Hello,
We’re just around six weeks ahead of the release of Viewfinder, my 2xLP with American Dreams, the most recent “solo” thing of my own doing since 2021. Please pre-order it so I don’t get even more of a complex. I wrote the dang thing 2021-2022, and have written at least 30 songs since then, some of the best I’ve ever written, and they’re in purgatory, and I’m dying of it; some of these songs have even been recorded, and I just keep having to wait for you to hear it. Viewfinder also has the best song I’ve ever written on it - In The Pines - and I want you to hear it SO BADLY but I keep having to wait! I hate it. I hate summer. Summer is impatience and inaction, swamp-ass and no appetite.
I feel the grossness of waiting as a sort of extension of the heat. My family is from the north-ish part of Eastern Europe, so I have to believe we are cold and thick and strong, and not (physically) suited to this boiling world. Every time I leave the house I feel like I’m suffocating under a thick wet screen. It doesn’t even have the erotics of apprehension, just entrapment.
I am not on the level in summer. Walking outside makes me hate all textures and sensations indiscriminately, but especially the screechy itch of those in power who keep making this stuff hotter and hotter, more neck and neck. I am all nerves and panic. Spotify numbers don’t help. Social media is a lie. It makes me feel melodramatic, especially because I have everything I need, I don’t want for anything at all, my war is largely emotional, and yet these “quantifiables” make me feel like even though I have made my way to your inbox, your eyes, whatever the hand of my emptiness is reaching for was a thin fog of false relief, a humid cloud that isn’t a breeze.
A few days ago I told someone, because of this pressure, that I feel like I am in the wrong industry. I told them that I should have put more time into knowing how to be marketable and what that could even mean, instead of trying to understand the guitar or songwriting or the techniques of music, the processes that bring me closer to God and to time, that help me become an architect of space, that (dangerously) remind me of the raw fact of my existence. I told them I should have been dieting instead. I have a theory that the music industry, like all industries, has a fetish for the thin female body because it reminds those in power within it that they can be bigger than someone - they know the field makes no money and creates waste and competition, so they just want to win at anything. Executives like to work with people whose arms they think they can easily break.
I have not looked like my arms could be easily broken for a long time. I think I was 17, the year I broke, was the last year my arms could have passed as weak. Now, I look strong and solid, and I am. I wish it was not such a battle for me to accept that about myself.
Here be the gigs:
Saturday August 3, Lisbon, Portugal. Jazz em Agusto with the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet. (This was yesterday, I know).
Wednesday August 7, Ridgewood New York, @cassette fka sundown, solo on a bill with Lefty Parker, Leah Rando, and Market.
Sunday August 11, Greenpoint NY, Light and Sound Design Studio Loft, duo with Caroline Davis, Joseph Allred also on the bill.
booked, and I love him. Tickets hereWednesday August 14, Jalopy Tavern in Brooklyn. I play solo or maybe with Mari on a bill with Jana Horn and Iceblink.
Sunday August 18, The Owl in BK. Whait plays a show that’s all I know!
23-25 Editrix tours with sister band Lahnah. Shows as follows:
8/23 PORTLAND, ME @ secret location (house show)
8/24 BOSTON at The Cantab
8/25 PROVIDENCE at AS220
Monday August 26 Whait opens Nick Zanca’s LP release show at TV Eye, Minivan also plays.
Wednesday August 28 I play solo in Philly at Abyssinia with Michael Cormier and Bad History Month.
On my stereo:
Stina Nordenstam - People are Strange
Lambchop - Damaged
Jim O’Rourke - Insignificance
nudo- alma blindada
chuquimamani condori - DJ E
On my bookshelf:
Elena Ferrante - My Brilliant Friend (finally)
Frederic Dannen - Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business -
Michal Ajvas - The Golden Age
The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins
Harpo Speaks! - Harpo Marx
On my Mind:
I want to know how everyone else learned Routine Maintenance Femininity. I never learned it despite being taken (at least) to get my hair cut a few times a year, by my mother. Because I never learned it I felt I never had to learn it, which then led to me now, at age 32, wondering, is this the time I start knowing what it is that I’ve rejected? Do I wax my brows, shave everything, gloss up, get regular pedicures? I got my first pedi in this afternoon and within a half hour got two chips in the baby blue. Sitting in the chair I felt so far from my body, sticky in the AC against the pleather. I felt self-conscious of my toes.
What is secret might simply be “anything you don’t know.”
Tonight at post-show drinks I heard about a guy who routinely/constantly chewed tobacco and spat it into fruit-flavored soda while touring with a band in a small car (I’m protecting this distant acquaintance by not specifying which fruit soda it was). This guy is married to the person who revamped Pre-K programs of NYC, making them free and accessible to all city residents (I’m protecting this person by hiding their gender, and by the fact that heroes aren’t so easily googleable, especially those who triumphed on missions that require the strength of a collective). That, my friends, is what you could be capable of if you stopped trying to change the gross habits of your spouses.
Evanescence is actually a perfect band name for that band.
Lately I have realized that I tour as though it’s the last time I’ll ever play where I’m playing, despite that, I’ve found, at the European hotel breakfast you’ll see the same people ever few years, that you can sometimes be asked back. That’s why the call it a circuit - it’s as obvious as how you write better at a desk than curled fetal in a bed. You skip a few, but ultimately you get there, but nobody ever tells you if you go back again, or if you won’t.
Tschuss,
Wendy
summer sucks, down with summer