Lost + Found
How a lost voice and a pair of sunglasses started a personal revolution...
Have you ever had a major life event occur that completely changed or redirected you as a being? That sounds really dramatic, but it kind of is dramatic. As I wrote in my previous post (read it here!), I experienced post viral (COVID) muscle tension dysphonia in my voice. It started in the winter of 2022, while we were living abroad in England. We had been touring like mad once the restrictions lifted. I played some of the biggest shows of my career - Green Man Festival in Wales, a full Europe tour supporting Courtney Marie Andrews, a big sold out London show supporting the shooting star that is Sierra Ferrell, countless festivals across the UK and Europe, and the most special; opening for the Eagles at Hyde Park. It was a go go go time for us.
Things really seemed on the up and up. We put out an album called Old Kind of Magic - the biggest (sonically) we’ve done to date, and had completed a lengthy record store tour to promote it, with the headlining tour scheduled for February of 2023. During the record store visits we contracted Covid for the 3rd or 4th time. Stephen got it first, then passed it to me. I gave myself about 1.5 weeks to get better and then was back on stage. Now, if you know English winters you know they are damp, dark, and very bone chillingly cold - even for this East Coaster. It was our third year living there, but I seemed to be getting less inclined to the weather as time went on. We played a show in London with friends then hopped on a train to Bath to start recording new songs.
During these sessions I was exhausted. I was being asked to push harder and harder vocally by the friend who was engineering (and forcefully producing) the recordings. By the end of the second day it was clear I was again getting sick. I tried to sleep it off, but when I couldn’t keep water or food down and my heart was racing (even when I was lying down), it was very clear something was wrong. I went to the emergency room where I continued to feel worse. My resting heart rate was 170 bpm. The doctors were confounded by me, I shouldn’t have been able to speak to them, I should have been severely sick. They ran labs which all came back normal. They took other tests that had me hooked up with tape and cords all over my body… nothing. After 16 hours I developed a thick cough, high fever, and body aches.
They sent me home… which was a 3 hour train ride and then 1 mile walk from the station to our flat. By the time we got home I was a shell. For the next few days and nights I sweated out whatever illness I had picked up. I was coughing… a lot. This was at Christmas by the way, fa la la. Stephen caught the Mumps from the hospital. We were both an absolute wreck. I am really glad we lived because I am not sure how we did. It took a solid month for my energy to come back. Just in time to go BACK to Bath and try to record some more. Now looking back I have zero idea why I agreed to this and I am proud to say that if I were in that position now I would say no. Gotta love how lessons make us have less tolerance for shite!
So back we went and back to pushing my voice both socially and in the recording room. It felt strained, at its breaking point, and I felt like we weren’t getting anywhere. We went home. At this point my nervous system was a mess. I was burnt out, my anxiety was extremely bad, and I wanted to go to a beach and never return. But we had a three week headlining tour of the UK! It was on this tour that I began to feel something was wrong. I was having a hard time with vocal stamina during the show, my pitch felt like it was running away from me, and I felt like my muscles were squeezing my voice. I thought, “it’ll go away I just need rest”.
The tour ended and I flew home to visit family. I thought I got the rest I needed. We went on a short tour of the Netherlands supporting a friend. During that tour all of my symptoms came back, but worse. I can’t believe I strong-armed myself and my voice through that whole tour. We came home and I took 10 days of vocal silence. Not speaking for 10 whole days does a lot for your voice, sure, but I felt like my brain could finally turn off. I finally had the peace I was in desperate need of. This was the beginning of me waking up from some weird fever dream veil I had been dosed by for the last 5+ years.
It’s really easy to get caught up. We all do, in our own way. Dreams are a heady load to carry and can truly make a person crazy. Being a woman in the music industry is also a way to go crazy. I was actually told once to “just do your Joni Mitchell thing,” as in - don’t be yourself, be someone else. That’s not only impractical and rude, but it’s so detrimental to the woman I am. I sadly have too many examples of this type of thing to list them all here, and you get the point. I felt like the more successful we got the more unhappy I was. All of a sudden my own values, opinions, tastes, and dreams were replaced by our label head, our booking agent, bandmates, fans, and friends. I got completely lost in trying to please other people and hanging onto the minute bit of success we had achieved.
