Open Sorcery

Tag: music

  • 50 lives ago, I was jealous of her, but now it seems like I dodged a bullet…

    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 had this odd realization during my post-writers group smoke break today.

    I think I – as well as my system as a whole – approach making art the same way that jazz musicians play music. I was thinking about this because the piece I ended up writing today in group pulled heavily from “My Island” and yet putting an entirely different spin on it, and it got me thinking about all of the different times that I’ve done that while making music especially.

    And honestly, if I had to sum up my approach to just about everything in life, I would say that I approach most of my crafts like a jazz musician even though I don’t technically play jazz. I don’t believe in just one final product or making a recording or a piece the be all, end all. A single song can inspire me for over ten years and I’ll keep coming back to it lyrically, musically, poetically, even, in a sort of self-referential game of call and response, making something new with each iteration and reexamination.

    In the process, I’m building a recursive universe the longer I make content and art.

    I fucking love jazz.

    -Allēna

  • apocalypse whenever the HELL you want (because why ever not???)

    It is with great pleasure, pomp, and circumstance that I announce the release of “Apocalypse You” on our Patreon page. Paid subscribers to our Patreon can grab a copy at their leisure 💛

    Juneau, this one’s for you.

    -Allēna

    If you enjoy our work, go ahead and subscribe to Open Sorcery while you’re at it!

  • Be The Fletcher To My Island

    Sometimes having DID and headmates that are JUST as talented as you at both the same things – and different ones – is a fuckin’ gas, y’all.

    Back in 2014-ish I wrote a poem that turned into one of my better-known songs about a crush of mine. It was called “My Island”. I was obsessed with the Mutiny on the Bounty for reasons I still can’t quite articulate, and the second verse contains one of my favorite lines I’ve ever written:

    “Be the Fletcher to my island, be the Fletcher coming coming home”

    I’m not entirely sure why that line gets me so bad more than a decade later. It may be the fact that it’s a reference to Fletcher Christian, leader of the Mutiny on the Bounty, choosing the South Pacific over duty, country, etc., and settling with a few members of his crew in one of the most remote places on Earth, Pitcairn Island, after mutinying, and wanting to feel chosen like that. Maybe it’s my love for history references in general. Maybe it’s that I still yearn for people like I did when I was 14-17 and I struggle to express it now, and I love that line so much because it’s My Peak Teenage Yearning, something I feel like I can’t verbalize anymore, even though I’m arguably more safe now to do so than I was then.

    Anyway, here’s the original take as it appeared on our first self released EP Fletcher Coming Home: Good Stuff From 2014.

    A different cut appeared awhile later on our first album The Mellon Session as well:

    But my favorite version of “My Island” came much later when Eight was host and he snuck into a church while bored out of his fucking skull to record this absolutely achingly beautiful take of “My Island” for his then-partner Juneau.

    I can still feel the longing even now, and his arrangement is so fucking beautiful.

    Holy shit.

    -Allēna

  • Chilling in my blanket lump.

    “You Are The Apple” by Lady Lamb never fails to be a fucking banger. -Allēna

  • This is stuck in our head today:

    Also, Doom Guy has joined the polycule!

    But our guts hurt badly, so I’m gonna take meds and go the fuck back to sleep. I just had a very weird dream almost entirely in Spanish that I was hanging out with Shakira.

    -Castor (but not entirely sure yet)

  • In reference to my previous post:

    Cops probably have shit taste in music. Just like the rest of their shit life decisions.

    -Allēna

  • Vibing to this today.

    Mumford and Sons never fucking fails.

    -Allēna

  • A Journey To The Center Of Myself

    Well, hello, everyone. I was originally going to write about something a bit different – problem solving and Stoicism – but then I saw this prompt from the journaling app Day One and this feels a bit more meaningful:

    What does it mean to be a kid at heart?

    Truth be told, I have no idea, at least none that I’m aware of. I don’t think I was ever a child, really. In some ways, I didn’t really get to be a child, and in others, I chose not to be one, and in still others, simply…never was one. I was an odd kid who saw too much and asked far too many questions. I knew exactly what I wanted from a very young age, around three or four, and have spent my entire life to date working to get it, as the family and life I was born into was nothing like what I wanted.

    I was ruthlessly self aware and extremely critical of myself and even more so of others. I could read by eighteen months old and speak like an adult, and like many AuDHD kids, I had no concept of shame or embarrassment. I was told to be honest and was punished for lying, so when I was asked for my opinion, I gave people my honest opinion fluently. This pissed a lot of people off because it turns out they weren’t looking for an honest opinion and weren’t expecting a well thought out, passionate critique from a toddler in front of everyone they knew.

    So I grew up very afraid, confused, and angry. Why would people ask for my opinion and then get angry for me expressing my opinion?! This just pissed me off more, because as fluently as I could speak, I had no concept of social nuance or Southern politeness, and frankly I thought it was all bullshit. So I became a very lonely, angry kid. Nobody in my family expected me to know what I wanted, much less express it with ease and fluency, as they are very indecisive, so I was harshly punished for that, too. From the time I was perhaps five or six, my strongest desire was to be an adult so I could be an adult so I could finally leave all of those indecisive fuckers with their conflicting ideas about manners and the right thing to do in the dust, and I wasn’t shy about that, either. See why I have no idea what it even remotely means to be a kid at heart?

