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Every year summer rolls around with all its hot sunshine and school routines blown to bits, and I find myself wondering, what on earth am I missing? I thrive on a combo med of predictable daily routine and cooler temperatures. When that all disappears into melting heat and kids home from school littering the house with toys and papers and regaling me with “I’m bored” all day long, I struggle not to slip into a pit of what I would describe as a mild despair.

But then, when summer settles in for a long winter’s sleep, and the end of October brings grey skies, paler light, and shorter days, I feel suddenly able to draw deep breath. Before the heat breaks I just want to crawl under the covers and ask someone to wake me up when there are crunchy leaves to be walked on. It’s December now, so in the northern hemisphere fall is almost winter, and there are few things I love more than a late fall music playlist. This year’s is mostly indie/r&b influenced moods, perfect for staring out windows at grey skies. Thanks to my husband/producer/partner I have recently gotten into a few musical acts from Copenhagen and you’ll hear those here. If you don’t listen on Spotify, I apologize and you can use this tool to convert it to a platform of your choice :)

staring out windows at grey skies

My (very short, because who has the time anymore) fall reading list:

I’ve been enjoying some unusual memoir formats, and here are a couple.

Bluets - Maggie Nelson
blends poetry and prose into a non-linear memoir in fragments, all through the lens of talking about the color blue.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong
The story of a relationship between real-life mother and son, written in letters.

Hope you’re having a wonderful autumn so far, even if you’re (cat hiss) a summer person.

xo,

Audrey

Because time has passed, I’ve edited a few things for clarity and correctness. I have also added some photographs from my real world and life. You’ll notice I’ve left every single one of my em dashes in. I can’t believe I need to say it now that Chat GPT has ruined the sacred and holy em dash for good, but this is all 100% my work, from my own brain and hands. :)

The Mourning Room

I sit alone in a salt bath, wailing, my whole body wracked with sobs, my throat stinging, my head aching, my torso heaving, my hands clenched into fists under the water, the sound of my full-throated crying bouncing off the tiled walls. No one has died (not that I know of) but I am in mourning—and when I say ‘in mourning’, I mean this; mourning is not a temporary state of being. It is a room within me to which I return over and over, and to which I will return again and again while I am here. It has the same furniture in it, the same photos on the walls, the same plants, the same records on the dresser, the same blinds and the same lamps. It is always the same; only every time I come back, I seem to feel for the first time how vivid hunter green can be as I gaze, teary-eyed yet again, at the rubber plant; I notice the mango yellow hue of the nubbly vintage sofa as if I had never seen it before. Mourning is the same room it always was; I only leave for a while, and then I come back.

Grief seems to change shape and size instead of ebbing. No matter how far I travel from the original point of pain, the sorrow never disappears completely. It sleeps in my arms, a tattered old bear; lovingly held and handled until its stiff, shiny new fur has softened from age and from my skin oils and our dances and the saltwater stains on its forehead.

—

Grief is a blurry recollection, a sharp pang in the heart, a blunt punch to the gut, the loving hands that hold me, the yawning void I cannot close, the darkening question I can never answer, and the most consistent thing I have ever known. I feel it achingly just now, just here beneath the surface of my skin. It can be a candle flickering in a window on a hill, a body in the basement at the party, the fluttering of a curtain in the breeze. I long for it, almost, when I don’t feel any of it. It always reminds me how much love I hold inside myself.

Grief is ultimate. It is extreme sports. It is the bottom dropping out completely beneath me. It is falling into the abyss. Sometimes it really feels like it will never change shape; like this feeling of going blind with sorrow is all that grief will ever be. And yet then somehow, sometimes, on a day like this one—when the sun is brightening the corners of the room, glowing green through the leaves of my houseplants, and the air is mild for October—when I cannot outrun the sharp sensation in my heart that life is as short as a match burning out almost as soon as it was lit—when every moment reminds me that tomorrow might not be part of my experience in this life—sometimes, on a day like this one, I let grief in through the screen door and pour it a glass of chocolate milk. We braid each others’ hair. We drink too many Cokes and eat those mini donuts, the entire box. We giggle about someone we saw at the bowling alley. We paint our nails and we plan our birthday parties. We are best friends.

The other day my stunning and sensitive and silly and sunny and smart and scared and so, so courageous eight year old said to me in the car, “Mom, I think I know what your favorite feeling is. It’s missing someone. Bittersweetness, right?”

(Have you ever felt *seen* by a child? 10/10 would recommend.)

—

Here is something I think I know; grieving seems to happen in ovals. It feels sort of like a spirograph—I travel the oval, and with every rotation, I pass close by the center of the circle; then, as I crest to the farthest point that my pen can reach, I feel lighter; I feel expansiveness, joy, ease. But then we rotate again, and we pass by the white hot center of pain, and I am right back in this mourning room; I am once again feeling the same impenetrable blindness, the same heaving of the torso, the same headache, the same balled up fists, the same cursing at no one and everyone. But after the first turbulent and unpredictable journey around the spiral, during which I might, say, well up in tears at the cash register because the cashier said ‘hello’ too kindly—after that first skin-ripping soul-crushing part of grief has slipped away, then each time I go through the cycle of grieving a particular person or moment or experience, time seems to stretch a little longer before I get back here to the room again. The ovals travel farther away from the center of things. The spirograph pattern gets bigger and longer and I can go a few weeks, or months, or years, without being on the yellow couch, shaking my fist at that which I cannot outrun, overcome, or ‘get over.’

Joy could not be so beautiful and heart-wrenchingly blissful—it could not feel like dappled green lawns and popsicles and driving through the mountains with the windows down—it could not shock me into a sense of my own aliveness at the sight of the setting sun—it could not warm and nourish my bones—joy could not even be felt at all without this mourning room being what it is and feeling how it feels. This hurts, but it’s the truth.

—

Life hurts, and it ends, and that’s precisely why it is all so breathtakingly gorgeous. Without the grief of loss, joy would be sand in my mouth and water in my ears and a dull grey dimness in my heart. I’m not the first person to say this, nor the most intelligent or original; I just know that I have lived it. The original shock and awe of birth — of being forcibly pushed out of what is comforting, what is soothing, what is all-surrounding — of hurtling into the buzzing of cold electric lights and the soot-drenched city noise and the unfiltered, untethered, unsettling clear force of my own mother’s roaring as she pushed me out of the safety of the womb and into all this chaos — that original pain gave me the gift of being able to feel *relief.*

Joy, bliss, relief, pain, grief, rage….they are all—every last one of them—like the moon, which is only illuminated by the sun’s light. They need one another in order to exist. Life is either all of it or none of it. If I do not let myself feel the far reaches of my less desired emotions, I will move through life like I am a spectre, or like I am already in a sepulchre. And I simply refuse to be a ghost in my own story. So I will grieve when I need to, rage when I must, and I will leave the room again and again for the love of my children and for the smell of Sunday morning bacon; for parmesan and tomatoes and basil spread nearly all the way to the wood-fired crust’s edge: for the feeling of lying in my husband’s arms when everyone else has gone to sleep, for the laughter in the kitchen, and for the birds on the windowsill.

