#as a trad artist I’m struggling

[puffypoffin]

Sampo caught him off guard :)

[ironskyfinder]

When I first met Jackalynn, she was very confused about her place in the world.

The silly little girl was going by Jaden, had cut all her beautiful hair off, was wearing a binder to hide her beautiful hourglass figure, and was outwardly militant about ‘becoming’ a ‘man’.

She messaged me - seemingly furious that I would run a blog that openly advocated for female disempowerment, misgendering, and ‘transphobia’, but I could tell there was something deeper going on, and before long, she said something that gave away far more than she’d wanted me to know.

jadensjourney [11:24PM] I just can’t believe that you would knowingly post such filth. It boggles the mind that anyone would think it’s okay in the slightest to make such a toxically degrading concept so arousing. And you defend it without the slightest thought?!

trad-dominant [11:25PM] I post it because it’s filth that people enjoy, and I defend it for that reason and because it’s my artistic right to do so.

trad-dominant [11:25PM] So it’s filth that you enjoy, too?

jadensjourney [11:26PM] Our definitions of the word ‘artist’ are very different

jadensjourney [11:27PM] No, no, NO. I didn’t say that, you psycho

jadensjourney [11:27PM] What is WRONG with you?!

trad-dominant [11:29PM] You said it “boggles the mind that anyone would think it’s okay in the slightest to make such a toxically degrading concept so arousing,” which certainly implies that you found it arousing.

jadensjourney [11:30PM] No!! 

jadensjourney [11:31PM] Okay, but, that wasn’t what I meant and you know it

jadensjourney [11:32PM] What I ACTUALLY MEANT was that you’re a degenerate for even trying to make such disgusting topics into erotica

trad-dominant [11:34PM] Maybe I am a degenerate, but at least I’m honest with myself about what I like. I could help you with that, if you’d lose the attitude and admit it.

jadensjourney [11:37PM] Fuck you.

It wasn’t the first time I’d had readers reach out to berate me, and it wouldn’t be the last. I thought that was the end of it, and went back to writing. I felt like I was making good progress, so I stayed up later than usual, until another chat notification interrupted me.

jadensjourney [1:17AM] I admit it

jadensjourney [1:19AM] now what?!

trad-dominant [1:21AM] What?

jadensjourney [1:23AM] I thought it was a little erotic. Your story. So what?

trad-dominant [1:25AM] So you’re starting to be honest with yourself, that’s all that means

jadensjourney [1:26AM] Shut up, fuck you

trad-dominant [1:27AM] You don’t need to be aggressive, you’re judging yourself for liking it far more than I am.

trad-dominant [1:29AM] So, which part of the Little Miss Thought-She-Was-A-Boy story turned you on most?

jadensjourney [1:33AM] no I’m not

jadensjourney [1:34AM] judging myself

jadensjourney [1:36AM] stop it

trad-dominant [1:37AM] It took you all that time for just seven words? You must be typing one-handed, were you reading the story again?

jadensjourney [1:41AM] yes 

jadensjourney [1:43AM] the part where he’s cockwarming ryan and they’re doing anatomy

jadensjourney [1:44AM] That’s the best part

trad-dominant [1:47AM] I have to point out that Sam is a girl, I know you and her both struggle with that

trad-dominant [1:48AM] But, I agree, that is a great scene. 

jadensjourney [1:50AM] fine

jadensjourney [1:51AM] the part where SHE’s cockwarming ryan.

jadensjourney [1:53AM] where’d you come up with the paintbrush thing?

trad-dominant [1:54AM] Personal experience. 

trad-dominant [1:54AM] Holding a girl down and slowly tracing through all her erogenous zones with a brush is something that never gets old.

jadensjourney [1:55AM] crazy

jadensjourney [1:56AM] It’s only a tease?

trad-dominant [1:57AM] It is, although you have to be careful brushing around her clit, just in case

jadensjourney [1:58AM] i liked that most

jadensjourney [1:58AM] i mean

trad-dominant [1:59AM] Is that the part you were imagining happening to you?

trad-dominant [2:01AM] Having a stranger who picked you up at a bar overpower you, tease you mercilessly, and correct your gender?

I didn’t hear from her more that night; I assume she’d gotten embarrassed and deleted the chat. Most of the interactions ended like that - a confused girl reached out full of anger, then admitted how hot it was, then vanished. It didn’t bother me, but I was surprised when the next day I found a message waiting when I logged in.

jadensjourney [6:52AM] hey so fuck you but that last messsage you sent made me cum harder than I ever have in my human life and i passed out. sorry

It actually made me laugh aloud, between the reckless honesty and the charming turn of phrase. Few people had enough creativity or enough of a way with words to arouse my attention, but there was still the lingering combativeness from our earlier interaction. I sent the reply and assumed I’d never hear back.

trad-dominant [7:26AM] Fine, I suppose we can let that slide. If you keep cumming to my stories, though, you owe me your deadname real name.

I didn’t hear anything from her that night, or the one after, or the next. I expected to see her icon vanish one day, blog deleted. It was only after I published the next story, this time about a lesbian ruining her gold stars, that another two messages came through.

jadensjourney [9:52PM] three times. I hate you.

jadensjourney [9:54PM] and it’s jackalynn. 

From then on, whenever I posted a new story, Jackalynn and I talked. It started with her telling me how many orgasms she’d had while reading, but then we started talking more with each story. Over the following months, she confided that she was liking my stories more and more, and I told her if she sent a selfie of her all femme’d out that I’d write one with her as a main character. The story of ‘Jessie’s Fall Back to Femininity’ took a few days to finish, but when I posted it I saw that it had vanished.

