Content warning: Acts of sexual assault are detailed in this piece.
Pissed off, scared, broken—those are the emotions typically associated with songs about sexual assault. But Eva Hendricks, frontwoman for Brooklyn indie-pop band Charly Bliss, sounds positively gleeful about kicking a toxic, abusive ex to the curb and reclaiming her life on this year’s “Chatroom.” “I’m not gonna take you home/I’m not gonna save you, no,” she chants in the chorus, exuding the assurance of someone who knows she is right.
“As I was writing it, it was almost aspirational,” Hendricks tells me. “And the more I sing it, the more I really do believe what I’m saying. That’s how pop music works: You put your headphones on and steal this little bit of invincibility for yourself.”
Now Hendricks aims to give that moment to others. Though she was nervous at first about releasing the song, “Chatroom” has become her favorite moment during Charly Bliss shows. “It’s always the song that people dance the most to, and scream along to,” she says. “When I look out and I see people feeling the song, it makes me feel like I have a voice in a situation that made me feel totally silenced.”
Over the last few years, as movements like #MeToo have destigmatized victimhood by reframing it as survivordom and tried to educate the masses on grey-area issues involving consent, I have heard a loose progression of feminist thought play out in song. It started for me in late 2015, when Lady Gaga released “Til It Happens to You,” a big, ballad-y call for survivor empathy. The song served as the musical centerpiece of The Hunting Ground, a documentary about rape on college campuses, and was subsequently nominated for Best Original Song at the Oscars. Watching Gaga shakily perform it at the ceremony in early 2016, flanked by 50 survivors of sexual assault with phrases like “not your fault” written on their arms, something long buried in me shook loose. Since then, I have not stopped noticing the release of new music related to sexual assault and harassment.
The most brutally obvious example arrived in mid-2017, when Kesha dropped her third album, Rainbow. Faced with staying silent while pursuing legal recourse against her alleged abuser and label-head Dr. Luke, or allowing him to potentially profit from the art she made out of her pain, Kesha chose the path of healing by releasing a record that chronicled her own recovery. Simultaneously generous and chilling, her single “Praying” hints at a powerful double meaning: She hopes her abuser is praying, both for the forgiveness of his own soul and that she doesn’t come for him like The Bride in Kill Bill. Though the singer has suffered a losing streak in the courts, you could say the #FreeKesha movement still achieved its goal: Amid public pressure, Luke and Kesha’s parent label, Sony, broke off at least some of its ties to the super producer turned pop pariah.
There have always been songs inspired by sexual violence, from Bessie Smith’s bittersweet blues laments nearly a century ago, about the then-normalized practice of spousal abuse, to punk pioneers the Raincoats’ 1979 track “Off Duty Trip,” which offers commentary on how men’s professional code—be it soldier, priest, or banker—can unfairly protect them against rape charges. But it follows suit that there would be more space for these works to exist, in overt forms, during moments of broader feminist change and questioning, like the one we’ve experienced in the last two years. When #MeToo spread across social media in late 2017, it put a new spin on the old adage about there being strength in numbers, particularly as it relates to survivors. The amount of people sharing their stories in a way that wasn’t an accusation was so overwhelming, it was impossible to ignore. Couldn’t songs function in this way too, inspiring others to quietly come forward?
The current moment of women writing songs that directly deal with sexual assault is not without precedent, though the last time it occurred on a similar scale was nearly 30 years ago. The early-to-mid ’90s ended up being a crucial time period for this particular musical canon, partially galvanized—like third-wave feminism itself—by the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas sexual harassment case in the fall of 1991.
Ten days after Hill first testified against her former boss and soon-to-be Supreme Court justice, a young singer-songwriter named Tori Amos released “Me and a Gun” as the first single from her solo debut, Little Earthquakes. Inspired by the now-classic feminist blockbuster Thelma & Louise, the a cappella story-song details a version of Amos’ own violent rape at 21. She places you right in the moment of survival before revealing her deepest fear: That she is being punished by God for leaving the church. But in her waking mind, she knows the problem is systemic: “Yes I wore a slinky red thing/Does that mean I should spread...” she sings, delicate contempt dripping off that last word.
“Me and a Gun” wasn’t a hit but, coupled with its sister-song B-side “Silent All These Years,” it transformed Amos into a beacon of hope for trauma-stricken listeners everywhere. She was stopped by women of all walks of life in the ensuing years—powerful women living in shame, women in the Middle East who listened in secret, young girls who showed up frightened and alone to her shows. This was how Amos became so involved in the founding of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, answering the first call from their National Sexual Assault Hotline in 1994; someone needed to listen to all of these stories, and it couldn’t be her alone.