—

In the bathtub, there is something speaking to me through the noise and the giant void of pain that seems to be taking over my entire body; it is that still, small voice in my heart, the one which exists underneath all my stress, all my striving, all my fear and my doubt, and it says to me only this;

I do not ask you to prepare to die. I only ask you—please, do not wait to live.

Before I wax on about rage and feeling it all, did you know I have a brand new album out? I did a kickstarter in 2022 to make this, and because of the gracious support of all the backers who participated, this album was birthed. It was quite a process. And here it is. :) I’m so so so proud of it, and thankful to have made it. To my happy shock, Be Still even made it on Spotify’s New Music Friday playlist when it came out. Would love to hear what you think, so drop me a line here if you feel so led!

(photo by Matthew Priestley)

I looked around nervously at the old wooden frame of the main gathering space at the Omega Institute. Sixty or seventy people sat in folding chairs or on blankets on the ground or, like me, on the floor around the perimeter, notebooks on bent legs and backs against the wall. That upstate NY summer was lush, green, humid, the night air thick with cricket song. Ram Dass taught at this place once. One of the smiling staff members had whispered it to me in the lunch line like a secret. This particular day, I was there listening to Nicole Sachs break open a practice she called ‘JournalSpeak.’

There’s a lot more to it (check it out at that link above) but what’s essential to know in this moment is that you’re to write stream of consciousness for twenty minutes at minimum, allowing yourself to tap into and freely express even your most forbidden or frightening thoughts or feelings.

Mmmmm. Extreme vulnerability, my favorite. My inner child folded herself up and stuffed herself into a tiny hall closet. Unfortunately for her, I know where most of her cubbyholes are at this point, so she was eventually cajoled into trying this thing out.

Twenty five minutes later, eyes stung red and raw from crying, I came up for air. If you’d have asked me at the time how I was feeling, I’ve probably have said—horrified, but also, relieved though?

Rage is a feeling I hate having. Like all feelings, it’s difficult to put into words (songwriting would have been over a long time ago if it could be perfectly done) — but I can only describe it as white-hot, searing, and terrifyingly silent. Sometimes it’s sneakily hidden itself into a grief closet, and suddenly upon going through the old clothes in there, you come upon it stuffed into an old coat pocket and you know, with horror, that it needs to be un-trapped.

I feel it the moment before I scream at the top of my lungs, when everything that is wrong inside me and outside me sucks in like the origins of life at the Big Bang and gets ready to unfurl itself at a million miles per hour in the sound of my silence-murdering shriek. We’ve probably all heard the bromide at this point that ‘the body keeps the score.’ I’ve experienced it enough times to know that it’s true for me — the emotions I repress or disown always come back to overwhelm me eventually.

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This overwhelm when a feeling like rage circles back around can feel unutterably terrible, but it’s a severe mercy to express rage (or any other difficult emotion) because of the room that it creates in my emotional range when I do release it. It gives me more capacity to enjoy and express things like the bubbling over of effervescent joy I feel when my one year old son laughs at some stupid head motion I’m doing over and over, or the tiny rush of love that comes over me when I spot my partner laughing hysterically with a friend across the room. I hate feeling rage. But if I refuse to, I can’t feel the rest of it very well either. And I’m gonna feel it anyway. So I might as well shriek, I figure.

As I shared in my interview with Ruthie Lindsey last week…

There seem to be certain feelings I always struggle not to repress or disown. So, feeling it all is a challenge. I think I’m learning, though, that it’s really not possible to feel it all *at once*, which is what I think I’m always afraid of when I hear those words. Like, feel it all? ALL? Ashton, am I being punk’d? Because that sounds legit horrifying. More often it seems like I can handle feeling a few big feelings simultaneously. Then I find myself moving one step at a time through resistance or numbness or checking out, rinsing and repeating, slowly adding more depth of flavor to the soup that is my life. It’s finally occurring to me at 42 that there’s no capital m Moment coming where I finally self-actualize, when all my piles are all picked up internally and externally. I am human, and I am always going to be going through something. So if that’s true, I might as well feel it all, I guess. :) Seems like whenever I refuse to feel the bitter and hard things, I stop being able to fully taste the sugar in a watermelon, and I mean that literally. Being fully present to the cool splash of sweetness in the watermelon I’m eating, the beautifully strange dripping soft grittiness of it, requires me to be able to be present to whatever else I’m going through, too. At some point I have to ask myself, what kind of range of emotions do I want to be able to traverse with resilience? Well, I can’t get that kind of resilience without learning to tolerate feeling.'

The importance of learning to tolerate a wide range of emotions, especially the more challenging ones like rage or embarrassment or self-hatred, isn’t really a ‘feel-good’ concept. I think people hear the phrase ‘feel it all’ and might associate it solely with mermaid-haired white women wearing flowy linen garments, dancing strangely around bonfires. To me, ‘feel it all’ is guts and blood, labor and sweat—it spans the territory between the bright-eyed innocence of joy to the smoldering ruins of self-loathing and beyond.

This album is my most heartfelt and vigorous attempt at accepting and expressing that ‘the kingdom of God is within me’; that self-compassion and self-acceptance, rather than self-loathing, is the most sensible and truthful path I could ever take. The shards of myself that seem the most damaged and frustrating to me are crucial pieces of the puzzle. If I want to sink my teeth right down into the marrow-bones of life, I can’t get there any other way than being myself: so I am learning I need to accept and feel it all. All the imperfect emotions, the raw feelings, the dissonances, the resonances, the suffering and the joy. Maybe not all at once and violently like a thunderclap, but slowly and steadily, like molasses dripping shining ribbons into the cookie dough to make it deeper, richer, and more full of flavor. I want to feel it all, taste it all, see it all.

“In my back pocket is a love note with every word you wish you’d said.” - Andrea Gibson wrote this in a letter to their wife not long before their death from cancer in 2025 (watch the video too!) It hit me wildly, passionately, strangely. I felt I could have knelt in the street in awe. They were addressing Meg specifically but I heard my higher power in their words. Why would I talk to myself so scathingly, regret who I am and who I’ve been, when my Source has that love note in their back pocket? My freakiest and darkest and bitterest feelings can’t frighten whatever made me.

