#theyre so easy to play with. like i made that biologis a she/her but shes not A Woman. she's a biologis who wants to look like a wrack whil

[neonhellscape]

Im not kidding, your magos biologis is the (catalyst) reason i am deciding to go on t and get top surgery

god im so with you on this one. good luck on your mission boss

[mbat]

"natural world order" 🤢 shut upppp

btw i forgot to elaborate earlier on like. why the 'you have to choose one or the other' thing is really annoying. like thats such an easy metaphor for being something like mixed, and like... real life people dont have to 'choose' like its life or death... and one half of them especially doesnt 'take over' if they dont choose or something. people can choose which side to lean into more, or both at the same time, but no matter what itll always be a part of them. its not something that can be taken away or whatever. obviously these shows dont consider this when they do this dumb trope but whatever

its just such a nothing conflict. like its undeniably manufactured, which is silly when its ALL manufactured because its fiction, but it feels manufactured, and thats the last thing you want when writing something.

like, ive said before how for example in steven universe hes literally mixed species and, well first off he doesnt ever have to choose like characters in this show and another do, but he has the opportunity to explore these sides and even neglect the other if thats how things go, and they do. but even when he goes all in on one side of himself, hes still that other side. him dedicating himself entirely to gem stuff for several years never stopped him from still being half human. and even when he decides he wants to finally explore his human side, it wont stop him from still being half gem

i dont know how to explain it in a way that sounds right lol. its just such a shit conflict. also i forgot to say but they added yet another element to it where they made it so when the 'blendeds' as they call them choose which side to be, they forget they were ever the other thing ?? which makes it even more dumb??

i guess what im forgetting to say is WHY IS THAT HOW IT WORKS.!!!!!

is it just the biology they evolved(were created?) with? did something make it that way? is their biology fighting itself in some sort of incompatability way? is the monster dna stronger ??? is there some dumbass council that made it like this ??? like. WHAT!!!!!!!!!!! ALSO THEY HAVE TO CHOOSE BY 16 THAT IS SUCH AN ARBITRARY AGE that is such classic kids show stuff

theyre not gonna answer that though, i just know it. i mean, in wowp, the other show that does this, they never explained it either. they just said 'oh only one sibling from every family can be a wizard!' and left it at that, and when a character rebeled because she was rightfully like 'this rule is super stupid literally why does it exist' THEY KILLED HER ON SCREEN !!!!

at least in that show we know it was a rule made by a council, a really shitty one at that

dont @ me about me taking kids shows too seriously, im not actually mad or anything ajfjshf im just SUPER bored and i like fantasy a lot and this show has tropes that are soooo fucking dumb and boring

also these kids dont have discord i just know it, thats so weird. like this show is from last year, and there was a line where they were like '[the lead in the play] texted all of us this thing' and the main girl is like 'i didnt get the text' and its like... do yall not have a server for this? at the very least a group chat on SOMETHING? i mean i was never a theater kid but youre all in a group doing something coordinated, at least have some sort of group communication for it?

by the way one of the characters unironically texted someone else the word 'kewl'. in 2023. who has used that word in the last decade. who. and they keep saying stuff like 'obvs/obvi' and 'jelly' out loud along with other words that.... why

i hate how modern fantasy ALWAYS. hides nonhumans from humans. like it makes for an interesting conflict the first few times you see it but its... just so overdone holy shit. i would kill to see a modern fantasy show where that isnt a thing lmao

[artcanary]

1-50

oh my god dude 

im gonna put this under a cut bc this is a lot. this is a ride, have fun i guess

1. Your first OC ever?god. its got to be Super Kitty. when i was like … an incredibly small child I used to draw comic strips about this feline caped crusader, who was friends with everyone in the city, and the comics always involved him stopping an evil banana man from stealing money from the local bank. He was paid with donuts for his service to the city. i still remember how to draw him. 

2. Do you have a personal favourite among your OCs?i’d get arrested if I didn’t answer this with Bronze, probably… but really, they’re very important to me

3. Have you ever adopted a character or gotten a character from someone else?man, i cant remember! i really dont think i have… P:

4. A character you rarely talk about?there’s loads of characters ive never even posted a single picture of on tumblr, i wouldnt even know where to start asdf

5. If you could make only one of your OCs popular/known, who would it be? bronze is the easy answer, but… i guess that could also go to Servant or Westrin. Servant has a comic project in the works that basically stars him, sort of a series of one-shots about the things he’s experienced, i feel like that would be a good thing to take off and run with. Westrin’s just fun as hell, i love the guy.