The early-to-mid ’90s also saw the spread of riot grrrl from a small rock scene in Olympia, Washington, to a global movement. Working in the late-’70s feminist punk tradition of the Raincoats and Kleenex, bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Heavens to Betsy critiqued the white male capitalist patriarchy, demanded sexual autonomy, and railed against the normalization of sexual violence against women (or what we now call rape culture). On Bikini Kill’s 1991 demo, Revolution Girl Style Now, amid disturbing confessions of abuse at the hands of a father figure, is a seething song called “Liar” that condemns men who rape and then paint women as the uncredible ones. I often thought of this song—with its blood-curdling screams as Kathleen Hanna starts to sing John and Yoko’s “Give Peace a Chance”—during the Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh testimonies in 2018; they each capture such deep, perpetual cosmic unfairness, you have to laugh or scream or both.
Riot grrrls ended up being pigeonholed by the mainstream press as “combat-boot-wearing man-haters, angry rape and incest survivors, former sex workers, and caricatures of girlhood,” as one recent remembrance put it. Where rage defined the punk end of the ’90s sexual-assault songs canon, Amos and subsequent mid-’90s artists like Fiona Apple, whose rape at 12 became part of her early narrative, had a victim narrative foisted on them by the press. Going through magazine and newspaper interviews with Amos from 1991 to 1993, it’s striking how an overwhelming number of them mention her sexual assault within the headline or first couple of paragraphs—as if the worst day of her life is her defining moment. Whether it was true empathy or an eye for tragedy that led the media to over-extend the victim narrative, the framing was a sign of the times; these days, artists who share their stories of abuse are more likely to be thought of as brave survivors.
Of course, some people weren’t even afforded this type-casting as a victim—to stand as one was to be implicitly believed, and that privilege usually required being white. In the rap and R&B anti-assault anthems of the ’90s, the message was more about empowerment and fighting back. TLC’s “His Story,” from their 1992 debut Ooooooohhh… On the TLC Tip, begins with Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes shouting out Tawana Brawley, who lost her high-profile 1988 case over whether four white men raped her and wrote racial slurs on her body. The song itself is not hopeful, but the group’s frustration is funneled into a call to protect oneself. “Take it from me, don’t be a victim of society,” Lopes says during a spoken-word passage. “You can’t put yourself in a position to be neglected and disrespected.”
It must be noted that domestic and sexual violence affects Black women at higher rates, and that these acts are more likely to go unreported and undiscussed. Combined with hip-hop’s history of casually glorifying misogyny and violence against women, this creates a musical environment where honest dialogue about sexual assault seems even more difficult to achieve. When rap songs about rape and abuse are released—like Eve’s “Love Is Blind,” where she seeks revenge on the man who ruined and then took away her friend’s life, or Angel Haze’s “Cleaning Out My Closet,” in which specific acts of childhood incest are viscerally detailed—they are often remarkably powerful.
Art is not created in a vacuum. Much like today, women in the ’90s were airing out their grievances and trying to forge a path to parity, equality, and most of all, safety. Though the cultural landscape now is generally more accepting of survivor stories, this doesn’t mean every musician is interested in offering up their confessions in some kind of “message” song. (There are far more songs inspired by sexual assault than are actually about assault, in large part because abstraction is safer.) Listening to the margins over the last few years, I couldn’t help but sense the effects of lingering trauma in a more quietly knowing manner.
I hear it in the overlapping stories of violence that checker Big Thief songs like “Coma” and “Watering,” in Courtney Barnett’s “Nameless, Faceless,” when the typically sly singer-songwriter paraphrases a Margaret Atwood quote about how men are afraid women will laugh at them and women are afraid men will kill them. I hear it when Saddle Creek singer-songwriter Sarah Beth Tomberlin, mid-depressive spell on “I’m Not Scared,” asserts that “to be a woman is to be in pain,” to be made for another. On “Latch Key,” rapper Kari Faux mentions a partner who doesn’t stop when she says to, leaving her pregnant and then suffering from a miscarriage. On “Get a Yes,” Sad13—aka Speedy Ortiz leader Sadie Dupuis—offers a nonjudgemental, dare-I-say-fun explanation of how verbal consent works. On “Deadbody,” indie-pop belter Miya Folick isn’t trading her silence for a settlement. And it’s worth remembering that before all this, pop soothsayer Grimes made one of the greatest songs of the decade, 2012’s “Oblivion,” out of what she once called “one of the most shattering experiences of [her] life,” an act of assault and her subsequent distrust of men. “See you on a dark night,” she whispers in the chorus, a line that haunts—and maybe comforts—anyone who’s ever been followed home.