On Feel It All, I’ve done my very best to set all this learning and feeling in a lush and elegant sonic world that reflects its themes and emotions. Jeremi Clive, my producer and frequent co-writer, gave a massive amount of magic and mastery to the songs. The result, I hope, is a full soaking of rain for people whose inner gardens need a little water. You can hear it here.

xo,

Audrey

I have been working on an album for quite some time and I am stunned and excited that it’s dropping this Friday. (Or Thursday at midnight if you’re up that late. I will not be)

Feel It All is about gratitude and exhaustion and falling in love and the inner critic and friendship and grief and breathing. You can hear the latest single we dropped AND presave the album right here, or wherever you like to stream music.

Pre-save Feel It All

Check it out and pre-save!

My soul’s photographer captured this album art photograph. Jeremi Clive produced, mixed, and mastered it. I’ll have so much more to write and say about them and about this as it rolls out, but for now — please feel free to pre-save and share with anyone you know who might want to do the same!

xo

Audrey

I love the simplicity of this song—I love the gratitude it makes me feel for feeling the essence of a person. For seeing them in their eyes, for the mind movies we play to remember them when they’re somewhere else. We shift and change and so does love, and our songs and love letters are just memorials—snapshots of moments in time. Loving someone is bittersweet, it’s dark chocolate, it’s vinegar, it’s the sun setting just below the tree line, it’s always flowing like water through your fingers and you can’t hold onto it. That’s what makes it so gorgeous.

I read a piece of writing today by Joy Sullivan, a truly heartbreaking poet, that stopped me in my tracks.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the world into which my husband and I brought this baby. (Kind and Honest is about the man I created this being with) I don’t know exactly what I’m going to teach him about college, career, politics, owning a home, the economy, or the future. Everything feels insane—perhaps reality, or perhaps reality with a hefty dose of hypernormalization. At any rate, I seem to have been hearing the electrician singing in the kitchen, because here he is. Seemingly against all odds, we keep falling in love, dreaming of the future, and sometimes even having babies.

Kind and Honest is a quiet celebration of this. The ruthless passage of time gives birth to memories we come back to again and again—a child looking down at us from a tree—swallows in murmuration—someone’s eyes, flickering in our memory like a memorial. I hope you enjoy it.

XO,

Audrey

TL;DR

I released a cover of Alanis Morissette’s ‘Thank U’ and you can hear it here!

In 1998, I was fifteen and covered in zits, probably due to the fact that I used to frequently split six packs of coke and full boxes of Entenmann’s chocolate covered donuts with my best friend at our sleepovers—this functioned almost like an evangelical kid’s substitute for booger sugar. Our trash binge kept us up til all hours as we wrote and rewrote ‘The List’ of what we were looking for in a husband. This list contained things such as ‘has nice eyes but doesn’t seem to know it,’ and ‘attempts unsuccessfully to bring me breakfast in bed, but looks cute failing.’ 🤔 Your guess is as good as mine as to why that second one in particular made the cut, tbh.

Sometimes in those days of caffeine-fueled idealism I would try to sneak down to our cold, dark basement to watch TRL. (sorry, mom & dad. or maybe you knew?) I wasn’t an idiot, so I always had my index finger poised and hovering over the ‘last’ button on the remote to navigate quickly over to the Food Network if I happened to hear footsteps in the kitchen above me. IYKYK. I’d say I was a reasonably sheltered kid. I’d never so much as watched Clueless or the Smurfs, but thanks to the magic of cable television, I *had* snuck glimpses of all sorts of off-limits music videos, from Rammstein’s Du Hast to Marcy Playground’s Sex & Candy to Korn’s Follow The Leader. Scandalous.

One day a video came on where Alanis Morissette walked around naked in a bustling city, seemingly attempting to connect emotionally with strangers. Her long, wavy brown hair flowed down her body, covering her boobs, only sort of. Her lady cave was blurred out just enough to make it safe for television. A, I was awestruck by this, because at this point I had never so much as seen The Breakfast Club, so even a blurry naked body on television was a lot to take in for me tbh. I did already know Alanis’ music somewhat. I mean who among us in that era, even MTV-starved little Plymouth Brethren kids, could possibly have escaped hearing Jagged Little Pill? I probably first heard Ironic playing over the sh*tty little ceiling speakers in the ceiling of the CVS in our tiny New Jersey town, honestly. But Thank U was new to me, and after the initial shock of seeing Alanis mostly naked wore off, I remember thinking that she sort of looked like the pictures I’d seen of Eve in my childhood Sunday School coloring sheets, and yes I absolutely practiced telling my mom that in my head in case she ever caught me watching the video. 🤣

I’m not gonna lie to you, the nakedness did leave quite an impression on young and incredibly easy-to-scandalize teenage me. But what ultimately stuck with me about the song was its profound and life-interrupting lyrics, which have never quite left my mind since. I don’t want to be too specific or long-winded here about what these lyrics have come to mean to me personally, because I don’t want to risk dulling their time honored and semi-sacred shine for myself. But I will tell you that, even as a devout and pious evangelical kid who couldn’t quite yet hang with the expansive language of this late 90s gem, something about the song’s message of returning to the center of things really spoke to me even then, there in my parents’ jade-green-carpeted, wood-paneled, cool dark basement. I could feel what she was speaking of, even if I couldn’t yet understand it. That’s the power of great songwriting, and incidentally, it still floors me that Alanis wrote this when she was something like twenty two years old! When I was twenty two, I was pretty much the TEMU version of Jane Austen, writing many angst-riddled, flowery entries in my journal about young men who I thought of as perfect husband material but who didn’t even have any idea I existed, so…yeah. Color me impressed, Alanis.

As I’ve had such a long and deep relationship to this one, covering it felt a little scary. I wanted to pay tribute to it and yet transform it. I’ve even made several attempts to begin covers of it over the years, but thankfully none of those versions came into being. Because this year,  Jeremi Clive came along and truly helped me crack the code. I couldn’t be prouder or more thankful to share this version with you. It’s introspective and sparkling and trulymadlydeeply special to me. (My fellow ~*MiLlEnIaLs*~, do u c what I did there) 

Thank you Alanis (and India, and terror, and disillusionment, etc) for the chance to encounter and interpret this meaningful, gorgeous song. 

If you’ve never read the lyrics or listened to them deeply as they’ve passed you by in the original song, here they are: if they inspire any thoughts in you, I’d love to read your comment. <3

How 'bout getting off of these antibiotics?
How 'bout stopping eating when I'm full up?
How 'bout them transparent dangling carrots?
How 'bout that ever-elusive kudo?

