What I know for sure

I’m writing my third album, and as of now, it’s about falling into deep, healthy love, the yearning for female companionship, and grieving who I used to be before I understood consequence, before I saw my parents as people.

It’s a bit like this. This is what I know for sure:

On him:

I know that he crinkles his nose when he’s impressed. When he’s about to say the punchline. When he loved me but hadn’t said it yet. He’d kiss me at the end of our dates and his nose would crinkle. I knew then.

I know that he hits his index and middle fingers against the sides of spices in a fast rhythm when seasoning food. I know the sound this makes like I know my favorite song.

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Artists and professional pasta-throwers are one in the same

I’m writing today from a ski lodge in Lake Tahoe. My partner is an avid skier and has been here for about two months, taking advantage of his lack of responsibility in New York to do what he loves most. I came to join him for a week and a half.

Bringing my “I like to be good at things” attitude to the mountain, I thought I’d crush it. News flash: This shit is scary as hell. I don’t believe I fall into the category of people who look down a cliff and think, “Yeah, let’s bomb down this.”

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The voice memo you recorded in your friend's bathroom? We want to hear it.

I realized when I was sixteen that this was a sales job—that I was the brand, and my music was the product. I dove in like a fish that had been out of water her entire life, first cursing the waves for rocking me, then laughing when I realized this was simply the environment.

My time in the water has been filled with mistakes. I’ve walked into meetings overconfident and underconfident. I’ve thought too big and too small. I’ve involved people in my journey out of a desire to be kind, instead of being more selective about who I share ideas with. I’ve placed my worth in social media numbers and let the riptide take hold when the album I spent $20k on was released to near silence.

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Finding success in an under-sold crowd

The Protagonist Festival last week was our most intimate, with about 50% of attendees who had bought tickets showing up. The wind-rain that New York cast that night was perhaps the reason.

Tom, who’s been to every festival, walked in almost as soon as the doors opened. Wearing his orange protagonist hat that he bought at the first festival, wore to the second, and now sported to the third, I introduced him to James, a keyboardist he hadn’t yet met. Tom became one of my fiercest advocates after stumbling upon me busking a few months ago, then returning with a folding chair to watch the entire set. His consistency has done just as much for me as he says mine has done for him. Perhaps the music is working.

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You're not breaking up with him, you're breaking up with your youth

I’ve been writing with a new friend named Jake. We were about an hour into our first session when he said to me, “So if there’s one thing I know about you it’s that you’ll always bring it back to youth.”

So on the money. I almost spit out my water.

I spent the majority of my childhood wishing I was older than I was. I used to bring my mom’s spare handbag to school along with the second set of car keys to play “college” at recess. I do think this is somewhat of a shared experience for girls. I see it in the ones I nanny today, knowing to keep my urges of telling them to bask in their innocence to myself. They won’t understand. A woman must mourn her innocence to realize it was something she ever had.

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The music industry is in shambles. How should a wannabe pop star respond?

I used to think that if I could get an executive to a show, they’d swoop me up in their not-so-strong wannabe rockstar arms that haven’t showered in a week and fly me over the gates of a castle that features rehab centers and classrooms that read “how to make authentic art while knowing that if you don’t hit a certain number of sales we’ll ghost you and ruin your entire life” on the chalkboards.

That day never came, and it never will.

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On Realizing You're Living the Dream

I played a living room show this past Saturday in a neighborhood called Riverdale. I went to my partner’s family home for a meal before the show—they live nearby.

We chatted about the festival the night before at the late lunch/dinner table. We talked about the California fires. I excused myself to go upstairs to do my hair and makeup.

“This feels nice,” I thought, as I went through my vocal warmups and burnt what was left of my barely alive hair with a curling iron. The consistency of shows, the triumph of the festival the night before, and how quickly I moved on from it. I used to play small rooms and live on that high for the week following. Now I create festivals that showcase my art and so much more from my neighboring New York creators and move on from them almost immediately. I shift my focus to the next show. This mindset felt familiar, yet new. What was this feeling?

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On Being Proud of Yourself

My hope for this blog has always been that it can be a community space for creatives.

I tend to lean into how much of this feels like a relative slap in the face as we attempt to hold to our art amidst the pressures of surrendering to corporate structure, but as I sat down this morning and sorted through what to write about, all I wanted to dive into was how proud of myself I am.

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On Seeing Each Other

When I was serving at a restaurant in Hudson Yards, a lady said to me, “I hope you don’t mind this, but what’s your deal? I’m trying to figure you out.”

I told her I wrote music. She replied, “I knew it. You don’t belong here.”

Some friends and I went to a small music festival this past Sunday. I was waiting to retrieve my coat from coat check when an artist that had just performed came up to me saying, “It’s good to see another artist.” An interaction that lasted no more than two minutes, we spoke about the industry. I put my coat on and wished him luck.

This recognition of my artistry is validating to experience, undoubtedly, and especially in the midst of the, uh, existential panic that can come with living outside of the lines.

