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. 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.
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