|
Hey friends. Wanted to point your attention toward what will probably be the only piece of press I receive anytime soon: a really lovely review of my last three singles from my dear friend Lizzie Wann over on the Lady Brain Presents blog. Even though I'm putting out a lot of new music, I just don't have the capacity to push for PR right now, which goes against everything I've been doing as an indie musician for my entire career. Why, you may ask, would someone who has literally written a DIY publicity guide for indie musicians, not put more care into publicizing her new music? Um, I'm exhausted. That's pretty much it. I've reached a point in this pandemic where I'm creating and releasing music for my own mental health. What anyone chooses to do with it or think about it or write about it is not even a sliver of a thought in my brain at the moment. Maybe one day I'll get back to a place where I keep pushing for more reach, but for now, I'm just going to lean on good friends like Lizzie, awesome collectives like Lady Brain Presents, and my Patreon fam to give me the gentle squeezes and nudges I need to keep on keeping on. Thanks so much Lizzie for these thoughtful and kind words about my latest three releases. If you get a moment, please send her a little venmo love and check out her book and talk show!  Image description: Single artwork for "Nothing Worse" features a collage with light gray text that reads "Nothing Worse" overlaid on a grayish blue mountain landscape. In the center, a photo of Lindsay White in a green shirt, propping her chin up with her hand. Bunches of colorful flowers are placed over her face and near her shoulder. Artwork by ShyTheArtist, original photo by Sydney Prather.
0 Comments
New year, new music. Hope you enjoy my latest release "Nothing Worse," an original song inspired by one of my dear friends about that dreaded sense of hope we still somehow manage to feel during incredibly hopeless and lonely times. The song is available on all streaming platforms, but I hope you'll also consider a direct download from my website, which includes a printable lyric download as well as the artwork. Streaming is cool y'all, but artists can't make it work with fractions of pennies for royalties. Direct sales help me continue to invest in creating more music!
Image Description: Single artwork features a collage with light gray text that reads "Nothing Worse" overlaid on a grayish blue mountain landscape. In the center, a photo of Lindsay in a green shirt with black and white polka dot accents. She is propping her chin up with her hand. Bunches of colorful flowers are covering her face and near her shoulder. Artwork by ShyTheArtist, using original photo by Sydney Prather.
Lyrics:
there's a pillow i keep punching i always take you lying down there's a pill so hard to swallow i have to hide it in my mouth i'm sinking down the valley, can't find the surface i'm fighting the finale, like a novice novelist i'm pacing like Penelope, hope for my homecoming kiss but there's nothing worse than hoping at a lonesome time like this there's a hole where i keep whispering i always wonder if you hear there's a hopeless place where i know best but dear, i don't dare to go near i'm counting up the memories and the sacrifices i'll spend them on you honey i don't care what the price is i'm testing several theories hoping to prove the same thesis but there's nothing worse than hoping at a lonesome time like this worry my mind, furrow my brow sweetheart, i am sweating bullets sweating you out how can i let you go when i still hope that hope exists i know...there's nothing worse than hoping at a lonesome time like this but i just sit here hoping at a lonesome time like this
Thank you for listening fam! If you want to take your patronage one step further, you can also join Lindsay's Corner for $2+/month. Did you know someone would have to stream my song about 229 times before I earned $2? But it costs about $10-20 per year to keep a song distributed to these platforms, so just to break even for a single, my song would have to be streamed 1145-2290 times per year. This stuff makes me want to pull out my hair and quit music sometimes. Having support from the Patreon platform isn't just about financial sustainability, it's about the emotional support and knowing that folks care about artists enough to protect and preserve their ability to create. It's about giving them "hope at a lonesome time like this."
