A conversation with Annelle Staal

Transcript from episode twenty six of the Good Folk podcast.

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SPENCER GEORGE: Happy Wednesday, folks. My name is Spencer George, and you're listening to the Good Folk podcast. 

It's a rare and beautiful experience to come across someone you immediately connect with, only to realize you have been peripherally weaving circles around one another for years. It's how I felt immediately upon entering this conversation with Annelle Staal, a North Carolina-based songwriter and entertainer. Annelle's sound is distinct with catchy melt-in-your-mouth melodies and timeless lyrical depth. 

A pioneer in the world of virtual performance and a visionary in their artistry, Annelle marries music, comedy, and storytelling in a distinct and captivating show that has caught the attention of an international audience online. Celebrated for their sultry vocals and colorful creativity by Earmilk, DIVA Mag and ABC news, Annelle’s best is yet to come.  

Annelle's first studio project titled “Mars” in 2017 featured moody, driving pop production and a lyrical discussion of love, war, and imagination. After the pandemic of 2020 cancelled Annelle's live show schedule, the artist released an acoustic collection of music called “Heart on My Sleeve,” where stripped production was matched with vulnerable themes of loss and self-discovery. 

Annelle began performing on the popular live streaming platform Twitch TV. There, an international audience quickly grew in Annelle's playful ecosystem of music and improvisational comedy. 

After “Mr. Christmas”, a bluesy big band holiday single in 2020, Annelle released a slew of songs in 2021 and 2022. Tracks like “Lemon Days”, “Turquoise”, and “Tonight” anticipate Annelle's debut full-length album, which is set to release in 2024. Annelle publicly came out to the world as queer and non-binary in 2022 with musical and visual art that celebrated sapphic and southern camp imagery. 

The songwriter then took a musical detour with “Violet”, an EP of queer nostalgic pop, in 2023. 

Following its leading single, My Girl, Annelle began recording and playing with a Raleigh, North Carolina-based band. “Pressure”, tracked and co-produced by Annelle's guitarist and musical partner Ben Youngblood, features the group's groovy indie pop sound. 

Annelle has toured the country with shows in Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Charlotte, Miami, and more. They continue to stream a show of music and comedy full-time on Twitch TV, have raised over $15,000 for charity, and advocate for the destigmatization and prioritization of mental health.

At its core, Good Folk is a reminder that as Southern and rural artists, we are not alone. We have always been here doing this work, and there are so many of us spread out across the country. We seek to do this work with eyes open, in pursuit of the belief that when we do, we will see those of us all around, in collaboration, community, and creativity.  This conversation served as a reminder to me that community is everywhere, if you are willing to look for it. I hope you enjoy. 

SPENCER GEORGE: I caught up on all the videos that you sent, so I'm super excited to dig into this. 

ANNELLE STAAL: Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for being willing to do that and like look into my discography a little bit. And also, I'm just very happy to be here because when Vic, I know them as Tori. Tori, do you go by Vic now? Did we not get to this discussion? 

VIC LANDERS: As long as it's not Vicky, I answer to anything. Vic is solely like my nickname that has just taken off.

AS: Oh, it's your name for them. Okay. 

SG: I don't really know when it started, but my mom had a best friend in her 20s who is named Victoria and went my mom called them Vic. And so I was like, yeah this is my best friend Victoria, I'm just gonna call them Vic, and it just kind of stuck.

AS: [Laughs]. Okay well that's iconic. I love it. 

VL: It's like everyone from my childhood knows me as Tori, then everyone in my adult life knows me as Vic. So it's funny when people kind of cross over and everyone's like, who are you speaking about? 

AS: That's amazing. 

VL: Yeah, it’s funny. 

AS: I was listening to one of the podcasts and you referred to them as Vic and I was like, who's Vic? And then they started speaking. I was like, wait,  it's all making sense now. That's really cute though. 

VL: I like both, so it doesn't matter. As long as it's not Vicky. I'm not a big fan of Vicky. 

AS: I'll use both then. 

SG: Vic is a person of many, many multitudes and identities and we love them for it. How do y'all know each other? 

AS: How did we actually even meet in the first place? 

VL: I could not begin to tell you. I've known Annelle since we were what? 

