I Don't Know How...

...But They Found Me!

Today is April 25, 2025. Today my second album is out.

Every couple weeks for the last couple months, my managers have asked me for quotes and soundbites for publications that are writing about the album. I say this to explain how much I have been summing up and reflecting on this album, my second album, in recent memory. But I publish an essay on the Substack once a month, and this month, the album comes out, so here is more summing up and reflecting. This time on the heels of a meltdown I had at a hotel valet the other night. My health anxiety had been triggered after attending a party last week where there was nominally an air purifier but which was more meaningfully full of people in a way that triggered my pathological fear of airborne pathogens. Reader, I left. Reader, I had a meltdown at the valet.

As it turns out, the meltdown was less about the possibility of airborne pathogens and more about the attendant loss of control, a loss of control being mirrored, perhaps, in the days leading up to this record release, wherein this project that has belonged only to me and a few select others now belongs to everyone else.

I got into an argument with a friend, a male friend, the other day. I believe I was recounting the inanities of a text conversation with a boy (the specifics are unimportant). The male friend called me boy crazy, which is a term that makes me feel very small and colorless and unremarkable. I’d been called boy crazy by a different male friend a few months earlier, and I’d had the same emotional response. Both times I expressed my disdain for the term, and both times the men apologized, shocked for how personally I took what they believed to be an utterly innocuous comment. Both times I explained the origins of my distaste for the term: it implies a lack of meaningful interests and priorities on the part of the accused, a lack of intellectualism, of interiority. I am reminded, indignantly, of a passage from my favorite novel, Elif Batuman’s The Idiot:

“I read Ivan’s messages over and over, thinking about what they meant. I felt ashamed, but why? Why was it more honorable to reread and interpret a novel like Lost Illusions than to reread and interpret some email from Ivan? Was it because Ivan wasn’t as good a wrtier as Balzac? (But I thought Ivan was a good writer.) Was it because Balzac’s novels had been read and analyzed by hundreds of professors, so that reading and interpreting Balzac was like participating in a conversation with all these professors, and was therefore a higher and more meaningful activity than reading an email only I could see? But the fact that the email had been written specifically to me, in response to things I had said, made it literally a conversation, in the way that Balzac’s novels—written for a general audience, ultimately in order to turn a profit for the printing industry—were not; and so wasn’t what I was doing in a way more authentic, and more human?”

Anyway, I know part of the reason I become so distraught by this designation is because, in the same way I intermittently hyperfixate on perfume and makeup and multilingualism and The Sims franchise, I hyperfixate on romantic interests. I have been largely incapable of doing so recently, which I take as a tremendous mark of my growth. To be accused, then, of taking up a behavior that no longer resonates with my sense of self—that is a great betrayal. The other part of my distress is related to the release of the album. I am afraid of people seeing me in a way other than the way I have carefully curated and explained. I am afraid that upon presenting myself, even with footnotes and pull-quotes, I will still be misunderstood. Attendant loss of control. So it goes.

To be a touring and recording artist is to surrender. I have no choice but to surrender. My most personal work yet, etc. Here are the stories of the darkest, bloodiest moments of my mid-20s. Here is what happened, here is how I handled and mishandled it. Here are the two men who changed my view of myself and love, forever, who I have wished on so many lucky stars to forget, to strike from the record, only not so hard, then, because now they are on the record, forever. On and of the record. On this record, and nowhere else, they meet. Even if they don’t shake hands.

We’ve been rehearsing for tour for a while now. Every time we run through these songs, my songs, I am stricken with gratitude and humility. These people want to play my songs with me! These people want to get in a van and see the continent with me and they want to play my songs! And the songs are good! They are maybe even excellent! They sound good to the ears and feel good to the bones! Lucky me! Lucky me! Lucky me!

I hope this record means something to you. I hope it soundtracks the difficult times and the joyous ones. I hope you never relate to the worst of it. I hope if you do, that it never happens again. I poured everything, everything into this. I am nostalgic for who I was before any of this happened, but more than that I look forward to meeting who I will become next year, five years from now, a decade, and so on. I know I’m braver now, burning bigger and brighter and better. I know what’s coming is better than what is lost. I don’t know how. But I know these things to be true.

I hope this finds you well.

Love,
J