one of my favorite quotes* ever comes from roger ebert: “…for me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. it lets you understand a little bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. it helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us.” you can easily substitute movies for music here (or indeed any form of art). and it works both ways! we may gravitate to music because we feel like its author understands us — that it gets us — but we also may listen to a record because it makes us feel something we don’t normally feel in our everyday lives. and this brings us to evelyn gray’s debut album, let the flower grow.
but before i go on, i encourage you to check out karen ponzio’s article in the new haven independent about let the flower grow. ponzio is (always) insightful, and she gives gray a platform to talk about creating this album.
thinking about let the flower grow as an empathy machine, it showcases gray doing the impossible: writing an album that works in both directions. on one hand, it allows the listener to step inside gray’s headspace for ten sweeping, beautiful songs. listening as a cis woman or man, gray’s music serves as a portal into the life of a person who is queer and trans. and listening as someone who is trans or queer, let the flower grow is a direct emotional connection with someone who has lived, and is living, in similar footsteps. and being alive and being yourself when you are queer and trans is pretty fucking difficult in today’s world. the resulting music then is filled with pain, and as a vessel for empathy, gray allows others to feel their pain. but if i’m being honest with you, i don’t hear these songs as “sad.” i hear them as powerful. i hear them as powerful because gray has collected those feelings, those events, and given name to them.
it’s also important to note that let the flower grow is a true solo performance. these songs are all written and performed by gray, and their live performance consists of simply a guitar and a few pedals, which they use to recreate this music. and on one hand, this can sound incredibly lonely, right? but in practice, gray playing solo is another bold and empowering statement: they don’t need anyone else on stage to create this music. there is no safety net, and that’s okay because they are — both to themselves and to us — showing that they don’t need one.
here are my three favorite moments of let the flower grow:
“catching feelings”: there are several notable lyrics on let the flower grow — lyrics that stop me in my tracks, and i feel like i need to write them down. one of my favorites is in “catching feelings”, where the titular phrase comes up in: “i wonder if it’s just me / catching feelings like a disease / is it a sickness inside that makes me incomplete?” and again, as a vessel of empathy, the lyrics on this record are front and center. but one of the great things about let the flower grow is that they are specific to gray, but they can match onto other people’s lived truths as well. i remember at a live performance, gray introduced a song with a short dedication of “this song is for anyone that has been made to feel different”, or something to that effect (it was short and powerful). and while the song is imbued with gray’s lived experiences as a musician who is trans and queer, the lyrics could easily map onto anybody who is made to feel different just by being alive.
“gardening”: i’ve seen early descriptions of gray’s music label it as “ambient”, and i can certainly see the reasoning for that. let the flower grow is lathed with reverb and layering, and its structures are made from soundscapes rather than your traditional guitar riffs. however i’ve always heard their music as “rock” — and hey if you want to add an adjective like “gothic” or “dark” or “emotional”, you can do that too. but the song “gardening” gives an early example of the fierce, biting nature of gray’s compositions. at the 0:32 mark, a run of jagged and distorted strums erupt out of the darkness. it’s a surprising moment, and gray withholds that kind of distortion only for very select occasions, like the middle of “people like me” or the gripping back half of “accidents”.
“tired / take with food”: i wanted to highlight tracks 6 and 7 here, but to be honest, i could have chosen any pair of songs. let the flower grow is sequenced in such a subtle, smart way. not only does the album tell a story thematically — where the climax is the ending of “accidents”, and the resolution is “severed hands” — but musically, it glides from the ending of one song to the beginning of the next. this is made explicit on “tired” and “take with food”, which were written to be paired together, and on gray’s ep, the two formed a singular 7-minute song. it feels weird, then, to pick a single song from let the flower grow and throw it on a playlist. it feels heretical. because the album works as a whole, cohesive unit, each song builds on the next.
so what i’m saying is you should listen to this album from start to finish. and hey, it’s on spotify and bandcamp, so you can do that today. right now.
*i know starting off with a quote is one step above the “websters defines music as…” move, i know.