AS: Since we were like babies, basically. I mean, middle school? We’re actually childhood friends. Our parents were friends, and in some ways we grew up alongside each other because we would go for a long time without seeing one another and then we'd see each other again and get to check in. In our young adult life we've not been connected,? but recently I moved back to the Sandhills for to-be-determined how long, and I was like who do I know in the Sandhills? I was really wanting to get connected to community and I had known through the grapevine that Tori had come out as non-binary and I had come out as non-binary. And I was like, okay, well you know I know what needs to happen? We need to share an incredible meal and catch up on our lives. And so we did recently and that's when the podcast came up. I think it's incredible work and I'm not surprised that someone so wonderful is involved with something so wonderful.

SG: You actually really answered what was going to be my first question, which is what is your relationship to the Sandhills and to North Carolina? 

I don't know if you want to elaborate on that more now, but for some context, which listeners of this podcast will know, Vic and I met teaching in Moore County and kind of in the rural parts of the Sandhills and realized very quickly that—well, we joke all the time that I went to women's college in New York City and I have more queer friends in North Carolina than I ever did there, which is something that a lot of people can't wrap their head around. 

I found more of a home as an artist and more inspiration in this region than anywhere else. I'm in Chapel Hill now for grad school, but the Sandhills holds a special place in my heart, and I think it's a really amazing place to be. The arts community there is hard to put into words, but it is exploding. So I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about your relationship to the Sandhills, maybe as a place to begin. 

AS: Yeah. Well, I grew up a military kid, so I moved around everywhere. My dad was stationed at Fort Bragg, which is the military base that is in the Sandhills, and so I went to part of elementary school, middle school and high school there. 

I also grew up in a very conservative part of the Sandhills. My family was heavily involved in the Christian church and particularly the Presbyterian denomination. There are some that are very accepting of women and queer leaders and there are others that are extremely strict and are like, you know, to be queer is a sin, to be a woman is to not be allowed in a leadership position in church. 

It had a huge impact on me, as one might expect, being in high school and middle school in such a conservative church. I remember one time I went to my pastor and I was like I really think that my calling is to be a musician and he was like, well, technically the only real calling that God can give is to be a pastor and you're a woman so you can't have a calling, but allow that to set you free because you can do whatever you'd like to do with your life. I remember sitting there being like, oh my god,  I don't know how I'm supposed to move forward. 

I moved out of the Sandhills when I was eighteen. I graduated high school early because I was signed by an artist management company in Nashville. Before I left the Sandhills, I was performing in at least two or three different bars every weekend. I would play in Pinehurst, Southern Pines, Fayetteville, all of the surrounding areas. I played in a little three-piece band and just had made a sort of local name for myself and then I moved out to the big city and there I found more homophobia and Christian Doctrine because Nashville is—for those who don't know it's often called Music City, USA. It's the Christian music capital of the world as well as the country music capital of the world. 

I was signed by a company that was looking to engage with a young up-and-coming pop artist and that was very much what I felt my direction was leaning toward. I was heavily involved with the Christian contemporary scene and I had connections in that I had this area of music because of my upbringing. At this point I was starting to deconstruct religion and began to feel separate from the doctrine that I had been raised with, but I was still very much associated with that group of people. It didn't take long for me to essentially be exiled from that community in one way or another, whether it was that my church attendance started going down or, you know, something as simple as, like, I had a boyfriend at eighteen and I wanted to be in my room alone with him and shut the door and the Christian family that I was living with was like, that is not allowed, you have to leave and we're kicking you out.

Anyway. I know that's a long-winded way of saying I was out in Nashville for several years. I worked there as a songwriter and after several years of trying to get a publishing deal and work behind the scenes, I realized that what I missed was live performance. I just had this moment where I was like, I'm going to forget everything that I built here. I'm going to leave my job. I was in a biology program at Nashville State. I decided to leave that, my apartment, my community. 

And I was like, I'm going to move back to North Carolina. I miss it there. 

I felt homesick and North Carolina was the closest place to home that I had felt as a military kid because I had spent my high school and middle school years there. And so I moved to Charlotte and I booked a tour that was going to go all the way up and down the East Coast from Florida into New York. And it was set for 2020. 

It took me about six months to book all of the dates. And then in one fell swoop, every single one was canceled. That was a crazy time to be an entertainer that relied on crowds gathering. 

But it ended up being a really beautiful thing because I started doing virtual performance in an effort to find connection with people. And I started streaming on a platform called Twitch TV. Twitch is largely known as a gaming platform. A lot of people stream, like, you know, games. 

There's some sports. There's some variety content, but there wasn't a ton of music. 

