I’ve written this album and next week we’ll go finish recording it. A lot of it is about how a set of imagined criteria I sought to meet on behalf of men created my identity. The person I became to impress this figment is inextricable from whoever I am; with this album, I’ve tried to look that in the face. It’s always been hard for me to pass the Bechdel test in my personal life and in my writing without conscious effort. I wanted to stop punishing myself by denying that a good portion of the ingredients of my personality were characteristics and attributes I decided, based on empirical evidence or hearsay, men liked. I started likening it to a relationship with God, whose believers are fashioning a lifestyle around His commandments without being explicitly asked. Unsurprisingly, God is another concept over which I've spent a lot of time ruminating. I suffer from decision paralysis, wherein I’ll play the tape all the way through every potential choice and theoretically endure the consequences. God and Men provide some aspect of relief here in that they will make choices for you. I’ve always been the kind of person who needs to be needed; if I’m going to do something, it’s because someone asked. The great thing about God and my Figment Man is that I decide what they want me to do, so in this byzantine way, I get to do what I want while delegating the responsibility.
I’ve been calling this bootcamp week because I planned to spend every day writing in two journals: one for production notes and the other for storytelling and references. I write so elliptically that I often reference hyper-fixations in songs and lose details when explaining them later. I did that for the first half of yesterday and by 4 pm I started spiraling and entered a 7-hour freeze-state during which I re-downloaded TikTok and learned almost everything about the Clinton Kane scandal.
I’ve been using Masterclass a lot - I watched Margaret Atwood’s and Roxane Gay’s I’m half-way through Joyce Carol Oates’s. I drink two cups of coffee a day, one around 9am and the other around 2pm. I listen to music on the treadmill at the gym; today I listened to Lorde’s Melodrama and Jenny Lewis’s The Voyager.