Then - 

jackalynnsjourneyback [10:56PM] it’s me new blog. 

jackalynnsjourneyback [10:56PM] spent the last three days reading and re-reading jessica’s fall. i can’t think about anything else

jackalynnsjourneyback [10:57PM] so when i tell people i’m officially detransitioning do i blame it all on you, or?

trad-dominant [11:02PM] What a pleasant surprise! I thought you’d gotten cold feet, I guess I couldn’t have been more wrong.

jackalynnsjourneyback [11:04PM] yeah you brainwashed me back into being a girl or something 

trad-dominant [11:06AM] We both know I only reminded you that your clit exists, it did the rest.

jackalynnsjourneyback [11:07PM] uh, i think you did a little more than that!

trad-dominant [11:08PM] Not really, all I had to do was help your clit show you who you really wanted to be.

jackalynnsjourneyback [11:11PM] thanks for saying that, now i’m soaked again.

jackalynnsjourneyback [11:11PM] but you’re right, of course

jackalynnsjourneyback [11:12PM] i just can’t believe how hot jessie’s fall was, especially when she got fully corrected at the end

trad-dominant [11:13PM] You’re welcome. I thought you’d like it ending with her cumming from being impregnated.

jackalynnsjourneyback [11:14PM] and her repeating ‘this...is…what..i’m…for” is going to stick in my head forever

jackalynnsjourneyback [11:16PM] so are you gonna make me beg, or

trad-dominant [11:17PM] Probably, on principle, but I don’t know what you mean.

jackalynnsjourneyback [11:19PM] do it all to me

jackalynnsjourneyback [11:19PM] treat me like the professor treats jessica. tattoos and all

trad-dominant [11:20PM] For that, you’re definitely going to have to beg.

jackalynnsjourneyback [11:22PM] fuck

jackalynnsjourneyback [11:22PM] please

trad-dominant [11:25PM] You told me that in the last three and a half weeks you’ve edged for hundreds of hours, a lot of it to pretty misogynistic porn. We both know you know how to beg.

jackalynnsjourneyback [11:29PM] i deserve to have my silly gender fantasies corrected by someone who is going to take every advantage of me, i know i’m just holes and tits. please use me, sir

jackalynnsjourneyback [11:29PM] pierce my nipples, tattoo a qr code over my clit because i’m just property, and decide what else you want done to my body. 

jackalynnsjourneyback [11:30PM] please make me your jessica. take me in, break me down, make it so i lose my mind when you breed me

trad-dominant [11:36PM] That is better. Hmm.

Three weeks later, Jackalynn stepped off the plane; we talked the whole way back, her mind was made up. She wanted nothing less than to be reeducated, corrected, improved.

She’s getting her wish. Sometimes she still gets confused, but she’ll come and talk to me and a few minutes of intense anatomy practice always sorts out her delusions. Edging afterwards is helping her feel a lot better, and this will be her tenth straight day plugged - between that and the daily maintenance spankings, she says she’s never felt more feminine.

Now all that’s left is to breed her, and she’ll be the perfect woman she never dreamed she’d be.

[sweetlandspos]

When did you start drawing? and come up with the style you have at the moment, and do you have anyone who inspired you?

Love you drawings by the way <33

Hello anon and thank you for your message🫶🏻

This is gonna be long so:

I started drawing when I was 7, with pencils on paper, and never stopped. That's how I've been doing traditional art for 20 years now.

I've gone through several progression processes of course, but I don't think I've ever changed my style. I've always drawn with grey pencils and my aim has always been to achieve details and semi-realism.

a short accelerated video:

Silent hill and resident evil inspired me a lot at some times:

I think my style has developed on its own over the years, and I've always liked dark, sober things with a bit of gore, fantasy and body horror.

And finally last year I was tired struggling with *trad artists problems* (can’t go back, eraser tearing the paper apart, 288474 pencils all over the place….)

I bought an ipad and started digital this january and WHAT A RELIEF!! now I’m having so much fun I can draw wherever and whenever I want at any places without all the mess

Thanks for your message again anon and sorry if this was too long 🫶🏻

[bigfatmusicblog]

honeyglaze - Real Deal ALBUM REVIEW

Anyone who has ever been in a three piece band can tell you how hard it sometimes is. Especially compared to playing in a four piece or more where there are more people to hide behind -  in a three piece you’re typically the lone driving force behind your instrument. There’s nowhere to hide on that stage. Now there are also benefits that come to playing in a smaller band as well - less egos to deal with, can probably tour in a hatchback and, if you want to get capitalistic about it, there are less people to split the overall payment with. 

All that to say, honeyglaze is a three piece outfit from South London. Genre-wise I have read online people refer to them simply as Post-Punk - and I think this broad stroke sort of downplays all the different parts that make up honeyglaze. Jangly math rock riffs interspersed with random breakdowns reminiscent of mid-2000s post-hardcore bands, melodies and vocalizations that go from indie-folk artist to a dry Londoner talk-sing. honeyglaze is a lot more than just another South London post-punk band - maybe we’ll call it post-mathcore? post-math-folkcore? Whatever, who cares about genres anyways? (it’s me, I care too much)

The most impressive thing about this band is the fact that they’re able to delve into so many different genres and inspirations as a three piece. When I first listened to this album, because of the robust guitars, clever bass riffs with Anouska Sokolow’s vocals almost floating above it all like a low cloud, I thought they were five strong at least. But, GOD, a fucking THREE PIECE?!?! DOING ALL OF THIS?!?!? I was already hooked to this band but this fact alone made me realize that they are something truly special - especially with this strong STRONG sophomore album REAL DEAL.

Real Deal is a beautiful album that plays on themes of femininity, not feeling comfortable in your own body, and general anxieties about society paired with images of popular culture. The album starts off with the beautiful Hide - this song acts as a precursor to the whole album, being used in the same way an overture is often used, it gives you a taste of the musical themes that will be repeated throughout. Going from a grungy riff to the soft felt like nature of the clean guitar that plays behind the verses, culminating in a huge loud breakdown - it teaches your brain that this is what a honeyglaze song is in the world of Real Deal. 

The album continues on with Cold Caller, probably the lightest song on the album both subject-wise as well as the playful lead that continues throughout the song. This song is followed by Pretty Girls, one of the singles for this album, and it makes sense why this song was a single that they chose. This is the first song on the album that really plays with the overarching concept throughout the album, which are feminine struggles in a modern day world. It’s also the first song where you really get a taste of the cleverness behind Sokolow lyrics. “Pink, I wear pink on pink/I’m in touch with my feminine side/I always wear pink” she sings in the second verse, putting a slight snarl of sarcasm behind the feminine side line. 

