The "life lately photo dump" trend is everywhere on TikTok right now and I've been watching them and the thing I love about them is the promise of honesty. Here's my life, actually, without the highlight reel filter. But the thing I find interesting is how often they still kind of look like a highlight reel. The blur effect on a coffee cup. The golden hour windowsill shot. The "messy" desk that's been artfully messy-fied.
I'm not throwing shade. I do it too. We all curate. But today I'm going to try to write the actual captions. The ones you think before you type the aesthetic ones.
Consider this my photo dump with director's commentary. No photos actually attached because this is a blog and I'm chaotic, but use your imagination. The images are extremely vivid in my mind.
Photo One: The Closet Studio at 1:47 AM
Caption I posted: "where the magic happens ✨ midnight session vibes"
Actual caption: The acoustic foam on one wall is starting to peel at the corner because I used the wrong adhesive and I've been meaning to fix it for four months. The ring light has a smudge on it from where I accidentally touched it with chapstick hands. There's a mug of tea on the desk that was hot at 10pm and is now ambient temperature and I drank it anyway because getting up to microwave it required a level of momentum I didn't have. My back hurts. HEATHEN HYMNS is out and I am proud of it and also I am absolutely losing my mind refreshing streaming numbers at 2am like that's going to change anything.
The thing nobody tells you about an album rollout is that it doesn't stop when the music is released. The music being out is the beginning. Now there's the press, the social media maintenance, the pitching to blogs and playlists, the responding to every comment because I genuinely love doing that and also it takes three hours a day. The album is done. I am not done. I am extremely, actively, all-the-time not done.
But also, truly, I am more proud of this record than anything I've ever made. So the 1:47am desk smudge is fine. Worth it. Absolutely fine.
Photo Two: Lazarus the Pothos
Caption I posted: "thriving 🌿"
Actual caption: Lazarus the pothos has been with me for four years. He has survived: a move across two apartments, a two-week period where I forgot to water him because I was tracking the first demo and completely disconnected from my body, the time I put him in a spot with no natural light because it looked better aesthetically, and approximately seventeen other incidents of amateur botanic negligence that should have killed him. He keeps coming back. I over-water him when I'm anxious and under-water him when I'm focused. He just handles it. He hangs over the edge of the shelf like a green waterfall and I talk to him sometimes and he has never given me bad advice.
I feel seen by Lazarus in a way I can't fully explain. Resilience through inconsistent care. Thriving despite the chaos. Still green, still reaching for the light, even in the cramped shelf corner of a closet studio. Honestly, that pothos is my spirit animal and I stand by it.
Photo Three: The Secondhand Chair
Caption I posted: "my favorite spot 🪑"
Actual caption: This chair is from an estate sale I went to in 2022. It cost me forty dollars. The upholstery is a dark green velvet and there's a small patch on the left armrest where the velvet has rubbed off, revealing the beige fabric underneath. It's the chair where I wrote most of the lyrics on HEATHEN HYMNS. It's where I sat when I read the Bible cover to cover and started pulling threads. It's where I ate probably seventy percent of my meals during the recording period because I didn't want to break the flow by sitting at an actual table like a person.
It also smells slightly like Biscuit, the neighbor's dog I dog-sit sometimes, because Biscuit has decided that if I sit down in the chair, she's sitting next to me. Full stop. Nonnegotiable. Please enjoy the fur. I don't mind. Biscuit is extremely good company and has never once asked me what my streaming numbers are.
The chair is genuinely one of my favorite things I own. Forty dollars. Life-changing.
Photo Four: The Guitar Named Sunday
Caption I posted: "she's been through it 🎸"
Actual caption: Sunday is my beat-up acoustic. She has a crack in the finish on the lower bout that I got in a car door incident I don't fully want to get into. The tuning pegs stick in cold weather. She's not a fancy guitar, she never was, but she's the guitar I learned to play on, the guitar I wrote my first bad songs on, and the guitar that sat in my lap when I first tried to write about my grandmother's church and how it felt to sit in those pews and believe everything you were told so completely you never once thought to check.
Sunday has a sound, worn-in, warm, a little buzzy on the low E in certain positions, that I've never been able to replicate with a more expensive instrument. The imperfection is the sound. I recorded two tracks with her on the album and every time I hear them I feel something I don't have a clean word for. Gratitude, maybe. Or grief. Or both in the same breath.
Photo Five: The Small Win
Caption I posted: "big day 🥲"
Actual caption: I got an email from a listener I'll never meet. They found one of the songs and they said "I thought I was the only one who felt like this and now I know I'm not." I sat in the secondhand chair and read it three times and then I cried a little and then I drank cold tea and thought about how this is why I do this. Not the streaming numbers. Not the playlist adds. This. The person on the other side of the song who needed to hear it and finally did.
This is the thing that doesn't fit in a photo dump. There's no aesthetic shot for it. But it's the realest part of the life lately. It's the part that makes everything else survivable.
Photo Six: Aunt Deb's Chicken Coop (Second-Hand)
Caption I posted: "throwback to the homeland 🐓"
Actual caption: This isn't actually a photo from my life lately. This is a photo from a visit home a few months ago, included in the dump because I miss my aunt Deb and her chickens and the specific quality of light in the afternoon on her property where you can see the mountains if you stand at exactly the right angle. Aunt Deb is the family member who has never once made me feel like I needed to be different from what I am. She asked me once, after all the faith stuff happened, if I was okay. I said yes and she said good, then take a chicken home if you want. I said I live in an apartment. She said well that's your problem. I do not have a chicken. I kind of wish I did.
The life lately, honestly? It's a lot of alone time in a small space making something I believe in with everything I have, punctuated by Biscuit and Lazarus and Sunday and emails from strangers and occasional visits to a woman who offered me a chicken without a single condition attached. That's the real dump. That's the whole thing.
the part where I'm honest about the rollout
Here's what I want to say that doesn't fit neatly into the photo dump format: indie music rollouts are a grind. They are unglamorous. I am doing the same things a major-label artist does with their campaign but without the team, the budget, or the infrastructure, which means it falls to me to be my own publicist, my own social media manager, my own playlist pitcher, my own community manager, and also somehow the artist who makes the thing worth doing all that for.
Some days I'm genuinely fired up and it feels like momentum. Some days I'm staring at the analytics dashboard at midnight with cold tea and a mild headache wondering if any of this is working. Both of those states are part of the same life. Both are real. The photo dump shows you the plants and the guitars. The caption shows you the cold tea and the headache.
But here is what is also true: the album is out. People are finding themselves in the songs. Strangers are sending me messages that say "I thought I was the only one." That is not nothing. That is not a small thing. That is the whole reason I tore apart my closet and put acoustic foam on the walls and named a pothos and spent years writing songs about grief and faith and rage and identity and the specific ache of being a person who used to believe something with her whole heart.
It's out there now. It belongs to all of you now. And that is, without question, the most beautiful and terrifying thing I've ever done.
Life lately: chaotic, loud in my head, cold coffee, proud as hell. The captions don't always say it. But that's the actual truth.
Thanks for being here. Genuinely. You make all of it make sense.