Voice Note #4 - Hands Up // This is the life

Spinning around your ghost

Halloolaroo,

How are you doing? It’s been a big week for me, and my head is all cloudy. I’ll be honest, I put off writing today’s newsletter until the last minute—I found myself feeling stuck all week, swinging incessantly between worrying I had nothing to say, and wanting to express all these other things I wasn’t sure I’d find the right words to capture. I didn’t expect to dip back into my middle school years or write about Miley Cyrus (of all people!), but there you have it. There are a lot of other things I wanted to talk about, and I’ll probably get into them next week. In the meantime, there’s a lot of new music out this weekend, and I hope you’re enjoying it all—I’ll include links throughout the essay below.

This week’s song might be one of the best I’ve written so far (some of my best work?? one of my best work?!?!?? Forgive me, it’s 1:13 AM as I type this, and my brain clocked out an hour ago). I wanted to make a dancey pop song that was about heartbreak, but in a triumphant way. At the time I wrote this, I was bummed about something not working out, so I started going out a lot to forget I had something to be sad about. Like, I didn’t want to cry, but if I had to, I wanted it to glitter. I’m still a little undecided about the title—for now it’s called “Hands Up” but I’m also considering “Through the Tears.” (If you have suggestions, I’d love to hear them in the comments or in a reply to this email.)

I hope you’re having a lovely morning, wherever you are.

Niki x

Hands Up

Hands up on an empty floor
Nobody else likes dancing anymore
But I don’t care
I didn’t come to make friends

You had charm and all the right words to say
And well, I guess you’re still that way
But I don’t care
You were never mine, anyhow

So I’ll cry
And I’ll keep dancing through the tears
Forget tonight
I’ve been standing here for years
When the lights change back from
Red to gold
And the bartender says
It’s time to go home
I’ll be fine
Out on that dance floor alone

Chin up, it’s over now
I can’t feel when the music’s this loud
Thrumming beat
Come and drown it all out

Spinning around your ghost
You don’t know and that’s what hurts me the most
So I tell myself
That I’m better off somehow

So I’ll cry
And I’ll keep dancing through the tears
Forget tonight
I’ve been standing here for years
When the lights change back from
Red to gold
And the bartender says
It’s time to go home
I’ll be fine
Out on that dance floor alone

Wishing, waiting
Spent all my life aching
Only hating
All the tension fading
If nothing else, I’m
Done sitting by the phone tonight

Hands up on an empty floor
Nobody else likes dancing anymore
But I don’t care
I didn’t come to make friends

So I’ll cry
And I’ll keep dancing through the tears
Forget tonight
I’ve been standing here for years
When the lights change back from
Red to gold
And the bartender says
It’s time to go home
I’ll be fine
Out on that dance floor alone

In case the embed on top doesn’t work, try clicking on the title, above the lyrics. Shoot me an email if you encounter any issues.

Listen to the entire Voice Notes secret playlist here.

---

This is the life

Last night, my friend Allana sent me a track from Miley Cyrus’ latest record. Admittedly, I wouldn’t have listened to it otherwise, but Allana introduced me to Amine and Tyler, The Creator— I trust her taste in music. “BET,” she texted, an all-caps vote of confidence. Needless to say, I’ve been playing it on repeat since. This morning, I opened Instagram to see that Gracie Abrams released a new single. And then Taylor Swift surprise-dropped a whole entire album, just within months of releasing her last. It’s inspiring, this gush of new music from so many pop artists I love. It gets me dreaming about all the possibilities. Ever since I was in my mid-teens, whenever I’d feel stuck or blocked and unable to write songs, I’d return to my catalogue of favorite artists and play them on loop. (In those days, it was mostly Regina Spektor and Taylor Swift, but also a lot of movie soundtracks, like Juno and 500 Days of Summer and Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging). I frequently default to thinking that I only have a finite number of songs in me, that someday the tap will run dry and I’ll be out of ideas. But I know (cerebrally, at least) that it isn’t true. Hearing these artists churn out song after song reminds me of that, and it’s comforting.