Following Pretty Girls is Safety Pins the start of a darker feeling in the album, with a heavier, more driving riff, especially compared to what we’ve heard so far. There’s a gorgeous moment in this song that’s a real highlight of Sokolow’s voice as she randomly glides upwards on the line “I wish that I didn’t linger” evoking the likes of The Zombies or that more trad indie-folk sound I mentioned earlier. Continuing on with the dark themes of Safety Pins is Don’t - potentially the most badass song on this album. It’s about conversations with men that don’t listen due to internalized sexism, whether conscious of it or not. She gives you warning that she’s not to be fucked with, not only shown through the lyrics and the flat, angry, vocal performance, but the playfully dark riff that is prevalent through the entire song. What I like about this run of two songs is that it shows the true talent and duality of Sokolow’s vocal ability and performance. The differences between the two songs are noticeable and yet they go together so well. I will say however, that last bridge/breakdown does feel a little “Dodge Ram” commercial to me, glad to know it came from a cooler band though - we all write butt rock sometimes.

The next three songs are all on the softer side, which isn’t to say it’s never loud, but the loudness and fuzz take a backseat. Starting with TMJ it’s whiplash compared to how raucous Don’t was mere seconds ago. This song has the first real hook on the album and has a great variation on the typical move of loud build up into loud break down, where it has a loud build up towards the end but then subverts your expectations going back into the soft beautiful riff that’s played at the top of the song. After that is I Feel it All a song that plays on feeling from :01 where it starts off with an overwhelming soundscape I believe intended to invoke the feeling of, well, feeling. Then is Ghost, again on the softer side, but has the best hook on the entire album. Invoking relatable imagery of DVDs stacked on the floor with metaphors drawn on the most mundane of items. This song also has the prettiest lyric on the entire album, “You can see me naked without taking off my clothes” woof, much to think about - Billy Ray Cyrus.

Following that is TV the best fucking song on this whole album. I have listened to this song on repeat since the release, it’s definitely in my Top Ten of the year, and closer to one than ten. It starts off with an admission, seeing someone who is as put together as you wish you could be, even in the smallest of activities such as changing channels with confidence. As someone who grew up in front of the TV, watching these same home renovations shows, making plans to completely transform my life, plans so grandiose they’re impossible to follow up on - this song is incredibly relatable to me despite my inability to relate to the feminine experience. Also it does this little thing during the instrumental breakdown where it makes it sound like your speakers are broken? Just a lot of fun, little frills like that are what make this song and album so good. Listen to this as loud as you fucking can.

The penultimate song on the album is also the title track, Real Deal, the heavy bass in both the guitarists and bass riffs that play off each other is once again putting them in a grunge realm. With loud heavy guitars blaring throughout, vocally you see someone actively gaining confidence as the song continues. Starting off almost sarcastically saying “I’m the real deal” as each verse ends you begin to believe it more and more - and as the verses continue the lyrics invoke more confidence, a confidence that was seemingly impossible to find early on on this album. 

The final song on the album is Movies, a song about escapism, its most impressive aspect in the instrumentation. Starting off with a complex quirky “drum riff” wherein both the guitar and bass take a rhythm position, allowing the drummer to play lead. Halfway through the song, after some post-hardcore droning about wanting to go to the movies “when there’s no one I want to be,” there’s a Vampire Weekend type riff showcasing the fun abilities of the guitar player. After that initial verse under that new motif it’s the Bassists turn creating a melodic lead that gets repeated a few times more. The song ends soft, with the last minute and a half being almost pointless. Could've ended on a higher note but how do you end something like Real Deal? I don’t know, and sometimes I wish it never ended.

OVERALL:

This album is about inner struggles, not only presented through the personal lyrics but how the instruments are almost battling with each other for supremacy. However much they struggle though, it comes together beautifully. This isn’t an album I would skip, it draws you in, constantly making you feel like you missed something on the last listen through, making you eager to start it all over again. Combining all of that with the fact that this is a three piece makes it all the more impressive, I hope they tour in the US soon and I hope I can see them. Good shit.

GRADE: A

[constermonster]

Is it normal to struggle w transitioning to digital art? My dad bought me a really nice tablet + stylus, but when I tried digital art it was so confusing and I just always prefer traditional. But I really wanna transition to digital since it’s what most people use and idk idk do you have any tips?

OH ABSOLUTELY! I got a tablet when I was like 14 and started digital art properly when I was like 16 (I’m 20 now). I was really put off when I first got a tablet and found that drawing digitally wasn’t the same, and everything I made I hated so I didn’t touch it for ages. But in college I wanted to do more digital art so I picked it back up again. I found it really hard to hold the pen?? so I would do all my sketches traditionally and trace them digitally which worked for a while but i wanted to be able to do 100% digital piece, so I did a lot of practice without traditional sketches and it was SUPER HARD! But after a lot of practice it worked and I don’t trace my traditional sketches anymore (unless I do something really epic and wanna digitise it).

So yeah it takes a while and a bit of getting used to and it feels like ur never gonna b as good as you were, but if u practice you will get used to it eventually, and I’m p sure that most artists who have made the jump from trad to digital have been through a similar thing. You got this!! *\(^o^)/*

[hooterhorror]

hi!! could I have a matchup? tysm!! I’m not sure if they are all slasher mashups but I would like one of those.

My pronouns are they/them and I like women (anyone that’s not a man really but I don’t know how many nonbinary slashers there are)

Personality wise I’m very confident appearance wise, and I’m kind of… snarky I guess? A little rude at times, but I think that I’m fun to be around and like a kind person hopefully? the things I deem most important about myself… I’m not sure. I don’t actually deem my looks as an important part of myself really, I think everything else is more important. I guess I don’t have something most important but I’m quite creative so I’ll say that. I feel like other people probably perceive me as quiet and anxious or maybe mean looking as I have a bit of an RBF. I think of myself as really confident but I don’t think that’s how I actually come off.

