My hot take is that pop culture and art and music and fashion and snacks and puppies and drag queens and texting and stupid movies and memes and holding hands and dancing and expensive perfume and very high thread count Egyptian cotton sheets and fancy bath towels and shiny pretty things and tall boy bathtubs are all actually really important.
The pandemic is hard and endless and there’s no extra credit for suffering. It’s not shallow to want to surround yourself with life and beauty when there is death and sadness all around.
Say yes to all bread. Chase kindness. Buy whatever. Laugh about it. Cry about it. You’re doing great.
This month I am celebrating 14 years in longterm recovery from a 16 year addiction to cocaine and alcohol that nearly took my life many times.
I am really happy to be here. 🖤
For the first decade after I stopped trying to hurt myself, I had these incredible moments of shame and guilt and weird panic take me over constantly, just about having been this person for so long — and I still sometimes do.
Like…how did I ever think anything I did, wrote, sang, or said in the 90s and early 00s was ok? How could I have hurt myself so much and cared so little for other people?
I do my best to stay compassionate with myself, and so many of you have shown me the same over the years.
If you are someone I hurt, humiliated, or discarded somewhere along the way, I’m truly sorry. All I can really say is that hurting people hurt people, and I was hurting for many years.
Every single change I’ve made in my life has been made in the direction of my knowing I needed to do better, be better, and ultimately take responsibility for the entire experience of having been me this whole time — both as a very sick person, and now having been a very well person for many years.
I was talking to John from Portugal. The Man a few months ago about how so many things would never have happened if I had been successful in killing myself. One of the things I listed was that we would never have met. He very kindly let me know that we had met before I was well and that he just had never brought the experience up because clearly I did not remember and he knew I had been through a lot.
I have no recollection of this, and so many other experiences from that time; But I know that many of you retain these memories of me from before, and I am so grateful to John and every single one of you who have been willing to meet me again over the years, and have made space for me in your lives since.
Thank you to everyone who tried to keep me safe or showed me love during those early years — and thank you all for giving me the chance to be who I am now. It is your kindness that has carried me through.
No SXSW for me this year. I just officially pulled out of the festival.
Human rights violations on the state level aside, I am very committed to being part of a music industry that actually cares about people who are at heightened risk for complications from Covid-19 and makes space for people with disabilities and pre-existing conditions to still do what they love safely. That’s not the current trend and it’s really fucking gross.
I’m lucky to be on a label that supports me here. I know that’s not the case for everyone right now.
I’m screaming about the blow up doll from my music video’s devastating cameo on tonight’s episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race. She really followed her dreams and it paid off.
Watch doll’s first starring role from last summer’s sex bop on the Kill Rock Stars YouTube channel below. 🖤
I released my 10th album this week and next year will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of the 1st one. Wild stuff.
I can’t ever tell if I am the hero or the villain of this story, so I usually land on: I am both. People are assholes and I’m one of them. Unlike most of you though, my entire humiliating human journey is on record. Every dark thought I had as a teenager is literally downloadable on iTunes, a quarter of a century later. It’s horrifying and liberating all at once, and has always felt this way to me. I made bedfellows with overexposure early on in my career because I had to as a result of my writing, not because I understood what that would actually mean 25 years down the road.
I’ve been writing songs about what’s happening in my life at any given time since I was a child, and began recording and releasing those songs professionally when I was 17 — still very much a child. Life was all the way off the rails for me back then, and so is everything I did and wrote during that time.
My discography exists in two parts: 1998-2008 sounds like drugs and violence because everything around me was drugs and violence. 2009-now sounds like a person putting things back together after all the drugs and violence. I do my best to stay compassionate with myself about the lot of it, and I am ultimately glad it all exists — but it’s so incredibly hard to look at, in parts. I was a very sad, unwell person for many years, and that comes through loud and clear in all of those tracks from before.
My songs have never been about answers, and they still aren’t. Even now, as a happy, well person, I am all questions and nothing else. It has been this way for as long as I can remember. These albums are just a reflecting pool; kinda hard to make out, quite like the years.
Some of you have been with me this whole time, others have joined at points along the way, and many of you are just getting here now. However you found me and my songs, and however long you have been around, I hope you all know how much it means to me that you are here.
And for anyone about to dig into my back catalog: Apologies in advance. It was the 90s and I was freebasing cocaine.
This Christmas song of mine that Kill Rock Stars just put out was written about how our government and lots of our friends and neighbors failed us all over the last couple of years. We recorded it in the midst of the first wave of the pandemic where it really seemed like absolutely everyone I know and love was going to die.
Many did.
I think the holidays are traumatizing for a lot of people, especially now, given the scale of the loss and grief of this time we are living through. There are a bunch of queer and trans people who have already lived through a pandemic that brought suffering into our lives and wiped out entire generations of our LGBTQ+ elders — so I figured there should be a Christmas anthem for us, too. Fuck Christmas, ya know? Especially now.
I channeled all of my exhausted, queer rage into this beast in the studio and I know it was really cathartic for my whole team as we were in there making it. There has been so much to scream about, and not enough people screaming. It felt good to let some out, and to have a place to put it all.
For the video we brought together imagery that evokes these feelings I’ve been having around all of the loss, violence, misinformation and trolling so many of us have been experiencing, then we juxtaposed that with imagery of gay joy and sex and wildness from the before times.
