Little Voice album photo shoot, 2007
I felt like I was being asked to invite complete strangers into my sacred, secret fort and that none of them were respecting what I had already built. It might have been unrefined, rough around the edges, close to collapsing . . . but I had spent all the years of my life constructing it. Reggae and all. It was innocent and childlike. It was mine. If I was going to share it with someone, I needed to feel like they could at least acknowledge it and, more importantly, help me protect it. I was absolutely a rookie songwriter and had maybe thirty songs to my name, a lot of them terrible, but I was developing my own voice as a writer. My songs were my blood cells as far as I was concerned, and the idea of allowing someone to toy with them sent me into toxic shock. It didn’t help that I was being paired with people who spent all day every day in writing sessions and had naturally developed more of a business-minded relationship with the writing process itself. For me, music was still too precious. Too raw. Too private. I can see now how I contributed to those sessions being unsuccessful. The truth is that I wasn’t yet comfortable enough in my own skin to be open to the possibility of creating something with anyone. Collaboration requires trust, and first and foremost you have to trust yourself. I just wasn’t there yet.
The last stop on that train of potential collaboration was Eric Rosse, whose quiet and patient nature left space for me to be in the room. He is a talented and accomplished writer and producer and had produced two of my favorite Tori Amos records of all time. I think that gave me an inroad into believing he could be a safe place. The first thing we did was sit and talk for a while. He was genuinely interested in my story. He asked questions about me, about my music. I felt a tiny part of me open up and start to let something in, and though we met as potential cowriters, Eric ended up producing the entire record. He was encouraging of my songwriting ideas, and I felt validated and inspired to dig deeper and finish them on my own. He gave good suggestions and was an attentive listener—more so than any of the other writers I had met with. He and I ended up developing the kind of dynamic relationship that proves both parties care very much about what they’re making. This means we fought hard. I cried a lot. (I think he did too, but didn’t let me see.) It certainly wasn’t easy, but Eric pushed me in ways I needed to be pushed and I am grateful for all of it.
All that frustration leading up to this point with the writers, the label, and the process itself was a catalyst for me in digging back into my own storytelling. I wrote Love Song not long after that last writing debacle with Mr. Douche, at a rehearsal space in Los Angeles. I shared a small storage unit with some of my best friends in a band called Raining Jane, and I was using it as a writing room in the mornings. Our space was basically a teeny-tiny little roll-down-garage-door metal box, filled to the brim with a random smattering of instruments, twinkle lights, road cases, merchandise boxes, plastic tubs, half-drunk bottles of liquor, and bungee cords. We split the cost of the room for close to two years, and both bands would practice there and store whatever bullshit wouldn’t fit in the trunk of our cars. It worked out well until Public Storage found out we were playing music there and they eventually shut us down. The end of an era.
It was sunny and I drove to the rehearsal space in the morning with a coffee from 7-Eleven and walked down the corridor to the dingy but cozy little room that felt like the inside of a garbage can. I was numb. It had been months of bad meetings and confusion and insecurity and doubting my own abilities and trying to remember the way it feels to write something you love. There’s an innocence that comes with writing songs for no reason, and I was so very far from that point of connection. I sat down at my keyboard and literally prayed to God to help me write something that brought me back to a place I could feel.
Who I am as a songwriter had always been the most pure part of myself. She connects me to my deepest truth and says things I don’t always feel the courage to say in my own life. I felt so much distance from her in that moment, I just wanted help to find her again. I asked for guidance in writing something that wasn’t for anyone but me and my muse. I asked for the strength to release feeling responsible for making anyone else happy with what I created. I placed my hands on the keys and the opening chord progression came spilling out from somewhere. The majority of that song was written in about thirty minutes, which is incredibly fast for me. Most of my songs take hours and hours, if not weeks and months and sometimes even years. It was a gift that I desperately needed that day and I still don’t think I had much to do with writing it. That’s just plain ol’ magic and God.
In my next session with Eric, I shared the idea. It felt connected for me, but that meant nothing about whether or not it would connect with anyone else. I had shared so many ideas at this point that hadn’t landed; this could easily have been more of the same. He told me it was really good and smiled, suggesting I repeat the hook in the chorus a second time. I played with structure and finished the song in the next day or so. I felt myself exhale for the first time in a long time.
I had poured my frustration into those lyrics, giving voice to how small I felt. That song was a culmination of years of being criticized and misunderstood. Months of unfulfilling writing sessions that left me feeling vulnerable, inadequate, and worst of all, invisible. This song was what came out of my struggle to find my own voice again. The lyrics were so literal I thought that the label was going to be upset with me, and that no one would be able to relate to the story because it was so specifically mine. I was certain that it would get lumped into the bevy of discarded songs, but I didn’t care. I felt creatively energized. Eric and I made a demo and nothing could have prepared me for the phone calls I got after we sent it off. My label and my manager were elated. They were jumping up and down over that song. I was shocked. I had to break the news to Pete that the song was about them. He laughed and laughed.
