Prompt 5: Love loves your darkness
“dirtypure” is the feeling we get when we let someone else tend to our darkness. There are parts of yourself you have hidden because you worry no one will understand, monsters you can’t look in the eye. What if you let someone else stare down the darkness? What if you let someone love you not despite your demons, but alongside them?
Prompt: Draw three concentric circles. In the inner circle, write the names of people you trust deeply—this inner circle would set down everything to come find you if you called and said you were lost. In the next circle, write the names of people with whom you exchange joy. The encounters may not be consistent or dependable, but when you see one another, there is connection and joy. In the third circle, write the names of people to whom you are tethered by circumstance. You have formed a relationship of proximity or blood, but you might not choose each other were the situation to shift.
Do your choices reflect this solar system of love? Are you honoring obligation above trust? How can you align your life with the love that already surrounds you?
Prompt 4: gods and wonder
Some people think they’re a god because the stage is a few feet above the audience. What's worse, some nights the concoction of cool music and rogue ego make me think they are too. But I’m trying to look beyond the shine of popularity or the flash of a word like “genius.” Now, I’m asking of them, of myself: make something moving, give us a sense of wonder; then, do it again.
Prompt: Make a list of Wonders. What makes you feel awe? What gives you goosebumps? What magic lives for you in the world, in your home, in your body?
Prompt 3: What are you Made of?
“to make” is a splinter of inherited trauma pulled directly from my body. For each of us, there's that wedge of anguish that just won't let the door close. And then, there's the anger because we didn't even open that door. The wall of sound production under the line "you tell me you want to die" was this breakthrough moment for me where we really captured that feeling—the suffering, the empathy, the rage.
Prompt: Choose a family story. Tell it from the perspective of one of your ancestors or a living elder. Now, tell the same story as you experienced it, or, if you weren’t there, as it influenced you when you learned it.
Prompt 2: What Has Burned Away?
I'm burning explores power—the people who hold it, the way they wield it against one another and against themselves. It is a song about becoming through struggle.
The music I’ve been working on over the past year, including these last two singles, has pushed me harder than anything I’ve ever made. With that pressure, I’ve discovered the brittle points in my creativity, in my community, and in my leadership. Some things broke apart. At times, I longed for things to stay as they were, but that’s not how being human works. As I begin releasing this music, as the old falls away, I hope I can enjoy what’s coming. I hope this is a cleansing fire, and it leads me into my own power.
Prompt: Write a eulogy for your past self. Who were you? What did you accomplish? What joy and sorrow did you carry? Be gentle. Be kind. Consider what you will miss now that you are someone new.
Prompt 1: Who Could You Be?
When I wrote hot enough, I set out to capture the feeling of internalized misogyny. It increases in tempo dramatically from the beginning to the end. Even now, that makes my adrenaline spike every time I hear it.
Once I had that concept, I kept collecting images from my own childhood and adolescence as well as the stories of friends and family. One day, sitting in traffic, I just had most of the lyric. Writing it helped me look a lot of memories in the eye. It externalized something truly disgusting and disfigured that I had taken into myself. That was purifying—like fire.
Prompt: Split your page in two halves from top to bottom (hot dog style). On the left, make a list of images, moments, and interactions that taught you something you wish you hadn’t learned.
On the right, make a list of what you might have believed had the poison of those ideas never seeped in. Who would you be? Who could you be still?