it could be anything — claire rousay
#365Songs: May 1st
I love the stories of artists who were raised in claustrophobic environments — cults, churches, small Conservative communities–and who, through their craft, discovered a way out. A broader, richer world that validates non-normative lifestyles, breaks down conformist barriers.
There’s a Sparklehorse feel to rousey’s atmosphere building, the way she layers field recordings from intimate spaces — as if we’re in a place we shouldn’t be, overhearing sounds we weren’t meant to hear, and yet she urges us to get closer, to listen deeper.
Earlier this year, I wrote about Ethel Cain, a Trans musician who freed herself from a Southern Baptist family to craft edgy music that darkens the edges of popular music — all without shedding the musical influences that raised her. Today, let’s talk about another Trans woman, claire rousey — also raised in the South, who also learned her craft in an Evangelical Christian church, who also fled to explore sexuality, loneliness, and nostalgia in a safer place.
rousay said in an interview, “As the drummer in an evangelical rock band, it’s your job, with the singers, to manipulate the crowd. You start building on the drums and you know it’s one bigger chorus and then we’re out and you can see the tears, people just start crying. I still feel a version of that when playing my own shows now.”
As manipulation goes, music is the finest of its forms. It shapes how we feel when watching film, how we experience a walk, how we connect to others, how we reshape our emotions in a moment. To learn a craft while being manipulated in a setting that won’t accept you is perhaps the best way to understand its power. claire rousey has done just that.
There are layers of ambiance in her songs, elements stacked up to build worlds. Atmospheric intimacy, a slightly distorted distance achieved through heavy Auto-tune. This is music that makes it ok to feel, to be sad, to ponder, feel nostalgia. A gentle reminder that a depressive state is a shared experience in a modern world where seemingly everything is more than slightly off, as we lose days waiting for a long overdue stasis that doesn’t seem to come.
“I want to belong to the worlds and communities I look up to. Same as someone using a Fender guitar or dressing like Kurt Cobain. Emulate your heroes,” says rousay. And don’t we all, no matter who we are and what we do. A seemingly simple sentiment made so difficult by a world so desperate to push us around, always in conflict, at odds with our own sensibilities and desires.
To be different in any way is to know you can’t fit yourself in the world as it is, that you either mask, hide in safe spaces, withhold your truth in any way you can, or boldly present yourself exactly as you are to a world that might reject you. It feels at times that rousay’s use of Auto-tune plays in this space, a way of distancing or numbing oneself from having to perform as anyone other than yourself.
All of these themes play through rousay’s gorgeous new album, sentiment. On it could be anything, she contemplates loss and jealousy, the violin like a voice on the edge of tears, the slow drum build a mirror for anxiety. This is what it feels like to get all caught up in your head, crafting false narratives. The song crescendos into desperation, a chant of someone trying to convince themselves of something they know isn’t true.
sentiment is an album best listened to from beginning to end. It starts with a depressed voicemail and takes you deep into places perhaps you’ve spent far too long avoiding. That, friends, is where we discover our most hidden truths.
First it’s cheers at the bar
In the bathroom, there it starts
Voices crack in the dark
Is it self-destruction or pure of heart?
This is not your problem
This is not your fault
This is just me trying to stay involved
This is not your problem
This is not your fault
This is just me trying to stay involved
This is not your problem
This is not your fault
This is just me trying to stay involved
~
Start following the #365Songs playlist today, and listen to each new song with each new article!
