new year, new me
on writing songs, transitioning, connecting with music, breaking up, and drinking to feel better
I have moved my email list here to substack, where I’ll periodically post music updates and essays. Look for more soon!
posted first on my Patreon, with a cover of Against Me!’s “Fuckmylife666”.
written in january 2024
I don’t want to write another breakup album.
The music comes easy to me. It’s the lyrics I struggle with. To find lyrics I feel good about I need to write a lot, and even when I find something I like, I revise, revise, revise until I’m too fed up to keep editing and I just sing the fucking vocal already. Which means every time I have put together a new release, I usually have the music done weeks before I even have a first draft of the lyrics. This is the exact situation I found myself in for Princess, Pts. 1 & 2.
I had started working on the music for Princess, Pt. 1 back in January of 2021, and had gotten most of the stems back from the other musicians by the time my then-girlfriend (the Faggot from “Simone”) decided to end our relationship. In a grief-stricken haze, I wrote and revised, revised, revised the lyrics to the five songs that would become Princess, Pt. 1.
Over the Spring and Summer of 2021, in the wake of that break-up, I put together the music for the songs that make up Princess, Pt. 2. During that period of loneliness and vulnerability, I grew closer to my long-distance best friend Clara, another fucked-up trans dyke who moved to the west coast during the first summer of the pandemic. We would count each other down and hit play together on every episode of Rebels, worked our way through the Ghibli filmography, and kept each other company through Discord.
I was finally able to see her again when she came home to visit family in late-July that year. After skipping most of a Bright Eyes show at Forest Hills to swap childhood stories because our edibles were too strong, we made a plan. I would visit her in October to see what we could make of this mess.
To learn more about how that went, please listen to Princess, Pt. 2.
That’s how it’s been. I write the music, struggle with lyrics, have a disruptive emotional event, write lyrics in a flurry, get a sentimental tattoo and creatively stall out until my personal life crashes again. It’s a draining cycle that I have fought and failed to overcome these last two years.
The last song I wrote to completion was “Triple Leo”. It was November of 2021, and after marathon sessions recording vocals for Princess, Pt. 2 at Nu House, all we had left was this one song. I was in the booth, making edits to the chorus, not satisfied with the lyrics, and I told my friend and audio engineer Aki, “Fuck it, let’s do three takes and comp it and be done with this shit.”
I did three takes. I comped the vocal. Princess, Pt. 2 was done.
Three months later, in February of 2022, I started a relationship that –
My first memory of February 2nd, 2014 was throwing up in the clawfoot tub tucked into the corner of the tangerine bathroom of the two-story apartment in the small rural town I had moved to a few months earlier for work.
My last memory of February 1st, 2014 was gulping scotch from the bottle in my burnt-orange chair reading The Sun Also Rises while I sucked on my blu e-cigarette and tried to feel better by blotting out the certainty in my mind that I had hit a brick wall in my life.
I had found out on January 31st, 2014 that a position at my job I had wanted for years was closed to me because nine years earlier I dropped out of college to write folk songs instead of finishing my degree. Unless I made some big changes to my life, I wouldn’t be able to advance past the clerical position I was in.
In the Summer of 2010, two years after I had gotten a letter from my therapist to get hormones (back when you needed a letter) but still hadn’t found the courage to actually start hormones, I made a choice – I would stay a man and stick with my career, and cope with my gender feelings the same way I had my entire life up to that point.
Which is how I found myself sipping water on my couch on February 2nd, 2014, searching for some way to rationalize that I hadn’t wasted the last four years chasing a life I didn’t truly want that didn’t seem to want me either. I didn’t feel better.
I checked the news. Philip Seymour Hoffman had died. Presumably drugs? Terrible loss. What an actor. What a waste. Am I a waste? I wasted all that scotch. I wasted four years of my life. I wasted six years, really. I’ve wasted every day since the summer of 2000 when I first put the word “transsexual” to the deep, primordial self-knowledge I had carried since I became aware of my own existence.
What a coward. What a piece of shit. What a waste.
