I had a wobble on Monday, halfway through editing this new video. If only I looked cool, or could dance, or had a team of professionals sorting out interesting outfits and dramatic lighting, or [insert any number of random, out-of-reach expensive items here]…if only I could just do more to send my songs out into the world.
What do I mean by more, exactly?
Every time I make something new there’s the possibility of infinite reward when I share it online. Hundreds of views could turn into thousands, or tens of thousands. If I pick the right thumbnail, or learn exactly how the algorithms work on every platform, or say exactly the right thing at the right moment, the music I care so much about sharing could leap forth from my laptop and become a beloved fixture in the lives of music fans around the world.
The possibilities are tremendously exciting, potentially life-changing. Less grind, less hustle. Money in the bank. A slightly easier life?
I try to stay positive, without setting myself up for too much of a fall. If/when I don’t get 100K views in 5 minutes (!), I have to be okay with that. I have to be able to keep going.
I’ve done this for long enough to know that simply getting to keep doing it is the real goal.
And it’s certainly not just about finding new people to listen. My “big” mailing list has around 9000 subscribers, and my Substack list has around 200, and sometimes it feels just as difficult to successfully invite these people to click “play”.
That’s ok. It’s humbling. You have your own, way more important, stuff going on.
Just know that, even when I doubt myself, I will keep trying. Even when I receive nasty comments and unpleasant emails (and oh, I do), I will keep sharing music, sharing videos and sharing my words.
Every time I make a collection of songs I put everything on the line to create the best experiences I can for music fans.
You are never obliged, but you are always invited.
My new video cost around £200 to make: studio hire, two costumes, props and lunch. I did my own hair and makeup, set up my own shots and didn’t try to look cool or try to dance. The only other human involved was my lovely husband Tim, who helped with the moving shots and tightened the legs of my inflatable costume to stop everything from going floppy.
Talk about infinite reward: I got to spend a Tuesday being silly with my favourite person making something to make you smile.
My new Penfriend album “House Of Stories” is available to order NOW on super limited vinyl, CDs and KiT hybrid digital albums, with accompanying tees, hoodies and books. Get two songs in your inbox immediately, with another every month til the release date in April (before anyone else).
Join The Correspondent’s Clubon Patreon to receive quarterly bundles of art and members-only music plus extra perks + immediate access to my entire digital archive (digital and analogue memberships available)
Her Grammy acceptance speech showed up in my feed, so I looked her up. I read she’d risen to prominence after creating YouTube vlogs during the pandemic, so I went to her channel and tried to find her earliest video. My internet was being weird and just showed me this one.
She talks into her laptop, eating crisps, saying she’s just been fired from her job and she doesn’t care. She says she’s going to try and get an internship at a record label.
It’s not an interesting video on its own. She gives no context and no details. There’s no resolution, no takeaway. If you don’t know her, and you’re in an impatient mood, you’d likely shrug and say “and…?”
But that’s not the point – she wasn’t trying to “do” YouTube, she was documenting a real moment in her life, in real-time.
Five years on, Doechii has won a Grammy for best rap album, plus two MTV Video Music Awards, a BET Award, two Soul Train Music Awards and the Rising Star Award from Billboard Women in Music.
Five hours on from watching her video, I’d seen it pop up another 10 times around the internet.
Weird.
Two nights ago, I started reading “Manifest” by Roxie Nafousi, a cheerful orange hardback that’s been sitting on my To Read pile for a year. For whatever reason, it felt like the right moment to start making some changes. I read about the science of it, the quantum physics theory that we attract the energy we put out into the world. We have control over that – we can choose to vibrate at a higher frequency, to attract higher frequency things. We decide what we want to do, we put the work in, we vibrate.
Interesting.
Last night I dipped into my blog archives to try and find something well-written and timeless to share with you today1. At random I picked out a piece I wrote in 2020.
Inspired by a podcast chat I’d had with comedian Bec Hill2, I wrote about the need to zoom out from your current busy day-to-day work life to set goals beyond the old-you dream you’re currently maintaining.
A few months after our conversation was published, Bec was announced as the host of a new kids’ TV crafting show. It didn’t happen to her out of the blue – this is something she had decided she wanted, and had aimed her efforts towards. She was absolutely perfect for it, and did a great job.
Did I pick that blog post out because I’d already started vibrating at a higher frequency? (I didn’t see the date til I’d re-read the whole thing.)
Is that also why I suddenly heard about Doechii and found that particular video of hers from 5 years ago? (I don’t usually read up on the latest music news.)
Five years is a good block of time to measure things by.