Hey friends! I wanted to premiere a brand new video for "Crickets," ahead of my latest release that will be available for streaming/download on December 26. My Patreon crew got the first look, and they are absolutely the reason I continue to be able to create music despite not earning my usual gig income this year, so I want to thank them for their continued support during a really weird and hard time for artists. To start, let me disclaim that I have no real technical skills when it comes to video-making, but I had a vision to try and capture what the infertility struggle feels like; using a tripod and an iPhone, I managed to arrive somewhere in the realm of reality.  Image Description: Single artwork features a hand-drawn bathroom sink and a pregnancy test on the counter. A tiny cricket appears in the test window. Artwork by Chad Cavanaugh. In the song, you'll hear real crickets I recorded from outside my window on the nights I would lay awake wondering if I was ever going to get pregnant. Sometimes I would see a cricket in the bathroom, and of course (always looking for a sign from the Universe) I Googled what they meant - besides the "nothing" response they are commonly associated with. Some searches pointed to good luck and fertility. I secretly hoped my mama was coming to me in one of those crickets telling me that good news was on the way. The good news never came. Sometimes crickets are just crickets, I guess. You can also hear the crinkle of a pregnancy test wrapper in the chorus, which I used to represent the almost mechanical wheel-like revolution of hope to despair to hope to despair, cycle after cycle, fail after fail. What actually happens in these cycles is you actually have to go into the lab every try for a blood test to confirm the cycle failed (even if you already started your period or tested negative at home), which adds an extra spin cycle of hope/despair where you tell yourself tons of little stories "maybe it's implantation bleeding" or "maybe it was a false negative" until you finally get the phone call confirming what you knew all along. No baby. Feel free to share this video with anyone you know who has struggled with similar issues. It's isolating. I hope it comforts and speaks to people who have been through it. I feel very fortunate that we were even able to try five times. In the opening lyrics "I've cried onto a casket," I'm referring to my mom's death. I'm also wearing the clothes I wore to her funeral. I wanted to acknowledge that some folks don't have the resources to attempt to grow their family, and we would've been in that boat had it not been for my mama's death. So maybe she was still my good luck cricket in a different sense. Thanks to her, we will always get to say that we tried, and that is comforting. Still, I want to point out that for sooooo many LGBTQ+ folks who envision creating families of their own, whose own families did/do not accept them - we get such a late start on this process because it takes us such a long time to shed the shame placed on us by others and to arrive at our full authentic selves. Which then makes us a little late to the game in finding our healthy life partners/relationships, which then makes us really late to the family planning process. By the time Audrie and I started trying to conceive, it was practically too late. So many queer couples I know struggle with this, and it really angers me that our own loved ones, our own schools, our own religions stand in the way of our ability to love and grow into ourselves, each other, and our families. This is tragic. This is abuse. Please, if you are reading this, and you refuse to accept your child or loved one's sexuality or gender identity or anything else about their authentic self, you are literally robbing them of time they could be fully supported and immersed in your love for them and their love for themselves. Don't do that. God wouldn't do that. ****
This track will be available on Spotify/Apple/etc. on December 26! In the meantime, please follow on Spotify, subscribe on Youtube, and check out Lindsay's Corner if you'd like to be a part of the fam that helps me keep creating. Hi my friends. It's release day! My new song (and silly home video) for "Everything But Loving You" just came into the world, and I wanted to write about it a little since I'm mostly off social media and not doing a traditional promotional blitz where I beg a bunch of media folks to write about it. Instead, I just want to put it out there, give some context to the song, and then not stress out about whether or not people listen to it, but trust that It will find who it needs to find. So, basically shooting my music career in the foot, haha. Small price to pay for mental wellness during a pandemic.  Image Description: Single artwork features a hand-drawn pile of dirty dishes. Artwork by Chad Cavanaugh. Even though it's a love song, I wrote this tune from a pretty scary place. Anxiety dug its claws into me hard a few times this year. While I've lived with that little shithead in my brain for pretty much my whole life, this time, it felt harder to manage. Chalk it up to infertility, a rampant pandemic, ongoing social injustice, national incompetence, you name it. It's a traumatizing time to be alive, even for the most mentally stable people. In those moments, I didn't have or use the correct tools, and the result was an overwhelming sense of hopelessness and helplessness, which veered pretty hard into a land of shame and self-hatred where I started to lose sight of my worth on this planet and value of living life in general. In those moments, my anxiety puts me on trial, unfairly and incessantly asking me, "If you can't fix everything, what's the point of you?" In those moments, the one thing that is stronger than anxiety's prosecution is love's defense. I was able to hang on by focusing on the sense of purpose I feel in loving and being loved by my wife. Writing this song about Audrie, the person that makes me feel calm and sane and steady, provided enough of a glimmer of hope that I needed to be a functioning human again.
