When I was 14 and had just started going in and out of the recording studio, an artist named Sarah Jaffe in the DFW area where I was born and raised was starting to get big on the local scene.
Being the teenager bursting with insane, almost suicidal ambition that I was, I wished so badly that that could be me somehow. I had just released my debut extended play, Sweet Pea, that year, and even though everyone who heard it loved it, it really never sold outside of my friends and family that I know of.
I felt like I had failed. I craved all of the attention that my family didn’t give me, and witnessing Sarah Jaffe’s rise to prominence filled me with a secret envy. We were from the same place, we both wrote music, we both had professionally recorded work, we both played live when we could. What was I missing? Why wasn’t I getting noticed outside of my social circle?
Don’t get me wrong, I loved her music – I still do. This is intended to be more of a reflection of my emotional state at that time than any kind of a dig at her. That’s part of why I think it got to me so bad. I legitimately enjoyed what she created. I just wanted what she had, as well. I played her song “Clementine” on repeat regularly throughout my teens, as I deeply related to it. I wished I could be “more delicate”, as she put it, as I was so intense and driven that it frightened many of my teenage suitors away, with the exception of my future first husband, who was taken with my intensity and drive when we first met at 14 and 15 respectively, although he would not admit it until many years later.
When she released an alternate version of “Clementine” on her album The Way Sound Leaves a Room a few years later that was stripped back to nothing but piano, her voice, and haunting backing vocals, I fell in love with it even more deeply. For the first time, it felt like I truly understood and felt the song’s essence, as I often do when artists release extremely scaled back versions of their music. By that time I had also fallen in love with her song “Mannequin Woman” and started teaching myself music production when my longtime producer ditched me, got a publishing deal, and made off for Los Angeles and stopped returning my calls, taking the rights to Sweet Pea in the process.
I also worked through my envy over the years as I realized that I didn’t really want to be famous, as attention scared me just as badly as I craved it. Getting recognized on the street when I was gigging around Mormon college scared me about as straight as I’ll ever be, although I kept songwriting. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop, even though I go through a lot of dry spells nowadays.
And then in 2024, as news of the Diddy scandal broke, I worked through the rest of my envy as I realized that I probably dodged a bullet by not becoming famous as a teenager. I had had a shitty enough time growing up with a highly controlling mother. I don’t think that, had my singing or songwriting career progressed any further than it did at the time, I would have fared any better at the hands of industry executives, and I learned an early lesson to trust nobody with the rights to my music when my producer left without any real trace. He’d likely been an anomaly, as well, by treating me as an equal collaborator when we recorded Sweet Pea, and not trying to change things too much unless I requested he do so.
So, in summary… I still love Sarah Jaffe’s music. I don’t have any envy towards her anymore. I was an overly ambitious, precocious kid who also knew nothing about what I would have been getting myself into had things progressed. And honestly, now that I’m 29, I relate to these lyrics from “Clementine” even more.
“We were young,
We were young,
We were young, we didn’t care
Is it gone
Oh it’s gone
Oh it’s floating in the air?
I changed my mind
I changed my mind
How I feel indifferent
All that time, wasted
I wish I was a little more delicate”
-Allēna