In five years, Doechii went from being fired from a job she didn’t care about to winning a Grammy. (I look forward to learning more about that journey.)
Five years ago, I had recently ended my solo music project of 15 years to launch a new one, Penfriend, in May 2020. I was living in Bristol, recording music by myself in a colourful attic room. A pandemic was right around the corner. I’d started running twice a week, and was making my third and final bid to complete the famous Julia Cameron book “The Artist’s Way” (I did it!). I’d made a list of ways I wanted to change my life in this fresh new decade, and I was taking positive steps every day.
In February 2025, I’m working out of a different colourful attic studio in Nottingham. I’m still doing my thing, maintaining my 5-years-ago-me dream. And what a gift! It’s still one of my current-me dreams, but I know that I’ve put any future-me dreams on hold to keep the wheels turning.
It’s time to start making some new plans. It’s time to dream big again.
When violent, racist narcissists are causing chaos on the world stage, hurting people every day with their actions, it feels ridiculous to write about manifesting. When genocide is ignored, when our bodily autonomy is in the hands of powerful men, when trans rights are being erased, when tech bros have WAY too much influence and N*zi salutes go unpunished, it can feel redundant to focus on my own supposed day-to-day problems, let alone my future plans and dreams. What do I matter in all of this?
I’ll never forget a post I saw a few years ago that read: “It’s not manifesting: it’s white privilege”.
I’ll carry that reminder with me. It’s important to check ourselves.
But I’m still going to dream big, because I exist too, and I can be more helpful to everyone when I’m vibrating at a higher frequency.
I’m thankful for the life I manifested through my previous actions, thankful for those who make this possible by supporting independent music, and thankful to inspirational figures like Doechii, Roxie and Bec for reminding me that the future is full of possibility.
Where were you 5 years ago? Where do you want to be 5 years from now?
Let’s dream big together. Let’s take care of each other.
I failed. I found two fatal flaws with my idea of sharing that older piece with you:
1) It contains a paragraph about a recently disgraced author which is central to the point I’m making, and he can absolutely do one.
2) I’d somehow confused the words “infinite” and “infinitesimal”, which are basically opposites, and the sting of embarrassment is too fresh in my mind to consider reposting it.
My new Penfriend album “House Of Stories” is available to order NOW on super limited vinyl, CDs and KiT hybrid digital albums, with accompanying tees, hoodies and books. Get two songs in your inbox immediately, with another every month til the release date in April (before anyone else).
Join The Correspondent’s Clubon Patreon to receive quarterly bundles of art and members-only music plus extra perks + immediate access to my entire digital archive (digital and analogue memberships available)
What to do when everyone doesn’t love you on the internet
Dear fellow artist and interested internet person, I am here to coin a new phrase.
Allow me to introduce the HUUIG aka the Hitherto-Unknown, Unfriendly Internet Gentleman. Not to be confused with a New Fan Of Your Work (NFOYW), this esteemed surfer of the internet superhighway is usually brand new to you, choosing to show up in your life for the very first time sounding something like this:
We all know that when we share ourselves on the internet: in words, photos, daubs on a page or, in my case, music and video, we’re opening a can of worms and inviting them to crawl all over us and our painfully exposed vulnerabilities.
Some of these “worms”2 are delighted to hear from us, thrilled to stumble across meaningful work that speaks to them, speaks for them, heals them, brightens their day or, at the very least, provides respite from yet another fucking Temu3 ad.
I regret calling these people “worms”, even though it’s a clever metaphor, because they are the ones who keep the wheels turning. I wouldn’t have a job without them. They might be YOU. Thank you!
You’re a name, not a worm-ber.
Receiving positive messages about your work is life-affirming and galvanising.
“My work will find its audience”, you tell yourself with relief, while still trying to figure out exactly how many vertical clips and text-based social media posts will make you feel you’ve done enough to send your offering into the world with the best possible chance4.
Unfortunately, alongside enjoying interactions with these kind, generous and encouraging patrons of the arts, we are forced to bear witness to a whole bunch of nonsense from people who I’m far less sorry to refer to as worms (though this is very much still a metaphor). Rude, rude worms.
Because, you see, what you made doesn’t suit them exactly. The snare sound you carefully chose for your song5 that you wrote and recorded yourself in your attic home studio during yet another pandemic lockdown isn’t the one they would have chosen had they had the wherewithal to make that exact song, so you are wrong, friend, and they are not going to let it go!
Or, obviously, you’re a “tattooed slut” because…you have tattoos and are a woman sharing your wholesome, bike-riding music video with the world?6
Um.
In this case, I am the lowest of the low because I used the word “motherfucker” twice. Fucking hell. The absolute cheek!