Thank you, India
Thank you, terror
Thank you, disillusionment
Thank you, frailty
Thank you, consequence
Thank you, thank you, silence

How 'bout me not blaming you for everything?
How 'bout me enjoying the moment for once?
How 'bout how good it feels to finally forgive you?
How 'bout grieving it all one at a time?

Thank you, India
Thank you, terror
Thank you, disillusionment
Thank you, frailty
Thank you, consequence
Thank you, thank you, silence

The moment I let go of it
Was the moment I got more than I could handle
The moment I jumped off of it
Was the moment I touched down

How 'bout no longer being masochistic?
How 'bout remembering your divinity?
How 'bout unabashedly bawling your eyes out?
How 'bout not equating death with stopping?

Thank you, India
Thank you, providence
Thank you, disillusionment
Thank you, nothingness
Thank you, clarity
Thank you, thank you, silence

new song, Thank U, out now <3 here’s a little preview.

You might be wondering why I’m singing to you from inside a bottle. Well…sometimes I feel like Instagram / TikTok etc have gotten to be like a small town where everybody and their mother signs up to be a salesperson for a multilevel marketing program. A quick scroll through my own IG feed shows a bunch of really sincere people passionately trying to sell their courses and products and music and art and coaching—is it just me, or is everybody selling while nobody’s buying these days? 

Thank U wasn’t written about this conundrum — first of all, it’s from 1998. Our sweet little baby hearts didn’t even know what Instagram sales funnels were back then. Secondly, Alanis seems to have written it about gratitude, surrender, and keeping an open spiritual mind — all things I have been learning about in my own life. 

But marketing things aimed at spreading messages like this, via music or otherwise, has just gotten plain weird at this point. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube have become personalized, open-24/7, virtual ideology shopping centers — each of us are wandering a giant virtual mega mall tailored very specifically to our own aspirations, ideals, curiosities, and beliefs. 

I get so exhausted of feeling like I’m always selling something or being sold something. I long for open-hearted sharing that doesn’t end in a hook. It’s gotten to the point for me that if I happen to be scrolling through socials and I see a (probably very sincere, earnest) human being with their eyes closed and a hand on their chest, breathing, I just keep on moving because I’m 99% sure they’re going to end their video with ‘comment ‘breathe’ to receive a free stress reduction / breath work training’, which itself will of course be a sales funnel into a full online course purchase. 

This whole phenomenon of personal and professional work blurring together is kinda f***ing crazy in the first place anyway, isn’t it? Late stage capitalism seems to have turned us into little hungry rat people, trying desperately to make livings off our passions and/or beliefs because we have gotten (rightfully!) sick of working our whole lives to support the profits and greed of huge corporations — so we take what could otherwise be really rewarding practices and hobbies in our personal worlds and we try to package them into salable things so we can ‘work for ourselves’—only to find ourselves bowing and scraping before the algorithmic gods. (Which, may I remind us all, are owned, built, operated, and capitalized on by the same huge corporations we quit working for in the first place.) Content creators and online artists haven’t really escaped the system at all. We’re still participating and perpetuating them from the comfort of our own couches.

I’ve done all of this myself. I’ve marketed courses and seminars, and I market music still — and the older I get, the more that I live, I feel more and more uncomfortable with the whole lot of it. On one hand, I’m so unutterably thankful that I can make a living doing something I love. I know a lot of people would really love to figure out a way to do that and haven’t yet been able to, and the privilege I enjoy in that regard is not lost on me. On the other, the sales and marketing grind that it takes to help me make a living at being a musical artist is making it alarmingly easy to…well, to love it less. 

And when you intersect selling music with themes of *healing?* Woof. (Shoutout, by the way, to @healingfromhealing, one of the only accounts on Instagram that makes it feel worth logging on for me anymore. They hold mirrors up to the spiritual and esoteric trends of our time. (and usually it’s funny) What I appreciate most about their content is that they are not outright denying the validity of all spiritual experience, or making blanket statements about all spiritual practices; rather, they’re successfully highlighting just how complex and strange the intersection of spirituality, pop culture, tech, and money has gotten—and how worth examining it is.)

I drift around an online world that’s stuffed so side-splittingly full of sales funnels, it can get to feeling like I’m just caught in a never-ending giant labyrinth of spiritual / creative pitches and bids for my money and my attention—and that is what I’m scrolling before bed and when I wake up in the morning.

As I am neither rich nor determined enough to make like Wendell Berry and eject myself entirely from city life and social media and the systems that keep us here, I hope to at least put out content that acknowledges this burnout and exhaustion, which I’m certain is very real for a lot of us. 

And that’s a little context as to why I’m singing to you from inside some prescription bottles in the video we just put out. 😂

Thank U is out now. I hope you can hear how much these words mean to me. They feel like some kind of an antidote to all of this. Even if I have to sell you on listening to the song. #priorities

I find myself wanting to organize my emotions like flatware; disappointment and grief and joy and excitement all in their little separate compartments so I can pick up the ones I want to feel and leave the ones I do not sitting there in the drawer. It does not work, yet for some reason I still want to try. Maybe *this* time it will work, I keep thinking. But it never, ever does.

As an elite-level and experienced emotional avoidance athlete, I am now easily able to construct elaborate scaffolds of ego, shame, distraction, people pleasing, scrolling, overfunctioning, underachieving, overspending, binging, and more. I would never posit that avoiding my feelings is the singular root cause of any of these issues, but what I *am* saying is that ‘feeling it all’ isn’t always my favorite option; and when I DO want to avoid whatever it is I might be feeling, I have many, many coping mechanisms available to help myself do just that. 

Suspect #1? Instagram. What makes Instagram the best example of this for me is that it is a strange and terrifying funhouse of weird mirrors; it makes it all too possible for me to live passively and vicariously through the experiences or thoughts of other people (or even worse, through my judgments of them) and somehow I am able to convince myself that I have done something with that time. Let’s take the other day as an example. I wake up, immediately reach for my phone, flick open the app and suddenly I am watching a video of a young woman crying in her car, holding the phone, saying she’d like to ‘share what’s real, and not just the highlights.’ At the end of her heartfelt and verbose caption about feelings: ‘comment ‘_____’ down below to receive more information on my course about feeling it all.’ 