I’m too old. Twenty-eight. There’s no way I’d pass. I’d have to quit my job. I’d have to go back to school. Maybe I could go to law school to become a lawyer? Maybe I could be a family lawyer for gay people, no one would care I was a busted tranny then.
I really just want to do music. I could never do music now. I’m too old. No one would take me seriously. No one would take some old tranny seriously. I wasted all that time. I wasted my life.
Well there is that woman from Against Me! How old was she when she transitioned? There was that piece in Rolling Stone – last year? Two years ago?
She was thirty-one. Probably thirty-three by now. Well fuck. I mean, she’s so beautiful, and she was famous already. Besides, have they even made any music since she came out?
New album. Transgender Dysphoria Blues. Shit. I need food. I’ll listen after food.
I listened to that album on repeat for the rest of that day. I cried, I puked up the food I ate, I cried more, I drank water. I emailed the therapist who wrote me my first letter for estrogen and asked to restart sessions. I wrote my resignation letter to my job. I thought about what my new name might be. I started to feel better.
I fell asleep to Laura Jane Grace singing from the shitty laptop speakers next to my head:
Chipped nail polish and a barbed wire dress
Is your mother proud of your eyelashes?
Silicone chest and collagen lips
How would you even recognize me?
Two years later, I would text my father the last words I would ever say to him.
Six years after that, I would open Grindr and meet –
On September 26th, 2014, I sat in the driver’s seat of my two-door hatchback on a quiet street overlooking the blinking concrete expanse of the industrial side of my small city. I stared at the two white pills in my hand. 100mg of spironolactone. My endocrinologist wanted me on testosterone blockers for a month before starting estradiol.
I had waited six years for my first letter to start hormone replacement therapy, then another six years to realize that no, it was not sustainable to know and accept that I was trans and also not transition, and then another six months from when I started therapy again to actually getting the prescription for blockers. In that time, I had to quit smoking. I came out to my parents. I came out to my friends. I could wait another month for estrogen.
I ran my thumb along the edge of my paperback copy of Nevada. My old acquaintance Briana had suggested I read it when we met for coffee a few months earlier. I’ll tell the story about Briana some other time.
Growing up in the 90’s, we were told that trans women were jokes, freaks, subhuman. Even among online trans support forums like Susan’s Place, there was one dominant narrative – to transition was to narrow the possibilities of your life. To recede into the background. To give up everything you ever loved and focus everything you have on being a picture-perfect princess. To accept a life of less. Your transness is a defect, and to survive you must pass and be perfect in every other regard.
Nevada is the story of Maria, a trans woman who kinda sucks but is doing her best. And while trans women who mean well but are messy as hell are easy to find on Twitter today, it was the first time I saw that another life was possible. I didn’t need to be perfect, I didn’t need to accept less – I could just be me. I could just try to be happy.
I burned through that book and threw it across the room several times. Not since Transgender Dysphoria Blues had I felt so seen and understood by a piece of art. I read Nevada three times that summer. I listened to Against Me! every day.
In that car that September, on the edge of a future I never thought actually possible, I took a picture of the spiro with my phone and uploaded it to Instagram with the most cliché of captions:
“First day of the rest of my life.”
I hit play on Transgender Dysphoria Blues for the 300th time. The drums kicked in and I tossed the spiro in my mouth. They tasted like unsweetened mint. I washed them down with some flat Polar seltzer. I felt better.
One month later, I would start estrogen.
Fourteen months after that, I would have my orchiectomy the day before I turned thirty.
Six months after that, I would come out publicly and tell the world my name was Mel.
It’s impossible for me to express how deeply important Transgender Dysphoria Blues was to me in 2014. And how it’s still important to me now in 2024.
“True Trans Soul Rebel”. “Fuckmylife666”. “Paralytic States”. “Black Me Out”.
“You should have been a mother, you should have been a wife”
“There’s a brave new world that’s raging inside of me”
“In her dysphoria’s reflection she still saw her mother’s son”
“I don't want to see the world that way anymore, I don't want to feel that weak and insecure”
These songs carried me through that first confusing, painful, restless year. I was going through a period of uncertain change, trying to understand more about myself and what it meant to be “trans”. Just like Nevada excavated and made plain specific anxieties I thought were mine alone, Laura Jane Grace’s lyrics showed me myself and said “it’s not just you”.
