Now that we are wrapping up the New Money release campaign, I thought I’d share how some of the sausage was made. Getting to partner with Gucci again this entire album cycle has been a dream come true.
Every look, every drip, started as a storyboard. Canceled tour dates aside, we pulled every piece of this campaign off!
The idea behind this musical era was to be as intentionally gauche and over the top as possible. Thank you to Alessandro Michele and the team from Gucci Portland for bringing this gilded, monogrammed, New Money vision to life with us.
I was being interviewed for an upcoming story and when they asked about what I hope people take away from this new record, I said my entire goal this album cycle has been to be so unabashedly queer that even people who thought they were pro-gay before go “Ewww!” whenever they see me, hear the songs, or watch the videos.
It’s been out for two weeks now and I’ve really been feeling so much love. Tune in tonight for a convo about the album with Portland Radio Project at 99.1FM in PDX and PRP.fm everywhere else.
Pick up your copy of New Money from Kill Rock Stars at your favorite music shop this week! 💚❤️
(Wearing: Brown leather visor with harness from the #GucciAria runway show, GG monogram canvas 2 piece suit, embroidered GG monogram polo shirt, and embroidered GG #GucciTennis shoes by Alessandro Michele for Gucci.)
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.
