A Story of 2024 in Twelve Things I Made (That Weren’t Music)

JANUARY :: roasted tomato salsa.

 

At this time last year, I went to Mexico for a much-needed break and a visit with my sister after a prolonged period of intense stress and overwork. It was an amazing trip. It was also the last time I could pretend to myself that my increasing anxiety was just a temporary byproduct of pushing a bit too hard, and that a holiday would solve it all.

Luckily, you don’t have to be in a perfect mental state to enjoy a vacation—or a cooking class. That green mole, look at it! The tamales! We snacked the whole time we learned how to make these gorgeous dishes, then we sat down and ate a full meal of what we’d made (plus plenty that had been prepared beforehand), then we sampled the funkiest mezcals ever. A day of total indulgence, tasting as we went. This picture was taken by my friend Steve, the best travel companion, as we crushed on the enthusiastic and crazily knowledgeable teacher/chef Emilio who ran the class.

 

 

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FEBRUARY :: an excruciating mistake.

 

I was chatting in Dutch on live radio for a feature on my recent album with Sam, Forget This Night. The interviewer was asking me about the female composers on the album. I know SO much about them, but for some reason I said something glib and off-the-cuff, was questioned about it, backed myself into a corner, and couldn’t figure out how to recover as I could have easily done in English. I basically stopped talking, red-faced. The interviewer smoothed over my gaffe, and we carried on; then Sam and I performed two songs, which went fine.

I signed up for a Dutch conversation class after that. The class was great, but I’m still not fluent in the language of the country where I’ve lived for twelve years.

 

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MARCH :: a depression sweater.

 

One of my slowest knitting projects ever—intentionally slow, as it was a coping mechanism for my burnout-turned-existential-crisis that unfolded invisibly at home during a quiet winter. I stayed on the couch for weeks, feeling lost, wondering what was wrong with me, avoiding people, trying vigorously not to let anyone see how terrible I was feeling. I’ve always been able to snap out of funks, but this one wouldn’t quit. While I sat and worked through those endless stranded rows on tiny needles, I asked myself whether the things I valued had any meaning, whether anything I made could last, whether humans can ever recover from our garbage treatment of each other and the planet. I questioned every one of my relationships; I picked at every one of my millions of insecurities. I had no desire to sing—just thinking about singing made me cry. By the end of the month, I had a cardigan, but not much more clarity or balance than before.

 

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APRIL :: a friend.

 

Epke and I already knew each other—he’s my in-laws’ best pal—but I stayed over in his house for the first time while singing at the Weesp chamber music festival, and we got closer. I told him I was trying to improve my Dutch, and he promptly switched. He was patient with my hesitations (very rare here, since everyone’s English is excellent) and helped me stick with it for entire days. He came backstage in tears (pictured) after one of the festival concerts and let me see, with no emotional shield at all, how our performance had touched him—which of course touched me, reminding me why this job is worth it.

We talked together about my mother-in-law, Feikje, whose death a half-year previous had affected me much more than I admitted at the time. I had mostly focused on caring for the family, not giving in to my own grief; anyway, I couldn’t, because work was so nuts in the fall of 2023, and I just had to keep pushing through. A big part of what I had to do then was to make lots of cheery, proactive noise on social media about the album, which was released a week or two after Feikje died, and was incidentally full of songs about how people deal with endings and heartbreaks.

No wonder I fell apart after the press for the album quieted and I finally had time to feel everything.

Epke understood all of this.

 

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MAY :: a transcription.

 

Two years ago, I started copying out some unpublished songs by a fascinating, overlooked composer from a manuscript only available in one library in Paris. The project stalled because I was busy, the work was slow, and I wasn’t sure if anyone would be interested in these quirky pieces.

This spring, I picked it back up again and spent many wifi-free hours with sharpened pencils and an industrial-strength eraser finishing the transcription.

I’m learning the songs this week. They are so weird and so beautiful, and virtually no one has ever heard them. They will, though, as soon as we get to grips with them and understand how to make them speak, perhaps for the first time ever.

 

 

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JUNE :: a basement stud wall with my dad; a hike and swim with my mom.