Wanting to be seen as a woman, but only being seen as a faggot. The anxiety of thinking your tells will clock you. The fear that no one could love a girl like you. The sadness of knowing you’ll never give birth. The memory of doing your awkward best to be one of the guys. Being overcome by your dysphoria distorting the self reflected back at you.
The right music has a way of taking over a part of our lives. Even as I feel less alone, there are some songs and albums that hit me so deeply and profoundly that they become mine. It doesn’t matter what the artist intended, this song is mine and the experience I had is so uniquely mine as to make my experience an essential part of what that song means. And everyone else’s experience with a song contributes just as much to the essential meaning of that song.
I think about that a lot when writing my own songs. Whatever meaning I intend and whichever pieces of myself I put into them is only a part of the story. The experience that each listener has, the way they internalize and derive their own meaning from the song, the way they project that meaning out into the world – that matters too.
Not a death of the author, but a co-authorship of the living meaning.
I have had the incredible and humbling privilege of strangers telling me how much my music means to them. How it has helped them feel seen, helped them get through hard times in their life. How it’s helped them feel better.
They use the same language I imagine I would if I could tell Elliott Smith how his music touched my life. It’s hard to articulate the sense of honor and unworthiness that comes with knowing your art has affected at least one other person’s life. I’ve seen two tattoos that people have gotten of lyrics I’ve written. That shit changed me.
I am now aware of The Audience. I am aware of The Reader. The Listener. I know there is a chance with any song I write, someone I’ve never met in a state or country I have never visited may connect with it in a way that goes beyond me and makes that song theirs. The same way “Fuckmylife666” is mine. The same way Elliott’s “Happiness” is mine. The same way “Grounded” and “Baciami” and “Simone” belong to people that are not me.
I want to write songs worthy of that.
On December 9th, 2023, my then-partner and I were pulling into the Port Authority Bus Terminal and I had a pit in my stomach. The weekend trip we were on was originally conceived as a birthday celebration. My actual birthday wasn’t until the 19th, but this was the most convenient weekend to getaway and have some time that was just about us. We had both been unhappy for a while. We had several hard months in our relationship, after we had a hard summer, after we had a hard year. We were both looking forward to a chance to decompress and enjoy each other’s company. I turned over organizing the trip to them and it quickly went from being a relaxing trip about reconnecting and celebrating my birthday to supporting their new relationship with their new girlfriend and smoothing out relations with their new girlfriend’s partner.
A few days before we left, I had expressed my concerns to my partner that the weekend would likely be stressful instead of calming, and because of the polyamorous complications, I didn’t feel like I could comfortably say I didn’t want to go anymore. I was told that it was my birthday and I didn’t have to go if I didn’t want to – in a way that made it clear they would be hurt if I backed out now.
The events and wounds of that weekend and that relationship are still raw. I want to keep most of the details close to respect the privacy of others involved, but it’s safe to say the experience makes it a strong contender for the worst birthday of my life.
For example, I was bit by a dog — twice. The first bite only broke through the ass of my already fading jeans and scraped the skin. It was the second bite wound, along the right side of my torso, that was deep and long and broke through flesh. The bruising has come down but it looks like it’s going to leave a nice scar. A reminder to trust my instincts.
That was still not the worst experience I had that weekend.
I will not tell you the worst experience I had that weekend.
It didn’t take long for the situation to predictably degrade around us. Everyone else was either having big feelings or trying to console those having big feelings. I was asked to sit quietly and extremely still.
My only respite from the mess happening around me was spending a few hours with one of my dearest friends (the aforementioned Faggot) to record an episode of her podcast about our relationship and sex life — how the experience informed our other relationships, including the one I was in at the time, how we each made our own art about the experience and how it felt to be seen, etc.
For a long time, my last partner and I found ourselves caught in cycles of conflict that even weekly couple’s therapy couldn’t pull us out of. We had met on Grindr in February of 2022 and quickly realized we were each dating the same person. A meeting of the metamours. We connected and fell hard for each other amidst polyamorous chaos. That began two years of a deep and affecting love unlike anything I’d experienced and a continuous pile-on of unresolved resentments. It felt to me like we never caught a break. We were always fighting some new fire, arguing over new versions of the same shit.