I don’t know this woman, and I don’t know what she is going through; but I know that in an age branded by the phrase ‘authenticity is king,’ laying in bed casually watching a stranger weeping in her car feels voyeuristic and uncomfortable. I was just sleeping, but now I am suddenly a peeping Tom, looking in the window from the metaphorical back yard on a moment which certainly may have been extremely real for her. Somewhere between the part where she felt the crying jag coming on and the part where she picked up her phone to record it, what was going through her mind? We are all seemingly caught in this labyrinthine maze of capitalistic authenticity. If we are not selling our bodies for labor, we are often selling our inner worlds instead. That video was both a journal entry and an advertisement—a sales pitch for a course, along with being a vulnerable revelation of her inner world. What a complicated intersection of conundrums and dissonances and needs and passions all this is. 

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Anyway, all that thinking about a stranger’s motivations and psyche first thing in the morning when I never would have encountered her had I just risen from bed and made a coffee and taken some time to think about my day…that’s just one of the expert ways I have of avoiding feeling it all (while also finding a code for an online course about feeling it all.) 

I fully recognize and acknowledge the inescapable irony in this. I am here, blogging about feeling it all in the first place, because this is all my very long winded way of telling I have a song out today called … you probably guessed it … ‘Feel It All.’ 

I save my long-windedness for this platform because it’s an essayist’s platform in the first place, but in light of all this—what am I even going to say on Instagram to promote this one? Should I post a crying in the car video??? Let me know in the comments. 🤣

Hope you enjoy. I started this as a song of affection for a loved one and, as it often goes, found that I needed its message just as much or more. From my heart, I hope it feels like a hand held out to you too.

xoxo

Audrey

PS. as ever, it’s massively helpful if you share this newsletter, my social posts, or just the song in a text to a loved one. To make it simple for you, here’s a link you can copy and paste: https://ffm.to/feelitall

Your support means so much and I do not take it for granted.

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Firstly, I’ve got another new single coming out June 14 called ‘Feel It All,’ and you can pre-save it by clicking on the cover art. <3

Okay—now let’s talk about Fallout please.

Have you seen it? I’m not much of a gamer so I had no familiarity with the game that inspired the (apparently record-smashing) Amazon hit series, but…ask me how much I love Walton Goggins and you’ll get some version of a real life heart eyes emoji, so I had to at least give it a two-episode college try. I was a little shocked by what I saw, since I went into it knowing next to nothing, and those of you who have seen it will probably understand why—it’s more than a little bit brutal at times, and the premise is certainly bleak af. (Don’t worry, no spoilers here, beyond laying out the premise of the show which is explored in episode 1)

Fallout is set in a fictitious (but realistic) 1950s California town at the height of nuclear war panic; Walton Goggins plays a flourishing movie and tv star who’s been hired to shill for a prominent nuclear vault technology company (ever-so-creatively named ‘Vault-Tec’). His wife is an executive at said company, and naturally, the intersection of commerce and war panic and marriage is full of … shall we say, surprises.

When the worst happens, some people go into their vaults (mainly privileged/rich people, naturally) and others are left to survive the…you guessed it…fallout. The show explores what happens when people eventually emerge from the vaults several hundred years later and begin to interact with the hardened, desolate world of survivors. Walton Goggins plays the former movie star turned ‘The Ghoul’, and I’ll let you go ahead and google that rather than reveal anything about his character here.

Anyway, anyway, anyway…why am I writing about all this? Well, I’ve been finding myself feeling a little more contemplative lately about the state of the world and its systems and governments, as well as about my place in all of it. Fallout may or may not have been meant as a catalyst to that type of thought, but I like to think there was some intention put into it in that respect; if everything as we know it were to fall apart, who or what would we become? Who are we as a species *already*, while still living in the fever dream of these societal experiments? I well know that I am unable to fully divest myself from the systems that both help and harm me. I am typing this reflection on a keyboard attached to a computer whose technology wouldn’t be possible at this time without the sacrificing of children to hard slave labor (and death) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I am sitting in a house on land that was once tended by Cherokee, Yuchi, and Shawnee tribes and subsequently taken over and settled by force. I am a part of all of this. I cannot escape that, and no amount of righteous thinking or belief will absolve me. As a lifelong seeker of absolution, a longtime shame addict, and a dedicated pursuer of ‘doing the right thing,’ my complicity in the reality of the world’s corruption and greed and violence has finally hit home.

The other side of this is — I also can see how little control I really have over any of it. My place of birth, my upbringing, and my privilege are all things I did not choose. I simply happened to be born here and not there, then and not now, to these people and not those people. And if I were to spend the rest of my life trying, I could never right a fraction of the wrongs in the world. All the rightness in the world, all the honesty about my own complicity in oppression, can’t save the world—or me.

Did you know that the reason Red Lobster is going out of business isn’t, as meme culture would have you believe, because they were tanked by their all-you-can-eat shrimp promotion? It’s at least partially because they were bought by a hedge fund company who, after purchasing what essentially amounted to the Applebee’s of seafood, began charging each franchise rent on the properties they now owned. I know there’s more to it than that, but the reality is that deals like this are going on all around us, all the time. From something as relatively innocuous as fast casual shrimp to the maniacal arms trading and profiteering going on via the Israeli government’s assault on Palestine; little old me and little old you are kind of just mayflies having our one day in the sun, while the systems keep on keepin’ on.

If you can’t tell, I haven’t felt much optimism lately. “Despair is the luxury of the privileged,” I have told myself until I’m blue in the face. But it’s begun to dawn on me that privilege is a spectrum, and although I do enjoy a LOT of privilege in this world I am not privileged ENOUGH to impact billionaires or global economies beyond whatever measly little boycotting or protesting or tweeting I might find myself compelled to do.

The back of history is pock-marked and littered with cysts of war, brutality, greed, and corruption. In many ways, none of this is new. That used to lend me a crumb of comfort, but these days, I just feel grieved. In the absence of belief in a planned-for future heaven where all these things are made right, I am left to deal with the fallout of what has been and the reality of what is—and the uncertainty of what is to come.

We all have things we say to ourselves at the end of the day to help ourselves fall asleep. For some, it’s “when I die, hallelujah, by and by, I’ll fly away,” and for others it’s something more akin to Cormac McCarthy’s “the point is there ain't no point.” These ideas, opposing though they may be, seem to me to be little more than pacifiers to put ourselves to bed with. Neither of them is provable. Neither of them is ultimately knowable. And yet…we all have to make our peace with things — and ourselves — somehow. So if I sort of imagine that these ‘pacifiers’ are less like ‘silly little implementations of comfort’ and more like ‘methods of making peace with it all’, I find myself feeling a little more free to figure out what my pacifier is. Because gosh dammit, I still need sleep. And whatever the harsh realities of the world may be, I’d like to continue showing up for my family, my friends, and myself.