After the allegations against director Harvey Weinstein hit in October 2017, there was a domino effect felt throughout the film and TV industry; many have wondered if a similar reckoning will ever come about in the music world. Since then, R. Kelly has been arrested on 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse. Alice Glass spoke up about her alleged abuse at the hands of her Crystal Castles bandmate Ethan Kath, and the court twice dismissed Kath’s defamation lawsuit; hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons’ request to dismiss a $10 million rape lawsuit was similarly shut down by a judge. Brand New’s Jesse Lacey and Real Estate’s Matt Mondanile were practically exiled from their respective rock scenes amid allegations of abuse from young fans. Ryan Adams was outed as a perpetual creep and destructive mentor, which he denies. And some major-label suits lost their jobs, then got new jobs, amid harassment and abuse scandals.
But the idea that one lynchpin outing would inspire change across the industry, sparking frank and meaningful conversations about the culture surrounding musicians, live venues, and record labels… that never came. And I don’t think it will come. For one, there are too many people still invested—financially but also spiritually—in protecting abusers. Also, the music industry is structured differently than Hollywood, with pockets of power dispersed in each scene and hierarchies replicated therein.
Maybe, just maybe, instead of one big outing, there are a bunch of smaller ones, not played out in a courtroom or on Twitter, but in creative acts of catharsis—in songs. With this in mind, I spoke with five musicians who have, across the last two and a half years, released songs that address sexual assault or harassment: Eva Hendricks of Charly Bliss (“Chatroom”); Georgia McDonald from Melbourne emo-punk trio Camp Cope (“The Face of God”); Ellen Kempner, who helms the indie rock project Palehound (“Killer”); Toronto R&B star Jessie Reyez (“Gatekeeper”); and Perth, Australia indie-pop singer-songwriter Stella Donnelly (“Boys Will Be Boys”). It is telling that a number of these songs feature the backdrop of the music industry, chronicling traumatic incidents involving others in a scene or a producer passing through town. In their own words, these musicians explain how their songs came to be, share their fears about releasing them, and marvel at and mourn the outpouring of responses received from listeners who can relate.
Charly Bliss: “Chatroom”
“I am trusting, well adjusted/Marked me dormant, I erupted,” Eva Hendricks sings of her journey as a survivor of partner abuse on this highlight from Charly Bliss’ second album. “Chatroom” was the moment when the band’s dizzying hooks met a powerful reclamation, resulting in an undeniable anthem.
Eva Hendricks: I didn’t want to go so far with being specific that people are like, “Oh, this is the song about rape.” That was really scary to me, because I do want anybody to be able to relate to the song, whether it’s about sexual assault or a manipulative person you’re not going to let be part of your life anymore.
I really wrestled with whether I wanted to directly address what some of these songs are about. It was brutal. But when people come up to me after a show and share that they’ve been through something similar and that the song is helpful to them, it makes all of it worth it.
With what happened to me, I didn’t feel strong. I felt stupid. I felt like I had really fucked up. I was really embarrassed and I didn’t know how to tell anybody about it. Something that’s really confusing about being assaulted by your partner is that there’s this feeling of blame. That is part of most survivors’ understanding of their own experiences, but for me, I was confused about how to explain what had actually happened. Because there’s this feeling of, “I brought this person into my life, I dated them, I should have left them sooner, so I’m complicit.”
I hadn’t heard from this person in a year, and they reached out to me as we were in the studio, right before we were about to record “Chatroom.” It was someone who had been called out by another person, which is sort of how I figured out that the same thing had happened to me. They reached out to say that they’d been in therapy, and to ask if I’d clear their name.
That moment was really brutal and eye-opening because I realized, “Oh, this person has no remorse, they haven’t grown from it.” I don’t know that they recognize that they put me through the same thing [as the person who called them out]. Thinking that I’d be someone who could clear their name was just so, so fucked up. I can’t do that. How could you not know that I couldn’t do that?
