Say What You Will, it’s been a heck of a year!

In late August I packed my car, left my home in Seattle, Washington and a fully lived life in the Pacific Northwest.

I drove down the 101 to San Fransico through the Trees of Mystery and gave my respects to the Pacific Ocean. In San Fransisco I dropped my kid off for her first year of College, then reluctantly headed east for seven days with my co-pilot terrier mix Rasputin, a rooftop car tent, my guitar and a headful of memories; destination - Lexington, Kentucky.

When I wasn’t listening to the audio book version of Dune, I had my Spotify playlists to keep me company on the 30+ hour drive. On one of my playlists there was a song by an artist I wasn’t familiar with— but one of his songs had popped up as a suggestion and it immediately struck a chord with me. I put James Blake’s song Say What You Will from his acclaimed album Friends that Break your Heart, on a playlist, that I titled, I’m So Tired. I listened to it over and over again, singing at full blast, trying and failing over-and-over to sing the notes for the duration of his breath without loosing my own.

I’ve never done a solo roadtrip like this one by myself, but it was something I knew I needed to do. I needed to make space in my soul for a big shift, while at the same time seeing the literal space that would exist between myself and my only kid, the life I’d been living and the culture and community that I knew and loved. I almost flaked on myself and looked into how expensive it would be to ship my car cross-country and fly instead…but in the end, I knew I needed to find the courage to make this trip alone.

Through the miles, Blakes song kept digging into my soul with his beautiful refrains and self reflective lyrics over and over again. Every time it showed up in the queue, my heart felt the pull of emotional expression.

“’I’ve been normal, I’ve been ostracized, I watched through windows, as my young self died.””

— James Blake

I have worked on a few cover songs that I have wanted to try, but none of them ever to a finalized arrangement. However, this song was like a spirit box, whispering me back all the things I was already feeling.

Perhaps it was the ‘too many’ huge life changes and transitions happening all at once, the switching of identities (not only as a mother, but as an artist/musician and as a woman), the work of moving through the aging process and the isolation of a pandemic. Perhaps it was the determination to rip myself out of the grip of a depressive state that grabbed me the moment I arrived at my new home. Whatever it was that got me into my studio, it was the act of recording this song that inspired my emergence out of the darkness of an utterly debilitating existential crisis and culture shock . Recording this song was my retreat to self and therapy for my soul. In the music I could find comfort in Blakes lyrics while finding my own way and my own meaningful intention through melody and sound.

There are so many songs that I have been drunk on in my life, but there is something about the kismet of time and place that makes a song become a part of your dna. I truly connected to what I believe Blake was intending in this song— and I hope that he would feel I did his song justice. The willingness to be self-reflective, vulnerable and honest in contemplating our human experiences can be painful at times. I find that sharing these experiences through art, music and conversation truly helps alleviate the uncomfortableness of existence in world that I can often feel at odds with.

[Feels so] Uncontrollable: then & now

It’s hard to willingly subject myself to the cringe that is triggered up and down my spine from listening to the me of 1994 singing cathartically into a microphone and haphazardly assaulting the strings of my first electric guitar. Even that run-on sentence seems apropos to the force at which I wanted desperately to get out the layers and complicated intersections of feelings I was experiencing at the time…

…and it was hard...and it took many years until I was able to find a path past my insecurity and self-deprecating perception of my own journey. So much so, that I conveniently kept my practice recording cassettes of my first years of trying my hand at being a Seattle musician in the early 90’s under lock & key. I think it was due to an inability to find peace and conciliation with the person that I was struggling to be in my early 20’s with the me I’ve been trying to grow into my adulthood. My memory of the me-child holds layers of shame, disappointment and blurry and confusing relationships. For so long, I wasn’t able to visit that version of myself without being reminded of what I have always considered my own bad choices and the failed endeavors that were the result of my shortcomings.

For some people it takes longer to trudge through all the junk-coding of our DNA to get to the more refined version that our current self has been working to curate. Some of this molding happens over years of personal work and self-healing, but sometimes it also takes the temperature of a societal culture at large to offer better tools for self-discovery, and in that shift there starts to arise better language to understand personal stories of transformation.

“...I’m hiding and I don’t know why...”

— hummingfish

Among the many messages I internalized as a child ( I was the top middle of four siblings), was “you’re not good enough, you’ll never be good enough but try harder.” Some of the negative messaging I got from childhood was from my parents and the chaos of their complicated dysfunction, but it was also a part of cultural norms and conflicting ideas about women’s equality and worth, body image and how to support and identify the mental health of children in abusive families. All of which we as a modern society are still grappling with today, decades later.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to an independent mindset—this has put me at odds with the world, my parents and myself from a very young age. While I am convinced that I may never find myself fully on the other side of my childhood trauma, I have been working to accept and find equanimity in the experiences, failures and damages that were the foundation of my personal narratives.

In 2020, the 1st summer of the Pandemic, also know as the summer that we all ‘stayed in', I found myself compelled to revisit my box of cassettes that held my first music recordings. It was under the guise of wanting to get them digitalized. As technology has improved and become more accessible, I finally felt capable to tackle the feat of translating tape vibrations into x’s and o’s.