How funny that the tighter you try to hold onto something, the faster it’ll slip through your fingers - almost protecting you from yourself. I am not sure if it was the Covid or the stress or both, but something set my nervous system off course and took my voice. I was completely devastated by this. I am not one to cry, but I spent at least one lifetime of tears crying over this. It broke me. I thank my lucky stars I am one hell of a strong ass woman. I am the only one who picked myself up and drug myself back. I had help and support but I was relearning how to speak, sing, and be. When you have to dedicate all of your life to recovery, suddenly everything shifts. Who can remain in your life, what you can be present for, what you will tolerate, how much you can give, how much you need, what you need… Your entire life becomes about getting better and making sure to not let anything that could have possibly contributed to this ever come near you again.
I am a person who loves people, so realizing that some of the newer people in my life, both personally and professionally, weren’t working for me was tough. I learned I had an abusive friend. I learned I needed therapy to recover from holding back how I have felt for my entire life. I learned that I wanted to take back the control over my creativity and not let any industry people intervene or advise. I learned that what once worked was no longer serving me at all. I needed boundaries. I needed my childhood friends who always always always hold space for me in the most beautiful way. I needed the familiarity of America. It was time to go home.
It was around then I realized I lost a pair of sunglasses. This was my favorite pair of 70s deadstock sunglasses, which I wore near daily and loved. I spent a long time, hours, looking for their replacement online, racking my brain for where precisely I left them, making myself feel crazy in the process. I even called several places in Bath, UK (now my least favorite part of England after Birmingham, which is a story for another time) where I believe I left them, to no avail. They were gone, gone, gone.
In the months that followed we moved back to America, after 3 years abroad. We felt homesick, cold, and longed to be out in the great wide West again. I started to feel this pull away from the person I had been for the last 5 years. I felt tired of dressing myself in clothes that no longer felt comfortable, jeans that were too tight to breathe, my feet falling apart from platforms, pointed boots, and cobblestones, and the never ending hunt for more made me feel restless and exhausted. I opened my closet and thought, “whose clothes are these?”. The energy around buying vintage had grown competitive, greedy, expensive, and exclusive - not a place I could justify spending any more of my time and hard earned money. I had already had a rough year with my voice disorder, and I just felt defeated and disconnected.
When I feel this way I turn to art, music, nature, books, films, journals, museums, plays, any creative work that will spark an interest in me, or awaken something that was dormant. I did just that and for some reason old western movies spoke to me during this time. The slow pace, the sweeping scenery, the beautiful soundtracks… A light had turned on in my mind. I read about horse therapy and felt that was something that could help me overcome my constant nervous state of fight or flight from years on the road and within this sick industry. I remembered how badly I wanted to live in the West when I was tired of NYC. I started listening to old country from the 50s-70s and fell in love with Chris Stapleton’s voice. I felt myself coming back to life; as if this person I already am was picked back up again. I was stepping back into my old favorite boots.
I don’t know if it’s time and age, or if it’s a change of life but for me as the years have gone along I have needed less and less. And I don’t say this to put myself above those that have large collections of things. I respect and admire curation of treasured goods and I definitely have a few of those myself. In the last year I have refined, edited, and streamlined years of collecting into something more personally manageable and purposeful. I get dressed for me, the woman I really am, not who I think others want me to be. I can honestly say I feel the least self conscious I have felt in years and that is a true gift.
A few of the collections I continue to curate are books, records, 60s/70s feminist and anti war pins, hats, and antique and vintage turquoise jewelry. I used to collect clothing, primarily 70s vintage clothing. Almost without abandon or thought I would scoop up anything that caught my eye in a vintage or thrift store while out on the road in America. Over many years of this I accumulated rails and rails of clothes, accessories, shoes, jackets, jeans… you name it. I was either in possession of it or on the hunt to add it to my collection. When the pandemic hit I used what I had to sell and get a piece I wanted more. This wasn’t new for me. I grew up scouring the racks and bins of Goodwill finding true treasure, the likes of which do not exist in those stores anymore. I found Landlubber denim, Ralph Lauren silk and tweed, real leather coats, Woolrich sweaters. To think of those days brings a smile to my face. It was the start of my love of fashion as a form of creative expression and also taught me the hunt for gold something that brought me great joy for many years, brought fellow collectors and vintage dealers into my life as friends and collaborators. There were many years where outside of music, my biggest passion was hunting for vintage clothes and curating outfits for myself to wear onstage and off.
