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I can’t really pinpoint when it was exactly that we technically finished Heaven - I know that we started it awhile ago and that up until January of 2021 it was still called “Stargazing” (just a random temporary name we came up with off the cuff) and then at some point we tried to call it “All Your Tragedies” which didn’t really stick. Eventually it became Heaven pretty much right before we wrapped up production and sent it out for mixing. The uncertainty about timing, coupled with the fact that Heaven expresses a mentality I’ve held repeatedly for the sporadic majority of my adult life, makes it kind of hard to determine who or what I was even specifically thinking about when I wrote the lines that address an unnamed second-person party. When I wrote Heaven (whenever that was) I really was pretty certain I never wanted to fall in love again, or maybe more-so thought I wasn’t capable of it. I was so proud of the aptitude I’d honed for being alone, in the joy and rhythm I had cultivated within my solitude. They seemed to me not only a unique accomplishment but a reliable and sturdy defense mechanism against the pain that I’d previously suffered from falling into a trapping cycle of codependency, resentment, and attachment anxiety. I felt like I had cracked the code to dealing with such issues: I’d simply choose perpetual bachelordom and hope to someday end up in a particularly gender-inclusive spread covering which hot thirty-somethings Some Magazine considers to be the Most Eligible Bachelors in the New York Metro Area. It was just like that time I thought I’d found a secret hack to managing my chronic anxiety (meds) and instead wound up facing Jackass-Genie-style consequences for my naïve actions (a raging benzodiazepine addiction)—in both instances, my solution turned out to be a band-aid at best (the solitude) and at worst, a brand new nightmare of my own creation (the drug problem). I always tell friends who are frustratedly looking for a romantic partner that it won’t happen for them until they give up—I mean like really, truly give up—that only then will they meet someone who slips naturally into that role. I don’t know if it’s a behavioral probability thing or an issue of mindset or some kind of whimsical reverse-law-of-attraction phenomenon but that’s just the way it seems to always go. So I guess I must have been quietly hoping for something like that without admitting it to anyone or even myself, for like a girlfriend-type of thing I guess. Or just someone who’s there all the time, both in my house and also figuratively speaking in some profound kind of sense. I guess that’s what happened because eventually I did really truly give up on all of that and embrace solitude not in a romantic, brooding way but in a boring, practical one. Then and only then (as you may already know if you’ve read my other blog posts) did I very suddenly find love in a person who, on paper, looked nothing like how I would’ve expected them to look (based on the aforementioned girlfriend-type scenario I had tossed around in my imagination). It’s funny to share Heaven with you now after all of that has happened. It feels a little insincere at times because now you guys see me post her face up there on my Instagram and what not and it all starts to feel like I’m publicly betraying the person who wrote honestly about never wanting to fall in love again, and perhaps even the people who were told similar sentiments (honestly, truly) by that person along the way (before The Unpredictable entered the picture, that is). I meant what I said then, and if anything there is a new layer of emotion behind Heaven when I perform it now—a fear that I’ve indulged too deeply in a fantasy that is now inextricable from reality, that I’m missing out on a higher level of self-actualization achievable only by the alone-and-lonely version of myself. Stuff like that, I dunno. All kinds of fear and stuff. To be honest, I'm starting to realize it's stuff I never would've had to examine or unpack or wrestle with if I'd kept intentionally avoiding intimacy. And on some days I begin to resent that because it was more simple then when I didn't have to look at that stuff in the eye. On most days, though, I consider it to be the best thing that ever happened to me. The current girlfriend-type scenario, I mean. And really at the end of the day it doesn’t feel like I had much of a choice in the matter anyway, which eliminates some of that useless trauma response of intrusive second-guessing. Sometimes life hands you something so good that you’ve just got to see it through. Chances are that all that fear and stuff is mostly just fear that if you ever lose it now, you’ll be painfully aware of something you hadn't realized you'd been missing out on.