6. Two OCs of yours that look alike despite not being related?real talk now… there’s at least five different characters that i refer to as a whole as “bronze-tangential”, who started out as, “what would bronze be like if they were in this world?” and then becoming their own thing within said world because i just get stupid attached 

its an epidemic

7. Are your OCs part of any story or stories?nearly all of them, actually. that’s the main reason i make characters, after all! too many to really go into specifics here, again P: 

8. Do you RP as any of your OCs? If you do, introduce one of your RP OCs here!not often, but i think Bronze and Westrin are the most common ones. unless playing a character in dnd, or running an npc in dnd counts… then a whole lot more hahaha

9. Would you ever be willing to give any of your OCs to someone else?it depends on the circumstances. i don’t really like the idea, though. 

10. Introduce an OC with a complicated design? Westrin’s old getup is a pain to draw, and there was one other design i did that I cant find anywhere… whichever way, i dont often tend to draw super complicated things often 

a couple fakemon ive designed though… heheh those can get pretty finicky

11. Is there any OC of yours you could describe as a “sunshine”? hmmmmmmmm my immediate thought was Eric Silverdale from a comic i was working on a few years ago. hes a darling, i want him to be my friend irl

12. Name an OC that isn’t yours but who you like a lothow could you do this to me i love each and every one of all my friends ocs GOD the first one who comes to mind is @d20-official‘s Smith, whos Bronze’s friend… everyone in that DND party actually

13. Do you have any troublemaker OCs? Rated on a scale from “harmless” to “honestly somewhat frightening”: -Baromet (charming and quite friendly but definitely a kleptomaniac),-Westrin (demigod of bards and travelers), -XEN09 (a nonsense hacker), -Conny (needlessly contrarian and dumb as HELL), -Enza Colie (long fucking story but hes a good-for-nothing), -Hemlocke (mad scientist, chaotic evil), -Iris (AI and hacker, VERY bad), -The Terminus (glitch-in-the-matrix demon, chaotic evil), -and Sydd (the Queen of the Faeries, hopefully the danger there needs no explaining :’D)

14. Introduce an OC with a tragic backstory Mmm… there’s a few of them, most obviously Lent (whose background I did a short comic about). Basically his entire town got eaten by ghosts and turned into zombies, he only barely survived with a sliver of his soul left. 

15. Do you like to talk about your OCs with other people?yes, i often discuss storylines and such with friends

16. Which one of your OCs would be the best at biology (school subject)? Probably Bronze’s dad! I don’t talk about him much, but his name’s Devon Reed, and he was a biotech developer specialising in android design. 

I often describe him as being something of a reverse Arthur Weasley - a very fatherly scientist fascinated to the moon and back with the concept of magic. 

17. Any OC OTPs? having trouble thinking of a lot of them right now, but there’s Eric + Lent & Naiadine + Tailias from Emerald Sigil, Avken + Baromet from my space campaign world, Sydd + Wyvv from my unnamed campaign world, and I’ve been considering Westrin + Servant as an interesting dynamic in Servant’s story

18. Any OC crackships? My character Bismuth and @autistictimeknight​‘s oc Eros. Theyre so fucking in love, I love it. Its been awhile but I do still think about them sometimes.

As I recall, Eros is an empath, she can read other people’s emotions. But Bismuth is a robot, and Eros can’t read her. Because of this Eros can let go of her fear of unintentionally manipulating the emotions of her date, which would hold her back from most other relationships. 

19. Introduce an OC that means a lot to you (and explain why)Hey, meet Bronze! I definitely do not talk about them every five minutes, why would you say that. 

Bronze was with me through two of the hardest years of my life so far, and being a DND character they grew with me, both as a fighter and as a person. They were non-binary before I started using those pronouns, they were the first character or person or anything who I fought someone about using the right pronouns for, they make a great icebreaker for if I want to see how someone reacts to non-binary pronouns … 

One funny anecdote about Bronze is that when I first made them, their “gimmick” was that they would sometimes glitch out and mess up their speech, mostly because I wanted an excuse not to engage in the roleplaying (which I was very bad at). The interesting thing is that as I got better at interacting with the group, we both grew out of needing it very quickly. 

I’m very proud of Bronze. 

20. Do any of your OCs sing? If they sing, care to share more details (headcanon voice, what kind of songs they like etc)?Westrin is a bard! His singing voice sounds like Bill Wurtz and these are his theme songs.