In a song about escaping from a potentially murderous ex-boyfriend, written to share my experience in a bid to put words to other peoples’ perhaps-hidden experiences of the same or worse, written because that’s the song that wanted to be written that day and it turned into a bona fide banger7, I both swore and showed (justified) anger.
It’s just the truth. So fucking sue me!
In 88 songs spread over seven albums and some stand-alone singles I have sworn a total of 8 times. I stand by every single fuck, fucking, shit and motherfucker. I chose to put those words in those songs because that’s where they had to go.
Oh, and because artists can and should do whatever the hell they want in their work8, because that’s what art is. Please remember this above all other things.
To answer an inevitable question: yes, of course I read the comments. I want to see what impact my work has on other humans. Also, I work alone. Who else is meant to read them9?
It’s annoying, because I share things on the internet in search of actual human connection. I’m not hunting digital applause, requesting smoke be blown up my arse10 or hankering for a viral moment. Please PLEASE no.
It’s a shame that when I see a Facebook notification I automatically cringe, assuming it’s going to be something awful, because that’s the platform where I usually get the bad stuff11.
However, in my experience, these people usually only pop out of the woodwormwork when prompted by:
– an album release: I always get a shitty email from a HUUIG12 on album release day, either to tell me I suck or that I stole an idea off them –
OR
– a paid ad (how very dare you try to get your heartfelt, handcrafted work into the hands of the people! What are you, someone who needs to eat?!!!)
OR, probably
– great success and massively increased exposure. I have no experience of this.
Because I am a very lucky person, last week I got not one but TWO freebies.
Part 2:
Oh, how I laughed and laughed. 5 years ago I can’t honestly say I’d have been amused at this exchange, but I like to think I’ve grown up a lot in that time. Quoting God/Jesus/etc back at him was not in any way a childish thing to do.
There was a time when an email or comment from someone criticising me and/or what I had dared to share would make me furious: not because they didn’t like me, but because they thought it was okay to go out of their way to interrupt my day to tell me. I would take time to reply, incredibly politely, letting them know I’m a real life human being – not a team of people or robots – and reminding them that not everything in the world is made for them. I wanted them to rethink their approach and stop bothering people who are just trying their best in the world.
But, strangely, after making all that effort to get my attention, none of them ever wrote back. And I thought they wanted to be friends!
I stopped doing this when I decided to spend that energy on the people who love what I do.
In 2025, with a new single coming out every month up to the release of my new album “House Of Stories” in April, I definitely don’t have time for this shit13.
Here’s my current thinking on neggy comments from HUUIGs14. I hope it helps.
It’s unrealistic to think that everyone who comes across your stuff online is going to love it and gush at you about it, and honestly wouldn’t that be WEIRD? I would have a hard time trusting myself or anyone else without some sort of resistance.
We set ourselves up for avoidable stress and upset if we don’t account for, say, 5-10% of all comments we receive online being irritating or downright rude.
Personally, when I dislike something I just keep on scrolling or, ideally, turn my stupid phone off and do what I’d planned to be doing which is usually making stuff15. Others are not so strong.
Others don’t have the lives they want, or are in a sad or bad mood, or just broke up with someone, or have been poisoned by social media into binary thinking so if they don’t like something they go straight to HATE and simply have to tell you all about it. Some people are autistic, and come across in a far more blunt way than they intend. Some people have severe mental health issues and I genuinely hope they have the help they need.
Unfortunately, every comment and message looks basically the same in our homogenised online world. There’s no way of knowing what situation the sender is in, mentally or physically. And that’s good, because I don’t need to know you’re on the loo writing me a message, whether it’s a nice one or a nasty one. But it’s also bad, because if you could tell the difference between someone being nasty to you because they’re a hateful person and someone writing unkind things because they really need some help, you could choose to respond in different ways, or not at all.
I want to live in a world where the segment of people who are just plain hateful keyboard warrior arsehole pricks is a very small segment. A tiny segment of tiny pricks. Except they’re not tiny are they, they’re HUUIG16!
I want to believe that most people are decent, and would be, if not gushingly enthusiastic of my work, reasonably supportive of my general right to make and share it without receiving neggy messages sent direct to my eyeballs.
However, I spent 5 years working as a part-time comment moderator for The Guardian UK website, and grew skeptical of the value of online comments on most platforms. Not yours, of course, and not here. You’re great!
I’m not telling you any of this to justify myself to Bob my latest HUUIG17. I’m telling you this to remind you that YOU don’t have to justify yourself to Bob any HUUIG18 (or, fine, HUUIP19 – though in my experience they’re always G’s) who decides to send a comment death ray your way.
