I know the exact moment I went from being a teenager – a girl – into being an adult. A woman. Or, at least, for the first time, wanted to become a woman.
All autumn i just had “writers block” and “didnt like music any more.” Everyone was worried about me. I’ve never felt depressed like that before, because it wasnt chemical- i genuinely for the first time in my life stopped believing that everything was just gonna work out. I stopped seeing my future at all. I didn’t want to write. I filled my days with distractions so I “didn’t have enough time to write.”
I found myself up late into the night googling local convents that would take me. Before you ask: yes, I have always been this dramatic.
I finally wrote my first good song again, December 4th after a heard a Liz Fraser song. I properly wrote it just after a conversation later that night with my sister and my mum while we watched telly. I think i finally said something like “but i can’t write angry any more, and I can’t write bangers anymore. I think I just want them to be pretty.”
I wasn’t angry at all, I was madly in love and I felt like a woman, not a girl and I wanted to make beautiful, clever music, not angry and juvenile. I was sick of getting on stage and not knowing what to do or who to be. I was listening to Fiona Apple, and PJ Harvey and Kate Bush and Janes Addiction, people who were virtuosos. I had forgotten that had always been my mission – to be one too.
And they said: “But that’s okay! You’re allowed to write like that! You’re allowed to write anything!” Which was genuinely something I had forgotten: you can write anything.
I ran to the shed and wrote the riff for Ropeburn. And that song changed everything. Something unlocked and I was on the write path again. That very unfinished song was literally all I had, and I was so confident about it that I called a team meeting with the label straight away.
We were at the pub, and I only drank water. I wanted to show how serious I was. I said:
-cancel my upcoming EP. (Cancel everything.)
I wanna make worlds now.
They were very taken aback. They said they’d never seen me so serious and were very very excited. That I had the air of someone who was gonna do something good.
I was ready, I’d prepped the shed. Thrown out the sofa in it, it was no longer allowed for seshes with my friends. It was only for music, and I had to fall back in love with it. Start respecting it again.
i made rules for myself:
-Is it good?
-Do i like it
-Is it true
I would never write a song without a middle eight or any riffs ever again.
And there would be rolling bass-lines and drones and HUGE guitars and harmonies and repeating choruses and things that would build and build so fast they felt remorseless. But also things that were sunlight and mist and twinkley and euphoric.
The next 3 months was the rainiest ever recorded in British history. I hermited and hermited and expiriemnted and expireimented and drank cup of tea after cup of tea, until I had made this album. It wasn’t like all the rock docs of making a debut album that i had watched that were all girls, and cocaine and band fights, it was one very hormonal girl, quite a lot of weed, and me fighting with the electronic drummer on logic pro that i try to mold to my own will, Kyle who can be a quite a little shit.
There was one particular world I saw through this whole album – very much shaped , my childhood of reading Little House On The Prairie, of vastness. Of Laura Ingalls-Wilder – who I’m named after – saying how, when she walked across the huge prairie, she felt part of it. That it’s bigness made her feel big, too.
I felt like her. I felt small, and I wanted to feel big.
I wanted to be like the Ocean, or the Mountains, or the plains or the clouds. They all had singular purposes and I didn’t anymore. I wasn’t having a nervous breakdown, I was just a hurricane making a whirlwind. I am not stubborn, I’m a mountain. I’m not pathetic when I cry, because clouds aren’t.
So I walked into the shed not knowing who I was, came out a year later holding the album knowing exactly who I am: I had learned how to be an adult, how to make a world inside of myself and then push it out. How to be big, not from people, but from the sky and the rain and mountains and music. If you are hormonal and neurodivergent, these are actually far better and more accurate role models for you to be honest.
Whenever you listen to this album, you’ll have a ticket to get to the world that I made.
I hope you feel it, and I hope you can escape there, like I escaped there during that wet rainy winter.
