Making up for lost time, I've been spinning female artists on repeat

Contemplative at home on a late October Sunday afternoon, having spent a cool 40 hours out of town with my best friend of nearly 20 years, I whip up a veggie chili instead of tending to one of the numerous tasks I foolishly imagined I might tackle “to get a head-start on the week.” Once the stew is set to simmer, oven preheated for cornbread, I open a Google Doc to purge, channeling alternating feelings of tenderness and fortitude. This whole scene is a procrastination- and autumnal vibes-fueled tale as old as time.

And yet everything is different. Because the chili will last me days and days, prepared as it is for only me. I came home to find my slow-leak driver’s side front tire flat as f*ck, and changed it to the donut, by myself. And my soundtrack for contemplation, most notably different from years and even decades past, is indie singer-songwriter Ella Williams, who records and performs as Squirrel Flower. As I sit and attune to the myriad thoughts and impulses dotting and dashing my end-of-weekend head, the music I’m drawn to is that made by another woman. And before I got divorced last year, choosing to go mid-adulthood alone, this simply wasn’t so.

…

Having healthfully, I think, built a tween identity upon ‘90s popular music icons Mariah Carey, Jewel, Whitney Houston, The Spice Girls, Fiona Apple and fierce female-fronted acts No Doubt and The Cranberries, I somehow found myself shuttling through adolescence worshiping mostly male alt-rockers and pop-punkers, who, not so strangely, had absolutely nothing to say about my own experience. But how I loved them.?

Just before high school, I shifted gears to fanaticism for rootsy radio, summer touring darlings Dave Matthews Band – a Southeastern suburban obsession so commonplace I don’t feel warrants an explanation. And then, fueled by widespread albeit criminal file-sharing courtesy of Napster, Kazaa and Limewire, I put stock in unsubtle, tortured-teen emo AIM away messages for the balance of my secondary school experience. You see, anyone (coughcough CHAD) who’d hover over CeliaLeigh2003 and read this wee hours confessional could really know who I am:?

But now I'm confused

Is this death really you

And do these dreams have any meaning

No, no, I think it's more like a ghost

That's been following us both

Something vague that we're not seeing

Something more like a feeling



Bright Eyes, “Something Vague”?        

Uh, Conor Oberst in the year 2000 did not speak for me. So why did I let him?

…

It would be several years more before I would face my anti-feminist bias toward male singers and songwriters. Or rather, I had it reflected back to me in a jarring way. A college pal asked me to make a mix of my favorite female artists, and I came up shamefully short. Save for the aforementioned ‘90s stalwarts, classic soul sisters like Aretha, then-and-forever college radio crush Neko Case, and the burgeoning art-rocker St. Vincent, I found my CD and mp3 collections still painfully, overwhelmingly pulpit to the White Straight Male Experience.?

There’s nothing wrong with loving rock ‘n roll, which we know to be predominantly (popularly) male throughout the 20th Century, nor having what’s accessible during your upbringing shape your lifelong musical tastes. My point is that I subconsciously yet actively avoided songs that I could and would have identified with more fully, written and sung by those who identify as female, and to my own detriment. I was missing out on such feeling, such camaraderie, such commiseration and confidence-building, all of it. And after that genial confrontation in 2004, I still didn’t right the ship, to be honest. It’s nobody’s fault but mine that I doubled down on reverence for the white male perspective when I fell in love with one. And then another.

My “favorite bands,” then and now – groups I will uniformly spend barista tips and public radio salary to follow to other cities and giddily anticipate when they grace our Sonic Cathedral performance space at WNXP – are mostly male-fronted. Almost nothing can dilute the emotional power of early aughts indie rockers I’ve been spinning since I could vote – my, when pressed, Desert Island Records include those by Radiohead, Wilco, Death Cab for Cutie, The Weakerthans, etc., etc. It is what it is. In fact, this involuntary attachment to what was important then is well-documented by science.

But what IS now is my social-emotional reckoning – a reclamation of my individuation and independence, something that rose up in me undeniable and unavoidable in early 2021 – that has synced almost accidentally (but fortuitously) with the city’s musical reckoning in the advent of 91.ONE: a radio station designed to uplift un(der)heard voices and perspectives. You won’t tune into a half-hour on our station without bopping to a queer, BIPOC and/or woman’s song. And do you know why not? Because some of the best music made here or elsewhere, music worth sharing over the FM airwaves and in features on our site, is made by previously underheard artists in underserved communities. Communities that still, in the year 2022, include women.

I’ve found the deepest salvation recently – for the second time since the mid-’90s, really – in artists who are saying shit and singing (beautifully, sometimes angrily) about where I am, where I’ve been, and where I (hope I) am going. It’s not simply solidarity in capability – you can self-produce an album, and I can self-pay a mortgage for the first time as an adult, look at us, girl! – nor is it solely the familiarity in (newfound) freedom, though there’s certainly some of that:

I've spent way too, too, too many years not knowing what

What I wanted, how to get it, how to live it and now

I'm gonna make up for it all at once

'Cause that's, that's just what I want




MUNA, “What I Want”        

It’s high-register lamenting about double-standards in sexuality:

Posters and TV

Tell me my body

Is for other’s satisfaction

Get a sexual reaction

We’re taught we’re only?