My appearance is that I am white, I have short layered brown hair (I cut it myself recently! it was based off of Ramona Flowers from Scott Pilgrim, I didn’t really like the movie but I liked her.), and I’m average height. I’m inspired by trad goth fashion/makeup but I only listen to a bit of actual goth music, although I’ve been getting into it a little more recently. I shaved off my eyebrows to draw them back on with eyeliner recently.

My hobbies/interests are visual art (drawing, painting, ETC), customizing clothes to fit my style, horror (I like horror comedies the most I think), I really like all kinds of music but I think I probably listen to punk/alt rock the most? Although my top artist this year is mitski but the rest of them fit into that genre lol. Most of my time is spent doing something that has to do with one of those things.

My top love language is DEFINITELY touch, although there has been debate over whether that counts as a love language or whatever but I am just. very touch starved. I also really love when I have shared interests with someone and we can talk about it together. An ideal date would maybe be staying in and watching movies together OR having a picnic in a cemetery. Cemetery picnics are veryyyy calm? I don’t know how to describe it it’s just a nice feeling.

I would like for my partner to be funny and I guess I would just like for them to genuinely like me and enjoy spending time with me. Optional things that I would enjoy would be them having a similar fashion sense to mine and being interested in the same things as me like I said before.

Cons about myself are that I tend to prioritize my own wants without thinking about how it will affect other people, or I do think about it but I do the thing anyway.

Thanks again!! It feels strange to share all of that info about myself but this seems very fun.

hi!!! ofc!! tysm for sending this in :33 I didn't know people debate on if that's a love language- it totally feel like it should be considered one, since a lot of people identify with it by now.... idk I've never paid attention to debates xp

Carrie White.

OKAY OKAY. Carrie adores you. She found herself fiddling and stumbling over her words around you, but she's always been a shy kind of girl... can you blame her? she's been bullied and harassed for so long that it's gave her perma social anxiety :// but she does manage to awkwardly compliment your eyeliner and mention your eyebrows, or lack thereof.

"I- I like your... like your makeup, and stuff... uh, your eyebrows are- different."

she has the biggest smile on her face after she was able to talk to you 😭 so proud of herself

Looks into goth culture and it's many subcultures just to be educated. She hides it all from her mom, being that she's overly religious and probably would see you as a devil... poor Carrie has probably already struggled with the concept of her being attracted to women because of her. Now she's proud of her wlw self, and kinda finds an escape from her shitty home and school life in you.

I have so say she probably was intimidated at first. I mean, who knows what other people said about you! and how you looked was certainly different, but she starts to LOVE it. and you, ofc!

loves little picnics with you, even in as such a dreary and depressing setting as a cemetery. she packed all the food herself and smiles so big when you take a bite and seem to enjoy whatever sandwich she tossed together for you. Her love language is definitely acts of service, but she isn't exactly opposed to physical touch! in fact I think she enjoys it. She just has to start out small like with hand holding and cheek kisses before full on cuddling and pecking a kiss to your lips

PLEASE do her eyeliner- or her makeup in general- don't touch her eyebrows tho, she thinks a bare forehead wouldn't suit her face like it does yours.

If you do end up doing her eyeliner, I think her poor little heart would stop for a full second as you leaned close and started to carefully apply it

she doesn't think you're selfish when you think about yourself. she envies that you don't worry about other people first, since that often plagues her mind when she's making decisions. Carrie finds herself worrying what other people would think if the breakfast she eats, sometimes. While that might be a con and get in the way of some relationships for you, she admires the ability to care for yourself first.

while her style isn't like yours, she does adopt something's and incorporate it and makes it her own. It's cute! especially cus she steals thinks like bracelets, earrings, necklaces, or maybe even a leather jacket. It's a little big on her but she LOVES that.

"Should I cut my hair? I like a style like yours."

Carrie would love to have a soft moment with you where you just listen to your music together.

she ends up being a huge mitski fan. Tears up the first time she hears "I bet on losing dogs" and washing machine heart makes her less emotional but still hits her in the heart.

"can we listen to that one again?"

has such sweet nicknames for you tbh. calls you flower, sweetie, and starling. yes, after the bird. you just remind her of it!

she would probably sneak out to see you. she loves being around u sm that she just.... has to be with you more and more.

breaks my heart to think about you being at the dance with her when everything goes down so... let's not touch on that.

just imagine laying in bed with her, facing each other, foreheads pressed against one anothers, and just looking in each other's eyes as music plays softly in the background 🥺

she adores you. that is all.

[serpentariusart]

So you want to help an artist?

Critique and advice (both pricing and general art ability) are some of the most important parts of an artist’s journey. None of the professional artists you know and love would be where they are now if someone hadn’t given them advice when they needed it.

However, a lot of people seem to forget, or simply not realise, that there’s a time and a place for these things. Not everyone always wants advice. Heck, I’m usually VERY receptive to critique and advice, I crave that. But there are times when I might be having a rough time, and critique on my art might put me in a worse mood, in particular if it’s unsolicited. Likewise for giving people advice on pricing their commissions: they may not always want that, for various reasons.

The biggest thing to remember is consent. Unsolicited advice can be very jarring, and even upsetting. If you want to help someone out, ask first. Just a simple “Hey, do you want any critique/advice right now?” is all. If they say no, leave it. If they say yes, great! But remember: there’s still a wrong way to give critique.

Don’t be harsh. This should be obvious but my god people can be scathing. And don’t JUST tell them what they need to improve upon. That does depend a bit, some artists might not mind, but a lot of artists, in particular young/novice artists might not take well to that. A GREAT formula for giving critique is this: positive comment/something they should improve upon/positive comment AND/OR relate the two. An example could be as follows:

“Firstly, I love your shading! It’s so dynamic, it really brings a lot of realism to the subject. I think your colouring could do with some improvement, I noticed a lot of odd colour combos in your work, and they can be a bit jarring. Proper colour theory will really compliment your shading though! And it’ll help out with that realism you seem to be going for. I have some great links about colour theory if you’d like to see them?