And this is someone who was super outspoken about being against misogyny and assault. It’s really confusing when someone presents themselves as being a hero, but you know something totally different about them. From the beginning, I felt like I couldn’t say anything—like no one would believe me. I will never forget when Kathleen Hanna came to my school—I went to NYU—and spoke to my class about her career. At one point she talked about being raped by a close friend who was an outspoken activist for women’s rights. That stayed with me and has been really comforting to me.
Going through all of the nightmare scenarios that could have happened [after releasing “Chatroom”] and having them not happen has been one of the best experiences of my life. Instead of crushing me by keeping it inside, I get to work through it every day, which might sound extreme but is actually really magical. It’s forced a dialogue within my own family and with people who might not have ever told me [about their abuse], or might not have ever told anybody.
Camp Cope: “The Face of God”
“Could it be true? You couldn’t do that to someone/Not you, nah your music is too good,” sings Georgia McDonald, emulating the uncertainty of a local music scene after allegations trickle out about a hero.
Georgia McDonald: A few years ago, I had an experience with this guy who was always super intense and pressure-y. He played in this really cool band—they weren’t successful, but everyone would pack out the front bar of a pub in Melbourne to watch them.
We had a little thing, and one night he was like, “Come over, I really want to see you.” He called me like 10 times, until eventually I agreed. I was driving over and I kept hitting red lights. I thought, “This is a message from the universe.”
When I got to his house, he was really drunk. Things started happening and I told him to stop; he was like, “Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry.” But then he’d do the same thing and take it a step further. I’d go, “Stop. Don’t do that. I don’t like that.” And then he’d be like, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry”—but still do it again, go another step further. Finally he was asleep, and I was wide awake, just staring at the ceiling thinking, “I need to get out of here.” So I drove home.
Six months after that, he kept texting me being like, “You’re avoiding me. Did I do something?” And I told him, “You sexually assaulted me that night. I kept saying no, I kept saying stop, and you kept going.” He said, “Thanks for telling me.” Like, to not even say you’re sorry? I texted him back eventually: “If I ever hear about you doing this to anyone else, I will out you and end your career. Don’t reply to this.” He didn’t.
Many months later, I heard that he did something similar to someone else. I posted about it in a closed Facebook group for women. It rippled out from there, word of mouth in the scene, and he stopped playing shows. His band hasn’t played since. I remember walking into the pub and feeling ashamed, like, “All these people have lost this great musician that they can’t see play anymore, and that’s my fault.” I kept trying to remind myself it’s not my fault, he’s the one who fucked up.
After I outed him, he sent me a written letter being like, “I’m so sorry. I acknowledge what I’ve done. I’ll pay for your therapy.” And it just sounded like someone else wrote it for him. I burnt the letter on my balcony. An apology would have meant something when I first told him, but it doesn’t mean anything now that he got caught.
I wrote the guitar bit for “The Face of God,” and then words just started coming. I sent my bandmates a recording of it; I just wasn’t sure about it. I couldn’t see how this could become a band song. And I was scared of releasing it because I thought something bad was going to happen.
When [2018’s How to Socialise & Make Friends] got released, it just was so heartbreaking how many people related to “The Face of God.” I get DMs almost every day from people being like, “I listened to that song when I’d just left my abusive husband, I’ve got two kids…” The song’s got a life of its own, which is a blessing and a curse. If someone listens to it and they feel less alone, that’s the most important thing to me. But when it comes to a personal conversation with somebody, I can’t do it. I can’t take on other people’s pain more than I already am. I’m still coming to terms with my own experience.
I’ve been sexualized by men my entire musical career, my entire life. I’m hoping that the #MeToo, #TimesUp waves will make men fucking terrified, so the next generation of men won’t try anything, and that’s the end of it. But knowing that Pinegrove still sell out tours and all these fucked men still get away with shit, it’s made me realize that people just don’t care. Maybe once the Chris Brown documentary gets taken off Netflix, then I’ll have a bit more hope.
Palehound: “Killer”
“With every step he takes, an evil shakes in you,” whispers Palehound principal Ellen Kempner at the onset of “Killer.” The haunting song, off this year’s Black Friday, is of the “you hurt my friend, I hurt you” variety, but instead of gruesomely detailing what she’s going to do to the man who sexually assaulted her loved one, Kempner focuses more on how sinister and all-consuming abuse can be to those who endure it, even years later.