Hummingfish was the first incarnation of a band ( really just a solo project that I found some people to help me out with). Before that, I had tried to be in a band with a couple of guys that had put an ad out in the The Stranger (a classic Seattle Rag) for a singer for their band, and I answered. In the end I wasn’t the right fit for their project. However, Simon the drummer was super helpful and generous with his time to help me make these recordings which he then added drum tracks to. I only played around town for a brief time with a handful of shows…but one of the worst things any performing artist can have is a debilitating performance anxiety (aka stage fright). In a time where we didn’t have words like social anxiety and we didn’t talk openly about PTSD and we didn’t throw around phrases like ‘being triggered,’ having stage fright was the sabotage that kills anyones ability to ‘get out there’ or even ‘ fake it till you make it.’ There was also no internet to populate a digital version of myself to share with the world safely from the confines of my home.

As an artist, sometimes it can feel like what I do is invisible. For most of my life, the idea of calling myself a musician or an artist would evoke a fear of fraudism in me—even though I felt confident in my work and continued to put in the hours to refine my voice and my intention. When someone introduce themselves as a dentist or a carpenter, most people have a general sense of what that means. When someone says they are an artist or musician, it will mean whatever preconceived idea, notion or subjective version of what art or music is and base their opinion on their biases of what they consider to be good or bad. When you grow up with an ingrained sense of never being good enough but pushed to keep working anyways—there is an immediate sense of feeling unable to portray value in your work. In the creative world, if you aren’t able to exude the sense of value in your own work, it’s very hard to convey to others a sense of value in it.

In the spaces of time where I haven’t found my way to present my work ‘out there’ it can feel as if I don’t actually exist at all. However, when I sat in my studio one day that summer of 2020, I listened to a young girl belt out notes and words from a different version of myself and for the first time I was listening with empathy and not judgment. Inside of this listening experience I had a flash of awareness for my eclectic trajectory filled with purpose and passion lined with so much visual art and hundreds of songs and tens-of-thousands of hours of creative processing.

…I see you all in my head…it’s so much sweeter in my head…

It was almost like I was time traveling through my personal experiences of being human, and also through the years of my creative outputs that I kept working to realize into being outside of my head.

Listening to this rough cut of a raw moment, I got to be the audience that I never felt I could find at the time and still feel I long for. It was like, for the first time— I really heard myself as someone working through a lot of confusing emotions completely on her own as a result of being pushed into adulthood way too soon. The me-today listened and I was present. With the tape whirring on the small cassette player I had in my basement studio, I had a tremendous rush of relief that poured out from finally understanding the grief of this very young and desperately lonely and sad person. For so long, I hadn’t been able to hold space for her, but that day I felt a strange sense of completeness. I was in tune with the words she was singing, her sentiment, the raw edge of her voice—this song I had written so many years ago from a completely different place in my life felt as relevant that day as ever.

In an instant I knew that I had to re-record this song and re-imagine it for today. However, I didn’t really change anything. I just was able to come at it from the years of learning better skills as a musician, producer and visual artist. I was also able to approach it from the place of deep love and understanding for the person that was the me-child of so long ago.

As the me of today (and also the nurturer and supporter of my own child through to adulthood), I believe I was able to see that me-child who was suffering back then. I wanted to connect in with her and finally hold that space that she never truly felt was held for her in all those years trying to survive on her own. I wanted to reach back and let her know that she moves forward though time and keeps going; that she keeps writing songs; she keeps painting and more; that it also is still hard to be her sometimes; That she feels she’s got it in one moment but it’s still all so uncontrollable the next. But she hides less and less and when she’s does find herself in the tall grass, she doesn’t feel as small.

Original lyrics from my old Macintosh computer and printer that had the annoying tabs you had to rip off circa 1994

early 90’s Gig poster for a show at the Ditto- an old “hole in the wall under the monorail” music venue.

betwixt & between

“...and When I was low I looked under the stones to see what was creeping below me—and while I was there instead of a scare I saw pieces of parts that were missing...”

— emc

I remember clearly when this song started to form. There was a strong urgency that came out in the hard strumming of some bar chords. It was a different sort of rhythm than I had been using at that point in time, and it felt like my hand was being pulled down the fret board by a tide escaping back out to sea. In this instance, the vibration of strings was coming up from somewhere below my belly button through the exhale of sound that was my voice and then the first line came through — “I know I can bend.”

It’s a subtle moment, when I can feel that a song is arising. It usually just takes that first presient string of words to unlocked the rest of the lyrics. However, it can still take a while for the song to fully come to the surface. I have a bunch of songs that I can’t give up on because there is still something not yet revealed that I keep hoping to find.

On instagram I posted an early version of this song that you can see below. I hadn’t fully developed it yet ( I was calling it ‘my retreat”). It’s so raw because that is the place I tend to arrive from. It’s in that raw place that my fear of judgment has to take a back seat. This has been my work lately;I challenge myself and allow that rawness (vulnerability) to be seen.