21. Your most artistic OCProbably Westrin again, he writes a lot of songs… and Hallux is a game designer?

22. Is there any OC of yours people tend to mischaracterize? If yes, how? I honestly dont know… no-one talks to me about them, haha! 

people use all manner of pronouns for bronze, though. 

23. Introduce OC that has changed from your first idea concerning what the character would be like?I’m gonna go with Enza for this one. Enza Colie was originally written entirely because I wanted an antagonist for a short starring his sister, Jane Colie. But the more I fleshed out his reasonings for acting how he did and explored his character, the more I realised he’d make an even more interesting character if allowed to have a redemption arc, too. 

I just want to state for the record that I was very reluctant to the idea, and he basically dragged his way out of the villain pit entirely of his own accord. I am dubiously proud of him, and also a bit scared. 

24. If you could meet one OC of yours, who would it be and why?Probably either Eric (Big Man, Best Friend), Crocus (Mother figure), Reed (Father Figure), Westrin (hed just make a good friend u kno??), or Bismuth (she makes good conversation!)

25. The OC that resembles you the most (same hobby, height, shared like/dislike for something etc?)probably the homestuck fan-troll Hallux, but that’s mostly because they were based on a troll-sona I made awhile ago. They’re a hope/prospit game designer who is small and full of rage and love

oh, and there’s dave! dave’s a superhero speedster, existing in a modern-day superhero version of seattle. theyre idiot, just like me,

26. Have you ever had to change your OC’s design or something else about them against your will? this is an interesting one… i don’t think ive ever had something Bad in a design ive done called to my attention by someone, but I did create my character Servant at around the same time I was first really expanding the diversity of my casts. (since i don’t talk about him often, a little context: he’s a magic spirit creature bound to human form to serve the royal family of the land and follow their orders.) 

somehow, younger-and-more-stupid me managed to have the revelation that making this “eternal slave” character literally anything other than a white man, especially as a white author, would be Pretty Not Good. im … thats really, really not something i should pat myself on the back for, but i do consider it one of the biggest bullets dodged in my artistic career so far that i realised that not all representation is good representation so quickly, before i could make that incredibly, incurably stupid mistake. 

after that, trying to make sure my characters and their presentations don’t harm anyone pretty much has become a paranoia. i don’t seem to have stepped on any toes yet, but when it inevitably happens, please let me know - i didnt know, and i want to fix it! 

27. Any OCs that were inspired by a certain song? None that I can think of, actually! I don’t really do that often. 

28. Your most dangerous OC? god damn it i have no idea!!! is it the terminus? glitch in the matrix god of chaos motherfucker?is it sarle? terrifying calculating scientist with the power of the soul at her fingertips ??? is it ares??? is it athena????? is it petra?????? the gatekeeper???? 

… actually, the gatekeeper might be it, if “dangerous” just refers to “the amount of raw power it can wield”. the Gatekeeper is a titanic entity that exists in interdimensional multiverse space, and its implied to have the ability to create and destroy entire universe bubbles at will. for what cosmic purpose, no-one knows. 

at a more personal scale, though, literally all of the aforementioned characters are pretty bad to run into too. 

29. Which one of your OCs would go investigate an abandoned house at night without telling anyone they’re going?god. Mina or Tawn. Tawn is the Indiana Jonesy type and probably dumb enough, but also competent enough not to get into too much trouble there. Mina would probably drag her friends along. 

30. Which one of your OCs would most likely have a secret stuffed animal collection? XEN09. No-one knows, because no-one knows xir personal identity. Xe absolutely does, though. It’s less of a secret if you know xir in person, but good luck finding out about it otherwise. 

31. Pick one OC of yours and explain what their tumblr blog would be like (what they reblog, layout, anything really)dave just reblogs memes all the time tbh. they like to keep tabs on the ridiculous superhero news going on, and they show human jokes and cat videos to their alien gf. they dont really post or add to posts, but they talk in tags a lot. 

32. Which one of your OCs would be the most suitable horror game protagonist and why? i want to say tawn because i literally just realised ive been imagining their voice as sounding like luigi this entire fucking time and i never realised until this exact instant

33. Your shyest OC?probably baromet. they prefer to keep to themself in their hideout, with their collection of shiny things. they don’t really enjoy trying to communicate much, mostly because they expect to get yelled at. 