7 Seconds is very easily my most personal song to date, at least lyrically. In the last couple of years it’s come to my attention that pretty much all of the mental health struggles that I was taught to attribute to chemical imbalances and genetic predispositions are probably mostly just different symptoms of complex PTSD. For those who are unfamiliar, C-PTSD refers to a form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder which develops in response to exposure to a series of traumatic events, specifically in a context in which the individual perceives little or no chance of escape, and particularly where the exposure is prolonged or repetitive. Unlike PTSD, C-PTSD is not defined by the occurrence of one particular instance of trauma, and is not recognized by the DSM-5 as a psychiatric disorder. It’s often misdiagnosed or diagnosed in comorbidity with other disorders. It’s treatable, but there’s not really any quick fix to offer relief to those who suffer from it. It has been an ongoing process to realize how much of the hurdles I’ve faced in my life can be traced back to a pattern of repeated childhood trauma. Every day I realize new ways in which enduring such traumas during a crucial period of my emotional and intellectual development led to a warped view of the world, myself, and my interpersonal relationships. Every day I must practice compassion for the ways that my younger self was failed by the world around me and manage the rage I feel toward this profound injustice. I actually don’t remember much of my childhood. I remember scattered moments of joy that feel sort of far away like they were experienced by a totally different person. They’re all shrouded in this overwhelming sense of dread that I recall being near constant. From a very young age I felt trapped in my existence, incapable of believing promises that I’d someday feel relief, let alone consistent safety and security. I used to imagine some kind of larger-than-life human or spiritual being that would nurture me and provide reassurance that felt believable, some kind of tangible closeness to a figure bigger and wiser than my small scared self. In some ways, I feel that I am still that small scared child, suspended forever in fear and loneliness and uncertainty, pickled in a brine of confused juvenile teardrops. In other ways, I feel that from very early on I was forced to be that very nurturing figure, to put on a brave face that felt so old for my age, to provide that reassurance for myself. I think I’m composed of two selves—one which is perpetually emotionally stunted, constantly needing care from the other self, who was never given the chance to be scared or sad or needy and who had to mature so much faster than they were ready to. This song was an attempt to play the role of a mediator between these two selves, to sit them both down and give them the space they never felt they had to feel young and old, weak and strong at the same time, rather than let myself continue to careen back and forth between the two in a whiplash-inducing way wherein I can never find balance, can never feel truly whole or present. I tried, with 7 Seconds, to give strength to the vulnerable one, to let them borrow sternness and power from the stoic one, while transversely offering softness to the other. I tried to capture the anger that I feel on behalf of both of them and of anyone who can relate to this struggle, especially to those who were socialized in their youth to believe that their bodies were those of adults when they were not, but that their minds were those of children when they were really never given the chance to be. I wish I could believe in my own call-to-action to “run it down”, so to speak. I wish I could believe that thunder will come imminently, but to be honest with you, I don’t. I don’t believe that there will be a reckoning for people like us—not now, not in seven seconds, not ever. The pain of that hopelessness is what I tried to capture in 7 Seconds. I aspire for someone out there to find, if not hope, solidarity in my story.

Hollywood, MA was never an apology. I admit that one may be overdue in some contexts and I’ll get to that eventually or maybe not. It is, rather, an attempt to untangle a pattern of events that I thought reflected a greater emotional deficiency on my part. I think most people will live their entire lives never feeling truly seen. I think we may be lucky to feel at times that we have been glimpsed, and many live and die contently believing that this is as good as it gets. I know that I believed this prior to experiencing the love that I have now been lucky enough to have stumbled on myself. But I think for the most part that the vast majority of people will never be so lucky as to know what they were once missing out on. Because of this, we find ourselves settling, without even knowing that settling is what we are doing, for superficial visibility. We cling to the first person who shows potential for seeing or for evoking the feeling of being seen, while knowing deep deep down that the given context will never allow for such empathy. We blame attachment styles that we learned about in infographics or in rooms where they were harmonized by white-noise-machines, stationed carefully outside the door to protect our little anxious-avoidant secrets. And we believe that this is the closest anybody ever comes to empathy because, metacognitively, that’s the closest we’ve ever come. Technically though, there is of course no true ability within the experience of humanness to see and feel the world through another’s perspective. Simultaneously, many of life’s greatest pains and joys stem from attempts to challenge this truth, many of life’s most celebrated masterpieces from this resistance. David Foster Wallace, a particular standout among the many favorites I have which make up a specific group of partialities of mine that I’ve been informed can be described as “male manipulator taste” (a concept that probably-not-so-coincidentally tracks with some of the lyrical themes present in Hollywood—I’m nothing if not self aware), gave a voice to a lot of the feelings I have about empathy and loneliness. He sought, through densely postmodern literature, to get as infinitely close to true empathy as one can get. I’ve sought, through catchy accessible pop music, to sort-of vaguely approximate some semblance of it. At the risk of inviting accusations that I am overintellectualizing a song which, at the end of the day, is stylistically characterized more by the presence of 808 hi hats than the highbrow quality of the lyrics, I tried to imbue some of the strategies of my favorite postmodern minds into the writing of