Testo Part II – Blood Ballet: 2012-2015 (Commentary)

So, the next six you're gonna hear are from a record called Blood Ballet. It was my second record. I came out in July of 2014, and these songs were all written all in the time since moving to New York in late 2012. So I was 18, 19, 20 when all of this was being written, being recorded, being produced

It is called Blood Ballet because of the song "Blood Ballet," and the idea of a blood ballet is a beautiful mess. It's about the sort of grace that destruction can sometimes take, and for me personally I was completely unravelling because I think that's kind of what happens at that age. I have lived in rural Maryland my entire life, and I was 18 years old and I moved to New York City. And everything I believed to be true was completely blown open and changed. I started seeing four, five, six show a week. You know, before it would take me two hours plus to get to see a show and it was like the most sacred thing in the entire world and suddenly I had access to this thing I had just dreamt about forever. And I think you can hear that too in this record. I'm sort of experimenting with a couple different styles. You can hear me really in true folk mode on songs like "James." Um, shout out to my high school boyfriend James. Um, you can hear me really starting to learn my craft as a songwriter on songs like "Blood Ballet." You know, I was also on this record removing from banjo where I started in 2011, 2012 and into electric guitar and that spectrum is filled in on songs like "Resonant Body" or "Little Joys." Um, I was really starting to play around with space in production on songs like "Symmetry." My brain was starting to expand

It's important to note that both The Echo, my first record, and Blood Ballet, my second record, lived on streaming services. These songs were out in the world. They were on Spotify. They were on Bandcamp where they still live. They came out as I was making them, but when I was graduating from college I had a double major in Music Production and in English, and I was working as a journalist and I thought I was going to be applying for jobs as a music journalist and I thought that if I had music out on streaming services it could hurt my credentials and hurt my objectivity for an editor's point of view. So, I went onto CD Baby or whatever the site was that I had independently distributed them through and I applied for all the songs to come down

Some background on independent distributors is this music doesn't come down immediately. There is a sort of lag time where they process your request and eventually the music will come off the internet. Two days after I applied for this music to come down the video of me and Pharrell Williams at NYU went viral and suddenly I had five songs in the Viral Top 50 from these old records and then they just went inactive [laughs] and they just completely disappeared off the internet. So, I was on the phone with this company being like, "You have to get them back! Like, I can't do it." And it didn't work and so I sort of out of nowhere was given this blank slate. I was gonna get this shot at a career in music that I had always wanted, but it sort of looked different that I thought