I’m not saying that Love Song is a perfect piece of writing, but it saved me in a lot of ways. At a crucial moment in my life, it allowed me a glimpse of that sacred connection that happens only every once in a while with songwriting, and reminded me it hadn’t been extinguished. I think in some ways it prepared me for stepping into the professional realm on a larger scale. There is an enormous amount of toxic nonsense to wade through as an artist, and if you lose sight of what is at the center of it all, you run the risk of losing yourself completely. Love Song became a barometer of truth for me and reminded me of who I was as a writer and an artist at a time when I really needed to know. If nothing else, that moment of clarity would help me be more patient in waiting for the next one.
And that’s the bigger story of Love Song.
I don’t share all of that with everyone. It’s not only that it’s a lot of information; much of it is just so personal. It doesn’t need to be written about in a magazine or spoken of on the radio in a five-minute interview. I can share it in the pages of this book because it feels safe here, like I’m among friends. In a way, the entirety of these pages is an extension of that childhood fort I’m still trying to protect. And now you’re in on the secret. So . . . if you happen to catch the next time someone gets that cheeky look on their face and says to me, “So is it true that you wrote Love Song for your record label when they told you to write them a love song?”
You will mostly likely see me smile and answer yes.
But you’ll know better.
Dear Sara,
I know when your friend Matt dropped a quarter in the schoolyard and you put your foot on it to tease him, acting like you weren’t going to let him get it, you were trying to be funny. You didn’t know what to say when he yelled, “I’d need a bulldozer to move that leg.” You laughed because you were uncomfortable, but your stomach turned and you cried when you got into the bathroom. You look in the mirror and you don’t really like what you see.
At the school dance in seventh grade, you will be brave enough to ask the other Matt to dance. He’ll run away from you screaming, making you feel very awkward and lonely.
When you ask his friend Kenny why he did that, he’ll say, “Matt thinks you’re fat, ugly, and a snob.” You’ll write that down in your journal, which you are beginning to do more of these days. You spend a lot of time and mental energy comparing yourself to the other kids in your class. You think every other girl is cuter than you, and you have noticed that you are bigger than most of them. You’re ashamed of that. You wish you could just disappear sometimes. I’m very glad that you don’t.
You are beautiful.
You have a kind heart and your sensitivity is swiftly growing in ways you will never understand right now, and someday you will be so glad for all of this. Being a kid is hard sometimes, because kids are just miniature people and being a person is really hard. That part doesn’t change, unfortunately. But right now you are particularly innocent and vulnerable, and I’m sorry that you feel punished and excluded sometimes.
You are learning empathy, and what it feels like to be left out. This is going to make you want to be the kind of person who makes room for people who feel like outsiders, and it’s going to serve you well. It’s going to guide you toward people who love you for who you are, so hang in there. Trust me that things are moving in the right direction.
Love,
Sara
St. Bernard’s Elementary class picture, fourth grade, 1989
Dear Sara,
You have fallen in deep and desperate love with about six different boys this week. It will happen again next week. You are at a new high school with new friends, and the circle of people you hang out with is shifting constantly. My So-Called Life is the best thing that has ever happened to you. You believe that you practically are Angela and you dyed your hair in the bathroom at your mom’s new house to feel closer to Claire Danes, or you, or whatever. You are mortified by the “white spots” on your two front teeth that are calcium deposits that will bother you for the rest of your life. You will figure out that they are especially prominent if you accidentally sleep with your mouth open and so you will scotch-tape your mouth shut at night for a while. You are getting used to the fact that since the divorce you have two homes now. You don’t like dealing with the back-and-forth, but you also don’t know how to talk about that, and so you just don’t.
You started drinking this year. You were one of the last of your friends to try it, because you wanted to be a responsible person. Then you were shocked and kind of disappointed when it was actually really fun. You had your first drink, red wine in a plastic cup, on the beach at night in the pitch-black dark and your stomach felt warm, your muscles relaxed, and silliness seeped up from your blood and then you had to pee. You ran far enough down the beach so no one could see you, and then took your shoes, pants, and underwear all the way off and left them in a folded pile while you laughed out loud, ran a few steps farther down the beach, and peed. It made no sense, but it will be a story you tell forever about the first time you got drunk.
You stay at your best friend Kona’s a lot during the weekends because her mom works nights and is gone most of the time. You get buzzed on jugs of Carlo Rossi Burgundy wine with Kona and your new friends and you will all call yourselves the Carlo Rossi Posse. You are a quiet observer a lot because you feel intimidated by how much you admire them. They are artists and philosophers and writers and musicians and they are a precursor to you finding their likenesses again and again in your life, but you don’t see that yet.
You’ve convinced yourself that your true love must be right around the corner. It’s not. Or at least the corner is a hell of a lot bigger than you think it is. You keep finding yourself infatuated with someone new who doesn’t feel the way you do, and then somebody finally does feel the way you do next year. Every rejection you encounter will be twisted into a story you tell yourself that ends with “I am ugly,” and the relationship you end up having will do the same thing. You feel overlooked and plain and embarrassed and you break your own heart over and over again by placing so much value on this particular kind of love. You feel incessantly unseen.