Speaking of being a functioning human, this is the first release that I produced, with the help of friends James Staton (bass), Steve Nichols (guitar), Jules Stewart (drums) and Amelia Sarkisian (mixing). It's not perfect or polished, but what feels more important to me than being perfect is: making an effort within my capacity, being proud of any small progress in that effort, being compassionate about any setback in that effort, and letting go of any attachment to other people's perceptions of that effort. It's a good way to fight anxiety. It's also a good way to approach art. And life. In closing, I feel it's important to disclaim as a white person that this song was written in a mental health moment about a mental health moment. In no way do I want to give folks musical permission to ignore injustice in your community and in the world. I must admit, I've worried the song could be perceived in that light. But then, I just gotta circle back to letting go of any attachment to other people's perceptions of my effort. For me "quitting everything" kinda means letting go of the shit that doesn't serve me (sorrow, anger, worry), and focusing on the shit that does (love, love, love, etc.) so I can function with more clarity and serve others with more stability. However, I absolutely would like to quit doing the dishes for the rest of time. ;) **** Spotify (please add to your fav love songs playlist or follow mine!) Youtube (please subscribe while you're there!) Patreon/Lindsay's Corner (be a part of the fam that helps keep creating) Lyrics (for word nerds like me) Hey y'all! Historic day. I'm celebrating the relief that comes with overthrowing a racist dictator-type man-child from an office he had no business occupying in the first place. I'm celebrating the hard work and organizing efforts of grassroots organizations that kept us from driving right off a fascist cliff. I'm celebrating the tireless work of Black womxn and indigenous folks and folks of color and progressive folks who constantly answer the call to save democracy despite the fact that their calls for justice go so often unanswered. I'm celebrating the long overdue achievement of sending the first Black person, the first Indian-American person, the first womxn to the VP office. I'm celebrating the heartening idea that more folks are recognizing their own power in creating communities, a country, and a future that looks like all of us and works for all of us. I'm celebrating that idea that, come January 20, my raging anxiety might lessen just the tiniest bit simply by nature of not having to think about or hear or read the vile words of a hateful, racist, ignorant, greedy fool.
But I'm also not getting it twisted. Ousting Trump from the White House is like trimming a little crusty leaf off a Sequoia tree with serious root rot. Electoral politics is but one tiny branch of that tree. Half of us managed to eek out enough votes to get this particular ignorant, self-enriching, fear-mongering, white supremacist out, yet greed and white supremacy (bolstered by hate, willful ignorance, and an array of oppressive and destructive -isms) continue to run the show in almost every US institution I can think of, from healthcare to housing, from education to immigration, from faith to feminism, from police to prisons, from politics to the nonprofit world. This poison, selfish stew is upheld, protected, and perpetuated everywhere you look, including the right, including the left, including the undecided and apathetic, including the mirror. Take for example, media outlets and correspondents, who all bent and stretched and hemmed and hawed for 72+ hours to exhaustively opine on the incoming vote counts - yet no meaningful conversation or even curious discussion took place regarding the white vote and what it might indicate or illustrate in terms of systemic racism in this country, especially given the enormous amount of police brutality and demand for racial social justice we witnessed this summer. There was every reason to talk about outright and/or internalized white supremacy for every one of those 72+ hours, but god forbid we disturb the viewers (ie, ratings and sponsors) for even a nanosecond. Someone, please give the giant elephant in the room a microphone and a fancy interactive electoral college map! Continuing in 2020 to treat “white” as "default" in a land with no white natives, in a land whose post-colonial economic system was developed through white exploitation of Black and Brown labor, in a land whose post-colonial political and educational and housing and healthcare systems purposefully denied or excluded or obstructed non-white participation shows just how tightly the culture of white supremancy grips our bodies and brains. It will hold on forever if we let it. Trace any historic path from that time to this time. You will find plenty of gallant notions and powerful figures and flowery speeches and even actual instances of freedom and equality along the way. But I would argue that, if concepts like freedom and equality are the lungs of US society as we now know it, working together to breathe life into our democracy and to sustain the idea of a “more perfect union,” then white supremacy is the heart, steadfastly pumping greed and hate and fear and ignorance into the whole damn organism. And no matter how much “freedom” oxygen we cut it with, devastatingly toxic blood will continue running through the veins of this society until we reckon with that. That toxicity IS systemic racism, is colonial mindset, is misogyny and patriarchy and rape culture, is queer/transphobia, is consumer culture and internalized capitalism, is xenophobia, is ableism, is religious discrimination, is white privelige, is MAGA mentality, is a Muslim travel ban, is family separation at the border, is