In September of 2023, a new-old dynamic popped up again for the fourth or fifth time when I had already spent the Summer stretched beyond my capacity for stress. I found myself drinking more and more to cope with the pain of holding the relationship together by suppressing my sadness and frustration and resentment.
At what was supposed to be my birthday dinner on December 10th, 2023, the tension was thick from a fight that happened while I was mercifully absent. Everyone else at the table was focused on damage control and reconciliation. It did not feel like my birthday dinner. I drank.
After dinner, we went to Girl God's Christmas Spectacular, the show we had been planning to attend for weeks. My partner, my partner’s girlfriend and my partner’s girlfriend’s partner continued their relationship repair and peeled away from me to be with each other. I sat on some steps near the bar. Grace and April came on stage. I drank.
As I sat there alone among some of closest friends and this burgeoning polycule, aggressively gulping my third or fourth drink, watching Tim Rogers give his best off-model Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and casually throwing out phrases like “forced feminization surgery,” I wished for the first time in my life that I wasn’t in love. I drank.
We went to Singer’s. I drank. I did bad karaoke. I drank. I bought Italian cigarettes from a vending machine and handed them out to anyone who wanted them. I drank. I did bad karaoke again. I drank. I asked a beautiful transgender woman if her pronouns were it/its. I drank. I didn’t feel better.
Four days later, the relationship that had defined the last two years of my life ended.
What a waste.
I don’t want to write another breakup album.
And yet! I sit here, six weeks after the biggest relationship of my life ended, after a two-year drought of finished songs, in the midst of a familiar rush of creative energy and I just –
I really loved them. I still do. And I know they still love me. But we wanted different things and we made each other miserable. And buried in our stress and angst, we hurt each other. Deeply. In ways that bit and bloodied the care and affection we held for each other.
There are no villains here. My last partner is a good person who wanted so much and burned themselves out trying to hold it all together. They made decisions that were right for them but that affected our relationship in painfully negative ways. I understand why they did what they did. I’ll be able to forgive them for that some day.
I don’t want to write about breaking up. I want to write about how two people can love each other so deeply that they endure so much pain and misery – until suddenly they can’t. I want to write about desire and feeling needed and wanted. I want to write about how friends can tell you to leave a relationship for more than a year and still be devastated when it abruptly ends. I want to write about the futures we plan and how holding on to those ghosts can drag you through hell.
I want to write about family, and what it takes to move beyond hurt. I want to write about what it means to enter the second half of your life with absolutely no idea what it will bring or whether or not you can endure it. I want to write about being alive much longer than you ever expected and still wondering if it was worth it.
I want to write about feeling like you’ve wasted your time but knowing in your bones that you haven’t, that you’ve been changed by your experiences, that you’re a better, stronger person now. I want to write about how every connection we make is precious. I want to write about building meaning from every moment of your life.
I want to write about promising someone they can say goodbye to your cat when it’s time for her to go. I want to write about how hard it will be to keep that promise.
I want to write about the ways we can lose ourselves. I want to write about finding ourselves again.
I want to write songs that people take and make theirs.
I want to feel better. And I want you to feel better too.
-mel
p.s. - The dog is a very sweet pup who was terrified and put in a stressful situation they should not have been in. The dog was not responsible for what happened and I will defend that very good pup with my life.
This was posted early on my Patreon, along with a cover of Against Me!’s “Fuckmylife666”. Please consider joining for $1/month or more to support my work.
some art I’ve recently experienced and enjoyed:
Monica (dir. Andrea Pallaoro)
“11: Logging Off w/ Tess Scilipoti” - Fire In My Belly, Cat Graffam
“nine different christmases” by tim rogers
Star Trek: The Next Generation - Seasons 01-07
The Bear - Seasons 01-02
Self-Titled, Patty Pravo
some other art I would encourage you to experience:
Transgender Dysphoria Blues, Against Me!
Nevada, Imogen Binnie
My latest album, Princess, is for sale on Bandcamp and streaming most places.