#again I got covid last friday it has been a week kk

[bestfriend-confidant-sillyrabbit]

I'm very proud of them and our community for all the money raised for the PCRF

[tammyfeabakker]

My pot girl. Kinda snapped on me... She's starting a new job. I have been with this girl for ages. The last 3 months same shit. people were starting to complain to me bout it. Because I gave her the business. I never really swayed from her because she was in college. Now she got a new job. I wanna cut the ties. My nephew has such better stuff. Cost is less. He delivers. I don't hear shit bout that I'm there to much. If she had better stuff I wouldn't be there to much. Last week was my breaking point. I can't feel guilty that I want to go with my nephew. My girl has new rules because of her new job. I can't abide by them. When your a dealer consider yourself a rockstar everybody wants you. Your basically at the beckon call of people. Last week. She's snapped. I asked for a quarter she ended up given me an eighth. Now if she would of given me the freaking quarter. And her new job doesn't start until Monday. I wouldn't of been there the 3rd fucking time! Keeps telling me she's quitting! I'm over it. She snapped I said kk. ,Now I hear from her. I don't fucking need it now. I have to break it off... Fucking bullshit bullshit bullshit covid. I lost people again! I can not afford to keep spending money on shit. My eyes roll Everytime she sez I'm quitting selling. I can't take it! The problem is I go most of her people will follow me. She worked hard to get her education to get a good job. I want her to succeed more then anything. She will be making good money. I have to break up with her. This shit I got from my nephew is awesome. He needs the money. I heard from the guy with the rescue. Been playing tag. Calls me on a Friday. I'm fucking busy!!! The weekend. Tells me call me Monday nothing I hear from him again yesterday! Rolled my fucking eyes! For the love of God! If he can only do a fucking weekend then fucking say it. Fucking consultation! Take up a fucking Saturday! I work Monday Weds Thursday and fucking Friday! I made plans for crying out loud! I haven't called him back. Since yesterday!!! Why because I'm fucking busy working. Today I go get the grandsons. Why didn't he just say! Can you come up on Saturday?!!!! Fucking people! I have to call him back to tell him I'm busy again 3 weekends in a row. I don't even want to call him back to tell him again I'm busy. Like I'm suppose to sit around and wait and see if he calls me make no plans. What the fuck is wrong with people. In his mind well I can see she's busy on the weekends. He needs me one weekend day. Yes I'm busy on the weekends because I'm getting every weekend I can before I give up fucking Saturday! I didn't even start yet. It's jus a consultation jeeeesusssss fucking Christmas! I can tell this year already sucks fucking shit! There's no come in like a lion roll out like a lamb. In my life. Stays lion. Can't wait for 2023 already I'm done 2022 already.

[chickadeeee]

So I moved halfway across the country for work, but I wasn’t too worried about it, in part bc I had a good friend living in the same city who I was excited to get closer to.

Except now it seems that my friend doesn’t want to be friends anymore.

The first sign of trouble was pride weekend. I’ve never been to pride ™ but I’ve always wanted to go, my gay+ friends just… forget I’m bi I guess idk lol. Anyways I asked if he had plans and he said yes but he could maybe see me after! I had to head that way anyways and we had our virtual zoom book club meeting in like an hour so I asked if he wanted to meet up irl for it. He said sure just give him that hour to sober up! The parks were closed so I sat on a curb and waited. For an hour. Reading a new book, but still, ouch. Then when time came for book club he ghosted me and never signed on for the group call. I was really upset and just walked home, it was a 20min bus ride but I walked the hour instead just to process. I had caught covid right when I moved and this was my first chance to see him, kind of my first social event, so I had been super excited. He never apologized or mentioned it again.

He invited me to another vague thing when his friend came into town a few days later. I asked him the day before if he still had plans and if he wanted me to come and he replied with a detailed itinerary. So seems that he had it all planned out and just forgot to tell me.

A week later I invited him to come watch fireworks on my office rooftop. He didn’t let me know if he was gonna come or not until the end of the day when he said no. I wasn’t comfortable riding transit alone late so I just stayed home.

He did invite me to an event! For a professional org he’s the president of. So like, it makes him look good for me to come. I went. He barely talked to me. He hasn’t invited me to any of their other events.

We finally hung out… when a mutual friend was in town. That was fine.