But it’s not like an artist is more radiant than any other. We’re all searching for those that are similar to us.

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On My Burning Hometown

One of the few things I knew for certain as a child was that my mom would tell each visiting person we’d be hosting that Culver City hosted the munchkins from The Wizard of Oz at the Culver Hotel, with the movie being filmed on the very grounds of our home turf. She spoke with pride and diplomacy, as if it were the most important story in the world. I remember thinking, There is nothing else she could possibly care about as much as this.

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On The "I Made It" Moment That Hasn't Come Yet

Our living room faces a busy Brooklyn street, and with it comes a soundtrack of sounds—some endearing, most grating. The corner drummer, banging on empty water buckets, goes live once a week around 6pm. The kids, protesting their discomfort with the routine of school, are a daily fixture between 7 and 9am.

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On Mentally Being in the Bahamas While You Worry About Me

“I love your honesty, but your last blog post made me sad for you,” my dad says over the phone. I then learn that some of his friends reached out to him, expressing concern, asking if I was okay.

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On Releasing Your Art to Silence

There’s something poetic about spending two years and nearly every dollar you have making an album, only to release it into silence. PROTAGONIST has been out for over a month now, and the momentum I built leading up to its release has flatlined.

Your music won’t make noise unless you’re constantly behind it, putting in just the right amount of effort to make it seem effortless. Don’t ask me the science — there is none.

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On The Room of Infinite Possibility

I’m picturing the washer and dryer from Meow Wolf in New Mexico, where they open up to a galaxy-like tunnel of blue and purple gradients, glittering with stars and cosmic light. I imagine a room alive with that image—floating, breathing shards of color and light, each suspended with its own outcome. I call this the Room of Infinite Possibility. It’s the room I live in.

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On Name-Changing Behind The Counter

Writing from behind a barista counter today. Two days into the new gig.

My mind goes into panic mode whenever people ask for my name here, and it makes me chuckle. I immediately think, “I can’t tell you my name. This isn’t me! This isn’t my identity! I’m an artist! Take your double-shot macchiato, get out of here, and forget I was ever here.”

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On The Things That Never Change

My dear friend Veda is visiting this week. She got in today, serendipitously just in time for the album release festival happening tomorrow. She arrived tired, fresh off her early morning flight, her hair longer than I remember.

A new version of Veda has arrived. One two years older than the one I knew throughout our college years together. The two of us would pull all-nighters, always ready for anything. An invite, and we were there. We’d spend evenings chatting about our dreams and how we were going to live them out together—me playing stages around the world, and her tour managing it all.

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On Embracing the Overwhelm

“This is not a time to throw up our hands, this is a time to roll up our sleeves.”

Our instinct when things get overwhelming is often to turn numb. It’s to fly above the hurt. But art brings an irony to this. It refuses to let us continue on. It’s a moment of fixated time that lives forever. It’s one emotion, displayed in all of its depth. It’s what reminds us that we’re not alone in this overwhelm, in this pain, in this uncertainty.

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on needing time to develop

A large part of my frustration with the industry today comes from the lack of time devoted to developing artists. What used to happen—before social media and streaming services took over—was that an artist would be discovered, nurtured, and developed under the wings of a label, management, or publisher for years, sometimes even a decade. There was an understanding that when potential was seen in someone, that person needed to be supported, protected, and guided because their talent was something fragile, not meant to be exposed to the harshness of the world too soon.

This approach is now nearly extinct. Labels, as their role diminishes, are increasingly relying on social media engagement as a proof of concept. They’re looking at the numbers and engagement an artist has online to gauge whether they’re ready for the big leagues.

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on the quiet supporters

The first gig I ever played was at a club called Pig n Whistle in Hollywood. I sang to a handful of bargoers, pint after pint in hand, and my parents, sitting front row. They were there because they wanted to be—but also because, legally, I couldn’t have entered the bar without them. I was fifteen.

Psychologically, I wouldn’t have made it this far without them either. They’ve always mirrored my dreams, stepping in where I ask, lifting small weights off my back—both figuratively and literally. My dad used to carry my guitar from the house to the car, from the car to the venue—at every single show.

Then I moved to New York.

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on the dual roots of tragedy and creation

When Right Now, It’s Like This came out, I went downstairs and did the dishes. I’d let it go—this piece of me—and handed it to you. And I celebrated that quiet victory alone, scrubbing dried pasta sauce off a ceramic bowl. It felt right. After all the noise of getting the album out into the world, the silence and simplicity of doing the dishes felt like a relief. I wasn’t staring at the mountain of a music career ahead of me—I was just scrubbing a bowl, grounded by the immediacy of it.

Albums are released weekly. Singles daily. Books, films, columns, and sculptures are unveiled continuously. Each project comes with a different name attached to it, and behind each name is a crowded table of brilliant minds—producers, co-writers, collaborators—who silently stand in the shadows, holding up the public persona with grace and humility.

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