34. Do you have any twin characters?Yes! At least two sets; 

- Crocus and Sarle. (x) (x) They don’t exactly have a very well-developed relationship, but they are both quite important to the plot of my campaign world, and they are both very interesting. Crocus is a motherly figure who just exudes friendliness, while Sarle is .. very much not that, a researcher studying very gruesome things and pushing the boundaries of reality. 

- Jane and Enza Colie. I haven’t talked a whole lot about either of them here, but I’d rather leave their story to do the talking whenever I get around to it. Essentially, the both of them were intended to do the dirty work for their crime boss family, but Jane ditched to study medicine. Most of the conflict between the two of them comes out of Enza not understanding why she made the choice she did, and coming to understand how he’s been manipulated. 

35. Any sibling characters? I can’t really think of any off the top of my head, I should … I should really work on that. 

I can talk about Westrin, though. Westrin (a demigod of many things, but namely bards, travel, travelers, and people who are lost) often becomes close friends with mortals, sometimes practically adopting them. These people who consider him family, and people who have received his blessing, are able to use his surname, Brilanta, as their own if they choose. So I guess all of the Brilantas are siblings, at least in spirit. 

Oh, and XEN09 has like, seven siblings. Xe is the second-oldest, and least remarkable. 

36. Do you have OC pairs where the other part belongs to someone else (siblings, lovers, friends etc)? I already talked about Eros and Bismuth up there a ways in question 18, but I’ll talk about another relationship here. @autistictimeknight​‘s character, Nova the Alchemist, is mentor and adopted parental figure to my character Munna. Munna … Munna isn’t a very good apprentice. She tries very hard. 

37. Introduce an OC who is not quite human That’s most of them, I’m not quite sure what to say here. Bronze is an android? Bronze again? Westrin? All the aliens ?? 

38. Which one of your OCs would be the best dancer? man. uh. westrin or jean. or perhaps valencia. 

39. Introduce any character you want ??? uhhhHHHhhHHH Lord Brillium is the reigning deity of the Cloud Kingdoms in the other campaign setting I’m working on. They represent light and the quest for knowledge, and spend most of their days in the Cathedral Observatory watching the stars. 

40. Any fond memories linked to your characters? Feel free to share!one time bronze flew a hover-bike through the stained glass window in a cathedral blaring all star by smash mouth on their iguana

also one time bronze rickrolled a rakshasa demon and then pulled updog on it like, two minutes later

another time bronze scared off an entire army by pretending to be an automated security system 

41. Has anyone drawn fanart of your OCs? If yes, maybe show a picture or two here (remember sources & permissions!)ive got a whole little folder on here from all you blessed people !!!! right now ive got a drawing quinn did of one o fmy characters as my lockscreen

but i think the one i’ll really never ever get over is this piece of Jane, by @rabendraws​ / @owoltron​: 

(i bet you thought i forgot about this, dude. dude. think again.) 

42. Which one of your OCs would be the most interested in Greek gods? this is kind of a weird question, m, I feel like Bismuth would find learning about the mythos utterly fascinating, as would Tawn. 

43. Do you have any certain type when you create your OCs? Do you tend to favour some certain traits or looks? It’s time to confesshaha. uh. i might. 

aside from the entire “bronze-tangential characters” thing i mentioned awhile back, I tend to really like designing characters with hair color lighter than their skin color. it just looks so cool man. i love drawing freckles but dont put them on enough characters. i like really curly hair, but also really long and flowy hair. i like drawing triangular body types, and pointy/prominent noses. 

44. Something you like about your OCs in generaluhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh this is a really vague question. m. m. 

45. A character you no longer use?there’s old versions of characters, but a lot of my older ones have been somehow repurposed. I guess there’s Turien, my first-ever DND character, who’s just kind of sitting dead now. Haven’t really done anything with him other than a pretty recent tangential character. 

46. Has anyone ever told you that you treat your OCs badly?Not that I can think of.

47. Has anyone ever (friendly) claimed any of your OCs as their child? Im certain it’s happened, but I can’t remember any specific instances. 

48. OC who is a perfect cinnamon roll, too good for this world, too pureSpring. spring knows nothing of th dangers of the world who is letting them into fights someon eneeds to stop this

(spring roll, hehe.) 