Ellen Kempner: It happened to me at such a young age that I didn’t really see it as sexual assault at the time. It took talking to friends of mine to really come out of my perception of it as something normal. I was road-tripping with one of my best friends, and at one point she basically just said, “Have I ever told you about my abuse?” It was extremely powerful because I thought I knew everything about this person, but I had no idea about this thing that shaped every move they make. We ended up talking for hours, and I came out about my abuse to her as well.
Even after that conversation, it took me a long time to feel anger, to feel like something really did happen to me. It was much easier to get pissed off about my friend’s experience. In the next few months, just coincidentally, I had conversations with other people I knew about their abuse. By the time I wrote “Killer,” I thought, “Wow, almost everyone I know and love has been hurt by someone.” I wrote the song a year or two ago, when this was constantly on my mind. At the same time, I was listening to a lot of murder podcasts and hearing all these stories about murder, especially of women. It all mixed together to make this song where I just wanted to—I don’t know—kill someone!
It’s hard to come out about your own experience. I was feeling so much shame. But I will tell you: I was assaulted on tour four years ago. I was 21, touring with my band at the time, me and two dudes. We were staying with friends of theirs, and there was another girl there who was crashing as well. She assaulted me, basically. Which, as a queer person, took me so long to internalize as assault; I had it in my head that assault looks like this one thing. She’s a really physically beautiful person, much older than me, so at the time I thought of it like, “Oh, this beautiful person is giving me this attention, I slept with this pretty girl.”
I didn’t really face it until last February, when we were touring in that friend’s town, and the person who assaulted me was in the front row at our show, taking pictures of me. She was crying to our tourmates that we wouldn’t stay with her. One of them had to physically block her. That was the night it hit me: Oh, that’s what that was.
She started stalking me afterwards. She was very unstable. She was dangerous to herself and became fixated on me. She was trying to come to a bunch of shows, messaging me, sending me pictures all the time. I had to block her on every social. But this is not an unusual story at all. My sister has a story like this. My best friend does. My cousin does. It’s inescapable.
That’s another thing, being a non-cis man on tour is dangerous! Lucy Dacus’ tweet about that—basically like, “With love: please don’t follow me back to my van...”—was really genuine, and a lot of people responded, Mitski responded. It’s happened to me a couple times. We pulled up to a venue in Vancouver, where we’d never played before, and there was a man waiting for me outside. He was, like, my dad’s age. Turns out he just wanted something signed, but I had to have someone come with me. I go to the merch table at every show, but even then people feel so entitled to touch my body. Men are rubbing my back, coming up behind me and I don’t see them.
Jessie Reyez: “Gatekeeper”
“Wait till five years down the road and you’re failing/Keep fucking these regular dudes that are nameless,” Reyez sings in her villain voice on “Gatekeeper,” quoting the powerful producer who threatened to ruin her career if she didn’t hook up with him. After including the song on her 2017 EP Kiddo, Reyez released an accompanying short film that recreated the night in question. She initially declined to say who inspired the track, but after two women came forward in May 2018 with graphic allegations of rape and physical abuse at the hands of that same man, producer Noel “Detail” Fisher, Reyez confirmed his identity.
Jessie Reyez: I’d be lying if I told you that there was a blueprint to writing this song. I happened to be telling the story to the producer I made the song with, Willie Larsen. We started talking about how we got into the industry and the adversity we faced. It just came out. And it came out in a linear fashion—exactly how I’m singing it, that’s how the event happened. It’s all quotes, it’s insane. I got told, “Hey, somebody pull up my bank account because she doesn’t know who I am. She doesn’t realize what she’s doing right now, that she’s throwing away her dream.”
I didn’t know the kind of impact that it would have until we started playing it in different meetings. Sometimes, I would see women go into themselves. I would see women tear up. Women would get emotional or hug me after. It was crazy ’cause then it would affect me the same way, it would throw me back. I wasn’t expecting to feel that connection.
And then, the other side of it was in certain meetings, watching men’s energy switch, or watching men tense up. Certain men didn’t know how to act because it was almost like they’d been called out in the media, you know? But like, fuck it. It’s me and it’s my story and it’s my truth. If I didn’t say it, I would feel like I was censoring myself.
There’s so many things that have rippled out of that song that I just didn’t anticipate. There were people saying that it resonated with them, that they were so happy that someone was talking about it. But then, there’s this other side. I couldn’t even tell you how many messages I got—there were so many women telling me this had happened to them. The worst that had happened was that they got raped, and a lot of those women were saying that they just felt compelled to tell me because they still couldn’t come forward. They still felt that fear. Women have to walk around with that baggage every fucking day because someone else was an asshole? Ridiculous.