With these changes and the impending move home, I looked at my near exploding wardrobe and thought “time to say goodbye”. The best part about collecting vintage is that someone else out there is looking for the exact piece you are ready to part with, and it’s a cycle that is never broken. It’s a beautiful, sustainable, and radical industry in its own right and I am really happy to be a participant in it. I will never stop loving, supporting, and buying vintage. I just had to find a realistic way to participate that didn’t give me anxiety over “winning” something in an online bid, or dressing to feel accepted.
It was very easy to part with most of the things I was letting go of. And it was sweet to see some of the buyers wearing them out and loving them. It felt right. Some of the pieces took longer for me to let go of and even made the journey back to America before I eventually decided I could part with them. There are also things that will stay in my wardrobe for years to come, maybe until I am really old and can pass them down to my niece. The goal wasn’t to stop owning and wearing vintage, it was simply to take a new route, have less, be intentional about what comes into the closet, invite other more fluid fashions into my world, and not be a strict wearer or buyer of only 70s fashion. I am at a point in my life where I have to be comfortable in my clothes. I want to feel authentically me. I want to wear the outfit. The more I lean into that the better I feel, the happier I am, the less fussy it all feels, and I feel prepared for anything life throws my way. If I could only wear one thing for the rest of my life it would be bootcut Levi’s, a denim snap button shirt - the super worn-in kind, boots, and my favorite jewelry. I have been wearing this uniform for over 20 years now. And to be honest, most days you might catch me in this exact look. It does feel like the days of dressing up and going out dancing are mostly behind me (I could be wrong and I have saved a pair of satin disco pants just in case). I stopped drinking alcohol over a year-and-a-half ago, and though I was a frequent imbiber of weed in college, those days are a decade behind me. I simply lack the interest or the energy to be anything other than stone cold sober. I am no longer living from my wardrobe or my life for the “what ifs”. I am making my life about the here and now, the definite.
By dedicating my life to my art over the last year, I have had little time to visit my fancier clothes, and it’s made parting with a lot of them really easy. I’ve started wearing what I want to onstage instead of what I think I should wear and it’s made all the difference. I feel like me, not the “me” that I am using to hide behind, but the real me. There is so much pressure on women, especially, to live up to other women’s ideas of who they are, and to never change from that. I have felt that a lot in my life. If I choose to part with a coat I’ve loved and worn I have often been met with shock, confusion, and questions from the “committee” about why, how, what about… and I find that thinking to be so limiting. That’s not allowing for any growth, change, or adaptation of a body and soul. Like our wardrobes, we too should be allowed to change. I’ve never been afraid to morph. In fact I look back on all of the different clothes and styles that have come and gone for me and it makes me smile. They are markers of a time and place unto their own magic. I am grateful for their place in my story and grateful other chapters followed.
For me, the nature of being a touring musician, an artist, and a seeker has been to travel light. This has no doubt found its way into most aspects of my life as well. The discipline of an artist is extreme and may even seem severe and strange to those outside of it. But to be ever evolving is part of it all. I hope to never cease exploring who I am and following where that takes me and my creativity. I wrote in a poem recently “I am carving the unnecessary bits off | Like an ice sculpture or a shrub” and that is exactly how it has felt. I am removing the weeds to see myself complete underneath all that grew to hide me. If you silence unnecessary noise you can hear for miles.
Fashion trends come and go, favorite clothes are worn, worn out, and replaced. We remain, looking to represent ourselves and live authentically. Was it losing my voice, or losing the sunglasses that brought all this on, was it the need for a change or a return, was it just simply time up on that chapter?… I’ll never know for sure but I am so glad I lost them and found myself again in exchange.