I’d been trying to get lunch w him since I moved but only brought it up a few times. It was originally his idea bc we work close to each other. He gets weekly lunch with one friend so I thought it would be like biweekly or something with us. When we finally got lunch, he said ‘maybe we can do this again in like a month!’ which kind of shocked me. Like I get if you’re busy but saying it so coldly without even adding “bc I’m so busy” just felt awful. It’s been over a month since & he hasn’t mentioned any second lunch.

By this point I had basically given up but the last thing was his birthday. He usually goes ALL OUT and he has a couple friends flying in which he mentioned last book club. His birthday is this Friday and by yesterday (Sunday) I hadn’t heard anything yet… I kinda knew he just wasn’t going to invite me but I wanted to give him a chance. So in yesterday’s book club, I asked if he knew what he was doing yet, trying to give him an opportunity to invite me. He listed out five days of detailed plans with his visiting friends and said he wasn’t having a party this year. He didn’t mention one stop on his itinerary that he wanted me to come to. I wanted to give it one more shot so today before work I texted him to say

“oh btw if you’d like me to come to any of your birthday weekend plans I’d be happy to! but I understand if you just want to keep it smaller”

and he replied at the end of the work day

“Kk! I think we’ll make it over to [nearby neighborhood] at some point so I’ll keep you posted and maybe you can join for a drink!”

He didn’t even say what day he was thinking. Just that they’ll probably be sorta near me once in a 5-day span and maybe I can join for a single drink. When I got that text I laughed out loud. I doubt he’ll end up texting me, if it happens I’ll be shocked. But I won’t make the past mistakes of waiting all day to hear from him. I don’t know if I would go or not though. I guess if I feel like it I will, but since I can’t plan for it, it’s unlikely that I’ll feel like it. I usually need to know in advance of any events so I can plan my hair wash, budget my social energy, etc. At least I can save money by not getting him a birthday present. And I can make plans to watch football on the holiday instead of seeing him.

So like. Yeah. Clearly he’s just not interested in staying friends with me for some reason. I don’t understand it at all. I don’t want to be more pathetic or more annoying so I’ll just accept that he’s not interested and stop trying. But it hurts because I thought we were going to become closer friends and now I feel so so alone. I gotta get off my ass and make new friends for sure but for now it just sucks and I feel so isolated and lonely. Like talking to the employee at a local jewelry store was the highlight of my day the other week because it was a human interaction.

Anyways I don’t meant to be dramatic, I’ll be fine and I at least have my cat, plus ik what I need to do. I just need to get this out and I can’t post on my usual emotional social cuz he follows me :/

[sinceileftyoublog]

Katy Kirby Live Preview + Interview: 3/11, YouTube

Photo by Jackie Lee Young

BY JORDAN MAINZER

From growing up singing in church in Texas to dissecting everyday life with the precision of a travel writer, Katy Kirby’s journey has brought her to what should be a breakout year. Her debut album Cool Dry Place, released last month via Austin-based indie rock label Keeled Scales, is a concise collection of minimal songs that still manage to punch you in the gut. With an unassuming coo and wiry guitar playing, Kirby certainly covers a range of topics, from privilege to motherhood to toxic masculinity, but her songs about relationships hit the hardest. “Tap Twice”, released almost a year ago before Cool Dry Place was even announced, is a standout, detailing a person’s increasingly desperate attempts to reach out to someone else, as the low-key venerable band’s instrumentation also builds up to unhinged clatter. The title track uses similarly autobiographical imagery--that of an orange--as a metaphor for a dissolving relationship. “Ten segments in an orange--only so many ways that you can pull apart someone,” Kirby sings on the penultimate track, the emotional climax before the stunning closer “Fireman”. That one’s about an always distant relationship, Kirby’s sophisticated writing again playing with the album’s established iconography while introducing new metaphors: “We’re a slow burn kind of love / but now the whole house smells like smoke,” she sings. Intentional or happy accident, for a first record, it’s connections like this that have already positioned Kirby as one of the best new songwriters in recent memory.

Recently, Kirby was in Alabama helping a friend produce his first record, as she and some other musicians, after quarantining and getting tested for COVID-19, moved for a month to a friend’s family ranch and farm. It was there that they chugged out a live version of Cool Dry Place, front to back, that they’re debuting tomorrow night on YouTube at 7 PM CST. (I’ve embedded the YouTube video link at the bottom of this interview.) I spoke to her last Friday over the phone about the inspiration behind many of the songs on the record. Read our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: Where do you live these days?