You’re here, and we need you and your work. So, somehow, you have to find a way to laugh it off, to file it in the metaphorical bin (hide/delete comments, mute/block people), and/or to use it as material for a piece of writing that might hopefully help someone else find a way to laugh it off, file it in the metaphorical bin, or use it as material for a piece of…
Yes. We can do this! We can follow our creative energy, turn lemons into lemonade and transform attacks on our disrespectful vulgar crude filthy foul mouth into something beautiful.
That’s exactly what I did with my new single “Emotional Tourist” aka the “motherfucker” song, and OH THE IRONY of receiving a list of the things someone doesn’t like about me:
My new Penfriend album “House Of Stories” is available to order NOW on super limited vinyl, CDs and KiT hybrid digital albums, with accompanying tees, hoodies and books. Get two songs in your inbox immediately, with another every month til the release date in April (before anyone else).
Join The Correspondent’s Clubon Patreon to receive quarterly bundles of art and members-only music plus extra perks + immediate access to my entire digital archive (digital and analogue memberships available)
I recommend Seth’s Social Media Escape Club as an antidote to these crazy-making thoughts, while admitting I succumb to them often. I make next-to-zero vertical clips because this line of thinking makes me seize up entirely and get six hours behind on my already ambitious task list for the day, and it’s always better to put any energy I can muster into writing pieces like this, emailing my lovely subscribers or doing almost anything else.
Yesterday I was weak, and I commented on a company’s Instagram reel about how they should have hired a person to do the voiceover instead of shitty AI. I’m not perfect, but I am right.
When I was a little girl, one of my favourite possessions was a shoebox that I filled up with bits of paper, envelopes and leaflets gathered from wherever I could find them. I called it my Post Office, and every now and then I’d take the box from under the bed and pour my treasure out on the floor.
I’m hazy on the details, but I remember loving to “play Post Office”, which I imagine meant sorting the assorted paper into different piles and then putting them back in the box. Oh, how the interests of our youth can creep up on us as adults, writes the woman who spent a happy evening last week reorganising her boxes of scrap paper, stickers and magazine pages by category.
Nerd alert.
Later, somehow, I ended up writing letters to children I’d never met, who lived far away – Svetlana in Belarus and Alastair in Derbyshire. It was utterly magical to send my closely-written pages to people I would never talk to in person, carefully copying the unfamiliar Russian words onto Svet’s envelopes well enough for her to receive my missives. I only ever know my letters had arrived when she replied.
It was to Alastair I first proudly declared my aim to be a songwriter when I grew up – having never written a single song, and knowing nothing whatsoever about how to do so. Letter-writing predated those heady days when I started to discover my favourite bands by some years, but both activities were a youthful statement of independent thought at an age where actions were largely dictated by adults.
As I grew older I gathered more people to write to. My family moved every three years, so there were always friends left behind, and in my early teens I wrote to kids I met on school trips, boys at other schools, even friends at the same school as me. We challenged each other to fill up more and more pages and somehow still had enough left to say to talk on the phone for hours in the evening. The freedom I found to express myself in letters is one of my fondest memories of childhood.
On my journey into adulthood, switching to email and blogging and Twitter (2007-style) felt intuitive, but my love for words written by hand on paper never left me.
As I released music on CD, vinyl and cassette from 2009 onwards, I got to “play Post Office” more and more regularly, and my role as the maker and sender of things became clear.
Writing songs and dispatching them into the world, in whatever format, is a natural progression from the innate desire I had to connect with others from a young age.
And that, dear reader, is why I’m called Penfriend.
“The internet” was a destination. I raced home from work to “go on it”, and happily replaced my previous TV-watching with clicking around, finding out about the world and other people, mainly through reading personal blogs. It was quite unusual to be someone regularly “surfing the internet superhighway”, online ordering was wildly exciting because you had to trust it was real (and high street shopping sucked), and finding places to stay in European cities was, weirdly, easier because there wasn’t infinite choice.
When short-form text-based social media came along in the form of Twitter, I let it steal my writing energy. I still wrote regular, friendly emails to my growing mailing list (which is why I have a job doing this today, honestly), but any public writing was sporadic at best. And this from a person who breathlessly read Writing magazine when she was 13 years old, dreaming of her certain future as a novelist.
I shake my fist at the social media oligarchs in the sky, but mostly at myself. Silly.
I’m not interested in wanging on about the platform I’m sharing stuff on – that’s too meta1 for me, but suffice it to say I’m delighted to be stretching my writing-in-public muscles again, and excited to be here amongst friends.
