“I’m Upper Reality, and I make beats, and then I sing over them so people don’t steal them,” my voice wafts over the dented mic like a puff of smoke in this hotboxed venue. People chuckle. I do the same. The set begins.

I have always been stingy over my art. My vocals initially acted as a copyright over everything I created, so that if anybody ever wanted to run off with them, they’d have to bring me along. Over time this metastasized into a hyper-insular attitude. All of my music, instruments, studio time, even video editing, became by me and only by me. I knew I had a need to be in control of it, but I could never fully articulate why. During the pandemic, under immense reflection, the answer came to me.

I have come to realize that music, like most things, is not about how it sounds–it’s about how it feels. I have spent hours and hours and days and years perfecting my mixing and music theory skills, and my conversations with my mentors in that same sphere echo the same complaints: people will flock to the most poorly mixed, music-theory-bereft, distorted sounding cacophonies if it makes them feel a certain way. Actually not just any old way, but one way…VALID. It’ll never sound bad to them, because it feels good.

No matter what genre, no matter what time, all music and it’s audience is a reflection of our values. This is why the music industry is so rife with narcissism and closet backstabbing, because there is so much power in being able to influence people’s values. What makes people feel validated for something they’re feeling? What makes people feel less resistant to accepting certain ideas or cultural norms? Music. What I didn’t want, was to have to step into power through the backdoor on the cosign of someone whose values I didn’t align with, or even ran contrary to my own self determination, in order to not alienating people who weren’t feeling me, but had more power than me. I’ve seen this happen many times before with features, especially with femmes, queer and otherwise. Dreezy’s amazing, articulate, and artful verses squunched in between the lazy dribbles of Kodak Black and 6lack on “Spar.” Anderson .Paak just having to give the male perspective on Jazmine Sullivan’s “Price Tags.” Curren$y’s vocals sounding like it was recorded on a voice memo and emailed over on Kari Faux’s “In the Air.” And man, those verses on some of Meg’s songs felt so clearly to be an attempt to dilute her energy with dominance, seemingly making sure anyone who felt empowered by her work felt quickly put back into their place. And much much more.

Concurrently with this, anytime I’d feel stressed, I’d run right to Youtube and put on a guided meditation. I’d allow the music to wash over me and it activated my chakras and other energy centers of trauma and the like, and I’d actually wake up and feel a material difference in the experience of my life. This is when I woke up to the power of audio as a healing tool.

From there, I began taking apart the songwriting and production aspects of Upper Reality. What would be marketed directly as healing tools, versus what would simply promote healing through the music? It was a fine line, because songwriting is supposed to be sexy and elusive and a little bit vague, it has to have cadence, and it can’t be too on-the-nose. But guided meditation has to simply be a guide. How do we reconcile these two things?

That is what Upper Reality is about. I want to give you both, because both are important to the way you see, approach, and experience life. So I give you my work because I want it to inspire you and heal you. That’s what feels good to me.