And a very important note for if someone specifically asks for critique: for god’s sake on offer RELEVANT critique that actually applies to what they’re asking. If someone wants some help on figuring out how they can improve their lineart, don’t start going on about how they should work on their shading. An exception could be, for example, if you think their lineart ability would benefit from something else, like anatomy, seeing as those two can often be linked. You’d think this whole “be relevant” thing is obvious, but I literally had someone offer a whole bunch of critique on my art, when I was asking for help with my writing. It was very jarring, and I have pretty bad emotional regulation sometimes so I may have lashed out a bit. Giving someone critique that is not relevant to what they’re asking is no different from just giving someone completely unsolicited advice. If you think they’ll benefit from critique in another area of their art, ask if you can comment on it.

And that’s all just art ability advice. Pricing advice is a whole other horse. Again, consent is everything and unsolicited advice is a bad idea. If you see someone offering commissions and think they need to change their prices, ask first if they’re receptive to that. There’s a lot of reasons people might not be, in particular being that they often struggle to make sales anyway, so telling them to raise their prices isn’t going to go down well. This in particular goes with artists who do traditional work, because traditional art typically is much harder to gain commissions for that digital art. You do trad art and you get commissions easily? Great! But your experience there is far from universal.

First and foremost: Unless someone is a legitimate professional (works in the art field/is a full time freelancer) and/or has a very long waiting list, that whole “charge mine wage for your country” thing is a load of bullshit. In an ideal world it’d be GREAT if we could all charge that much, but it just isn’t realistic. This goes doubly for people who live in countries with a much higher min-wage than the US. Most people who buy art from me live in the US, but considering my countries min-wage is about $14 USD it just isn’t affordable for a lot of my customer base. If I charged my min wage, I’d be charging US$90 for a fullbody. I’d love to make that much, but it’s not ideal.

It’s important to keep in mind that most people you see selling art in places like this aren’t professionals. Unless they’re extremely popular, they probably struggle to make a sale. Sometimes someone may genuinely benefit from being told to raise their prices. But they often won’t be.

If you think someone should raise their prices? The best thing you can do for them is support them. The very best way to do this is of course to buy art directly from them, at the price you think their art is worth. If you can’t do that, give them a platform. Reblog their art, share it with your friends. Help them get known. The more popular someone is the more commissions they can sell, the more money they can charge, the more money they can make. If you seriously want to help an artist, support them directly.

[firstfootingscotland]

Bogha-frois Conversations

Early this year during Glasgow’s Celtic Connections Festival I had the pleasure of joining a host of incredible LGBT+ artists for a performance and a panel around the theme of Bogha-frois: LGBT+ Voices in Folk. A brainchild of Pedro Cameron (Man of the Minch), Bogha-frois began as a workshop at the Scottish Storytelling Centre and takes its name from the Gaelic word for “rainbow.” The energy around Bogha-frois has enacted a metamorphosis - far beyond a standalone workshop, panel, or critically-acclaimed gig, Bogha-frois is a movement celebrating gender and sexual diversity within traditional and folk music, song, and dance in Scotland. Following the events in Glasgow, I wanted to continue these conversations and proposed a series of monthly blog posts. It’s hope this series will be a place for dialogue around the intersections of traditional arts, identity, and each artists’ path as a LGBT+ person. This month’s Bogha-frois conversationalist decided to share her story anonymously. I’m very grateful for her artistry, generosity, and courage in speaking about her experience.

Tell me a story... what was a moment when you felt both your identity as a traditional musician and your identity as a LGBTQIA+ person were in focus? (1)

I’m not sure they have ever been in focus at the same time until the Brogha-frois gig at Celtic Connections this year.

How do you identify? What are the pronouns, descriptors or other words you like to use, if any, to describe yourself in regard to your LGBTQIA+ status.

I identify as gay, would seldom use “lesbian” as I feel it’s more of a noun than an adjective, and when I was first starting to think about how I would describe myself to people, probably around 20 years ago now, I was really conscious that I didn’t want it to make me a “thing,” rather than a way. I guess that has stayed with me into adulthood.

Talk about your perceptions of LGBTQIA+ identity (both yours and others) within your experience playing traditional music in Scotland.

I think the trad music scene in Scotland is becoming increasingly open, and I’m aware of many more openly LGBTQIA+ folk on the scene. I don’t really think about my own identity within the trad music scene.

In what ways do you feel your identity as a LGBTQIA+ person and a traditional musician intersect, overlap, engage?

I don’t feel that my sexuality has had much influence on my music: as a mainly instrumental musician, I haven’t struggled so much with the pronoun issue a lot of singers find difficult. The times I’ve been aware of self-censoring are all around chat - the introduction to a tune written for my first girlfriend ended up having a silly story attached, rather than any affection. A tune written for a great love was seldom introduced at all, as I was conscious that I didn’t want to demean it with a glib story, but couldn’t face outing myself or talking myself in knots onstage! Before anwswering this question, I would have said that I haven’t ever really been aware of these parts of my identity overlapping or intersecting. With the above said, perhaps I have made a strong effort to make sure that they didn’t overlap. The Bogha-frois gig was a big deal for me in regards to that. It was a pretty nerve-wracking thing to allow them to both be visible. And, as it turned out in the end, it really didn’t need to be!

Talk about your experience connecting with other LGBTQIA+ folks both inside and outside the traditional arts. If you’re comfortable sharing, talk about any incidents of homophobia or transphobia that you’ve witnessed both inside and outside the traditional arts.

I don’t really take a great part in the “folk scene,” and even less in the gay scene: a situation with which I am quite content. I have many gay friends, but these are mostly people whose only connection to the folk scene is me! None of these friendships are based on a shared identity, more on shared humour, experiences, university choices!

I grew up surrounded by the casually homophobic language and attitudes that many of my peers did, but can’t remember any overt or aggressive incidents. One really positive thing I’m aware of is that I feel that I’m hearing less and less of that all the time. I’m sure it still exists, but people seem to be much more aware of how offensive it can be and making an effort to alter this. The attitudes may take longer to change, but the language and behaviour being tempered is a positive thing.

How do you see the traditional arts changing in regard to LGBTQIA+ people? What are the further changes you would like to see?