Katy Kirby: That’s a great question. Technically, I’m living in Texas at home with my parents. I was in Nashville before that, and I’m trying to figure out where to go next.

SILY: In various iterations, whether via this record’s singles or the Juniper EP you put out, about half of the songs on the record were released before the album came out. In context, all together, what are you trying to communicate with the record?

KK: Honestly, I’m trying to communicate that I’m a good artist. [laughs] I don’t know if I can honestly say that I had a unifying concept in mind. Someone pointed out to me recently that a lot of the songs on the record seem like they’re identifying a minor disfunction in a relationship that hasn’t quite made something go wrong yet. I don’t know if that’s true exactly, but maybe minor disfunctions in close relationships is the unifying theme.

SILY: That reminds me of the song “Portals”, which is about the end of a relationship, but it’s ambiguous whether it’s about you. How do you balance singing and writing autobiographically versus more generically or fictionally?

KK: A very smart songwriter told me to not worry about the divide between biography and fiction because it doesn’t really matter in the context of the song or clarity of the narrative, so long as you’re able to get people from one line to the next. I allow myself to fictionalize autobiographical events to make the situation clearer, if that makes sense.

SILY: To clarify it to you as much as to the listener.

KK: Exactly. Clarifying fiction or hysterical realism. It makes things a lot clearer when I’m looking back on the events I’m sort of writing about. I feel like a lot of very smart writers or people I’ve listened to have said you’re always writing about yourself no matter what you’re writing about. In that way, fiction doesn’t super feel like fiction.

SILY: On “Juniper”, a song about motherhood, you sing about not learning the difference between “lightning, rain, and thunder” and between “herbs, weeds, and flowers.” The difference in the former group is more obvious, whereas the difference in the latter group is more ambiguous. Were you trying to approach different levels of ambiguity? Are these differences metaphors for something else?

KK: Kind of...I never noticed how different those are. I think that those lines in “Juniper” are sort of about the gaps in, I want to say relational skill, but that sounds a bit too clinical. Ways of loving people you happen to be bad at or you don’t feel were ever clarified for you in a sort of missing piece way. Sometimes, those skills or differences can be really subtle, like identifying toxic and non-toxic plants, where it’s tricky and even experts fail at it. Sometimes, the skills and knowledge that’s lacking is horribly obvious and debilitating in how basic it is.

There used two be two other refrains in the song that got dropped. One was “waves, surf, and water,” in a verse that’s no longer in the song, which feels like “weeds, herbs, and flowers,” and there was one I would always end on, which felt too intense, which was, “bruises, burns, and fractures,” obviously all very different. The pattern you mentioned happens in parts of the songs no longer there...four verses seem like too many.

SILY: There are a couple moments on the record where the relationship between how you treat your voice and what you’re saying stands out: the auto-tune on “Traffic!” and on “Tap Twice” when you sing, “I almost broke my wrists trying to bring you back,” when the effects come in. Can you talk about those moments and the interplay between vocal effects and what you’re singing?

KK: In “Traffic!” that was sort of a happy accident. We had the auto-tune on there when demoing because my voice was really tired and I had a cold. The way that the auto-tune sounded felt like it brought more than a wink at some sort artificiality that I wanted “Traffic!” to have simmer throughout it. We kept it there and then decided to have the auto-tune weave in and out throughout the lyrics; it shows up and goes away and comes back again at varying levels. I can’t remember exactly where we placed that, but we were just trying to underline some of the more direct or earnest lines in the song by letting the vocal be a little bit dryer.

The part in “Tap Twice”, it’s distorted, right? 

SILY: Yeah, and the instrumentation climaxes.

KK: It felt right to feel the most unstable at that line in the song. The narrator of that song feels like they’ve restrained themselves pretty well up to that point, where they’ve only been interacting with the other person through Instagram, or taps on the window, or oranges as an offering. At that moment in the song, I wanted it to sound like they were losing their grip the tiniest bit. It maybe makes the line “thrashing around like goldfish in a garbage bag” make a bit more sense.

SILY: I love how the drums in the song initially sound like window taps.

KK: That never occurred to me.

SILY: Also, your use of orange the fruit and orange the color, of goldfish, and you use oranges as a metaphor in the title track.

KK: Someone else pointed out that there are two mentions of grapes. A lot of fruit on the record. I didn’t notice that until we were done with that. I feel a little weird about it since I feel like fruit as iconography is a little bit trendy right now. Is that Petra Collins’ fault? Who’s in charge of this? 

