tour diary: clean is out <3
day 2. it’s 9:29 AM and we’ve been on the road now for only an hour. more importantly, our second single - clean - is out today. you can stream, or even purchase if you’re feeling particularly generous, because it is bandcamp Friday, which means 100% of proceeds go to us (or any artist on bandcamp <3)
to write about clean is an exercise in vulnerability i may be too tired to do successfully at this very moment. however, i’m going to try anyway.
i first wrote clean in september 2017 in my freshman dorm room at Barnard (which shame on them for expelling Pro-Palestine students and shame on Columbia for not only doing the same, but now investigating students who are Pro-Palestine. Free Palestine). it was after a night out where i came home quite drunk and couldn’t sleep and so the song began as this lo-fi reflection on desire, nostalgia and insomnia. i played with it over the years, changing time signatures multiple times, adding midi-keyboard strings and drum machines, but basically left it untouched until august 2022.
what happened in august 2022? not good things. in short: another soul crushing confrontation with gendered violence in my life left me concluding - as many do - if i was the problem. and of course, i ~knew better than that rationally, but when you’re in that position in those moments you’re never quite sure if that’s true. and it felt like, not only stripped of my Self, but my dignity and any goodness i had in me. and so i resolved to do better - an endless cycle of seeking perfection and confrontation with crisis, building and collapsing, building and collapsing. this is what clean is about: a confrontation with your own spirit out of desperation from experiencing a violence, a reflection on the past that never ends as both a severance and a connecting tissue, a sensation of being drunk and insomnia the world blurs and spins and combines reality and non-reality.
my bandmates took these themes and pushed this song to lengths i didn’t know it could go. jonathan brilliantly resolved the time signature problem i had been struggling with rhythmically dividing the song in two, the first in 3 and the second in 5 and played the building parts that give the song its epic feel. claire composed the most beautiful orchestral section/string break that it aches and breaks and moves my spirit every time i hear it. andrew’s guitar pulses like a heart beat, david’s (who plays on the record) saxophone soars, fran’s guitar loops and loops. and of course complete with beautiful album artwork from the one and only natalie tischler (who i lived with in that freshman year dorm), this is clean.
so tonight we celebrate the release of clean with a show in Raleigh, North Carolina at Neptune’s Parlour.
and thank you philadelphia for an epic night last night. we love you and will always love you. go birds. go stream clean <3