Perhaps it is representative of society in general, but the number of young musicians coming through now who feel completely comfortable to be out and open about their identity is greatly increased since I first got involved with the trad arts scene. LGBTQIA+ audience members are much more likely to see themselves represented by performers now, making the scene feel much less cloistered and way more inclusive. Long may this continue!

First Footing is a collaboration between dancer and dance researcher Nic Gareiss, the Traditional Dance Forum of Scotland, University of Edinburgh Moray House School of Education, and the School of Scottish Studies with support from Creative Scotland. For engagement opportunities check out the First Footing website.

(1) Following methodology developed by Fiona Buckland in her book Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-making, I began each conversation asking artists to tell me a story. This, Buckland reminds us, redistributes significance to the voice of the artist, rather than the anthropologist/researcher/interviewer. In Buckland’s words, “the meanings they made from the practices are more crucial than whatever meaning I impose with the theoretical tools in my standard issue doctoral utility belt.” (Buckland 2002, p. 11) This feels incredibly important when collaborating with folks whose voices have so often been underheard or marginalized. 

[dustedmagazine]

Listed: Luke Winslow-King

Luke Winslow-King has spent his career blending strains of traditional American music. Throughout a decade of releases, the sounds and attitude of his adopted home of New Orleans filter through his albums, whether he feels the blues or moves into jazzier sounds. After 2016's break-up album I'm Glad Trouble Don't Last Always, Winslow-King plays the blues less and brightens his tone for new release Blue Mesa. On an album surprisingly recorded in Italy, his guitar works its way through ballads and rockers, with a little extra swamp and boogie, the Stax influences pushing through a little more, even as the album maintains a stylistic diversity. With his approach to music, it would be expected that Winslow-King would have favorites from across the country (and from one British band influenced in their way by American roots music). For this edition of Listed, he provides his top 10 albums of all time, in no particular order.

Ry Cooder – Boomer's Story

A childhood family friend handed me this album when I was 15. It has been a source of inspiration ever since. Tales of woe sung by a train hopping hobo. Slide guitar Bible...

Bob Dylan – Time Out of Mind

I listened to this album for the first time crossing Lake Pontchartrain on my way to New Orleans. I ended up living there for 15 years, slowing unearthing the lyrics of this album layer by layer. It's Dylan's late masterpiece in my opinion. Daniel Lanois’ production is incredible as well.

Beck – Sea Change

"Put your hands on the wheel / Let the golden age begin." The acoustic songster side of Beck, coated in metallic reverb lasting for days.

Tom Petty – Wildflowers

Plays like a greatest hits record. Songs like “Time to Move On” keep we writing and believing in artistic simplicity. It takes a good many records to reach one as clear and confident as this.

Gram Parson – Return of the Grievous Angel

The quintessential outsider country album. Gram explores the billboards and truck stops of the west, singing in tandem with an underage Emmy Lou Harris. The original “Love Hurts” and bizarre lyrics shoehorned into a country song. "And I thought about a calico bonnet from Cheyenne to Tennessee.”

The Rolling Stones – Sticky Fingers

Recorded live in the studio in the late '60s, this one captures the Stones at their dirty, jagged peak. The guitar intro to “Can't You Hear Me Knocking” alone made me a Keith fan for life. “Wild Horses” and “You Gotta Move” were record at Muscle Shoals in Alabama, committing their blues pilgrimage to wax.

Baby Dodds Trio – Jazz a' la Creole

The is the best Mardi Gras album of all time. Great for sipping wine and getting in costume. Mardi Gras Indian classics performed in a trad jazz combo setting. Danny Barker sings in English and French Creole, capturing the essence of New Orleans flavor.

Aretha Franklin – I Never Loved a Man the Way That I Love You

The Queen of Soul never grows old. This album has reminded me that in not alone in times of struggle. If you ever feel like you've been done wrong, put it on and you'll have Aretha in your corner. I love the recording and performance of the the Atlantic/Muscle Shoals house band at their best. Sounds like she's about to break the microphone...

The Band – The Band (The Brown Album)

This one feels like a family member. Like Levon Helm, Richard Manuel, and Rick Danko are my crazy drunkels whiling out on a long weekend. I heard this one a lot growing up and can relate to the esthetic sound of the record. I love the way they internalize roots and blues music and truly make them their own.

Bob Dylan – Blood on the Tracks

“Simple Twist of Fate” transports me every time. I feel like these songs are about my life personally. “Tangled up in Blue” is truly an novel.

[talhaghafoor2019-blog]

Joni Mitchell: the sophistication of her music sets her apart from her peers – even Dylan

“But even on the scuffle, the cleaner’s press was in my jeans/ And any eye for detail caught a little lace along the seams,” sang Joni Mitchell on a song called The Boho Dance from her 1975 album The Hissing of Summer Lawns. If the couplet was an acknowledgment of her Canadian well-bredness, it was also the perfect metaphor for the increasing sophistication of her music at that time, the “lace along the seams” of her songs.

“For a long time, I’ve been playing in straight rhythms,” Mitchell told her friend, Malka Marom, in 1973, in the first of the three extended interviews that are included in Both Sides Now, a new book published next month. “But now, in order to sophisticate my music to my own taste, I push it into odd places that feel a little unusual to me, so that I feel I’m stretching out.”

Sophistication – melodic, lyrical, compositional – is an undervalued currency in popular music, though it illuminates the finest songs written by artists as diverse as Lennon and McCartney, Randy Newman, Ray Davies, Brian Wilson, Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield as well as the songwriters for hire of an earlier era – Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, George Gershwin. It also defines the best songs that Joni Mitchell wrote at her creative peak, which, for me, stretched from the release of Blue (1971), through For the Roses (1972), Court and Spark (1974) and The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975), to the pared and broodingly atmospheric Hejira (1976).