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The ocean has played a big part in many of the songs and poetry I’ve written and also has been a theme in my visual art.

I grew up by the ocean in a small town north of L.A. in California. Growing up in a beach town, the ocean was a symbol of leisure and recreation. However, for me, the ocean represented the unknown and a powerfulness that kept me in awe of her magnificence. I tried my hand at water sports such as surfing, sailing, even outrigger canoeing, but as I grew older, my weariness and fear of that unknown was overbearing and I began to fear the water, even though I worshiped her power & beauty. I remember clearly the first time I had a panic attack in the water. I was probably eleven or twelve and I was doing a swim test for my sailing camp from a buoy to the beach near the harbor. All I had to do was swim to shore. I remember the water was clear enough that I could see the seaweed waving up at me and small fish swimming about and large shadows that engulfed my imagination. All of the sudden I felt completely vulnerable with my feet dangling and my body weightless; I was helpless. In retrospect, this feeling stemmed from getting older and gaining a growing awareness of the increasing dysfunction and instability in my home life.

Betwixt & Between is about fear and anxiety- and of all the ways that life can seem to come at you and all the ways you can make up stories of what is actually happening to you. But this is actually a very hopeful song. It’s a song where I am reflecting on my fears of the unknown and coming to terms with the fact that all-in-all, I have persevered. Even through the trials and traumas that I have endured, I am still here learning to bend and find flexibility in my perceptions and understanding of what a life is and how it can be lived. Learning to see through an alternate lens that the things I had been most afraid of in my past didn’t have the power to permanently hold me down, and they still haven’t kept me down. I keep coming back up for air over-and-over-and-over again.

Shadows can cover, the tides can pull, the waves can crash and the weeds can tangle me; but I am still here, persisting and fully alive.

There is tremendous benefit in leaning into the dark, scary and unknown places of the mind. However, it is not an intuitive place and without the right foundation of support, it can be dangerous.

“And when I am low I dig under below to reach for what feels like it’s pulling. And with my hands bare, instead of a scare— I find pieces of parts that I’m missing.”

— emc

Depression is the shadow, deep water, and tangle of weeds that I’ve had to accept as a part of my life. Betwixt & Between is an anthem to myself for not looking away or trying to drown away my painful experiences in this life.

I try to surrender to my darknesses. And there is a relief in the solitude of aloneness— even at the rocky bottom in a moment of despair, there can be a release; a reprieve.

Accepting aloneness, is a metaphor. To allow yourself to go down below, to see what lies under the heaviness of the stories we create to make sense of our lives—is the bravest thing you can do. But also a huge risk—not everyone around you will have the ability to be a support for you during your decent and might not be able to be waiting for you on the beach when you finally come out of the depths. Because of this, it becomes a solo journey to embark upon no matter what. It’s only you that can hold yourself down or let yourself take a dive.

At the very end of this song (yeah…you gotta listen to the end)! I decided to narrate a line from Richard Bach’s epic tale of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which is a metaphorical story of a gull who is driven to search for more to his existence than just following the rules of etiquette passed down through the ‘ breakfast flock'. As he struggles through existential questioning about life, purpose and flight - he is compelled to take the dive into self-discovery at the risk of loosing the support of those around him.

This book has been with me since middle school. Fun Fact: I had the images of his ‘dive’ tattooed onto my back when I was 22 years old. I have seemed to always relate deeply with Jonathan, especially in the many episodes of my life where I have felt isolated and misunderstood. Jonathan is a voice that reminds us that it’s only you who will know which directions you’ll need to fly towards and surrender to before you’ll be able to emerge back into the light.

Some of us have to make this journey over and over again in our lives no matter how much therapy we seek out, psych drugs or otherwise we try, people we find that are there to support us ‘no matter what’, or spirituality we find…

For me, I’m always betwixt & between my ability to be my own force of strength and inspiration for myself or I am dragged out to sea by the overwhelming gravity of reality that I perceive for better or worse.

This song is my personal reminder that…

…the waves never last and they’ve haven’t drowned me
Cuz I know they can’t hold me
Down for long.

All rights Reserved Copyright 2021 Nico Lund

Lyrics:

I know I can bend with the wind and the rain
And the shadows below me they all look the same
Cuz I know they can’t hold me

Ive been back and forth with the moon and the sea
And the waves never last and they’ve haven’t drowned me
Cuz I know they can’t hold me
Down for long

And When I was low I looked under the stones
To see what was creeping below me
and while I was there instead of a scare
I saw pieces of parts that were missing…

Down below Where I go
My Retreat
Don’t See Me
My Retreat
Un-see See Me

I know I can bend with the wind and the rain
And the shadows below me they all look the same
Cuz I know they can’t hold me

And I’ve taken my turns through the meadows and weeds
And I’m always betwixt and between what I need
I need Something to Hold me

Down, ground me, hold me down
Down, I’m wanting to be found

And When I am low I dig under below
To reach for what feels like it’s pulling
And with my hands bare, instead of a scare
I find pieces of parts that I’m missing

Down below
Where I go
My Repreive
You can’t see
Down below
My Retreat
You won’t See Me