Did I have fear about saying who the song was about? Yeah, I had a lot of fear because I was just getting started in the industry. He was much more powerful than me at that point, and I didn’t have any security around me or my family. I also had a hard time saying I almost got raped. I feel like “almost” doesn’t count—I was scared of getting that reaction. And then I was also scared about everybody coming with that mentality of, “Oh, well if she wore the short skirt, she’s asking for it.” I also didn’t think that anything could actually be done [about the problem].
When those other girls came forward, I broke. The reason I decided to come forward was because their bravery inspired me. He actually went all the way with them and they had to suffer through that. That fucks you up because you end up feeling guilty for being scared, which is where I was.
The experience [with Detail] definitely stuck with me. It affected how I felt about moving forward in music. I thought I wasn’t built for it. I had these people with experience in the industry telling me, “Well, this is what it takes. So if you’re not willing to do this, quit.” I was like, “Maybe I’m just chasing something that’s not meant for me.”
Even now, I’ve gotten into the habit of walking into meetings with armor on, to make sure that I’m teaching people how to treat me, to make sure that I am setting boundaries from the first second. I wouldn’t say it’s a negative quality, but it’s something that’s born from paranoia. It’s more of standing in my truth and standing in self respect, to make sure that I’m not accepting anything less from other people.
Stella Donnelly: “Boys Will Be Boys”
“Your father told you that you’re innocent/Told you women rape themselves/Would you blame your little sister/If she cried to you for help,” sings Stella Donnelly on her ode to all that is wrong with rape culture. She wrote “Boys Will Be Boys” a year before the Weinstein allegations broke, but when both came out around the same time, her straightforward depiction seemed to capture the toxic masculinity at the root of the problem.
Stella Donnelly: The domestic violence in Australia is insane: 44 women have been murdered by men since January here. I guess my little fight within the music industry is part of a broader thing. What I’m asking for isn’t very extreme, but you have to go out there guns blazing for something relatively normal to happen.
The catalyst for the song was a friend of mine; something happened to her at the hands of a guy I didn’t know but who was known in our friend circle. In the same breath that she told me what happened, she straight away started being like, “But you know, I was doing this, I was wearing that”—just blaming herself. I had to stop her and say that she didn’t need to justify herself. I realized that’s what she’d been made to do by her family.
I didn’t want to be too specific about her story—and I didn’t have to be! I had so many stories that I could tap into when writing this song. I had forgotten about something that happened to me, and one night when I was playing the song at a gig, I suddenly remembered. I should’ve given myself a content warning. I just had to keep going.
After Pitchfork posted the song, I had trolls and guys sending me pictures of their dicks to intimidate me, which at the time really affected me. Even people in my hometown were like, “We know where you live.” There were washed-up musicians from Perth who couldn’t deal with the fact that a woman had found success so they were trying to slam me at home. That hurt the most.
When I play it live, I do a big disclaimer, the main point being that I didn’t write the song as an attack on men. I very much wrote that song with my baby brother, who’s 10 years younger than me, in mind. I wrote it knowing that the men in my life are just as damaged by the whole boys will be boys generalization as we are. My only regret is that I don’t get that perspective across in the song, so I use my live shows to explain it. As a result, I often hear from fathers; they’ll thank me.
I’ll never open with “Boys Will Be Boys.” You have to be clever about it. If you want to get through to more people, you have to create a safe space for that to happen, which generally means laughter and a comfortable feeling. There have been times when, I’ll admit, I haven’t played the song. If I’m supporting a huge artist in front of 10,000 people who’ve never heard of me and it’s like 5 in the afternoon, and they’re just having a picnic, I’m not going to fucking play that song.
I played this gig in Leeds once and there was a group of drunk lads who had never heard of me before. They were giving me a bit of banter back and forth—it was heckling, really, but I’ll call it banter for their sake. When it was time to play “Boys Will Be Boys,” I was just like, “Hey guys, can you be quiet for three minutes? I promise I’ll let you say whatever you want to me after this song.” They were super responsive to that. So I played the song and at the end I looked down. One of the boys, not realizing everyone could hear what he was saying, turned to his mates and yelled, “Well, she’s got us there, lads.” I couldn’t help but laugh. These really unsuspecting kind of dudes got it! Honestly, it was beautiful.
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