On Missing (Noun and Verb)

June 17, 2025

“I can just see fog / nothing else.” A customer at work said this conversationally about her apartment view 30 seconds ago, and it compelled me to write for the first time in a while. New York fog is different, heavier — heat and bodies and no promise of relief. I can’t help but compare it to boardwalk mornings in Santa Monica — mist, summer camp and the ocean, hesitant sun at 2PM — a glimpse into brighter tomorrows. Do you remember those hypothetical sleepover questions growing up: “If you could time travel anywhere / any time, where would you go?” I used to think of grandiose answers — Paris in the 20s, Italian countryside — now I would just go back to eating ice cream with my sisters, my hometown not yet scorched, my grandmother humming when I get home.

I started writing with the intention of talking about my music, but of course somehow I ended up on the Santa Monica boardwalk in a regressed teleportation exercise. There isn’t a hugely natural progression here, but I guess there’s something to be said about fog. I put out a song recently called “Beacon,” by definition “a fire or light set up in a high or prominent position as a warning, signal, or celebration.” I use frequent imagery of light in my next project, and this was the catalyst of that metaphorical throughline. I went to my friend Ben’s place in Ridgewood, after weeks of tension and push and pull in my personal life, and told him I wanted to write a song from scratch. We had luck on my last project with this approach writing “Pins and Needles,” and we caught that ease again. Beacon kind of feels like Pins and Needles’ older sister — a recentering of my perspective in something like self-assurance. Pins and Needles was rooted in mental nausea — spinning out over repeated cycles; Beacon is a testament to being entrenched in the same dizzying repetitive dynamics — but with more desire to exit — to become my own source of light, rather than outsourcing it.

I ended up bringing Beacon to Jos in Nashville — where this entire project was made. It’s strange that after three visits there, these songs felt like they appeared out of thin air — a guidebook to emotions I can’t quite remember writing. I am connected and proud of these songs in a way that I didn’t think I would be after Stray Dog. I’ll get more into that later in the release cycle — the way the evolution felt impossible until it wasn’t. But for now, I just want to remind myself of the joy of creation as I continue to put out this music, because sometimes it’s brutal. The incessant output into an overcrowded landscape — a hail mary of does anyone connect or give a fuck — and does that even matter. On my worst days when I want to throw my phone in the ocean and never share anything again — I think back to my first days in New York, listening to these demos like secret prayers on the subway, which I didn’t know how to navigate yet.

It’s been almost a year in New York — I have paintings on the wall, and the subway is second nature, and I own a pink couch. I work and pay bills and collapse into time spent missing a partner, missing myself, missing playing shows. I have spent so much of my life missing — (verb and noun) — am I missing something? I think I have tried to answer that in every song I ever write. But lately, I look around and am struck with amazement that I spend time with myself for maybe the first time in my life. I write songs for myself and play records and cook dinners that are halfway edible. I make new friends and my legs carry me, stumbling forward for better or for worse. And as for the fog and chasing clarity and finding the light, I think for today I am kind of grateful to still have questions to ask.

If you read this all, thank you for listening to my cold-brew–induced bored-at-work ramble. Stream my music if you’d like, and have an awesome day. oxoxoxoxox