There were a lot of musicians that were looking for a platform and I kind of joined this beautiful wave of entrepreneurial independent musicians that found connection and community online through Twitch for their music and that can bring us up to date. I know that my connection to the Sandhills turned into part of my life story but it sets the scene and it’s important context.

SG: I'd love to talk a little bit more about Twitch and the idea of kind of reclaiming or making a space for music. I know plenty of people who stream on Twitch, but it's definitely on the gaming side. You're kind of one of the first musicians I've heard of who is using this in a very—not that gaming is not creative—but using it as a new platform for creative work, but also to build connection and community. 

We started this podcast to find the community that we felt like we were lacking in real life. And what has since happened is we've uncovered an entire web and network of people who've been here all along in so many ways. And now we're forming connections that start online and then become this real life thing and people we have on the podcast become some of our closest friends, which is a really, really cool experience. I imagine it works maybe similarly on Twitch or another kind of online platform like that, and so I'd love to hear more about your journey as a musician on there and seeing this platform grow. And I know for you, it's also been very important in kind of your identity formation and coming out a little bit more publicly in the world, so I'd love to hear you reflect on that experience a bit. 

AS: What Twitch did was give me the gift of the internet. That was something that I think a lot of us think that we have, but I had not had it in this particular way. I was connected with people that I had known from my real life on, like, Facebook and Instagram. But then Twitch, my audience comes from all over. It's an international collection of people from around the world that gather together because of a common interest. And the common interest was connection, music, and ultimately what has become my personality in that, you know, like I have a certain sense of humor. I stand for certain things and what happens is you attract like-minded people. You attract people that think your jokes are funny. You attract people who value the things that you talk about and that you create space for in your community. 

I was also exposed to a larger variety of people. Growing up in the South, something that I notice is that oftentimes people just haven't ever heard of a non-binary person before. They've never— they don't have a lot of queer representation because queerness has, you know, historically been marginalized in this area especially but also, you know, just for safety reasons people are a bit quieter here about their queerness, and they're not on the internet. But the internet is very queer. 

The social circles that I started to find myself in, they're just a lot of creators that are taking up space, being vocal about their identity, whether that be with their sexual orientation or their gender. So many things were normalized for me as I started to get exposed to this beautiful wide spectrum of humanity that can be found on the internet. Over the course of several years, being live for three to four hours, three to four times a week, with an audience of several hundred people at a time, you really get to know them, and you also really get to know yourself. 

It's unsustainable, I've found, to put on any type of face to the internet. I feel like I have to be authentic all the time, otherwise I get burnt out. There's a certain, like, showman attitude that you might tap into, but for the most part, I'm just me. I started to realize—I think I'd been streaming for about two years, and I realized I had a crush on one of my friends and she was a girl. I was like, no, it can't be me. Gayness is something you hear about. Gayness is something you go to hell for. That could never happen to me. 

But it just became more and more obvious once I was in an environment where suppression wasn't needed for safety reasons and queerness has been normalized. For me, it was like a champagne bottle in my body and in my heart and mind and it became so obvious all of a sudden like, wow, like, I like girls. I've always liked girls. Actually, looking back, I've had crushes on multiple of my friends, and I didn't know what that was or why, but now I do. 

It became more and more relevant to me, and I really wanted to share it with the world. I came out to my nuclear family more privately, but I really wanted to make a statement. Coming from the background that I did and coming from a conservative family and a conservative area I felt excited about the possibility of sending a shock wave. So I dropped a music video where I'm in love with a girl and it's not really— like, it's not an explicit video. I don't ever kiss anyone in the video and nothing is seen. No clothes come off, but it felt scandalous because it was a girl.

There was this very noticeable reaction in my community in person. It racked up the views. I got an interview with Diva Magazine, which is one of the largest queer publications in Europe. And one of the things that they asked me was, you're from the South, that must be so hard to be a queer person in the South. Why do you stay there? 

I had this moment in the interview where I realized how passionate I felt about the area that I had come from, and how many people were likely in the situation that I was in, and how much good can come from dropping a queer video. From someone like me coming out and dropping a video that portrayed a queer relationship. If I came from somewhere else, if I dropped a video like that, it may not have the impact that it ended up having on my community. I was given this very special honor and opportunity to have an impact somewhere. 