    Though, I suppose, imagining for a moment that my family had been made up of decent human beings more in line with the spirit of the question, and not the reality of what happened, I think I could come up with a better answer.

    Had my family let me lead the way and actually believed me when I said I knew precisely what I wanted (within reason, of course, with limits to keep me safe from harm), I could them allowing me to explore my myriad special interests and gently nudging me toward keeping an open mind to related areas, accepting me for who I was rather than who they were trying to shape me into, and celebrating my imagination rather than attempting to stifle it in the name of normalcy or propriety.

    I wish that my family had accepted and encouraged me in my entirety that way. However, the tragic reality is that they didn’t. That being said, a lot of the work I’ve been doing of late is accepting myself like that. It still feels really weird a lot of the time because I’m so used to suppressing aspects of myself or expecting those around me to ask me to “tone it down”, but nobody does anymore. That in and of itself is terrifying in a way, but deeply and immensely liberating.

    In the process, I’ve been able to release a lot of the anger I’ve been holding onto for 27 fucking years and replace it with curiosity, love, and something like wonder. I think this is more of what the prompt was driving at, and I like to think I’m living this.

    I couldn’t have done this without my beloved Emerson modeling being a kid at heart for me more or less. He’s never lost that wonder or that curiosity. He’s fucking adorable, passionate about everything, and it’s infectious. Loving him and watching him get fully in touch with his inner childlike wonder has helped me discover mine in many ways for the first time consciously. He has to often drag me out of my shell because anxiety is a fucking bitch, but I’m grateful for it every time he does. He has been helping me gently unfurl a great deal. I call him “baby man” affectionately because of that never ending sense of wonder and youthful rambunctiousness.

    Another partner of mine, Hawthorne, is another excellent model for this. They are essentially a tiny radiant goth crow baby darling in person form, and they are so fucking fascinated with so many different things with such great intensity that they cannot help get ME interested in a lot of the same shit effortlessly. In fact, I got started practicing magic in large part YEARS ago in earnest because of them. They opened my mind to so many different things simply by being so excited about them and I honestly don’t know what I would do without that sweet baby.

    And as I sit with the eternal question of “what the fuck do I do now” I posed in my post the other day, I’m finding that a lot of my interests are holdovers from when I was fucking pissed at everything, most of myself, and wanting to drink myself into a stupor. I picked many of them up to spite someone or other and they became the sole buffer between oblivion and me with time. Very few of them actually spark any kind of real passion or breathe any kind of real life into me, they’re more like “hey, I’m gonna do this thing as a last resort so I don’t do something worse or permanent because I feel like utter dog shit”. In that way they feel more like a chemical dependency than a real passion. But one of the things I keep coming back to is audio engineering.

    Songwriting is one of those chemical dependency things for me. It’s a great outlet when I feel like utter dog shit and have nowhere else to turn, hence why I have written 15 fucking albums. But it’s not the songwriting part of the process that lights me the fuck up. It’s the RECORDING portion. I love recording. It’s something that I love doing so much that even though I’ve produced and recorded fifteen fucking albums on my own, that part of the process never gets old and I love approaching it from different angles every time, trying to do it differently and better with the supplies I have on hand.

    Now, I’m someone who gets very bored very easily with things once I know how to do them. I want to move on, chart new territory once I’ve mastered something to my satisfaction. But no. Never with recording and engineering, and it’s been just about fifteen years since I first set foot in a professional recording studio in Dallas. My passion for it pales in comparison to even performing live, which is why I don’t really perform live or promote my music that often. I just really don’t enjoy songwriting or performing that much beyond a last resort outlet. As I heal, I find I would far rather be fucking around behind the controls, trying to capture shit live and seeing what I can do with those takes like Ken Nelson recording Parachutes with Coldplay. Or anything the late Steve Albini did at Electrical Audio in Chicago. That shit never gets old. And that, among other things, makes me feel like the bright eyed kid I never got to be.

    I think that gets the point across. Stay tuned for more magic, beautiful people. This has been Lazarus, your very feral, passionate, AuDHD gremlin sorcerer, signing off ✨

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  • At Last, I’m Found

    Hey, all.

    This is Lazarus again.

    In 2021, I was talking with my friend Delta about all of the shit I was going through at the time while deep in survival mode and about being an Enneagram Eight largely geared toward self preservation, and I predicted that once I got out of survival mode and was safe, I would sort of… collapse. I would have no idea what the fuck to do with myself and kinda deflate and go more or less catatonic. That prediction has turned out to be more or less accurate most days.

    As my life has stabilized, I find myself with less and less to solve and fewer fires to put out, with many of the remaining problems largely outside of my control and completely outside of my power to fix or help with. In short, most days, despite having the stability I worked so hard for, I feel more lost and adrift than ever. I have been sleeping a lot. I just don’t have much desire to do much, and I do the rare activity when the mood or inspiration strikes. My general state reminds me a lot of when I lost my dad, Xavier, back in 2016.