One thing I’ve been doing to (successfully, I might add) keep myself from succumbing to despair is following the oft-suggested and at this point, cliché, advice of one Mr. Fred Rogers—looking for the helpers. That phrase may be imperfect, but it reminds me that maybe keeping my mental lens zoomed out so far isn’t helping my emotional health very much. I do look around and see that people everywhere are committing random acts of kindness every day — that there are humans putting themselves in positions to help where they can, who they can, and how they can. And maybe if I spend a little time focusing on them, I can spend a little less time focusing on how terrible everything is. Hope, for me, is a choice—an act. It’s certainly not a feeling.

In that spirit, I wanted to share a few good things with you that I’ve seen lately.

The Camps Breakerz Crew have spent 20 years bringing hip-hop and breakdancing culture to the Gaza strip, offering psychological relief to children growing up in war through movement and dance.

Glennon Doyle’s nonprofit Together Rising has raised over a million dollars to send in aid to Gazans, via the local feeding work of Anera.

Ruthie Lindsey is doing a free online event on Thursday, May 23 for women who want to cease to define themselves by shame and suffering. If that sounds like you or someone you know, you can find more information here.

Tim Letts donated a kidney to one of his Uber passengers.

If you have any good news to report, please feel free to share your comments (along with any thoughts on this topic, as always.)

Hope you’re all staying well out there.

xo,

Audrey

Special announcement: I have a show in Oakland on May 11! Would love to see any of you Californians in the area. Click the image below or right here for info and tickets. (and feel free to let a friend know who lives nearby if you think they might be interested!)

Hope You Know It started out as a letter from love to a child in my life who had a grip on my heart from moment one of meeting them. As so many songs tend to do for whatever reason, it evolved into being a love letter to my own inner child too. I hope it can also be a reminder to anyone who needs to remember how loved and lovable they really are, in and amongst whatever pain or hardship they may be experiencing. 

This song started out quite somber and slow at first. I even had a recording of rain in the background of the first demo, which consisted of just a gently pulsing, warm square synth underscoring the reflective verse lyric. There was definitely a seed of something striking in the idea, something that pulled at my heart strings. When Jeremi and I talked about it he wondered if perhaps the song could potentially be really encouraging, and not quite so…melancholic. He encouraged me to think about finding a way to bring it somewhere cheering, brightening, uplifting, while still upholding the meaning and tenderness of the original idea.

At first this stumped me, to be honest. I had gotten so attached to the demo of the little bit of the song I’d written (a classic artist’s sin, of which I am far too often guilty) that I struggled to reimagine it, even though I felt he was right on as far as his instincts about what the song could become. I didn’t want someone to listen to it and feel sadder—rather, I hoped they’d feel affirmed and seen. Don’t get me wrong, there is 1000% a place for songs like that, but this one? I wanted it to be something that would make someone feel like they’d just been given a long hug, not a push downward on the head into the mud.

Well, I’m not sure if what I did next makes me more of an idiot or a genius but I went on Splice (an app for finding drum samples and loops and all kinds of random production sh*t) and found an afrobeats loop and re-situated the song over it, which inspired the writing very differently from there. It didn’t make sense at all, but all of a sudden I could imagine the melodies in a new way. The original had kind of felt statically low energy, gentle and contemplative the entire way through—now, I could see color and motion and expansion.

However, taking an afrobeats loop and slapping it under a song that wasn’t written in that rhythm or from that musical perspective sounded corny as hell, and the beat really made next to no sense with the phrasing/melodies of the song. So, when it was time to produce it, we started from zero on the rhythm. It was all part of the process, though. It helped me hear the song differently. :) 

There were about fifty steps between that point in the process and where the song ended up, Sometimes that’s how it goes. If I have any encouragement for you writers out there, it’s a cliché but it’s become trite for a reason: be willing to kill your baby. Sometimes ideas need to be iterated and reiterated before they reach their full potential. I really hope you enjoy the song, and there is more to come very very soon!

Have a lovely week,

xo

Audrey

I hope you imagine your life full of chaos and wonder

In brilliant color

No permanent lines

Friends, it’s been a while, I know! I have been busy working on some things that will be dropping very soon, and I’m excited to share them all with you. :)
New song drops April 12, and it has a lot to say about the wildness and glory of possibility.

It is all too easy for me to view my personality as being baked in. I find myself lured to believe that there is a permanence to who I was which carries over irrevocably into who I am now—and, more sinisterly, into who I can become. I know that operating from that perspective is short sighted and small minded, and yet I have found myself struggling each day to operate from a different one.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states that the more precisely you measure the position of a particle, the less it’s possible to accurately measure the particle’s momentum. In other words—the more you are able to nail down the location / position of a particle, the less possible it is to entirely know other important and fundamental things about it. The particle is a greased pig—a slippery eel. I’m probably peforming the world’s most egregious ‘yada yada yada’ here, but I interpret this principle to mean that matter defies measurement and ultimately, knowledge—it cannot be entirely or perfectly understood. I personally think it’s an excellent metaphor for the mystery of the self.

And yet, I get sort of obsessed with the question — ‘Why am I like this?!’ I puzzle maddeningly over this question any time I do something I find predictably frustrating, or anytime I find myself battling the same old patterns. Then, instead of moving into some sort of behavioral modification or change of direction with my actions, I often find myself wallowing in the quicksand trying to use the past to figure out or justify why I am doing This Frustrating Thing right this very moment.  

Reflection on the past can be extremely therapeutic, of course. I’d probably be a much less self-aware / self-actualized person were I not willing to do that. But I think there are also moments where I am unwittingly using the past (and my observations about it) to unequivocally define who I am right now, today, in 2024. Worse still, I let it tell me who I think I am able to become in this moment, and in the future.

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It feels tricky to write about this, because I don’t want anyone to misunderstand me as saying we can just suddenly up and decide to change old behaviors that are usually patterns in our lives for damn well and good reasons; but I know I can’t entirely control how this is understood. The best I can do is attempt to explain that, while I know our pasts can of course heavily influence our current experience, I also don’t believe we are rigid, immovable, or unchangeable—no matter WHAT we have been through or who we have been. The only constant in life is change, so why am I so reticent to believe that I’m capable of growing into new ways of being and doing?

I have a new single coming out 4/12 called ‘Hope You Know It’ that explores these themes.

When I think back to who I was as a young child—I both hope to learn to more wholeheartedly accept that version of me AND to remind myself that my life is an explosion of color and movement—that I am not static or stuck in whoever or whatever I think I am. Anything is possible. I am as dynamic as a song, as evolving as a storm, and so are you.