49. Which one of your OCs would most likely enjoy memesim not sure what this question is asking since many of my ocs actively enjoy memes including but not limited to westrin, dave, bronze, xen09, iris, and doctor archersen

50. Give me the good ol’ OC talk here. Talk about anything you wanti think. i think im going to pass on this one. i gave you the good old oc talk. your damn turn, yall: 

if you have any questions about any of these guys feel free to shoot one at me!

thats all from me im tired and its one am. techskylander you absolute madman 

[viralhottopics]

From Joni Mitchell to Laura Marling: how female troubadours changed music

Singing about drugs, politics and disappointment was once seen as a male pursuit and almost half a century after female artists began to defy convention, many are still trying break the mould

In the summer of 1969, Newsweek published an articleunder the headline The Girls Letting Go, charting the burgeoning careers of a group of young musicians it termed a new school of talented female troubadours. They sang about politics, love affairs, the urban landscape, drugs, disappointment, and the life and loneliness of the itinerant performer subjects that, hitherto, had largely been the preserve of male musicians. What is common to them to Joni Mitchell and Lotti Golden, to Laura Nyro, Melanie, and to Elyse Weinberg, the writer, Hubert Saal, observed, are the personalised songs they write, like voyages of self-discovery what they celebrate is the natural, preferring the simple joy to the complex, the artless to the artful and, rather than the holding back, the letting go.

There have been many new female troubadours in the years since fromPatti Smith to Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris and Carole King all of them writing and singing across aperiod in which womens liberation made great strides. Today, almost 50 years since Saals article, womens lives are markedly different from the way they were in 1969, but has the world of women in song evolved as markedly?

We are at a peculiar point in the music industry: female artists such as Taylor Swift, Beyonc and Katy Perry have been among the industrystop earners in recent years, yet womens presence elsewhere in the industry is sparse, and female performers are thin on the ground at the summer music festivals. While this has generated much media discussion, how have female songwriters responded?

This early stretch of the year brings releases by several songwriters who might fall into that troubadour category. Artists such as Laura Marling, Courtney Marie Andrews, Julie Byrne and Nadia Reid are writing songs that capture the pulls of both domesticity and the road, and what it means to be living a life that does not entirely tally with convention.

Marlings sixth album, Semper Femina, follows last years Reversal ofthe Muse podcast series, in which she spoke to musicians such as Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris and Marika Hackman, as well as women elsewhere in the industry, such as guitar shop owner Pamela Cole and recording engineer Olga FitzRoy, to explore femininity in creativity from the challenges of writing, recording and touring, to the masculine design of guitars and the fact that women hear differently from men.

I would say that feminine creativity is inherently different from the masculine, says Marling. Even at its beginnings, she suspects that womens musical impulses have different motivations from those of their male counterparts. I had a lot of chats with Blake [Mills, Semper Feminas producer] when we were making the record, about how we started playing guitar, she says. And he was like: I started playing because I wanted to impress girls. And that was obviously so different from why I started playing guitar that was never in my brain, toimpress boys. So even that crucial difference makes for a different musician. For me, playing guitar has always been tied up with my identity rather than enticing people in, its always been involved in myself.

This album emerged after a time inwhich Marling felt that she had become increasingly masculine determinedly touring alone, lugging her own gear, stepping away from ideas of feminine dress. While this stretch was not long-lived, she believes it gave her an ability to look at women in a different way and consider how Id been looked at. She is resistant to being pigeonholed. I think, when Iwas a teenager, in my head you were either this delicate tragedy or you were a muse, she says. And theyre both such horrifyingly subjugated roles.

She was struck, too, by an old edition of Desert Island Discs in which Marianne Faithfull was the castaway. The presenter said: So, tell me, you must have felt very hard done by that all the Rolling Stones deserted you? And she said: Can you stop trying to make a tragedy of me? Im not a tragedy! Ive lived my life. Obviously, I was a drug addict, but I was always going to be a drug addict. I had an amazing time! And its true, by any other masculine name, all those experiences would be clocked up as experiences and nothing more.

But ideas of what women in music should be are hard to shake. There is animpulse to make an easy tragedy of female musicians who have spent their lives on the road. There is something, too, that expects women to be static, indoor, domesticated and confessional songwriters. As the late John Berger put it: Men act, women appear.

Crucial to this is the idea of women and movement women stepping outside the safe confines of the home and domesticity. For Julie Byrne, the compulsion to keep moving has run intandem with her career as a songwriter. I was always fascinated by thatlifestyle, she recalls. When I was living in Buffalo, New York, where Im from, there was a huge contingency of freight-train hoppers. There was a pretty legendary house in Buffalo called the Birdhouse that was well known in that network. So there was this huge influx of travellers in the summertime, and thered be really glorious parties with music until the early hours I think this was probably where this sense of wonderment camefrom.

