How has the release been going?
As an artist and person, I feel so fulfilled and so proud, and I think this is the kind of thing that I look at and listen to. I’m just like, I can’t believe this is mine.
What’s the story behind the song?
I went through two crazy breakups at the same time-a friendship breakup and a romantic one. And I lost them to each other. They were seeing each other behind my back, and I had no idea. Along with that, I was processing all the big changes that had happened within me, graduating college and coming into my twenties. I think the idea of healing has always been big for me, that it almost feels intangible, but obviously it’s a really important thing to learn what it looks like for you.
As much as it’s about getting your spark back, it’s really about just wanting to be bigger than the things that have hurt you. And I spent so much time feeling so small and invisible to the people in my life. I think I felt really invisible and inconsequential. I reached a point where I was like, screw that. I didn’t reach a point where I felt better or bigger, but I reached a point where I finally wanted to.
After being so hurt and not writing anything for over a year, I started writing this song again when I was home in Colorado. I think I had to be in a really safe place with myself and environmentally to do that.
How do you think each breakup impacted the other?
Whoa, that’s a really good question. I mean, I think losing them to each other, in a sense, was really hard for me. I think it was really interesting that each of those relationships informed a reality about the other relationship that I had no idea about.
He was very much like the love of my life and we weren’t even still dating.
I think the craziest thing was just learning that there was a reality that I wasn’t living in for a point of time. They had slowly rewired my brain over time to the version of me that would fit the scenario.
How did not being able to write for over a year impact the way you write now?
It definitely made it a lot harder to write now. I grew up writing my whole life, and I started writing songs when I was 10, and I would just do it over and over and over again. I think that was the longest period I’d ever gone without writing something concrete.
I’d write things here and there, but frankly, it would be really bad. In my head, I’m like, that doesn’t count. To be so candid about it, I’m still getting my skill back and my trust back in my writing again. I also think that the time away from it was really important to focus on myself as a person and learn how I internalize the world. It completely shifted on its head. I didn’t trust anybody. I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t trust my friends. Even with my parents, I was like, do y’all know something that I don’t? But no, honestly, it just made it a little bit harder, but I am working back to getting that trust back in myself.
What have you learned from all the scrapped versions and the songs that you write but never come out?
I learned that you never know what song is gonna lead to the song. I was very used to sitting down and finishing a song in an afternoon. I had no concept of the fact that it could have been made better. With time, your taste, ability, and accountability strengthen, and I think your standards get higher. So I think all the scraps are very humbling, but every song happens for a reason, and I’m a firm believer that it leads you to the song that it’s supposed to be.
Was there a specific moment where the track felt complete?
Me and my friend Jack Harrington made this song. He’s amazing.
We’ve made a lot of music together. At the first chorus and the third verse, there’s this little piano that goes and comes back in the outro. It was the tiny missing piece that was missing. They moved out of that house up in Queens, and that piano sound is the piano that was in the Queens house. That house was so important to me and all the musicians that did sessions up there, but to have that little taste of it in one of my songs is so special to me.
How did the music video come into fruition?
My friend Breanna Lynn and I had worked together on a few things, and I sent her this song and I told her I wanted to make a music video for it. She was like, bet. So she asked me to trust her. I said, obviously, trust you with my life. And then she picked me up at 4:30 in the morning and we drove three hours upstate to this place, Bethel Pastures.
We went in with a plan, but obviously plans changed, and the moment that I knew that we could work with animals, I was like, this is perfect.
The whole metaphor of the song, Lightning Rod, is being able to go back to the human nature of existing in a space of channeling the energy that you receive and putting it through yourself and channeling it into something greater.
There was a goat named Thelma, who was kind of the star of the show.
The opening shot is me holding her face in my hands and looking at her. The whole idea was, I am you and you are me. She’s tied up to this ATV, and no one really knows why. Then I’m spending the rest of the video taking care of these animals, which I think is a direct representation of having to go back to basics and take care of yourself.
I think the animals represent me. Myself in the video also represents me having to take care of me, but at the end, to separate my hurt self from this person that I’m moving forward to be.
Why do you think it was so important for the storytelling of the song?
I think every artist, your song, feels so big and it’s an extension of you, and it seems to stop so short in the world. Any extra extension and extra life that you can give that piece of art is so important. It felt like the extra step that it deserved. I know every artist says this about their songs, but this song is so important to me. I think I’ve refrained from saying that a lot during this release because everybody says that. But this song reminded me that I was an artist, and it reminded me that I was bigger than the people and the things that have hurt me in my life. I really think it’s just a gorgeous visual representation of that feeling of attachment, care, and healing. The animals are just a perfect representation of things that are acting on a pure nature basis. They live to survive, but they don’t know it. When humans are in a state of survival-you feel it, like the world’s ending, so to be reminded that survival doesn’t always have to hurt was really important for me, and I think is really important to the storytelling of the song.
What do you want listeners to take away from the song?
I would want them to take away that you are bigger than the things that have hurt you in your life. And that is coming from someone who, if you were to say that to me even a year ago, I’d be like, screw you, I don’t wanna hear about it. But I think I’ve always said the more I feel alone in an experience, the more that I need to write about it. Because if I feel that way, I know others feel that way. I know what it feels like to live in that space of feeling just totally done dirty by life, by people, by the cards that life has dealt, and feeling like I’ll be stuck in it forever. But you can get your spark back, and you will, and you can channel things.
How has getting that spark been looking for you?
It’s been looking like a lot of therapy. It’s been really trying to let go of how I think other people want to see me and just showing up as myself, even when I don’t know what she looks like that day or what she’s gonna look like. It looks like eating when I’m hungry. It looks like reading before bed. It looks like writing songs that scare me. It looks like drinking wine with my friends. Sometimes it looks like just having a bad day when I need to have a bad day. I think I spent a lot of time focused on trying to make others love me, and I lost the trust that anybody would.
So it looks like trusting the people around me and trusting my life is beautiful and big. That’s what it looks like to me.
What are those songs that scare you to write?
Well, Lightning Rod scared me for sure. A lot of the songs that are scaring me to write are songs that I’m not thinking about anybody else.
Since these two people are also songwriters, I used to write with their voices in my head-of what they would like, of what they would want to hear. I would think about whether they would ever hear this, even if they did, would they ever care? It’s scary in a good way for me now to be writing things that feel so solidly their own thing, coming from their own place in my brain-not anybody else’s influence.
What are some emerging artists everyone should be listening to?
Mer Marcum, Laura Elliot, Ava McCoy, Truman Sinclair, Sabrina Song, Emma Ogier