After pulling together all my show reviews/notes (link in bio, etc.) I realized I never wrote one for the show that started it all. So back on July 13th, 2023 -- either seven months or one million years ago: Transfemme Takeover 2 at @lollipopshoppepdx with @feralspells, @blushbuttonband, and @lesbianwedding's @shayleeband.
This was 13 months after all my gender stuff woke back up. I was 10 months on hormones, and it was less than half a year since I'd started socializing regularly with other trans women.
The regular socializing with other trans women helped tear an even larger rift in my (de facto) marriage that eventually led to me stepping away. I had made that decision two weeks ago. My now ex-partner was still living at the house and would be there until late September -- each day getting more awkward and ugly. I was at the show with the friend who was my most consistent form of emotional support through all of that and who remains dear to me.
It was an awkward and fraught time full of potential.
I remember being charmed by Ferrel Spells -- both for their music, stage presence, and for someone to play the seemingly stock part of "trans girls with synths" and make it so much more than a stock part.
My friend was quite taken by Blush Button and while I liked the energy that Vivian, Heather, and Joe were putting out it was Shaylee that blew me away and left me reeling.
Part of how I'd reconnected with my queer and trans-ness was through some pieces that @nikostratis wrote for Catapult under the Everyone is Gay column header. These columns reminded me of what it felt like to be 18 in 1993 again and struggling to understand something in me that didn't fit the limited narratives we had at the time.
Shaylee wore its '90s influences on its sleeves, and while it's worth the price of admission to see Elle go full ham on a guitar but it was their ability to nail the quiet parts of quiet/loud/quiet that made me fall in love with this band.
You never hear the whole song when you first hear it at a concert. It's a tricky enough thing to write a sad song that works when you pour over the liner notes. It's trickier to have each stanza carry meaning when they're half-heard in the chaos of a live show
i met you at a support group caught your eye across the room we took a break and shared a laugh then we sat together in the back
#1 Destroyer Fan slowed down whatever raucous songs they started with -- its slow waltz beat unavoidably invoking Elliot Smith and pulling me into the time where I came closest to calling it early and, at the same time, reminding me of what my life had looked like for the past 10 months.
I daydream of holding you Gripping every curve that I once knew
The World Changes Around Us followed and this couplet seared itself into my heart. This would be my breakup song for the next four months, embarrassingly perched at the top of my Spotify wrap for 2023, its incredibly bleak chorus giving me immediate access to my grief.
I held it somewhere near, couldn't face the day without it there Always haunted you, the feelings you could never repair
And finally Audrey -- the message song that gets an intro so we know what words to listen for. The song about that girl so many of us almost knew and so many of us almost were. At some point during these three songs the tears came and I escaped to the side tables.
I read recently that obsession with media -- pop music, novels, films, etc. -- can be a form of dissociation. I know it was for me. Falling into the stories. Imagining yourself in the lives of those characters. I'm sure that's a universal experience, but when you're trans and pre-self-acceptance -- or the sort of pre-self-acceptance trans I was -- you never grow out of it. You see flashes of yourself but when you're out of phase with your own body and soul none of it can stick. While your cis peers take pieces from media and use it to grow their own personality you cling to the thing itself until you find the next thing that doesn't quite stick. And the next. And the next.
The chance to be a little cringe-ily obsessed with a local band like I was twenty-five years younger has been a delight. Also, like so much trans art, for the music and feelings to resonate so deeply with where I'm at has meant a lot.
All that said, for the first time, I feel the rest of my life calling. The wounds of my past aren't gone but they are finally healing. For all that art like Shaylee or Nevada have done for me I don't feel bound to them like I did with the obsessions of my past. I'm more than a little scared by that -- learning to run wild and truly free has been incredible but these early years are a liminal space.
I'm still not sure what the woman who comes out the other side is going to be but her shape becomes clearer every day.