Notes On ‘I Slept On The Floor’
My band’s debut album ‘I Slept On The Floor’ was released in August 2020, a few months after the coronavirus began to obliterate life as I knew it. I spent an entire week writing something to post about it. During the process, I felt myself spiral out of control and back into my past, ‘a bridge to nowhere’ as Sufjan Stevens so beautifully puts it. When I finished, I realised it was something I’d written for myself only. I’d titled it; ‘rejection arms us with what power never could’.
I began the piece incredibly angry at someone from my teenage years. Once I’d finished the piece, instead of getting! even!, or feeling closure, or whatever it was I wanted, I’d written myself into understanding why that person acted the way they did. I realised that if I grew up with their life, I might have acted the same way.
I faced a new journey, one I hadn’t anticipated, one that wasn’t easy to write about or turn into a bitesize, clickbait headline. It was one I needed to do by myself, outside the lens of the internet or myself as an ‘artist’. While I went through this transformation, I had to let go of constantly advertising myself online as a musician. I wasn’t well enough. My silence felt like admitting to the world I’d failed; as a musician, as a human being.
When we make art as kids, we make it hidden away from the world as a form of catharsis. Somewhere along the journey into adulthood, we lose sight of that. I don’t know what art should be, or if it should be anything at all. Through art, can I make people understand me? No.
Here is the only excerpt from ‘rejection arms us with something power never could’ that I like:
“Plato’s thought experiment goes something like this; prisoners are chained to a cave with their backs to a fire, facing their own shadows. They don’t know that light comes from the fire and they don’t know their shadows are shadows. The cave wall becomes a screen of illusions.
If they broke free and could turn around, the fire would blind them. They would be terrified, because all they’d understand is the immediate reality in front of them, and that it’s dangerous because it blinds them. They would find the blinding light too terrifying, and turn back to what they know and are familiar with believing.
Plato goes on to explain that if a prisoner were dragged, against their will, outside the cave, the sun would blind them. Eventually, as they have no other choice, their eyes would become accustomed to the sun, and they would see the outside world and the cave for what it is.
The prisoner would return to save the others, but the prisoner’s eyes will have become accustomed to the sunlight, so they would be blinded when they re-enter the cave. The other prisoners, according to Plato, would infer from the returning person’s blindness that the journey out of the cave had harmed the escapee and that they should not undertake a similar journey. To me, the prisoner’s ‘blindness’ is a metaphor for the depression kids like Greta Thunberg have been slandered for.”
I think a lot about how I’m still chained to a wall, watching shadows.
I haven’t walked around my hometown since last Christmas. Sometimes, I think about how quickly I learned where all the roads went, or how nothing ever happened. I think often about how I’ll never feel like that again. I think about how grateful I am to have had the privilege of growing up there as well as the privilege to leave.
The title of the album doesn’t refer to a ‘rise out of poverty’ as one review said. I should have seen that coming…been clearer…there are lots of things I should have done, but didn’t. I slept on bathroom floors due to anxiety making me physically unwell, but also to escape a bad situation at somebody’s house. And I didn’t want to talk about that part again and again in interviews.
Ultimately, a lot was out of my control. This album was a group of friends making music together and it documents particular periods in time, times I find hard to look back on because I was someone else. We never thought about how anything would be perceived.
Someone so kindly wrote that my voice is ‘the voice of a generation’. While I appreciated that support immensely, I’m not sure it is; I think it’s a voice women historically have been made to feel ashamed of, so it’s an androgynous voice that was never really given a platform. I can’t use my fingers to count the amount of times I’ve been discouraged from singing. From a wall of old men on the Jools Holland facebook page telling me I was disgusting, to a singing teacher telling me she’d created a monster when she taught me how to belt, I don’t know what made me carry on. Maybe because I believe art belongs to everyone — anyone deserves to make art, so by conclusion, I did too, even if no one liked it.
People had many opinions on the morality of what I was doing, especially lyrically. I wasn’t speaking out enough, I was speaking out too much, too woke, not woke enough. It felt like whatever I did, whatever I said, it would be wrong. But now I know that no matter what you make or who you are, you will face criticism from someone, and ‘real’ artists have understood they need to be themselves despite the world, not for it.
I felt like it was my fault for writing songs if I didn’t want to talk about their content, but most of us never make art thinking about what we’re going to say about it after, or how our art is going to be perceived. We make it to process and let go of something. We make it to sing with each other, to support each other, to secretly speak to each other when we know we no longer really can. Sometimes, we make art simply to have a voice in an otherwise voiceless life. We make art for connection, usually in fugue states of paradoxical disconnection.
My beliefs will change as I get older and that’s okay. One day, I’ll read this and go, ‘no, I was so stupid, I got it all wrong. I know now what I really meant. I know now what I really should have done’. But perhaps what I ‘really should have done’ is accept that the art we make can only document experiences, not hold all the answers. I look back at who I was even a week ago and disagree with that person. Change is not easily marketable, conveyed, or even liked (people feel misled and confused — unreliability feels unsafe), but change is our only certainty. Perhaps the eternality of published art against the fluidity of ourselves as ever-changing humans is something we need to learn to accept to be able to move forward. We’ll always look back at the things we got wrong, no matter what kind of life we’ve lived.
Michaela Coel recently retweeted about ‘Epistemic Humility’, a wonderful phrase I will carry with me forever. It said,“when we judge the bad choices of the past, sociologist Duncan Watts says we should strive for “epistemic humility” — a realization that our information is always incomplete. “We should be humble about what we think we know, and even humble about what we can know.” We have to speak anyway, allow ourselves to be wrong in exchange for allowing our authentic selves to be seen, even if we say something we will later regret…as long as we remain open and keep learning from our mistakes. Because the alternative is to never speak at all. To remain so closed, our thoughts turn into something far more toxic.
I am now a year into this ‘transformation period’ and even though it’s been incredibly difficult to accept my failures, alongside reality, I am so grateful I had the humility to step back.
Perhaps as human beings, we have no duty. Art has many intentions, but arts’ only ability seems to be documenting the complex people we really are and the difficulties of the times we live in. Maybe my intention with the lyrics doesn’t matter. The album means what it means to you, reader (or rather, listener), with or without me as its lyrical ‘author’. You will always listen to this album through the lens of yourself and attach meanings beyond its original intention and that is far better and more powerful than me attempting to explain myself.
Rejection arms us with compassion, connection, humility and a deeper understanding of the people around us. And that might not be the answer people want. But in this moment in time, that is what I believe. And if my ideas change, well;
“Sometimes a hypocrite is nothing more than a person in the process of changing” — Brandon Sanderson
Photo by Parri Thomas