And so I just started realizing that, you know, if everybody leaves, who is going to stay and create space for young queer folk and old queer folk? You know, all queer people that haven't had the space to be loud if they want to be. It was a really beautiful thing. And then to just wrap up this thought, I was very lucky to have an incredible friend who identifies as non-binary. I had known them for several years and I started having all kinds of feelings that caused me to seek out talk therapy with someone who specialized in gender dysphoria. 

I was a very, very feminine, hyper feminine content creator and I was— you know, I very much looked like a girl. I had a very stereotypically feminine body as well, and I would get compliments and attention for how attractive I was as a woman. But it just felt awful for some reason. 

After seeking out some therapy and confiding in my non-binary friend I started to realize how masculine I really felt inside and um you know one thing led to another. Actually this is, you know, very new and relevant for me because I really only came out as non-binary earlier this year online. I changed my pronouns and went through kind of a transition online where I lost a lot of folk and gained a lot of new people and my community went through this transition. I have so many people that have been in my stream for three or four years and have seen me change my presentation and become more and more myself and more alive. I've seen people become changed by witnessing that in me and watching minds open. And that's been an incredible thing. 

Now I identify as non-binary and I'm very fluid. I feel very feminine sometimes and I feel very masculine sometimes. And I am still in a process of learning about myself and the diversity to be found in gender and the queer community and feel really, really lucky. 

SG: It's a really incredible reminder that identity is never this fixed thing and it's also really refreshing to hear you talk about online spaces in this positive way. I think in my head, I associate the internet with something that feels really threatening and terrifying. But then I also have to recognize that in my own life, the internet has served a really important role in the identities that I have, you know, called mine over the years and continue to shift and change and grow in all of those ways. 

I was reflecting on that as you were speaking, because I remember being fifteen, sixteen, and realizing, oh, I have these feelings and maybe these are not normal, you know, feelings towards friends. This idea of not knowing what a crush is and not having the language for that until years later. And you come across, like—I'm thinking of Hayley Kiyoko's Girls Like Girls music video, and the similarities I feel between that and the Tonight video that you're referencing. I’m thinking about why it’s so important and the role that we can play as public people or people who are online in these spaces. Whether it's online or coming back and being in person physically in a community, you open up space for people to see themselves through possibilities.

I'm a folklorist and I describe a lot of my work as ‘Folklore Futurisms’ and using the things that we make and say and do as ways to reimagine our possible futures and I think that that starts by giving people an opening and an opportunity to reimagine themselves differently. I have this feeling that I feel very deeply that I think there's so many people who identify both as artists and as queer because when you start to break down these ideas of what life is supposed to look like, you open yourself up to all these new imaginatory possibilities. I think both artistry and queerness do that and there's a lot of overlap between them. 

As I'm listening to you speak, I'm starting to think the internet does that, right? Like, as damaging as Tumblr was in 2014, there are so many philosophies that I was opened up to and books that I read and films that I watched and things that really shaped my worldview as I was becoming a young adult that I had access to because I had the internet. 

It is frightening having been a middle school teacher to see the flip side of that and how things like TikTok can be both so good and so bad at the same time. And I'm just thinking really heavily right now about the responsibility of the internet to do kind of what you're talking about, which is creating community and creating space and not to become a replacement for the communities that we might lack in real life, but to become instead a pathway and an opportunity to opening and growing those. It's what I like to think we do with this podcast. You know, we both came back to rural North Carolina and said, we cannot be the only artists here, and I know for a fact we are not, so how do we find the other people? I think of this as a digital media project with the idea that we're able to identify people that we feel a connection to and bring them together. 

Good artistry includes that organizing piece, and I think you're doing very, very similar work in this other realm of the Internet, and it makes me feel positive about the future, I think, and where it will go. But how do you think of that when you think about the role that the Internet plays in your work?

AS: There is integrity required to be a content creator, if you will, which is so frustrating. That term is a whole can of worms to me because it is ultimately like we are existing and creating dialogue and engagement on these platforms that are built to be addictive. These platforms make spreading misinformation very easy. There's a lot of just kind of like— I feel like there's a lot of rage bait these days because there's so much polarization and baiting people into anger creates engagement and creating pictures that look unrealistic and shocking creates engagement and doing things that inspire awe or shock or anger or just these big emotions are ultimately what lead to relevancy as a creator. 

There is so much responsibility when people are engaged with you and looking to you and admiring you to create content that's uplifting. Not in a toxic positivity type of way, but I think it's important to create content that's real. It's important to create content that's honest and leave space for growth. 