When Allana sent me “High”, I pressed play immediately. It had been years since I’d listened to any of Miley’s music in earnest. The first note rang, the sonorous, ugly-beautiful trill of her voice, and I felt chills in spite of myself. Unpopular opinion: I’ve never really considered her to be a proper singer, and I don’t mean this in a bad way—last night I realized how endeared I am to this quality; it’s precisely what I like about her. That she can’t really sing, and yet she does. There’s something so painfully real about her aching rasp: “Sometimes, I get a little too low/And I can’t see myself through the fire and smoke” and there’s nothing I can say, I’m upended. 

There are certainly a lot of other elements that factor into her success and recognition as a musical artist—her Hollywood genes, her child star past—and who knows if she would have gone this far in the collective cultural discourse without all that, but still. You’ve got to admire her gumption. She has this unflappable willingness to invent and reinvent. Miley Cyrus is a shapeshifting figure, a stylized chameleon who’s inhabited so many bodies it’s confusing to keep track. I think she’s tried pretty much everything, from her darling, winsome Disney years to her hip-hop-tinged Bangerz phase. And now she’s rocking a bleached blonde mullet, divorced and leather-clad and relentlessly flamboyant in her efforts to shock (or maybe just make her mark). In the past few years, she’s released a lot of work that’s flown under the radar for lack of impact. But if Twitter and pop culture think-pieces are any indication, it seems like this record has finally clicked. I think, good for her, and I mean it with all my heart.

I used to be obsessed with Miley Cyrus. All throughout the sixth and seventh grade, my school locker was fixed up like a Hannah Montana shrine. Its narrow metal walls were collaged in a pastiche of photos and posters torn out of teenybopper magazines I scraped my meager allowance together to buy. (I’d forego real books for a copy of J-14 if Miley was on the cover). I printed out the words to “Nobody’s Perfect” and “This is the Life” from AZ Lyrics and taped them to the door. 

A very cool, very popular eighth grade girl took notice of my fanaticism. When I say she was cool, I mean really—she had tattoos and a tongue ring and would have made the characters in Thirteen look like nerds. She was an untouchable badass, and so gorgeous it was daunting. But she was also, surprisingly, kind of sweet. One day she gave me an old skirt of hers that was exactly the same as one Miley wore in an early episode. It was hideous, a brown, puffy thing embroidered with pale blue flowers like a granny throw rug. I loved it. 

I’d wear that skirt and feel like, if only for a few hours, I wasn’t me. I was Miley Stewart, fun and charming and full of adventure. I was a carefree girl from Malibu with a lot of talent and a very big secret. 

Playing dress-up was fun. I really, really wanted to be someone else, specifically her. I also wanted to be Avril Lavigne, and Taylor Swift, and even Emma Roberts’ Addie, from the Nickelodeon show Unfabulous. I admired each of them in different ways: Avril was defiant and rugged, a proverbial older sister I put on a pedestal to worship. Taylor was a bright girl-next-door who could have been my best friend in another life, who spun together quick-witted lyrics that made me mad because I didn’t come up with them first. Addie and Miley felt more relatable. They were young and inelegant, and as gawky as me. They could be messy in their good intentions and clumsy in the way they navigated obstacles— of which their adventures spawned many. They often tried to do well, and frequently failed.

But they had something going for them, because no matter how many classes they might flunk or how many boys would break their hearts, they could make music. They could pour all of that into song form, and it would be worth it. They had talent, or skill, or audacity. All of the above. Whatever it was, it made them special. At ten years old, always out of place and often bullied or left out, I wanted nothing more than to be special, too. 

In many ways, I owe a lot of my music journey to Miley. I wrote my first song the year before Hannah Montana came out. The next summer, I caught a late-night playback of the first episode in a motel room somewhere in Los Angeles, my grandfather snoring in the next bed and a Taco Bell bag filled with discarded burrito wrappers sitting on the corner table. Instantly, I was mesmerized. In retrospect, the soundtrack wasn’t objectively all that good. I don’t think I would have liked the songs if I’d heard them on the radio without knowing where they were from. But I was so caught up in the whole starry silver screen narrative, I wanted to be enamored with it all. So I was. I could relate to her. I was ordinary and unassuming too, and I also wrote songs, and maybe deep inside me there was something that shined, something that could be loved by enough people to fill a stadium. To fill all the stadiums in the world. With all that love, I was certain, you could never be lonely.

