The press materials also say that the album is inspired by non-monogamy, so I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about that.
I fell in love with my partner, Hayden, two years ago, and I wrote a bunch of songs about them. Practicing non-monogamy in this relationship has been a really liberating and loving and beautiful experience in a way that I didn’t even realize was possible. That’s given me a nice sense of freedom, and a sense of excitement and joy.
Is the album’s title inspired by that?
Yeah, totally. It’s meant in a loving way, although of course folks I hope interpret it however it feels, but my interpretation of it is like a loving, “You’re free to go, you’re free to stay.” I feel like it’s what I would want, what I would be telling my inner child. Or what I hope the universe is telling me.
Can you say more about that?
Well, this timeline is fucked geopolitically. I think I believe in past lives and stuff. I don’t remember my past life, but I definitely feel like I had some. But I feel like this life is full of such incredible, beautiful, amazing people that I’m so grateful to exist around, and the bondage and exploitation of capitalism can still not touch that. It’s challenging to live in a world that’s scary. War is scary. Sexual predators in the government are scary and white people are scary. But at the very least, I can continue to spend time with the people that I care about and dig into my community and cry and rage and protest and dance together.
Yeah, and you kind of have to do those things.
Yeah. Or else it’s like… what’s it for?
This album was also shaped by your voice continuing to change while on testosterone. Can you tell me more about that?
The process of getting used to my new voice and letting go of my old one and letting go of the vocal control that I had with my old one, it was pretty intense. I mean, it was amazing, but it took a lot of love and patience, and now I feel like even though I started taking T in 2018, my voice is still ever-changing.
That’s partly because of testosterone insecurity with my health insurance, but I can also feel the subtle ways in which it’s different every day in a way that maybe I couldn’t before I transitioned. I can feel very intimately what my voice needs. Now I know that I need to take good care of my voice because I feel like it’s so much more powerful than it was before. The lower register, this depth, this cavernous, these low notes I have, I think that’s exciting, and I feel like I’m only just now getting a handle on how to use them.
But also I feel like my voice is so much more fragile than it was before, my higher register is so fragile — sometimes fragile, sometimes biting. I’m just discovering all these new characters of my voice that I didn’t know were there and I didn’t even realize that was a thing. So that’s exciting to be experiencing as a 32-year-old man. I’ve been discovering the extent of the acrobatic nature of my voice.
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