I’m a long-form person. I make albums, not single songs. I am having a wonderful time delving into the long-form thoughts of brilliant minds, and I only wish there hadn’t been that break in the middle where I felt like I was surfing that superhighway alone.
Writing is the best, I love it, and I’m going to keep doing it. Reading is a close second.
From one solo home-working nerd to many others, I thank you for reading.
My new Penfriend album “House Of Stories” is available to order NOW on super limited vinyl, CDs and KiT hybrid digital albums, with accompanying tees, hoodies and books. Get two songs in your inbox immediately, with another every month til the release date in April (before anyone else).
Join The Correspondent’s Clubon Patreon to receive quarterly bundles of art and members-only music plus extra perks + immediate access to my entire digital archive (digital and analogue memberships available)
Last Wednesday I released “Emotional Tourist”, my first new song in two years and the first single from my seventh solo album “House Of Stories”.
It’s like this:
Fierce, wonky and unapologetic, it details the demise of a relationship where I was ground down by a narcissist to the point where he tried to set fire to the house and “I didn’t even think to scream”.
The song reasserts my right to tell my own story in my own words, after being told again and again it was wrong of me to do so: shameful, predatory, arrogant. Selfish.
When you’re told by your chosen person that the thing you do best, that you care about the most, is a grubby endeavour – that can be tough to shake, even if it never quite rang true.
Come on…I’m a songwriter, not a tabloid journalist.
The thing is, every one of the 77 songs I’ve released so far is about a person I know, and/or an actual thing that happened in my life.
Songwriting is how I process stuff: I work out how I feel by writing it down, thinking about it and, 77 times to date, spending many hours and many ££s crafting my thoughts and feelings into a song to share with other people.
It’s not not a weird thing to do, but there are a lot of human behaviours I find more peculiar. See above.
Writing personal songs and sharing them is nothing new. But it is a new thing for me to share so bluntly the real-life events1 that propelled a song into being.
My songs are an invitation: containers of time, sound and space for you to pour your own experiences into. You’re smart; you don’t need me to over-explain them. At a certain point, they’re not even about me any more.
In the case of “Emotional Tourist”, though, it felt important to explain that the “smoke in the house” isn’t a metaphor for me. It can be, and hopefully is, for everyone else hearing the song – and that goes for every factual snippet from my life that I bury in the poetry of my lyrics.
“In the particular is contained the universal”, wrote James Joyce to a friend. I agree. Unfortunately, the particular type of situation I was in isn’t an unusual one. That’s why I made it into a song, and why I’m writing about it outside of the lyrics.
The song has been publicly available for 8 days, and I’ve already had four people get in touch to thank me for validating their own experiences. In turn, that helped to validate mine.
This is what art does: it holds up a mirror, it supports us, it connects us, sometimes it even heals us. Making it – and immersing myself in art created by others – has helped heal me so many times I’ve lost count.
Every day since releasing the song, the video and this piece detailing what the song is really about, I’ve wondered if I’ll hear from that person, or from his family. What would they say? What would I say?
I don’t think what I’ve done is wrong. I don’t feel guilty about this. Everyone has a right to tell their side of the story. Not everyone has to like me, agree with me, or like what I do.
That feels good to write.
A dear friend shared “Emotional Tourist” online last week, describing it as “an infectious, rightfully scathing (I remember the guy) yet beautifully melodic synth-rock-pop song that should be a dead cert for the drive-time radio A-list”. That was a real boost, thank you Ben2.
Because, yeah, it’s uncomfortable to extract something so personal, reversing the abstraction from poetry to prose. But when I feel nervous about something, thinking maybe it is – or indeed I am – “too much”, I remember being told so bluntly that “I shouldn’t write about what’s real” and I think about the ways we make ourselves small for other people, and I think “fuck you” and I make, write or share the thing.
I am thankful and grateful and all the -fuls for the secure, happy, nourishing relationship I’ve been in for the past 10 years, and not only because it has helped push my songwriting beyond the more reactive angles of my earliest work.
As I continue to create albums, it’s my job to continually fill the well of creativity so there’s always something to write about. I thank the sun, moon and stars that my day-to-day personal life is almost completely drama-free, which prompts me to look outside myself more often and go deeper into pivotal moments from my past.
Even with 77 songs out in the world, there are plenty of unprocessed moments to take care of, plenty of dawning realisations that something I thought was normal really REALLY wasn’t.
In 2022-2023 those shadows kept creeping up and tapping me on the shoulder with cold, bony fingers, dragging me back into the past on a much-too-regular basis.