I see you.
You are beautiful.
You are innocent and naïve and you are exploring your adolescence. You believe in the good in people and you believe just about anything is possible. That feeling gets harder to hold on to as we age, so I am especially fond of that in you now. You have surrounded yourself with people who make you feel inspired by art, music, movies, and laughter, and you are ingesting it and storing that sense of awe and excitement for a little later down the road. You crave sharing love because you have a lot of love to share, and your teenage brain can only see a certain distance because that’s how it’s wired. There is so much incredible road ahead and so much love waiting for you, you can’t even imagine how gorgeous it all is. I’m glad that you had experiences where you felt unseen, because those delicate moments are fine-tuning your natural instinct to be introspective. Your observer self is growing and will be a dear friend to you as you begin to tell your stories with music, and it will allow you to see things and articulate your experience in a way that makes other invisible people feel seen. Drinking makes you feel a whole bunch of things that I wish you felt sober, and you will eventually. You are exactly where you belong, and your tender heart is precious.
Love,
Sara
Dear Sara,
You are living in an apartment off campus at UCLA with a bunch of girls. It is your first year out of the dorms and the apartment has tall ceilings and rounded Spanish doorways and bougainvillea growing over the car park. You float on the excitement surrounding your new independent life, away from your parents and anyone who’s known who you’ve already been. You feel like anything and everything is possible and it makes your heart race in both good and bad ways. You are reinventing yourself, and right now you are using the girls around you as a background to build your own self image. Most of them are very petite blonde girls, and you are having a hard time with how you don’t really fit that mold. Many of them are joining sororities and you went to that one event and tried hard to impress all of the girls in the house and did. They asked you back to join the sorority, but you politely declined because you didn’t really feel like yourself. You are searching for a way to connect to who you are in your soul, and you aren’t finding it easily.
You spend a lot of time hating yourself and your body and you have started drinking a lot on weekends and throwing up the food you eat after drinking. You get positive reinforcement for that period of time where you restricted your eating so much and ran around the track obsessively, so you are getting the wrong message. You lose a little bit of weight and everyone says how good you look, and that feels nice and stresses you out even more. You don’t get attention from boys hardly at all. You have started using sexuality as currency to attract their attention, and that doesn’t feel very good, but you’re very drunk when you do it, so it’s hard to tell which part is the part that doesn’t feel so good. The next few years are going to be really hard on your self-esteem.
You will move to Italy next year to study abroad and break your dangerous habit of being obsessive and disciplined about food by going in the opposite direction and eating anything and everything. You’ll gain close to twenty pounds while you are there and shock yourself with how you look in pictures. You won’t really recognize yourself, but that will make sense, because the entirety of your experience in Italy feels surreal and strange. Feeling fat becomes one of the lesser of the uncomfortable things you will experience. You will discover that music is the only thing in the world that makes your soul feel understood. You make some conclusions about yourself that define the next chapter of your life: You are a songwriter. You are fat. You are ugly.
Only one of those is true.
You are beautiful.
You are trying your best to make sense of a whole new world and a whole new self. It’s scary to take steps toward independence, and I wish I could help you feel softer toward yourself while you explore what that actually means. The dynamic nature of your experie
nce right now is completely normal, and those high highs and low lows are a ride that you will get used to and learn to appreciate. I know you are overwhelmed by your own emotions a lot these days, and it makes you angry with yourself. But a bird’s-eye view shows that there is a bottleneck building up, shepherding you toward your own discovery of songwriting as a part of your essence, not just a hobby. And you aren’t alone. You are about to find a maze of people who share a love of the thing that will be your lifeboat: music. They will be a bunch of silly, big-hearted, lifelong friends who are waiting around the corner. You are about to dance ridiculous choreography while you sing a cappella songs that make you think your heart might burst open from happiness. Soon, you will start really writing your own music, and you will see such depth in yourself that you didn’t know was there. It will fill you up. You will tell your story of feeling invisible to love, and it will comfort other people who feel the same way, and it will make you feel connected to something bigger than yourself. You are on the right path, and you are exactly where you need to be.
Love,
Sara
Dear Sara,
It’s April 15, 2005. Today you walked into your new lawyer’s office in Santa Monica and signed a record deal, then you walked the fourteen blocks home to your tiny upstairs apartment and cried. You feel miserable and guilty about the fact that you aren’t celebrating this milestone moment, but you feel like you have just given something away that you won’t be able to get back. In your mind you have just jumped without a net. You call your mom and realize for the first time that she can’t make it better.
You have spent the last year of your life in and out of deep anxiety and depression, and you are seriously afraid that you might be crazy. This will continue for some time. Sometimes you have disassociation with your body and your thoughts get so loud that you feel like you can’t see straight and can’t engage with the room around you. It frightens you and makes you feel very alone. You don’t tell very many people about this.
Sounds Like Me Page 5