I definitely have experienced firsthand what it's like to present a certain way and feed a certain image to people. Also, I think online, you know people fill in the blanks if they don't know something about me. They'll likely assume it based on context clues—what I look like, the things that I say, their own lived experiences. When I came out as gay and then when I came out as non-binary and I cut my hair and changed my presentation, I feel like there was a lot of disappointment and loss in my community and the people that saw me in a different way. I represented something different for them, whether that was innocence or femininity or whatever. And it was disappointing.

I think others were able to grow with me and something that I've learned since then is just, you know, using words and reinforcing the idea that people are ever-changing, organic, very multi-dimensional beings. Just because I'm one way right now doesn't mean I might be that way forever. That exists in my own artistry and in my music. Like, my genre has changed as I've changed and grown. The topics I write about change and as a person I grow and change, whether that's outward or inward or both. And I will continue to.

Yeah. I think just creating space for that and using dialogue that allots for that. Reminding people that gender isn't real, and that it's okay to be fluid. It's okay to change your mind. It's okay to experiment. I feel like there's not a lot of room for that on the internet these days. You know, like once you say something, you're kind of locked into it, or you didn't mean it, or you did it for attention, or you did it for whatever. I do think it's important for young people to feel like they can experiment and try new things, and it's important for creators to do that too. 

SG: Yeah, absolutely. And one thing that—I don't know if y'all feel this, but it feels to me like I remember coming out and it felt terrifying and huge and this major life shift. Like, I think I first publicly wrote it down in a creative writing class I was taking in college, and I remember having a panic attack in the bathroom. I had written a story about having a crush on my best friend. 

And of course, I'm at women's college. Everyone reads it and is like, yeah, highly relatable content.

There's this kind of cultural idea now that [coming out] is  a less difficult experience, especially when you're really online and really public and who you are to share that with the world, right? But it's still vulnerable. It doesn't have to be this big deal and, you know, for a lot of people, it isn't. But at the same time, revealing parts of yourself to the world always feels hard. And especially to your point, in a place like rural North Carolina, where it might not be a huge deal in somewhere like New York City these days, but it is still a big deal here. 

I think it's why it makes it so important to come back and to be the people that we are in the spaces that, you know, we didn't maybe have these people growing up. But I think the Internet sometimes pushes an idea that identity is something fixed but also not something super important. Identity is really vulnerable, and it feels like a really nice reminder to me here that, you know, the people that we follow online are still people. We create this detachment through technology that makes people feel like someone far off. I don't know if anyone's ever had the experience of, like, someone you follow online—whether it's someone just on a college campus that you follow but you've never met or like an actual person—but I think it's easy to forget that people on the internet are real people sometimes and that with that comes all of these complications in growth and identity and who we are. 

We have to allow people to change and grow because it's ridiculous to expect that we're all static and stagnant in our identity. Even something like changing your hair. I'm a natural blonde. I dyed my hair red last year, and it felt like an entire new identity shift. Vic, we've talked about you shaving your head. I don't really have a good point with this. I'm just thinking about it in terms of the internet and the way in which you're kind of reclaiming that space but also making it very known that  this is who you are. Especially as an artist, allowing your work to grow and shift with that. You said you're losing some audiences, but I'm sure there are many many people that you're also gaining within that who really respect you being so open and shifting in who you are because I think so many of us feel that way and it's a lifelong process to figure ourselves out. 

I really appreciate you being so honest and open about that and especially with the reclamation of Southern identity, which I of course want to talk about in some of your art and work in the way in which you’ve taken these different identities and also really made a space for them. You show them in the way you've experienced them and put this fun queer spin on a lot of it. It’s so fun for me to see because I'm like, wow this is work I can really relate to and I'm sure there are many many people who feel that way. 

AS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I was gonna say too that even though it's not it's not the right choice for everyone to be so public about their identity or their orientation, I've gotten a lot of thank yous and kind messages. I've had a lot of really authentic connections with people who have been appreciative of the representation. Before I came out, the creators that were vocal about their orientation or especially the non-binary creators that I follow that have been open about their experience with gender. I was so grateful, so endlessly grateful for their vulnerability and their willingness to create content around that. It just means so much to me as a non-binary person to see other people taking up space.

To your comment about the culture where I'm from, one of the things also that has been a lot of fun for me is to reclaim some of the things that I was raised with. You know, something I say all the time is y'all means all. With how masculine I feel, something that I have really identified with is Western culture and like masculine Western culture. It looks funny maybe or misplaced on someone who's androgynous and queer and is kind of doing it in this campy way.