I’d love it if you could pre-save the song so that you don’t miss it when it comes out!

XO,

Audrey

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It is counter-intuitive to be still when something hurts. And yet sometimes, we have no choice.

Be Still was written in July of 2021. I had been walking up to a local store carrying a bag of wrongly sized clothing, and I had my fingers on the handle of the front door when it came to me—the still and quiet yet utterly urgent feeling that something worth writing was about to come through. I had a fit of inspiration at 2pm on a sidewalk outside a boutique, nowhere near an instrument. Maybe it was because I was down the street from my friend’s house, and because I had caught sight of the wide fabric tree swing out front as I’d walked to the boutique from my car. Maybe it was because she had just sent me and some other trusted friends a message saying how exhausted and grieved and pent up she felt in the face of her sister’s skydiving accident and all that it implied for the future. My friend’s sister was paralyzed, lying still not by her own choice, unable to move—and unsure when or if that would change. Within one minute of receiving my friend’s message I felt the unmistakeable urge to express, to send deeply felt love to her and to her sister, to feel with them, to pray for them in the only way I knew how anymore — singing to I Don’t Know Who.

I turned around immediately, ill-fitting clothing still in hand, got back in the car and raced back to my office in hopes I would make it in time. All I had was a mini 32 key controller with no sustain pedal and my laptop microphone, but it was enough. Within 30 minutes, it was finished. I barely remember writing it, to be honest. I felt like I was catching it more than writing it. I don’t remember even really thinking about it…just trying to get out of the way. That is how Be Still was born. <3 Like many of my songs (the kind that come through fast and hard, like my second child did when I was in labor with her) it began as a song for one specific person, and it ended up feeling wide enough to offer something to many who might be struggling to accept something difficult or painful—including me.

I don’t want to deliver a sermon here. I really just want to point you to Becca’s amazing story and work. Two years to the day after her skydiving accident she got to go on another dive, thanks to modern technology and the help / support of her friends and fellow skydivers. Her amazing sister Elizabeth, my friend, is an energy worker and all-around beautiful human being. These two lovely people inspired Be Still, which has now become a quiet place of solace for me too. It will be out everywhere Monday, and you can pre-save at the link. If you’d like a little sonic preview, check out my most recent reel. I look forward to sharing this with you. <3 have a beautiful weekend.

XO,

Audrey

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I want to milk every last drop of goodness out of the life I'm already in. That seems like enough. And if living in a world full of people who can't sleep or live in peace due to war and poverty and oppressive systems and trauma isn't hell, I really don't know what is. Seems to me we are all in heaven, and we are all in hell--seems to me it's all happening right here, right now. Might as well actually BE here—as our fullest, most soul-drenched and saturated selves.

I’ve been finding that I’m brave enough to be myself
Sometimes I think I’m failing; I’m learning to be patient.
How about you?

You can pre-save hbu here. Every pre-save is so helpful--thank you very much. Can’t wait to share it in just a couple of days!

Also, if you hadn’t already seen what I posted to promote the song (and which has cost me a couple of hundred followers so far) please check it out. I am unhinged.

xo,

Audrey

HBU comes out 9/29!! If you’re into the sound of this, you can pre-save or pre-add it here. :) Thank you!

XO,

Audrey

I began How About You in my office.

It is an eccentric little room, a patchwork quilt of the person I am and the people I have been. A massive art deco mirror painted almost garishly with black and gold wildcats sits just above a little altar, which is covered with two Turkish towels and littered with crystals and feathers and incense. My standard “mid-century modern” pre-fab desk is nothing to write home about, but simple and nice enough to fade into the background— across it I usually have various books, my journal, pens, and easily two or three empty seltzer cans. The little drawer is stuffed with fake nails and batteries and pens and cables and tweezers and bobby pins and lighters and an ankle brace and pimple patches and and my little supplement pill box. I am, to my delight, prepared for almost anything.

On the wall above the desk I’ve hung about forty paint samples, a neon lightning bolt and rainbow, a piece of gradient-and-text art by a poet friend. A few of my belongings hang in the closet, mainly things I don't wear very often--photoshoot clothing, a black blazer, and a couple of avant-garde dresses—there is one with sequin patches on the breast and back of it that I sewed on myself, and wore in a music video.

I feel like myself in this room, somehow. I am not a person who has historically felt that I really and truly know myself, a reality which is more than evident in my lifelong (so far) fixation on personal growth. I come to write and work in here because, no matter what is going on in my mind, in this room I often find myself in tune with something deep and interesting and mysterious and beautiful. I have come here in the dark to bask in the glow of the neon lights and work on songs that deeply move me. I feel thrilled here. I feel inspired here. I feel safe here. I have made love to the muse in here. Perhaps especially in this room, in the blur of despair and delight that is songwriting, I am always shedding skin. Today I am packing up the crystals and the feathers (the incense stays) and putting them away somewhere for another time or another person—I'm not sure which.

How About You will be released on 9/29. (If you happened to read my last update, it said something different than this — plans shifted a bit and that song is coming out after this one instead :) more on that later.) I am more than ecstatic to announce this—this song has kind of cut me open or something. I’ve made a lot of music, and I love it all. But some songs seem to glimmer a bit more dazzingly in the sun, and I am moved every time I hear them — How About You is one of those. It feels both river deep and mountain high. It is immersive, heartfelt, sparkling. Can you tell I’m in love? I’m so proud of it. I can’t wait to share it next week!!

If you're new here, I write long-form in spurts; I also keep people up-to-date about new music, tours, etc here at The Violet Fields; I would love to have you along for the ride. Please subscribe (it's free!) if you'd like to keep in touch.

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xo,

Audrey

— Audrey Assad

_
Firstly, an update. I have been quiet on here lately, I know—but I promise, I’ve been very busy. We finished up the mix of the next new single and it’s coming out September 22. :) We’ve got the next one after that almost done and ready now, so there are a few fall releases on the way, and more in the new year. Also!! I have a show in Buffalo, NY coming up on Sept 1—I’d be so appreciative if you could tell your friends and family in the area if you know anyone who would like to be there. And hopefully I’ll see some of you there too! I’ll be playing mostly new songs but will definitely be sure to throw in a couple of my old favorites too.
—

On to the topic at hand: what do my attention span, my focusing abilities, my creative consistency, my hand strength, and my time all have in common? **They’ve all been kinda tanked by social media!**

I used to journal or write every day and read every day, and recently it occurred to me that I can pinpoint the moment that I stopped doing these things; it was 2011, the year I got Instagram. Cool, Instagram…cool cool cool cool cool cool. Since childhood, prior to that point, I had been piling up horrendously embarrassing journals full of overwrought angst and self-judgment, as well as painfully meticulous documentation of my tiny interactions with my many crushes. They were also full of creativity and spirituality and dreaming and slowly working out my feelings and problems. And so, for twelve years, there has been a distinct gap in private coverage of my life—apparently I forsook that for public coverage instead. I do feel some real sadness about this; but there is no way to go except forward, and as they say…there is no time like the present. (In fact there is no time *but* the present.) So, I began the Artist’s Way several weeks ago and … I don’t think I’ll be looking back. (If you don’t know about the Artist’s Way, it is a simple 12 week journaling program for ANYONE, “artist” or not, accompanied by an excellent book sharing the same title, by Julia Cameron.)