In her teens, a year after she began playing music, Byrne toured with some friends, travelling through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee and South Carolina. She remembers the joy of that time the new landscapes, playing live, trying to navigate their way to the next city in the days before Google Maps and smartphones. I think it just strengthened all the curiosity I had, she says. I wanted to continue to learn through my experiences that way.

This is not to suggest it was without problems. We were in my friends old Volvo that had a leak in the gas tank, she says. We ended up running out of gas and were stranded on the highway somewhere outside Memphis. That was my first experience of being outside New York state and everything was enchanted. Breaking down, all of it. There was poetry in everything for me then, and I think a lot about that time, how moving just the most mundane aspects were for me when I was younger.

Her experience of the touring life has changed with the years while she retains some of that early wonderment, she also sees its limitations. Her most recent album, Not Even Happiness, was written largely in the time that Byrne was touring its predecessor, Rooms With Walls and Windows, when she gave up the place she had in Seattle, along with her furniture and most of her belongings, because I couldnt afford to maintain a room somewhere while I was on the road constantly.

That weightlessness brought a new quality to her music. A lot of these songs come from the power and the beauty of travel and of relying on the generosity of other people, she says. But also the pain of not having any privacy and not having anywhere to goto weep for the condition of the world or the condition of my own heart, so that was a time of extreme vulnerability. But I think that brought on some meaningful realisations in my life that you carry your burdens wherever you go, and they dont just fall away just because youre across the country or in a different setting. They stay with you until theyre resolved in some way.

Courtney Marie Andrews left her home in Phoenix, Arizona, when she was 16 and began busking along the west coast of America. I just fell in love with the lifestyle, she says. At that time I was so young and so ready to get out of Phoenix I just felt trapped there, and I realised there was so much more to the world. I loved making music with my friends every day, and being in different cities. I thrive on change, and I really felt drawn to the constant movement.

She soon found work, first as a backing singer for other artists, then playing lead guitar for Damien Jurado, and her life on the road ran on. It was only more recently, after the end of aserious relationship, that she began to consider the drawbacks of a rootless lifestyle. It is a subject she addresses on her latest album, Honest Life, setting all the nights of travelling, playing, eating alone in diners and sleeping in vans against the pleasures of a home and community.

I wrote those songs because Irealised Id spent pretty much my entire later adolescence and early 20s on the road, she says. Id come home and people had cultivated these really in-depth relationships, and I started topine for that. Id be home just for amonth and that would be it. The pluses are playing your songs every night with your friends you cant really complain. But the thing you missis the human connection. That canbecome really hard. You say: Hi, my names Courtney! 500 times on atour.

The trials of life on the road is not an unfamiliar subject for songwriters, but for female musicians there are additional weights: centuries of women being expected to stay at home, as well as the constrictions of time and biology; the music industry is not set up to accommodate parenthood, let alone the physical demands of motherhood. There is also the suspicion that greets women who dont quite conform.

For Byrne, life in freefall is something that can grant womens songwriting extra force and insight. Ithink that women living lifestyles with no fixed home and really having to be at the mercy of that experience will probably transcend that [more traditional] mould, she says. I think women have a certain vision that is so deeply connected to their interior lives, and I think women are inherently willing to be very vulnerable, and have an honesty that theyre willing to share with other people. And thats the most powerful thing there is.

Andrews is similarly hopeful that these songs of the road will still have the capacity to affect their listeners. Its so funny, I always thought, Well, this is just how it is, she says. But its very true [traditionally] men touch on this life in their songs and women talk about domestic issues or their husbands. But I hope that women, or just people in general, can empathise with those stories coming from a woman. Because anybody can live that kind of lifestyle.

Nearly half a century after that first wave of new female troubadours, it seems women songwriters are still muddling out a way to be. But however gradual, what we are witness to is stillan evolution, a slow bucking of convention, women singing songs that tell of a new life and its possibilities; 50 years on they are still letting go.

Not Even Happiness by Julie Byrne andHonest Life by Courtney Marie Andrews are both out now. Semper Femina by Laura Marling is due for release on More Alarming Records on 10March.

Read more: http://ift.tt/2jubIEh

from From Joni Mitchell to Laura Marling: how female troubadours changed music