Quite honestly, the mention of oranges in both of those songs is not symbolic at all. I really did leave oranges for my friend Tom when he was sick and in a college kid broke place where he hadn’t eaten a piece of fruit in a week. I brought him some oranges and jotted that down. The “ten segments of an orange” line in “Cool Dry Place” is also autobiographical. The person who I wrote that song about and I were on tour, and I had a big bag of Cuties that I brought along, and I’d peel them and pass the pieces around the car to everyone. Ten is an awkward number to split between four people, and I noticed it was always ten segments.

SILY: The name of the title track and of the album came from a storage warning on a Tylenol package. Was there a moment you can point to where you decided it would be a good title?

KK: I probably jotted that down at some point. I wrote that chorus exactly as it is now. I lived with another songwriter and walked into her room not knowing whether it was good. She and another friend of mine convinced me that it was good and I wrote other verses around it. I think I had a list of 10 things I thought we could call the album, and I sent it out to a bunch of people, and they voted for Cool Dry Place.

SILY: Was “thrashing goldfish” one of them?

KK: There might have been one about goldfish in a garbage bag.

SILY: Is the title track the album’s emotional centerpiece or peak?

KK: Yeah. It is one of the most autobiographical and is one of the songs I wrote most quickly. It feels like it’s pointing directly to the proverbial camera and saying something all the other songs are hinting to or are adjacent to but not saying. Definitely an emotional center, at least whenever I listen to the record.

SILY: “Secret Language” interpolates “Hallelujah”. When was the first time you heard that song, and was it Leonard Cohen’s version?

KK: Ooh, definitely not Leonard Cohen’s version.

SILY: Me neither.

KK: I had no idea Leonard Cohen wrote that song at the time. I don’t know when I found it out. It was much later. Isn’t a version of the song in Shrek?

SILY: Yeah. Rufus Wainwright’s version.

KK: It has to be that, since I definitely watched Shrek as a child. Then, in a high school talent show, a girl in my grade sang a rather American Idol version of “Hallelujah”. Like, kind of the Jeff Buckley version, but instead of the words Leonard Cohen wrote, it was more about Jesus. It was a worship song. That is a thing I will never forget. I don’t think I heard the Leonard Cohen version until 2018.

SILY: It’s weird, because you’re used to it being a vocal showcase, and then you hear this old guy grumbling it, and it’s so schmaltzy and 80′s. 

KK: It’s got to be a testament to Jeff Buckley’s ear, or whoever was first like, “This song is actually somber and beautiful and heartbreaking” had a crazy brain.

SILY: What was it like working with Carl Saff to master the record?

KK: I have never talked to him or met him in person, but he’s unbelievably pleasant and insanely good at his job. Hire Carl Saff if you’re thinking of doing so. 10/10 would recommend.

SILY: What’s the story behind the cover art?

KK: Not much. We tried a few different ideas for album art and were talking to an illustrator that fell through. There were a few iconography-based ideas that I was thinking about. I didn’t want to have my face on a debut record. It felt corny to me. But that picture came out sort of weird and interesting, and I was gently encouraged by wiser and more experienced parties to, maybe, get over it and feel okay about introducing myself as an image or a person on the debut record. 

SILY: You collaborated with another Keeled Scales artist, Karima Walker, on an EP. What was that like?

KK: We wound up doing this EP together for this tiny record label in Spain. The nature of the project is that we didn’t know each other and they put us together in a horse farm in the west of Spain somewhere and had us write and record an EP. She’s incredibly smart and lovely and I’m super glad Keeled Scales is putting her stuff out. Waking the Dreaming Body is super good. 

SILY: What does it mean to you to be working with a label like Keeled Scales?

KK: I’m so freaking grateful. I had a relationship with them for a couple years before I signed with them, and they’ve proven themselves to be good people for a while. They did a really good job putting this record out, and I can’t believe it went this well. Also, I fucking love Buck Meek. I think he’s the best, and I’m freaking out he’s on the same label.

SILY: Have you been working on anything lately?

KK: Not as much as I would like, but I’ve been writing enough to still call myself a songwriter, and that’s all I can ask for.

SILY: Anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading lately that’s caught your attention?

KK: I just finished a collection of short stories by Emma Cline called Daddy. It’s so fucking good. I’ve been listening to the Lomelda record [Hannah] nonstop since it came out. It’s a very special album. That’s the thing that’s been saving my sanity the most.