anti-bodily autonomy, is anti-gay marriage, is lack of access to adequate housing and healthcare, is climate change denial, is widespread disease and death, is Donald Trump, is whatever comes after Donald Trump. That toxicity makes the idea of freedom and equality entirely possible for some and entirely impossible for others. Bringing awareness to it is not a singular attack against a singular person (though Trump makes a great target) and it’s not a problem that can be fixed with any one election (though today feels like a good place to start if you haven’t already). No more blood transfusions. No more reform. No more tiny bandages on gaping, gushing wounds. We need the entire heart transplant, and STAT. My suggestion? Vote, AND. Stay engaged and in service to your local community in whatever way aligns with your values, passions, strengths, and capacities all year long, not just every time a ballot shows up in your mailbox. Breathe in the fresh air of the potential for freedom and equality. But also take note of that toxic heartbeat of white supremacy. How strong does it (or the internalized desire for proximity to it) pulse within you? How strong does it pulse in your family or friend circle or neighborhood or workplace? Stop and ask yourself, multiple times a day, no matter where you are: would all people feel free and equal in this space? If the answer is no, ask what you might be willing to give of your time or energy or money or capacity. Because if the answer is no, that means there’s still much more work to do, and that work ain’t gonna do itself. It certainly won’t all be done in four years by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, wearing Mitch McConnel muzzles and likely up to their ears in whatever special interests and limitations all politicians at that level find themselves entangled in. White folks, I have a ton of specific suggestions for you (contact me and we’ll chat about fun stuff like detaching from guilt, shame, defensiveness, and other junk). But if you take away one crumb of homework from my election week Ted talk, it’s this: Vote, AND find queer Black womxn artists and/or grassroots activists in your community, then trust their leadership and support their work however you can forever and ever. Hey y'all - wanter to share a little interview I recently did with Shoutout Socal. Thanks to my buddy Cathryn Beeks for referring me to their team! Read the interview here.  Image Description: To the left, a black text headline that reads "Meet Lindsay White - Songwriter & Lady Brain Presents Organizer." To the right, a photo of Lindsay White playing guitar (credit Sharisse Coulter)
Thank you to Danielle Tucker for inviting me to come on her Pandemic-Proof Singer Series livestream show on Facebook. I'm always inspired by folks who are finding ways to keep creative communities together during pandemic times, and Danielle is a great example of that. In this episode, I talk about songwriting, Lady Brain Collective, We All We Got SD, and more. Catch the replay below and don't forget to follow Danielle's vocal coaching page to watch even more episodes from so many talented singers.
Video Description: Thumbnail is a press photo of Lindsay White, photo credit Sydney Prather. Video is a split screen zoom session, on the left is Danielle Tucker (wearing denim top seated in front of a mirror, plant, and beige and white tapestry), on the right is Lindsay White (wearing black top, seated in front of a colorful mountain tapestry that has hats hanging on top of it).
Excited to come to you live from Instagram on 9/3 as a part of Tori Roze's Queer Folx Making Music series. Tune in for my set at 6:30pm on www.instagram.com/lindsaywhitemusic. If you feel like tipping, please direct toward We All We Got SD mutual aid fund at https://venmo.com/gchrg. Here are more details for the full lineup/event: “Queer Folx Making Music” is ONLINE!!! This particular show features performers who all have three things in common: they’re queer, they make music, and that music is Folk/Americana tune into Instagram on Tori Roze’s profile (@torirozebutt) and click on the stories in the top left corner of the profile page (where the circular photo is). Tori will be broadcasting the show from her profile in addition to the performers broadcasting from their own individual Instagram profiles. Line-up: Lauren Leigh @ 6-6:30pm - @lowkeylaurenleigh Lindsay White @ 6:30-7pm - @lindsaywhitemusic Lillian Lefranc @ 7-7:30pm - @lillianlefranc Abby Posner @ 7:30-8pm - @abbyposnermusic All tips will go back to the artists or a charity of their choice Venmo & PayPal links will be listed in the comments during the livestream See you on September 3, 2020!  Image Description: Photo of Lindsay White wearing red coat, jeans and boots, sitting on sidewalk leaning against a wall - green shrubbery grows on the wall to her right. Below photo is white, red, and light blue text that reads: "Lindsay White 6:30PM Instagram @lindsaywhitemusic Queer Folks Making Music." Original photo by Sydney Prather This month, Lady Brain Presents is interviewing some LGBTQ+ members about their experiences and perspectives being a part of the queer+ community. To read the full series, click here - my interview is this one.  Image description: Photograph of Lindsay White (left, in black Tshirt and cap) and Audrie White (right, in pink Tshirt) standing shoulder to shoulder and leaning forward onto a white picket fence. Photo credit: Sydney Prather Hey friends! It's been a hot minute since I had a piece of press to share with you, and this one is exciting because my wifey got to join in on the fun. Thanks to Sydney Prather for photographing us and inviting us to be a part of this Pride series! Read more here.  |
Archives
January 2021
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed