreat, let an album's worth of songs tumble into your brain and start running incessantly until they're recorded.

Step Two: Decide your words need you to sing them. Spend 15 months eeking out every spare minute to hole-up in a dark room and create a writing process on instruments you've never played before. Sing songs hundreds of times to figure out how to be a singer.

Step Three: Beg your favorite people to make a record with you. Make a record. Book a show.
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Well, that's pretty much what happened. Hearing it now it sounds kind of dramatic, but it didn't feel that way at the time.

When I started playing the drums, it was sort of a similar thing. I was half-heartedly fronting a band and our drummer left. I was never going to be a musician, I was just trying it out. But I thought, well wow. If I was a drummer, I would have a job right now. Wait a minute... I want to find a career in which I can work and travel at the same time. If I was a musician, that would work. I wouldn't have to lead bands, I could just get hired to play. There were drums in my house, and my boyfriend said, well I'll show you what I know. And then a while later someone said, oh you're learning how to drum? Here's the number of the best drum teacher in NYC. I remember that piece of paper coming into my hands. I lucked out. Mostly I'm lucky to have had a completely unrealistic idea of life. I always thought I could do what I wanted to do.

I didn't know why I was playing the drums, but I just kind of had to. It's the same feeling now. Singing is terrifying to me. Being on stage isn't, but for some reason using my voice is. But now I just gotta. It has to do with a kind of desperation, a kind of unrest that comes when I've been doing the same thing for too long. I love moving and change and reinvention, and if I am the same person for too long I bog down and despair. And that place is where I always get the impetus to change. I wish I had a nice balanced mind, but anyone who knows me knows, that's not me.

Creation is a big battle made up of millions of little battles. Welcome to my war! And because I'm fascinated by other people's creative processes as well, you'll also find some interviews here of my artist friends.