The sophistication of her songwriting and, in particular, her musical arrangements is the essential element that sets Joni Mitchell apart from her contemporaries and her peers, whether the troubadours of the early 70s Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter scene or lyrical heavyweights such as Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and even Bob Dylan. And yet in the music industry, Mitchell has never really been afforded the kind of respect heaped on her male counterparts. Rolling Stone magazine once listed her at No 62 in its 100 greatest artists of all time, just below Metallica. She was belatedly inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997, but did not attend the ceremony. At 70, she remains a defiant outsider and recluse, who has often expressed her disgust at the music business. And who can blame her?

Her legacy, though, is long and enduringly influential, particularly on several ensuing generations of female singer-songwriters. If I had to choose her two masterpieces, I would opt for Blue and The Hissing of Summer Lawns, which between them illustrate the range and depth of her compositional skill. Playing Hissing... again now, its utter completeness strikes me even more strongly, in this age of endless MP3 playlists. I seldom listen to a single track in isolation. (The exception is the iconoclastic and still arresting song The Jungle Line, which jumps out at you with its juxtaposition of Mitchell’s voice and the thunderous rhythms and whoops of the Drummers of Burundi.)

Mitchell came up though the American trad-folk circuit of the mid-60s and was for her first two albums marketed as a fey, fragile hippy folk singer. She had already survived several setbacks. Her childhood in small-town Saskatchewan was fractured when she contacted polio, aged eight, in 1951. In 1964, she had fallen pregnant and, struggling financially, gave her newborn daughter up for adoption the following year. (The song, Little Green, from Blue, is an ode to her lost daughter and, on Chinese Cafe, a song released in 1982, she sang: “My child’s a stranger / I bore her / But I could not raise her.” She was reunited with her daughter, Kilauren Gibb, in 1997.) A brief, unhappy marriage to her fleeting musical partner Chuck Mitchell followed, before she set out on her own to be a folk singer.

Joni Mitchell at the Rotunda Gallery in Broad Street London, 1990. Photograph: Mike Floyd/Associated Newspapers/Rex

When her manager, Elliot Roberts, first contacted her at the prompting of her early champion David Crosby, Mitchell was setting out on a tour she had organised herself, carrying a small suitcase and an acoustic guitar. She told him she didn’t need a manager, but he persisted. He later said she had already written as many great songs as most songwriters created in a lifetime. It wasn’t until Mitchell settled in Laurel Canyon in the late 60s, sharing a house with the British songwriter Graham Nash, that she found a community of like-minded souls – Nash, Crosby, Stephen Stills, Jackson Browne, Mama Cass – to which she could belong at last, for a while at least. Her romantic liaisons were the stuff of legend – Crosby, Nash, Browne, James Taylor. Rolling Stone once published a diagram of her various romances under the disparaging heading: “Old lady of the year”.

It was there, though, that her music deepened and shed its folkie affectations. She later acknowledged that her songwriter style also drew on what she called “the beautiful melodies which belong to the crooner era”. But it was Dylan – who else? – who taught her the power of another kind of narrative, free-form and allusive, as well as the often deadly deployment of the first person singular.

“There wasn’t much room for poetic description in those older melodic songs,” she noted in a 2003 Canadian documentary, Woman of Heart and Mind. “That’s why I liked the more storytelling quality of Dylan’s work and the idea of the personal narrative. He would speak as if to one person in a song… That was the key that opened all the doors.”

In absorbing Dylan’s personal point of view, which hit her with the full force of an epiphany the first time she heard the gleefully splenetic Positively 4th Street, and melding it to the geometry of the old-fashioned well-wrought song, Mitchell began an extraordinary artistic voyage in the early 1970s. It began with the starkly powerful Blue, on which she single-handedly redefined the notion of the singer-songwriter. Intimate and confessional, her new songs of love and heartbreak shocked some of her male counterparts with their emotional intensity. On first hearing them, her friend Kris Kristofferson exclaimed: “Oh Joni – save something of yourself!”

That was not an option for Mitchell, whose songwriting had now approached a level of rapt intensity. Graham Nash, the Manchester-born, Los Angeles-based songwriter, remembers her “channelling” her songs so intensely at the piano of the house they shared in leafy Laurel Canyon that she would be utterly immune to his presence in the room.

When I interviewed Mitchell in 1988, she said: “My work has always contained the question of how far the pop song could go. What themes it could hold without collapsing.” The trio of austerely beautiful and forlorn songs – River, A Case of You and The Last Time I Saw Richard – that close Blue are the real beginning of that creative tightrope walk. On the final repeated line of the beautifully forlorn River – “I wish I had a river I could skate away on” – she lingers on “skate”, making it sound like the resigned cry of someone falling slowly, wilfully though the ice.

“During the making of Blue, I was so thin-skinned and delicate that if anyone looked at me, I’d burst into tears,” she admitted years later, referring to the messy fracturing of her relationship with Nash and the tentative beginnings of a short, but intense, relationship with James Taylor, then in the throes of heroin addiction.

The success of Blue made Mitchell a star, the most powerfully personal voice of an emerging generation of west coast-based confessional singer-songwriters that included Taylor, Jackson Browne and Carole King. “My individual psychological descent coincided with my ascent into the public eye,” she later said. “They were putting me on a pedestal and I was wobbling.”

Blue, though, also signalled in more subtle ways the more dramatic musical shift that was to follow. Listen to the way she enunciates the very first notes of the title song, settling on the word “blue”, stretching and bending it across an octave or two in the manner of a seasoned jazz singer. Then there’s the joyous lilt and sway of Carey, one of several songs of wanderlust that, across the years, testify to a relentlessly restless spirit. The term folk singer no longer contained her, nor increasingly did singer-songwriter which, by then, was becoming synonymous with a certain kind of plaintive Californian narcissism.

If Blue was a dramatic refinement of her songwriting approach, the next album, For the Roses, seemed like a step sideways. Revealingly, though, the usual coterie of LA session players was augmented by jazz musicians Wilton Felder and Tom Scott. The effortlessly commercial You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio – written to assuage David Geffen, the boss of her new record label, who had been pressuring her to write a hit single – and the snaky thrust of Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire both pulse with the more musically loose-limbed presence of Felder (bass) and Scott (woodwind and reeds). Joni was branching out and moving on once again.