Hollywood, fusing together different stories about a number of separate times that I felt I was incapable of sincere emotion into one Frankenstein-like mass of self pity. In doing so, I hoped to harness the power of postmodernism in inviting listeners to question the urge to identify and/or compare, or the sheer theoretical potential for doing so at all. Artmaking, for me, has always been about this challenge. I wake up every day feeling no choice but to rise to it because A) it’s fun and I think I’m good at it, B) I think I would probably just shrivel up and die if the opportunity for emotional vouyeurism through art was not available to me. For a long time I thought that making and releasing music was the only way I could ever hope to feel seen and heard. I struggled, and struggle substantially still, with how difficult it is to reach peoples’ eyes and ears. Modern technology, for all of the ways that it’s enabled this connectivity, also oversaturates our capacity for consuming media to such an extent that I think by the time I get my turn to speak, everyone has already connected with quite enough people for the day. As someone who is similarly affected as a media consumer by these overwhelming opportunities for consumption, I have nothing but sympathy for the audiences I often struggle to reach. That being said, in this struggle I sometimes feel a shameful vulnerability, a creeping awareness that my emotional perversion has left me an embarrassingly voyeurless voyeuree. It’s an incredibly lonely feeling to throw your art about loneliness into a dark, resonant chamber and hear it echoed back only once or twice, realizing through this sonar-like strategy that the cave really is not that deep at all, that you are actually every bit alone as you feel. It seems, at times, comically apropos. I am incredibly grateful for those who echo my loneliness back to me in their own voice and for those who hear but perhaps echo only silently in their own heads. I am also incredibly grateful that as of late I find myself less alone in this cave. I can speak more quietly and be heard by ears only inches away from my mouth. I have a dugout full of other voices urging me to throw another piece of art, to really put my arm into it this time. Sorry for mixing metaphors. There’s your apology after all. PS For those who ask about the meaning of the title, I wish I had an answer for you. I liked the idea of there being a town in Massachusetts called “Hollywood” the way that there is a town in Texas called “Paris”. I lived in Massachusetts for many years and hated it there.

Looking back on writing Breathing In Manual I can’t help but feel overwhelmed by compassion for the person I was just a couple of years ago, or to be more specific, for the person I thought I had no choice but to be. By 2020, even before people had begun throwing the term “pandemic” around, I had firmly accepted that anxiety would always be a defining feature of my personality, that neuroticism was a concept that would always be equated with the name “Jill Blutt”. It wasn’t really a solemn acceptance as much as a playful one—I’d concluded that my best defense against people judging me for this anxiety was to get ahead of it, to own it in a way that I could build a brand around. So I made a home for it among other identifying factors of mine, nestled right between “Jewishness” and “existentialism”. I found ways to play it off as charming, trying desperately to spin it into a kind of Seth-Cohen-style nervousness. In reality, I knew at the time that it was a lot deeper than overthinking everything and occasionally stumbling through interpersonal encounters. People who had known me for a long time prior knew, also, that my fear of the world around me and my inability to understand or connect with it manifested in a myriad of limiting behaviors. Behaviors that at the time were perhaps merely embarrassing from the outside looking in, but from the inside, fortified the walls of a prison the outside of which I had never really known. I struggled deeply and often publicly to escape this prison. At the time of writing Breathing In Manual, I thought surely I had found my escape in acceptance. With the help of great support systems, I had long since stopped using unhealthy coping mechanisms in attempts to eliminate the distress and was living relatively comfortably with the belief that panic attacks and social dysfunction would be a regular part of my life forever. Even as the pandemic made these factors worse, I maintained the belief that this was as good as it could get. And I was fairly happy. I wrote Breathing about this level of functionality that I thought many would be able to relate to. I think many did and still do. I experienced several moments since then that tested my ability to survive without the help of old coping mechanisms. I also experienced several moments which seemed to confirm all of the fears I’d had about the world—especially, that I was “weird” in a way that was still weirder even than self-proclaimed weirdos were, that my anxieties were character deficits that I simply had to learn to accommodate because they weren’t going anywhere. I felt immovably that they were somehow, deep down, my fault, and people around me seemed to echo that, whether they intended to do so or not. With all due respect to those people and their good intentions, I reject that version of myself wholly now. In doing so, I found that the anxiety subsided substantially. I realize that my acceptance of that anxiety was not radical or nuanced or dialectic at all, that I was still carrying around the shame of my weirdness and the guilt that it was my fault, still trying to make myself palatable and understandable for a palate I could never understand, and in doing so only reinforcing the problem. I now refuse to associate with anyone who is not themselves weird in a way that is compatible with my own. I refuse to give airtime to the voice in my head that was taught to speak by people who had already set out to dislike me from the moment they met me. I think everyone that’s ever turned their nose up at someone for displaying signs of neuroatypicality—everyone that’s ever giggled at someone’s behavior with their friends because of the ways it failed to meet their standards of normality, everyone that’s ever responded with judgment rather than sympathy to the ways that someone’s internal struggle might sometimes ooze out into the open, everyone that’s ever believed for even one moment that they’re better than someone else just because they intuitively know exactly how and when to laugh during a conversation—enjoy rotting awesomely at the absolute hottest table in all of Hell :)