That’s why I decided making my new album “House Of Stories” would help me bravely turn back and face up to some of the most intense and/or heartbreaking episodes of my life. Not to blame or shame any individual, not to elevate my own status, but to:
1. Figure out why these things still had the power to bring me to my knees, in a bid to reclaim that power for myself;
2. Create something beautiful out of my experiences, hopefully making something helpful (for me and others) out of some really shitty situations;
3. Use my now-very-VERY great wisdom to reflect on all the things that happened which are still bothering me, for which the common denominator is always MOI, in a bid to learn and grow and go forward in life avoiding unnecessary drama;
4. Forgive myself where appropriate, even if others involved don’t think they were in any way at fault and/or don’t remember what happened.
I make sad songs to make you feel better™3, and I’m happy to report they make me feel better too.
Have a wonderful day and PLEASE make, write and/or share the thing. I believe in you.
Love, Laura xxx
PS my new Penfriend album “House Of Stories” is available to order NOW on super limited vinyl, CDs and KiT hybrid digital albums, with accompanying tees, hoodies and books.
Get two songs in your inbox immediately, with another every month til the release date in April (before anyone else gets to listen).
PPS Lab coats and pointers make you feel – and look – clever. The evidence:
I’ve been describing my music this way for years and I just love it. I also describe it as ‘‘music for people who love handwritten letters” but that might be more about justifying my typewriter collection.↩︎
My new Penfriend album “House Of Stories” is available to order NOW on super limited vinyl, CDs and KiT hybrid digital albums, with accompanying tees, hoodies and books. Get two songs in your inbox immediately, with another every month til the release date in April (before anyone else).
Join The Correspondent’s Clubon Patreon to receive quarterly bundles of art and members-only music plus extra perks + immediate access to my entire digital archive (digital and analogue memberships available)
TW: domestic violence, emotional abuse, general motherf*&kery. Honest, not graphic, but go easy, friend x
Yesterday I released my first new song in two years; the first single from my seventh solo album “House Of Stories”.
It was accompanied by my 26th homemade music video, shot in my front room last weekend, where the current version of me (very wise indeed) educates my younger self (less wise, more glittery) on a few key matters.
Turns out, wearing a lab coat makes me feel –and look – EXTREMELY clever:
The song is called “Emotional Tourist”, and it’s a fierce, wonky indie anthem / banger1 about my absolute right as an artist – and human – to tell my story.
When I write it down like that, so plainly, it seems so obvious. I believe we all have that right, and would uphold and encourage it forever and a day for anyone else. And yet, like the proverbial frog in a pot of gradually boiling water, I’ve found myself in situations over the years where this became very not-obvious to me.
With hindsight, it’s easy to dismiss the petulant ejaculations of a frustrated person as so much absolute bullshit. In the moment, mired in the relationship, it’s far more confusing when someone who supposedly loves you spends their valuable time on this planet making you feel crap.
When you choose to spend most of your time with this supposedly special someone, the things they say can start to get inside your head and form a new reality.
When your special someone tells you that you shouldn’t call yourself an “artist” because you don’t have a fine art degree, that sounds faintly ridiculous, even in the moment. But they’re really upset about this, and they do have a fine art degree, and you don’t, and maybe that is a qualification that gives you the right to call yourself an artist. What do I know? I just make stuff up and send it out into the world. I’m confused, and I really don’t want to argue about this any more.
When your special someone ostentatiously storms out of your live performance in a quiet basement venue, at the end of a night put on to honour your music- and video-making with a screening and Q&A, and they tell you when you get home later they “don’t like it when people look at you on stage”, that is pretty weird. It’s easy to clap back “Well, I’ve been doing this since I was 13, and I’ve known you for 2 years”. But it doesn’t stop the feeling that maybe this is too much to put on someone else, this artist life – oops, I shouldn’t use the a-word. Sorry.
Maybe it is horribly selfish to mine your life experiences for lyrics, as he describes it, and maybe I am a shitty person, and should shut up and find something kinder to do with my time. Maybe I should be paying for everything, as he suggests. And maybe it isarrogant and strange to stand on a stage and play music to people. I just never looked at it that way before.
When your special someone repeatedly comments on your appearance, your weight, your attractiveness, and the way you making more money than them isn’t fair, that should be a red flag red flag red flag RED FLAGGGGGGG. Simple. But you live together, and you’re trying to make things work because that’s what relationships are, right? You have to work at them. And he’s probably just trying to help.
He’s my special someone! We chose each other!
Yep. Things so easily get out of hand. Red flags are much easier to spot from a distance.
There is no situation in which I should have made it okay in my brain that he threw a bottle near me.