I wanted to work together with my other non-binary friend and essentially like create this western character, this Southern queer cowboy character, and embody that. To kind of take back that culture and and provide representation for queer folks within that context. I think that even when we see representation in the media—I've listened to a couple other podcast episodes on GOOD FOLK, I'm a true fan, you guys. For those of you listening, we're all, you know, we're all here as fans, myself included. But one of the things I love that's talked about a lot is just like the importance of place and Southern culture and this misconception that to be queer is to move to the city or to or to become like city folk. Or that it’s more of like a west coast or northern thing to be queer, but there are tons of queer people in the South. I like the idea of providing specific Southern queer representation because you just don't see it. You don't see it as much. 

SG: I agree just a thousand percent with everything you've said and I am so obsessed with the Hindsight Bias music video. It's like right up my alley, because as Vic knows and many of my other really close friends too,  I'm obsessed with cowboy culture. I grew up in an Appalachian North Carolina family and I grew up going to this Wild West theme park, which is—there's so many problems there. We can talk all about it. But there's something really interesting to me about like this—and especially in Nashville—but the Southern reclamation of western culture. The way in which it's being kind of taken again by queer people in the South, I'm like so, so into and obsessed with.

I've been working for the last few years on a short story that's taking me forever, but it's like literally about a cowboy training camp and like everyone there is queer. I was like, I have no rationale for this, but I'm rolling with it. I'm thinking of the episode of Euphoria that came out, gosh, like two years ago, but they had a whole montage of Rue and Jules, and there was a whole scene where they kind of redid the Brokeback Mountain iconography. And I was like, this is what we're talking about! That people who have historically been left out of that are able to say, actually, this is also my home, and therefore I have a right to its culture. 

Now, we can talk for a very long time about the pros and cons of Southern culture. That's a much larger and longer conversation. But I do think there is something that when you're growing up in these places and there's only one representation of who you could be, and it often involves leaving that to be able to say, actually, this is my home. This is where I feel comfortable. To say, I'm going to take the aesthetic of this place and make it my own and have access to it, because you telling me I shouldn't have access to it doesn't actually make any sense. Like, I'm from here. Who's to say I don't have a right to these things? Even something as simple as, you know, wearing camo and cowboy boots feels really radical in a way right now. Those of you who are from the South might know and relate to this but I have really enjoyed seeing it.

I think it's really funny now when you see people in California and New York who want to use words like y'all and folk, which, I'll just make an aside here, are the two most gender exclusive terms that we have. Both very stereotypically Southern. Now it's like every cool lesbian I know in LA is wearing camo and I'm like, when did that happen? You know, the South in a lot of ways is the blueprint. 

One thing I always reference to people like working in Southern studies is that the South is seen as not having an activist history. And that is not because it doesn't. It is because the activist histories in the South are forcefully oppressed in a way that they want you to believe they're not happening. But it actually is happening more here than anywhere else. 

We hear more about the oppression of those movements than about the movements themselves, but it doesn't mean the movements don't exist. If there weren't any activist movements in the South, we wouldn't be having that kind of oppression, right? So it's not to discount it. 

Obviously, there's so much [discounting] of it. But when you actually look at the history, there is so much history of queerness and radical activism and labor rights and all of these things that are happening here in the South is really, in so many ways, the breeding ground for that. 

It feels really important to me to be a Southerner and to get to build on that legacy and be a part of that. It feels really important to also be able to claim some space within that. Because it's hard to be an activist here right now. It's hard to be a queer person and it's hard to be an artist. 

It feels like in so many ways, this place doesn't want you and that the easier choice would be to leave. And for those of us who have left, I think you relate to the feeling that when you go, there's something missing. And while it may be hard to be here doing this work right now, it also feels deeply fulfilling. It feels like I get to be home and I get to be in the places that feel like home. So that is my long ramble on all of that, which is mostly just to say I love the cowboy reclamation and I love what you're doing with it. 

AS: Yeah, one last thought there is that a lot of things that are reclaimed by marginalized communities, I think it kind of takes the power away from something that used to be oppressive. Especially with my time spent in Nashville and my time spent in the Sandhills, I very much associated country culture with oppression and with homophobia, and so I think it's really special and it’s very cool, I agree, to see the queer community leaning into Western culture and adopting words like folk and y'all. I make this point regularly on my stream that they are so gender inclusive which is so ironic but also so beautiful.