It's been four weeks since I released my first two songs. Where do I go from here?

Six months ago I had a long and muddled list of questions, things I thought I needed to understand to do things 'right' - the machinery of streaming and copyright, social platform algorithms, lots of buzzing noise around the central spark that brought me here.

So much has happened in that time, and I've checked off many of the boxes I'd set for myself. I’m realising more and more now what I want: to make music and have a sense of a community to share it with, listeners who will care more about the process, meaning, and sounds that I share with them than about the tightly curated woman-artist mold I feel equally pushed to fill and to resist.

For a long time I’ve felt conflicted about music-making, that a creative pulse is stuck somewhere between the teenage stage of pure wild emotional processing and the externally constrained 'realist' music career. I want both of those and neither: carving out a space to feel like the music and the writing are breathing for themselves.

Childhood and music making, a handful among many tensely interwoven strands: Playing the piano while loudly singing some maximalist song, or my childhood folk music along with a family member’s guitar. Early years, tiny, confident and screechy-voiced, to a (literally) captive audience; later to friends, in the sticky teenage tangle of performativity and connection, and in so many more spaces; but the feeling of bringing out pure emotion with so little never flattens. My parents' living room while they were away, we called it le weekend du bonheur, the weekend of happiness, some high school kids hanging around Paris, the memory of my then-friend's face full of sound, the heavy silence around the music, wordless. How can anybody draw the line? What's 'authentic' creation, ego, prescribed roles, talent, practice, possibility?

Ten or twelve years old on long family drives, escape, privacy, and searing bubbling emotion channeled through the conflict-inducing headphones jammed in. Discovering music that plays expansively with dark feeling, tension, wailing. The Knife's Silent Shout, James Blake's first album, or a few years later the first times listening to music that was less vocally driven, more abstract; but always such a sharp wave of feeling, so engulfing that once it's gone I'm sure it can't exist.

Eyes closed, feeling the music so densely that I thought I could sculpt it between my hands, strange motions lulled by the flicker of the highway lights -

This was all close to ten years ago. What now?

These days there are moments where making music feels like that. Everything I could have wanted. A current hope: to get to a place of technical ability - with my voice, hands, broadly-construed brain-computer interface, and the lovely potential of future gadgets - that making will just feel like shaping sounds in that hollow between my hands on my lap on those drives.

I'm so ready not to do this between two screens anymore, or in a little studio where the music stays just for me or a small us

I want a larger us, alive outside of me, one not bent to the whims of my own judgements and uncertainties, where the intimacy of these writing, producing, recording sessions will be amplified by my trusting that I'll share the fruits

Already, releasing two songs - the first I was able to accept as done since I was 19 or 20 and just starting out - makes the making feel so much less tight, less striving

I miss the days when we would obsess over a song, draw out every pointed lyric and unexpected key change, every layer together I put so much into every line Held back by judgement usually, by the sense that something needs to already be good before it's been sketched out Letting go of that more and more, making music from now on that is just as crafted but less constrained

What do I write about?

Where do I go from here?