But – he threw it at the wall, not at me. I must have pissed him off. I was on my way out to play a gig, and he doesn’t like me doing that, remember, and somehow the conversation got out of hand, and I don’t remember exactly what I said but seemingly out of nowhere that happened, so it must have been bad.
Thank goodness I kept walking out of the house, too worried I’d miss my bus into town for soundcheck to try and figure out what had gone wrong. It was a big deal gig for me, supporting New Model Army. And it changed my life forever (but not how you think2).
I know now that I should have called the police the afternoon my house filled with smoke.
I was working upstairs in my home office, and the smoke alarm started squealing, and I started coughing, and I ran downstairs to see what was going on. Wisps of grey smoke was wafting around the living room, but I couldn’t see any flames, so I went into the kitchen and saw the oven door was open, and something inside was on fire.
In a few seconds I was able to turn the oven off, grab what I discovered to be a flaming tea towel, chuck it into the sink, turn the cold tap on, and open the back door and kitchen window to clear the room. The alarm petered out after a few minutes. Phew. Crisis averted.
But wait – the tea towel was only singed. The fire must have only just started. Where was he? I called his name. Nothing. He definitely wasn’t upstairs. I checked the rooms downstairs. Nope.
None of this made sense.
I went and stood in the backyard, trying to clear my head.
He regularly baked bread – had the bread caught fire? (There was no sign of any bread making.)
Why was there a tea towel in the oven? Was that a bread making thing? (A tea towel in the oven is not a bread making thing.)
OK, so just a tea towel. In the oven. On fire.
And he wasn’t home?
What. The. Fuck?
– Oh.
As the cogs slowly whirred in my brain, the smoke dissipated along with some of my mental fog. He did this on purpose.
I replayed our last conversation, something about my upcoming European tour. I was excited – it was my first time playing my own songs outside the UK. A new friend had booked the shows for me. Boyfriend was concerned about this man’s motives. I was not – I’d met him, and he seemed sound. And anyway, from years of touring in other peoples’ bands I was well practised at being careful around strangers on the road (oh, the irony).
I was secretly thrilled to be setting out on my grand solo adventure, but I knew it was a touchy subject, so I had been downplaying the whole thing. Diminishing myself, my dreams, my achievements. Even my intelligence (I hadn’t read a novel in nearly two years).
I couldn’t work out what I’d said that could have triggered this reaction.
I don’t remember feeling frightened: I’d stopped anything bad from happening, hadn’t I! Everything was clearly FINE.
I do remember, when he shuffled back in the house half an hour later, thinking “I must be a total bitch to want to say this, and there’s no going back from this if I say it out loud, but –” right before I took a deep breath and said it.
“Did you do this on purpose?” A curt nod.
I don’t remember there being any further explanation.
I do remember saying “Okay” and that being the end of the conversation.
I didn’t break up with him. I didn’t tell anyone.
It didn’t even cross my mind that a crime could have been committed, that I was potentially unsafe, that I should make sure someone knew what had happened. That I should, hey, go and stay somewhere else? Ask him to leave?
I think I was in survival mode. I remember thinking that I couldn’t break up with him before the tour, because he might do something to my music equipment and all my other earthly possessions, might wreck the house we were renting and cause issues with the landlord.
Isn’t it strange the way our minds work? Not once did I consider my personal safety. I didn’t think of myself as a precious thing that needed to be protected, perhaps more urgently than some guitars and microphones. I didn’t think of myself much at all.
We did break up a few weeks later, at the end of my utterly joyful European adventure tour.
He came out to meet me in Austria, and it was really weird, and we broke up twice, and when we got back to London I refused to return to Bristol with him and went and stayed with a friend for a few days (thank you forever, C).
Eventually I went back to the house and made it very clear we had broken up for good and we both had to find somewhere new to live. I remember this – he just shrugged. It wasn’t a simple process, but in July 2014 I moved into my own place, with my beloved Schnauzer Mister Benji, and could finally breathe – and read – again.
Yes, dear reader, I stayed in that house for three more months before leaving. WTAF.
Later that year I told the story to a friend, in the jokey tone I tend to adopt when I have gained some distance from weird/sad/bad events. When I stopped talking he stayed very quiet.
“Are you okay?” I asked. He was visibly shaking. He was furious.
It was only then I realised the gravity of the situation I’d ended up in. It was only then the phrase “attempted murder” was mentioned. It still seemed entirely unbelievable to me. A misunderstanding. An exaggeration. A story no-one would believe. Sure, he’d tried to make a fire, but it hadn’t worked! I’d put it out!