Despite all these scattered clues, though, Court and Spark came as a surprise. Gone was the fragile, confessional songstress in a flowing dress; instead, here was a confident, full-throated singer in designer threads with a slick electric band in tow. Gone, too, were the acoustic songs sung with just a guitar, piano or dulcimer backing, replaced by an electric, jazz-inflected, intricately arranged sound, courtesy of Tom Scott’s LA Express, that weaved around lyrics that were acutely observational or dazzlingly impressionistic, rather than soul-baringly confessional. When her friend, Malka Marom, author of Both Sides Now, asked her if the band’s presence meant that she might risk the vulnerable singer-songwriter image she had cultivated, Mitchell replied defiantly: “Well, I don’t want to be vulnerable any more.”

Not for the first or last time, Joni Mitchell had moved on and, in doing so, had remade herself in the manner of a true artist.

Underpinning Mitchell’s new songs, the band sound muscular and sinuous, but, as some live footage from this period shows, it is Joni who is most liberated by the pairing, her voice now a thing of raw and sensual power as well as a vehicle for the articulation of sorrow and sadness. As her friend, the songwriter Eric Andersen, put it: “This fragile Nordic goddess became a red-hot mama, flesh and blood.”

“I was there when they were rehearsing the Court and Spark songs for the live tour,” says Malka Marom. “Joni had a close connection with drummer John Guerin. He was the first person to put her music on paper; he mapped it out for the band. But he was also the one who inspired the courting and the sparking.” You can hear that romantic static loud and clear on the raucously sensual Raised On Robbery, in which Mitchell inhabits the role of a good-time girl on the pick-up, relishing the lines, “I’m a pretty good cook, I’m sitting on my groceries/ Come up to my kitchen, I’ll show you my best recipe.” It was a long way from Laurel Canyon, lunar miles from the folksy piety of Clouds.

Joni Mitchell with the LA Express: Raised on Robbery, live in London, 1974.

On Free Man in Paris – reputedly about Geffen – and the observational People’s Parties, Mitchell turned her gaze on the newly ascendant Los Angeles rock music aristocracy with their “passport smiles” and cocaine cool. As Court and Spark became her bestselling album, she was still the conflicted outsider, unable to fit comfortably into this new elite – “I feel like I’m sleeping, can you wake me?” she sings on People’s Parties, sounding resigned, almost numb, “...I’m just living on nerves and feelings with a weak and a lazy mind/ And coming to people’s parties, fumbling, deaf, dumb and blind.”

The follow-up, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, sparked a critical backlash that, now, is hard to fathom. Rolling Stone noted Mitchell’s increasing sophistication as a songwriter while lambasting her “increasingly eccentric” melodies and “uninspired jazz-rock style”. One suspects that the rock blokes wanted folk-rock authenticity, but her hybrid sound and the shifts in style that now marked her writing had taken her way beyond that.

Among those who did get The Hissing of Summer Lawns, though, were Morrissey – who called it “the first album that completely captivated me” – and Prince. “Hissing got thrashed,” a defiant but still bruised Mitchell recalls in Both Sides Now. “But meanwhile out there was Prince. That was his first Joni record, and it was his Joni record of all time. So, though it got thrashed by the press, the young artists coming up could see there was something going on there.”

What was going on was another refinement of style, another burnishing of lyrical and musical sophistication. Both the title track and Edith and the Kingpin dissect the compromises made by women bound by marriage to powerful men. The former has poetry aplenty, her observational skill honed to near perfection as she elaborates the consequences of a hollowed-out life behind the high walls of a mansion in the Hollywood hills: “He gave her his darkness to regret, and good reason to quit him/ He gave her a roomful of Chippendale that nobody sits in”.

This is Mitchell exploring in song a similar terrain to Joan Didion, evoking the soul-deadening mixture of ennui and privilege that Didion would also dissect in her essays about Los Angeles in the 1970s.

In The Boho Dance, Mitchell’s writing deploys an almost cinematic point of view – “a camera pans the cocktail hour” – and a similar approach is used to more impressionistic effect for the fleeting images that flicker through Harry’s House (“Yellow checkers for the kitchen/ Climbing ivy for the bath/ She is lost in House and Gardens/ He is caught up in Chief of Staff”) before the song takes a sudden turn into poignant personal recollection (“He drifts off into the memory/ Of the way she looked in school/ With her body oiled and shining/ At the public swimming pool”). This is songwriting of the highest order, brimming with telling detail, yet pared to the bone, refined and yet teeming with suggestion.

After the richness of Hissing, the mood poems of Hejira seemed to me for a long time to be a muted coda to Mitchell’s golden period. Over time, though, the best of these often slow and brooding songs – Hejira, Amelia, Blue Motel Room – have kept calling me back despite my slight aversion to Jaco Pastorius’s relentlessly virtuoso bass playing. If Blue Motel Room is a study in longing and languorous sensuality – Prince has been known to cover it live – Amelia, an ode to the pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart, sees Mitchell in reflective mood, her confessional honesty now even more nakedly self-searing than before. “Maybe I’ve never really loved, I guess that is the truth”, she sings in the penultimate verse, “I’ve spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitudes…”

Once again, she is articulating the essential duality that has underpinned her life, the search for love pitted against the austerity of the lone artistic life, but this time we are left in no doubt as to which has won out. It is an acknowledgment that Joni Mitchell created her best music at some personal cost, which is part of the reason it carries such emotional resonance across the years. She once said that her audience connected with the honesty of a great song because “it strikes against the very nerves of their life”. She then added: “To do that, you have to first strike against your own.” For me, she is indisputably the most sophisticated voice of hope and heartbreak, joy and sorrow, in popular music. I hope against hope that she may yet return to the stage to reinterpret her songs in the spirit of risk and adventure that once defined her singular musical journey. If anyone can do that, Joni Mitchell can.

Both Sides Now is published by Omnibus (£19.95). Click here to buy it for £16.96. Four-disc box set Love Has Many Faces: A Quartet, a Ballet, Waiting to Be Danced, featuring 53 remastered songs from Mitchell’s career, is out 17 November on Rhino

Topics

Reuse this content

This content was originally published here.