Meant to act holy

Cover up your shoulders

Or you might tempt somebody



Girls run home at night

When we’re leaving from the party

‘Cause we’re raised to trust nobody

And it’s not right to make excuses

Teach them why they shouldn’t do this

‘Stead of telling us to hide




But I guess it’s my fault my body’s fun to stare at

Sorry my clothes can’t keep your hands from grabbing

Yeah it’s my problem, I’m asking for it

Guess you’re the victim and I’m the suspect




Beach Bunny, “Blame Game”        

It’s the eye-rolling ridicule of how we reverted and contorted during COVID lockdown:?

Yeah, everything's so whack

When I turn my back, my life shuts down

Everything's so rowdy

Now I don't have feelings

I'm doing on-and-off pilates

Like a middle-aged soccer mommy

I'm making donuts with my body

And talking with Jesus




Remi Wolf, “Anthony Keidis”        

And the soul-crushing “alone, together” disconnection of the same time:

Eyes on screen to left of me

All the clouds are wrapped around your brain

Hardly see what's next to you

Can't you see I'm trying to get through?

Baby, don’t you turn your back to me




Sharon Van Etten, “Headspace”        

It’s the grief that accompanies change:

It’s true that people, I’ve been sad

It’s true that people, I’ve been gone

It’s true that people, I’ve been missing out

Forsaking things for way too long

If you disappear

Then I’m disappearing too

You know the feeling




Christine & The Queens, “People, I’ve Been Sad”        

The shimmering lust for the unattainable:

I get a little lonely

Get a little more close to me

You’re the only one who knows me, babe

So hot you’re hurting my feelings




Caroline Polachek, “So Hot You're Hurting My Feelings”?        

And the childlike hope for adventure outside of the day-to-day:

I wanna go see the country

I want to get out of here

I'm sick of looking at graffiti?

On the walls of the gray walls, the city?



I want to drive in the countryside

I want the breeze in my hair

I am touching your leg and

I have my hand in your hand




Amyl & The Sniffers, “Hertz”        

It's the necessity in being guarded:

Open up your heart

Like the gates of Hell

You stay soft, get beaten?

Only natural to harden up




Mitski, “Stay Soft”        

Contrasted with the benefits of shared vulnerability:

I know you’ve been having nightmares lately

And I’m sorry I fall asleep first

You make me wanna cry in a good way

I didn’t know I was capable of being happy right now

But you showed me how




Faye Webster, “In A Good Way”        

It’s the guttural pros and cons of solitude:

To be alone, what a feeling

To be forgotten, what a feeling



Squirrel Flower, “To Be Forgotten”        

And the psychosomatic pull of companionship:?

I don’t think I’m ready for a clean cut kind of love

But I don’t think I have a choice

I’m already gone

Please send help to me

Things are changing, I’m having a hard time

Please send help to me




Indigo DeSouza, “Bad Dream”        

It’s the self-love and strength in sisterhood:

I love how you go from zero to one hundred

And leave the dust behind

You've got this

All action, no talk




I see you glow, you're the finest gold

When you walk in the room, they feel your soul

Your style, it shines so ahead of time

And you know that you're fire, you're so damn fine, girl




Little Simz, “Woman”        

Beaten back sometimes by residual, ex-evangelical guilt-tripping:

Sunday morning

Hands over my knees in a room full of faces

I’m sorry if I seemed off but I was probably wasted

I didn’t feel so good

Head full of whiskey but I always deliver

Jesus, if you’re listening, let me handle my liquor

Jesus, if you’re there, why do I feel alone in this room with you?




Ethel Cain, “American Teenager”        

And all-consuming, visibly-emoting-in-the-grocery-store sadness:

I am strong and it's stronger than I am right now

Tryna keep it in but it's comin' out

I don't wanna be cryin' in public

But here I am cryin' in public




Madi Diaz, "Crying in Public"        

And yet...rising like a phoenix with lip-bitingly confident sass, a line of questioning nearly as literal as “where do you get off?” we roar again, middle fingers up:

I was in your wet dream, driving in my car

What makes you think you're good enough to think about me

When you're touching yourself?




Wet Leg, “Wet Dream”        

It’s never ceasing to look inward, to ask ourselves and others key questions so we might know ourselves and each other more deeply:

Do you ever think about

Who you were then and who you are now?

And I miss you but I'll never ever, ever, ever

Ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever



Porridge Radio, “7 Seconds”        

This isn’t a listicle, and it’s not music criticism. It’s my somewhat guilty conscience splayed out on a screen, with a willingness to make amends, to give credit where it’s due, to remind myself and you that women and nonbinary folx make music that’s heart-rending, glistening, artful, acerbic, and fully human. Illustrative of the human experience, my experience.

And we play all of the above music-makers on WNXP, thank goddess. It’s not hyperbole to say that, as a daily DJ and playlist curator on Nashville’s Music Experience, I’m making up for lost time.

Come with me.