It took a while to reprogram my brain after that, to remind myself that making sense of my life and my place in the world through art making, music making and writing was an entirely valid way to spend my time. That it wasn’t selfish to share my work – that, in fact, it could be an act of generosity.
My story – my version of events, my reaction to factual things that happened, my emotions, my thoughtful reflections on actions perpetrated against me – that is mine and mine alone.
My story is MY story. The other person/s present will have their own version of events, and they have every right to make their own artwork3 about that.
I say this as a reminder to YOU, friend. Your stories matter, too. You never know who you could help by sharing them.
“Direction Of Travel” (recorded in late 2014) was bleak, chilly and very sad. And over the years, many people have emailed me to say it helped them through their own hard times. I’m glad I processed those thoughts into music.
Nearly 11 years on from the events above, I continue to reserve the right to write songs about whatever I damn well please, alongside striving to be a warm-hearted, kind and empathetic human being.
My last three albums “Brace For Impact”, “Exotic Monsters” and “One In A Thousand” necessarily became more outward-looking than my first three, first because I’m a mature adult woman and because having a wonderfully supportive and happy home life doesn’t make for sad-song fodder (thanks, Tim!).
My upcoming album “House Of Stories” deals with events from my past that refuse to stay there. It’s my attempt to make something beautiful and hopefully helpful out of some really shitty situations, stabbing some bad memories in the eye with the blade of truth. A celebration of wisdom and experience, and a reminder of our own personal power to change our internal and external worlds.
But no, of course my life is not a research project for funneling other peoples’ mistakes into songs – in fact, in my previous solo incarnation as She Makes War, I spent most of the time having a go at myself rather than other people. It’s called introspection, darling.
My life’s purpose is to write truthful, emotionally resonant music.
I don’t write sad / angry songs inspired by real events and people to target them, or to provoke a reaction. I don’t want to hear from those people ever again, and the feeling is almost certainly mutual. It’s not so plain, anyway: most of the time there’s no way someone could point at a song and claim it was about them without sounding very arrogant indeed. It’s MY story, remember – not theirs.
I very rarely choose to swear in lyrics – there are usually better words to use – but if you do decide to act like a motherf*&ker, I might just call you one in a song.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Love, Laura xxx
PS my new Penfriend album “House Of Stories” is available to order NOW on super limited vinyl, CDs and KiT hybrid digital albums, with accompanying tees, hoodies and books.
Get two songs in your inbox immediately, with another every month til the release date in April (before anyone else gets to listen).
PPPS this was a long one – if you got this far you deserve a treat. Go and treat yourself, you’re ace!
The rule is, if someone else (who isn’t a friend or my husband) calls my song an “anthem” or a “banger”, then I’m allowed to call it that too. That’s just science.
That was the night I met the man who I would marry 3.5 years later. He ran the venue. I’d heard of him, even emailed him to ask for an opening slot for Shellac (he said no). It was all very professional – we just said hi after the show – but months later he told me he had been “intrigued” that night, and as soon as we started dating we became inseparable.
10 years later we are still inseparable, and it wasn’t until that relationship began that I learned that the “making it work” thing I’d been doing consistently with various unsuitable persons from the age of 16 was not the correct approach.
Though, if I’m being completely honest, I don’t want to see/hear/experience said artwork if it does come into being! You do you babe, I don’t need to get involved. ↩︎
My new Penfriend album “House Of Stories” is available to order NOW on super limited vinyl, CDs and KiT hybrid digital albums, with accompanying tees, hoodies and books. Get two songs in your inbox immediately, with another every month til the release date in April (before anyone else).
Join The Correspondent’s Clubon Patreon to receive quarterly bundles of art and members-only music plus extra perks + immediate access to my entire digital archive (digital and analogue memberships available)
Tap to get your FREE 12-track album + 31-page PDF zine of stories, photographs and artwork here.
My new Penfriend album “House Of Stories” is available to order NOW on super limited vinyl, CDs and KiT hybrid digital albums, with accompanying tees, hoodies and books. Get two songs in your inbox immediately, with another every month til the release date in April (before anyone else).
Join The Correspondent’s Club on Patreon to receive quarterly bundles of art and members-only music plus extra perks + immediate access to my entire digital archive (digital and analogue memberships available)
Listen to my first Penfriend album “Exotic Monsters” and browse my back catalogue here.
If you make things too – or want to know more about the creative process – I’m sharing thoughtful weekly essays here on my experiments in art, music and life on Substack (and I won’t be at all offended if you prefer to read my stuff there rather than on this absolutely gorgeous website).
Chat with me on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