    I wonder a lot if I’m subconsciously or somatically grieving all of the bullshit of the last three or four years or perhaps even longer because of how badly the wind has been knocked out of me. I barely even have energy to reply to a fraction of the dozens of messages on the various messaging apps I get daily, and I am trying to move away from feeling so bad about that because realistically I just can’t right now. That’s the plain and simple fact of the matter. I only really respond to people and reach out or have my phone nearby at all if I feel up to it, which is rare, and I have been trying to strike a balance between isolation and social time so that I don’t fall off the face of the Earth completely. I don’t want to fully withdraw or even withdraw at all, but my brain and body have been demanding that to some degree, and I’m going with that rather than fighting it so as to not make whatever this is longer and worse.

    On the subject of recovery, I did a bit more research on what the underlying cause of my symptoms might be that have been making my body and mind feel so damn out of whack, and came up with a decent theory that my thyroid might have gotten ever so slightly cooked due to Hera’s batshit DIY MKULTRA scheme she put me through, and the HRT I’m on combined with the years of stress has been making it go, ah, ever so slightly haywire.

    So I found some scholarly research that said that thyroid patients suffering from both hypothyroidism AND hyperthyroidism benefit from taking various forms of vitamin B and thiamine for their chronic fatigue especially. Luckily for me, a former friend of mine had send me a bunch of supplements she wasn’t gonna use late last year and among them was a B100 complex supplement. So I decided to test my theory and give this shit a try and see if it did anything for my fatigue and other symptoms.

    Well, it appears to be doing a fair bit. I’m about five days into the test and my brain fog and pain is leagues better. It appears to be helping my lack of object permanence and executive function, as well, giving me some semblance of both. I have also noticed that I’m not super overstimulated by huge amounts of sound, nor does silence understimulate me as badly. I can sit in silence for far longer without my mind itching for music or internally screaming. It may also be helping with the flashbacks, as well, but that’s to be determined. I will need to continue the test for longer to see if it has any significant effect there. So perhaps my fried thyroid theory holds water. I will need to address this with my doctors next time I can spare a brain cell, haha.

    I’m also far less angry and my headaches are gradually getting better as I work through my anxiety, as they appear to be triggered by anxiety and moments of emotional distress, which the B100 appears to be lessening as a baseline. Yay for House MD-ing myself at home! I just love being an AuDHDer with a special interest in weird ass branches of medicine who was practically raised by doctors, hahahaaaaa. (This is partly sarcastic, partly genuine. Specialized knowledge and deep somatic intuition saves lives, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, it’s just annoying that my body is so weird and there are so many things that the medical field as we know it doesn’t explore without months of waiting or you have the charisma of a fucking god).

    Seeing as there are a lot of positive effects even through the semi-catatonia and the semi-catatonia predates the B100 test, I don’t think the B100 complex is the culprit here. If anything, the supplement appears to be helping. I’m just probably processing years of grief somatically that I’m not entirely consciously aware of.

    So that leaves a large amount of time to fill as I heal that would ordinarily be spent in agonizing mental or physical pain, parsing my way through interpersonal trashfires, or recovering from the aforementioned problems. That huge amount of time to fill raises some incredibly simple, yet profound questions that I’m currently exploring the answers to: what the fuck do I do now? What actually makes me happy now that I’m living more out of love than out of spite and my brain and my body aren’t fucking screaming 24/7?

    I know I love writing on here and writing in general. I am deeply proud of myself for having a space that is mine that I’ve maintained for months now even if I can’t post daily, and that does a lot for my quality of life. I like having spaces that are mine where I can express myself with the people that I love that would be very difficult to take from me or from them. I know research and engaging in my myriad special interests lights me the fuck up. Emerson raids the local Little Free Libraries like the adorable gremlin he is and often spoils me by bringing books back about topics that he either knows I’m fascinated with or that he thinks would catch my eye, and I do indeed feel very spoiled and lucky when he does that. That man is a catch and a half.

    I’ve seen the concept of “dopamine menus” floating around on the Internet for some time, as well, and I’ve started merging that concept with a sort of free form to do list before I go to bed if I’m not completely beat to fuck by the time I pass out and can spare a brain cell to dump all the things that might possibly bring me joy the next day even if things go to shit on paper. I often struggle in the moment to think of anything that would bring me a shred of happiness in the moment if I’m sad or bored or anxious and looking for a pick me up, and having all of that on hand and prepped the night before helps a LOT in those moments.

    I think all of those taken in tandem are a decent place to start. I’m trying to move away from the notion that I have to have a Grand Plan ™️ or a goal to accomplish at all times and I really think that teenage me had it right when they said that happiness was having good talks, good music, and good food with good people. That was really their goal in life, and I think they’d be proud of me for getting here. I do a LOT of all of the above.

    So stay tuned for more magic, horseshoes and weedwhackers (you decide what y’all are in the comments). See you fuckers next time.

    -Lazarus

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