From these daily pages, several themes are emerging. One, I find myself struggling not to take certain things about myself (perhaps especially my inner critic) far too seriously. This should surprise precisely no one, I think. Two (as I began this section by stating) — my attention and focus and mental agility (and in addition, my overall contentment) have been under siege ever since I entered the druggy funhouse of dopamine and cortisol that is social media. In an age where people of all types of careers feel that they must have an online presence to market their skills, services, art, and/or products, it can be a real headf**k to figure out how to engage without completely losing your sanity (and your ability to focus long enough to read a book or write a letter.) I don’t have any answers about this but I can tell you, the amount of frustration and even anger pouring out in my morning pages almost daily is well worth my time and attention and listening.

I wanted to share this with you simply because I feel that The Artist’s Way could be a massive help to anyone who feels similarly. (Or even those who don’t…this is for everyone.) If you have been feeling stuck, frustrated, blasé, distractible, etc, etc, etc…perhaps this could be a way to open a window and let some fresh air in to flutter your curtains.

I’ll be in touch again soon with more details about the new releases coming up, but for now I just wanted to pop in and let you know about this in case it might be helpful to you. And just a reminder; I’ll be in Buffalo on Sept 1 to play a show. These days, that’s a rare thing. It would mean the world to meet and see a bunch of y’all there, so please spread the word if you know any fans in that area. <3

xoxo

Audrey

xo,

Audrey

This playlist is my most popular by far and used to be called (S)piritual (B)ut (N)ot (R)eligious. Then I realized no one would ever find it with a title like that, so I changed it. If you were already subscribed, you still should be. :) Follow for thoughtful reflections on life, death, love, and personal growth from artists spanning multiple genres. 💫Now I Just Know Better💫

Some people rather enjoy the bittersweet kiss of solitude, the sting of a painful memory as old as a childhood friend, the gloom of the october sky. It is for these people I have made this playlist; 🫠Not Quite Heartbreak.🫠

It can be lovely in a very specific, poetic way to hear a familiar song with the thoughtful touch of another artist who loves it; this playlist might make your life feel like a movie, so be warned!! This is ✨Reimagine✨.

it's synth-soaked indie pop. it's my hand out the window while I’m driving; it's the beginning of golden hour; it's the sunkissed afterglow of going to the beach. it’s 😌bc i’m happy😌

XOXO

PS. a new song is coming soon :) :) :)

Audrey

Since I don’t have any sane reflections to offer at this time, I wanted to share this song by MUNA with you and ask you to listen to it as a birthday present to me. :) Katie Gavin (main songwriter and lead singer) may be thirty years old, but she writes rather agelessly. Sometimes she is all carefree and flirtatious #rollerskate vibes—at others, she serves ‘wise, but wild aunt-who-became-a-friend you always longed for.’ It’s a really incredible combo, IMO.

If you know me it’s no surprise that this song takes me somewhere very deep and very tender every single time I listen to it. It felt especially poignant the afternoon I wrote about turning forty, fresh off a cute little crying jag. I hadn’t been feeling a way about this birthday at all: but then, upon seeing my inner critic’s tired out old bullsh*t all over the computer screen, I suddenly found myself wondering if I would ever get out from under the weight of feeling broken.

When I was young I thought forty year olds Knew What They Were Doing; that they finally felt At Peace With Themselves; but it turns out that my birthday was just another day hurtling through space, trying to figure it out. I’m still ‘growing up’, whatever that means, and that’s all right. I don’t even know if there’s a better way to be. If turning forty has gifted me with any wisdom (a little over a week in) it’s this; I don’t have to be the best darn little grower-upper this cruel old world has ever seen! When it comes to being good, I don’t have to die trying.

Mary Oliver says what I am trying to say here far more heartbreakingly in her often quoted piece “Wild Geese”. (You have probably heard this poem.) Rather than saying poetic things about its rightful place in poetry’s hall of fame, I’ll just tell you that I believe it is responsible for thousands of goose tattoos. And for good reason! If you want to risk getting a goose tattoo, and only if you want to risk getting a goose tattoo, do read on.

“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -over and over announcing your place in the family of things.” — Mary Oliver

My last birthday request is that, if you check out Grow, that you would share your experience listening in the comments. I’d really love to hear how you feel about it.

xo,

Audrey

PS. My new music video for Better is out. :) If you haven’t seen it, you can check it out here! (Grab some 🍿 for the comments section. )

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my first single in a long line of new music to come, Better, is out now. You can hear it here.

We (Jeremi Clive, who I co-produced this song with, and I) made a music video! I’ve never really expressed myself through this medium before, and I really enjoyed the opportunity to cast a bit of a different light on the lyrics of the song.

Any of you who have been with me for a while probably already know that I have been really curious about how to present myself as an artist after moving beyond making religious music (and religion). In our conversations about this video concept, Jeremi and I were wondering how I might take an opportunity to poke a little fun at myself, and in that, to shed some of the tendencies my past art had for serious tones to a fault. I’m not like that (overly serious) in real life, and I never have been. I think in releasing new music, some of which certainly still has to do with my inner life and spiritual journeys now, the tendency for me could be to continue presenting myself with earnest seriousness, only about new subjects. Well, I really don’t want to do that; it doesn’t feel enjoyable, and it doesn’t feel interesting to me. I like to be goofy just as much as I like to contemplate the meaning of life. So, we did this. :) I really hope you enjoy it.

And if you haven’t yet, check out Better—out now. More music coming soon.

lyrics:

I used to run when it might hurt

I used to lay there waiting for a savior

pushing it down so I couldn’t feel what needed to heal

now I just know better

I used to say yes when I meant no

I used to stay there when I wanted to go

I was an island so I could see that it was just me

now I just know better

now I just know better.

by Audrey Assad/Jeremi Clive