 

I spent a few weeks this summer visiting friends throughout the US. The trip was lovely and complicated—as these trips usually are. There’s always a double sense of comfort and pain: of belonging there but also here or nowhere; of having the deepest relationships with people who have known me the longest, but almost never getting to see them face to face; of feeling more and more different the longer I live elsewhere, more of a hybrid of many different selves than any one authentic identity. On this trip, I learned that a friend and mentor in New York, Paul, had died. I missed seeing him again by just a week.

On this particular day, I chatted with mom about many things, and a thrush sang for us as we walked through the woods down to my favorite quarry. The water was the exact right temperature, and there was a cute elderly dog paddling happily nearby. When we got home, dad and I resumed a drywall project and made a little sweaty progress before breaking for dinner on the porch.

A perfect North Carolina day. No notes.

 

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JULY :: my first analog roll of film in decades.

 

My childhood friend Alex has a few cameras that used to be my grandfather’s. When I told him I was interested in trying analog, he generously sent me back to Europe with Papa’s old Leica M2 (!) and a basic lesson on how to use it. When my first roll was ready for processing, my friend Greg taught me home development, literally holding my hand in a pitch-black bathroom while our friend Nikki stood by in the dark, proffering towels and encouraging words. When the roll unspooled in my hands after its chemical bath with visible images on it, I could not believe it had worked.

Playing around with photography has brought back my sense of wonder and aesthetic curiosity more than anything else this year. It’s slow, luck-dependent, and totally situational, a completely different sort of artistic pursuit than performance. I’m bad at it, and it doesn’t matter. I don’t know enough to get perfectionist about my results. I can learn and improve as much, or as little, as I want. I fail constantly. Something beautiful always comes anyway.

This is one of my favorites from my first roll, taken near the pier in Penarth, Wales, where I had just heard George Crumb’s Black Angels played arrestingly by gorgeous friends. I was happy.

 

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AUGUST :: a grave for a rabbit.

 

It was the second time in a year that I held the body of a loved one after they died. 

It was the first time I’ve personally buried one (with the indispensable help of my friend Kate).

Mochi’s spot in the garden now has a small plant growing out of it, a spiky, hardy little shrub, which reminds me of her.

 

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SEPTEMBER :: a photo of my partner.

 

Ton and I went on a little vacation at the end of the summer. It wasn’t perfect—I had a foot injury and couldn’t walk much, I’d accidentally booked us an Airbnb with no kitchen, and a very dear friend died unexpectedly in the middle of the week, sending me (again) into a tailspin of grief. It was still good to be together, to be quiet; to feel—but not alone.

I took this photo at dusk in a birdwatching hut, full of gratitude for the thoughtful man I married: his presence, his strength, his curiosity, his ability to hold so many of my big feelings alongside his own. Soon after I took it, we were startled by a noise just above our heads. There was a nest in the eaves of the hut, and baby barn swallows were watching us as we watched birds in the pond outside. They’d begun to cheep, distressed because their parent was nearby but didn’t dare enter while we were there. We left as quietly as we could.

 

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OCTOBER :: a sweater from my own design.

 

I’ve freestyled little knitted gifts before, but never an adult garment. My friend Henk had done me a gigantic creative favor the year before—he’d worked with me on an experimental photo session that resulted in the cover image for Forget This Night. I wanted to knit him something as a thank-you, but didn’t see a pattern that was quite right. So I invented one.

What a project! So fun, so hard. It was cool to realize how much I actually know about fiber and clothes after an entire life of fiddling around with many different practices (knitting, sewing, costume design, etc). It was humbling to realize how much I could still learn: an endless amount, if I choose.

He loves it, and it fits perfectly.

Maybe I’ll release it as a pattern. Or maybe I won’t. Not every hobby needs to be monetized.

 

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NOVEMBER :: a dance.

 

I unexpectedly joined the cast of an opera this fall, a wonderful process that I already wrote about here. My character had a terrific solo song, meant to be performed under a spotlight in a glittery body suit, like a pop star. There was no time for self-consciousness in my preparation; there was no choreographer on hand to teach me a routine. I just had to move in whatever way felt right, whatever way matched the feverish defiance of the woman whose words I was singing.

Y’all, I quit ballet at age five after just a few months. Dance is not something that I do easily or freely when I’m not at a party. But I did it, and I had a blast. I got sweaty and out of breath at first, gradually acclimating to the adrenaline rush over a week or two of rehearsal. Then, a theater full of paying public watched me shake my ass on stage night after night. What??

