Excellence and batshittery, done on purpose.
I’m Lazarus. I make art, music, poems, plays, and magic for the quiet, brilliant, broken ones. If that is you, welcome home. I adopt your kind.
[Subscribe to my email list and I’ll send you a track I don’t remember recording.]
More about me here.
Please note that, with rare exceptions, any and all names mentioned in this blog are pseudonyms except our own. We want to be able to speak freely without doxxing anyone.
Emerson has surgery in a couple of hours, so I am probably going to try to get some sleep, if I am able, then see him off if I can wake up for it.
I had a great time facilitating Better Together, though. I gave everyone a prompt about coded language in poetry and everyone took it in WILDLY different directions. It was great.
-Allēna
It was fucking insaaaaane. I did “guernica I and II” from memory and “A Weapon” and “To Dance With A Cyclone” (also from memory), and then closed out with “hurricane lazarus”, which seems to be my signature piece.
I only posted “to dance with a cyclone” so far, because I started to get a really bad headache and I think I almost passed out during the performance because I went so damn hard.
It is time to crash and do similar things tomorrow.
-Allēna
But I performed Guernica I and II from memory at the last Honeybee Sage open mic of the summer. I’ll probably post the video of it tomorrow. For now, however, I’m exhausted.
Goodnight, y’all.
-Allēna
I had a dream last night/this morning straight out of a Gabriel Garcia Márquez novel.
I was in Louisiana and yet somehow in my old yard at the same time and there was supposed to be a massive storm coming but we were far enough inland that the storm surge wouldn’t affect us directly, but they were calling for some very powerful waves, and before the storm came in there was a lot of fog. And I was talking with some people who were also there (because apparently that was a thing) about the storm and the waves and maybe going down to the beach to see it like dumbasses when all of a sudden a patch of fog exploded into about a thousand birds of different colors.
And I was amazed because these birds looked like cardinals but some of them were purple and yellow and I wanted to feed them so that they’d get close enough to me so that I could take pictures of them, but it turned out I didn’t need to. These birds congregated around me like they knew me as I got down on the grass and started snapping photos and laughing because I was trying not to disturb them but they KEPT FOLLOWING ME. As all of this absurdity was going on, I was composing poetry in my head, but I CANNOT REMEMBER THE LINES. And I looked up at one point and Juneau was there, leaning on one of the wooden pillars the porch my old house had, watching with this strange, knowing smirk on his face, like he had planned this whole scene to delight me even though he HATES BIRDS, and then I woke up.
I have no idea what any of that meant, but it was gorgeous.
-Allēna
And I feel really nauseous and kinda out of it. I’ve taken my seizure meds AND my migraine meds, but if some shit happens in a few hours, y’all know what’s up. In the meantime, it’s time for turbo unconsciousness so I don’t dieee
-Allēna
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
I have a lot of feelings about this update and I could probably gush about this for ages but for now, I’m going to leave it at that.
-Allēna
Ooops. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, I suppose.
I do have two pieces of very good news, however:
Here’s a video of his performance:
Have an awesome day, and I’ll do the same.
Stay tuned for more magic ✨
-Allēna
And I appear to be in front. Allēna is exhausted, and so am I, for very different reasons. I also saw Cadmium today for the first time in a long time. Goodnight, all.
-Ashley