When she came out with new stuff after Hannah Montana wrapped, I felt weirdly betrayed. Like, This isn’t her! Bring the old Miley back! She was always in the tabloids then, for “scandalous” “antics” I rolled my eyes at, because, duh, sex sells, it always has, what were people so shocked about? It felt annoyingly performative to me, like she was trying too hard to shed her old image. But the things she was repudiating were the very things I liked about her. I’ve since recognized this bitter disdain as a projection of sorts, a feeling of inadequacy. Like the feeling you get when your childhood best friend starts sneaking out to hook up with boys and get drunk, while you stay cooped up in your room because you aren’t invited, and probably wouldn’t be able to go even if you were. Everyone around me was growing up so much faster than I was, and it felt like I was getting left behind.

Recently, a friend and I were talking about a shared aversion to change, and how this resistance is closely related to a kind of heartbreak, a loss of innocence. I was in high school at this point, and still felt such a strong attachment to who Miley was, or more accurately, what she meant to me. It was just, I don’t know, sad? Disappointing? To see a childhood idol go in a direction I didn’t resonate with, and could no longer follow. The eleven-year-old in me started to wilt. Maybe I was really just intimidated, because this figure who had made me feel seen was now way too cool for me to identify with anymore.

I don’t like this part of myself, the part that likes to stick to the way things are and hates when the leaves begin to turn. I don’t like being stubborn about staying in place. I think it stifles me in a lot of ways, especially when it comes to creativity. For a long time, I was stuck on only being a musician, stuck on only writing folk songs, stuck on so many particular demands I made of myself. 

On the bright side, it used to keep me focused on my goals. From the moment I wrote that first song, I knew I wanted to be a proper, full-time music artist when I grew up, and I zeroed in on that dream with bullseye determination. On the not-so-bright side, it isn’t always easy for me to let go when things aren’t working out. It doesn’t come naturally to me, to open myself to possibilities. It took me two years of crying before gigs to realize that something was deeply wrong. If you’re trying to pursue a music career when you can’t even bring yourself to write a song, well… maybe it’s time to examine why, exactly, your voice catches every time you try to do this thing you want to do so badly. It isn’t supposed to be this paralyzing, at least not all the time. But I white-knuckled my way through it. I pushed and pushed and pushed until I gave out. I had been following the dream because I promised myself I would, but I hadn’t given myself enough space to figure out if it was still my dream anymore. When I make a commitment, I really see it through, but sometimes it comes at the expense of other, more important things. Anyway, it wasn’t the music itself that was the problem, it was something else within me, something I’m still trying to understand. (I’m hoping I can figure it out here, in this newsletter, someday).

So it feels somehow triumphant, to see this popstar, like an old friend, come back to herself. This new record feels genuine to who she is. Her work here is glitzy and irreverent and lusty and emotional all at once. I don’t love every single track, but what does my opinion matter—I’m just one person, and so many of her other fans would probably disagree with me. Plastic Hearts feels authentic, and I appreciate that.

Oddly, what feels even more triumphant is knowing that this all comes after seven years and four albums that were often panned or ignored. Because the fact of the matter is, she did those albums. Even if they weren’t all that great. She wanted to make them, and she did. And then she moved on to the next. At the end of the day, all the stadiums in the world will never be enough to compensate for a lack of fulfillment. You can put out work other people love, but what will it matter if you don’t love it? If you wanted to try something new, but stopped yourself because you were so preoccupied with what people might think?

It’s more gratifying, I’ve been realizing lately, to explore. To follow your curiosity and go towards what thrills you, even if it falls flat for everyone else. That’s real bravery. It’s strange, but I’m truly just in awe that she powered through them all, that she made shit and fell on her face and got back up to do it all over again. And again and again and again, until she hit the mark. It reminds me that it’s important to create, even if it’s bad. Just because it doesn’t work for everyone doesn’t mean it’s devoid of any merit. The good stuff comes when you keep going.