My new pals in the cast were completely supportive and lovely about the whole thing. One day in rehearsal, I said nervously that I was considering watching the video of our run-through so I could see what I was doing and correct whatever looked stupid. An actress called Marjan (whose arresting, unforced, totally emotionally switched-on performances reduced me to tears on stage every night) grabbed me by the arm. Don’t watch, she said. It’s perfect as it is, free and joyful, and you’ll only make it harder for yourself if you analyze.

I took her advice. I never watched myself. I kept doing what I was doing, enjoying it more each time.

 

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DECEMBER :: a self-portrait.

 

My 2024 ended with a terrible cold. I had to cancel one planned recital, and I considered withdrawing from the next project too. In the end, I didn’t withdraw, but did my best—thanks to Fisherman’s Friend and conservative voice use. It was fine. No one sings perfectly, especially not in December. Even in a compromised state, I could offer plenty—and I got to sing (finally not coughing any more) for the first time in Wigmore Hall as my last performance of 2024.

At a moment during my recovery when I was well enough to be bored but not well enough to leave home, I impulsively loaded a roll of film and headed to the attic, the brightest part of the house. I spent my twelve exposures (Papa’s Rolleiflex, medium format) on random self-portraits just for the hell of it, with no plan or goal in mind. As always, technical faults and user errors abounded, but I had fun. It was a reminder that my illness would eventually end, and my body would feel like my own again. It was a reminder that even during a year like this one, making stuff is still my favorite thing to do. It doesn’t have to be singing or music-related. It doesn’t have to be perfect, or even good. It doesn’t have to feed anyone, or clothe anyone, or please anyone in any way, for the process of making to be valuable to me for its own sake.

 

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I’ve been trying recently to open up about how hard the year was. It’s difficult, but helpful, to talk about it at last. It turns out that almost no one had any idea what I was suffering. This is my own doing, mostly. When I talked to friends during those tough months, I would usually be cheered up just from their company and often didn’t feel like opening my own wounds. I can look back through my social media feed for the year, and I see only smiling pictures that I posted after concerts, on trains, with new colleagues. The year was very mixed, of course, and there were plenty of wonderful moments, so many. Every smile I posted was genuine. But the smiles aren’t the whole story, and the feed feels unbalanced to me now.

Like most of us, I’m self-conscious about what image I project outward. Although this blog might make you think otherwise, I do choose carefully what vulnerabilities I allow through. Like any singer, I’m terribly aware that I’m constantly being judged, constantly auditioning even when I’m on a job. The quality of my work matters, but my attitude matters even more.

That awareness choked me this year into an unhealthy silence about burnout and emotional fatigue. What right did I have to complain about a period of low spirits? I had nice work, a fantastic critical reception for the recent album, invitations to beautiful festivals, a few projects to look forward to further down the line. I had a home, a community. Other people had it harder. 

I thought knitting, waiting, a beach vacation, and smiling in public would be enough to make it all go away. Instead, what made the sadness finally go away (somewhat) was letting the mask drop in front of people, again and again, and letting them hold me, literally or metaphorically. I had to cry or get angry or be silent instead of smiling. I had to stop imagining that every little idea I had could contribute to an artistic or professional narrative. Sometimes life is just life, and sometimes it sucks. This shouldn’t be as big a realization as it is, but I had to re-learn it rather radically this year. The fact that this post mentions so many friends—by name and also silently, in my mind, you know who you are—is a reassuring testament to the community I do really have, the one I thought had vanished when my brain was in a toxic spiral of its own making for a while. Whether they let me talk for hours, teach me things, inspire me to start working again, or all of the above, I need them just like they sometimes need me.

The photo here is the one from that Rolleiflex afternoon in which I look the least beautiful: hair a mess, bathrobe askew. I purposely pulled the most extreme face I could, then hit the button without overthinking. The picture doesn’t amount to much, which is fine. I put it here as a reminder to myself that we don’t always have to present something beautiful or refined. We can show something in public besides the career-safe marketing-speak we’re trained in. We can be sad about many things at once, angry about others, and insecure about a whole host more—and still be hired back, and still be loved.