Not My Man

This single is one of first two where I tried a scary experiment — recording.  You might think songwriters just write and track and release and it's all pretty status quo, but it's much more messy.  I wrote songs for years to self-therapize, no specific idea what to do about it after that, and the idea of recording was expensive and foreign and vulnerable.  

You ever been scared to have sex with a new person?  Well, multiply that by 100 and that's how it feels to track an original song with...???  And everyone hates hearing their own voice recorded, and I'm no different.  "Ooh, I thought I sounded like me but that sounds like a rhinocerous in pain, ugh."  

So, enter Jeff Lusby Breault.  He deals in Highly Vulnerable Songwriters and lots of other stuff, making people sound their best.  

And to be honest, I'll say this — I had done some modeling for years with a photographer named John Running, and one of the reasons I did was because I was actually convinced I was ugly.  Yes.  I was diagnosed with scoliosis by (in hindsight) a predatorial chiropractor when I was 19 (I did legit have scoliosis) who told me I'd never have babies, exercise, bear weight, all this other stuff.  He made me feel really bad about my body.  I paid for his 3x weekly services until I decided not to, and then just went about feeling bad about my body for free, for the next two decades.  

Long story short, some people make you feel bad about what you have going on, some people make you feel good.  I took photos with John Running, who made me feel good, and realized: omg I'm not ugly!  I'm not twisted and wrong and bad.  I'm actually beautiful and desirable, in the right light.  I'm me, and being me is okay, and everyone has some stuff going on.  Nobody's perfect, but nobody's definitely imperfect either.  Right?  

So that's how it felt to trust Jeff with my first few tracks.  'Please don't reveal to me how bad and awful and simple and wrong and basic I am.  I like these songs but I know they'll fall apart under scrutiny, like sugar in the rain.'  Well, that's what I now know about a good producer — they take what you've brought and make it better, bigger, nicer, more polished, until it sounds like it was...really on purpose!  So that's the story of this song.  One of my very first tracks, trusting someone else to not make me feel completely stupid.  Songwriting is a vulnerable, scary endeavor, y'all.  Especially when you're writing about stuff that was hard to go through in the first place!  

Now, several years down the road, I understand that I could actually write something shitty (not that I would) and hey — you throw enough money at it, enough production and studio magic, it can sound pretty good.  But at this time, I did not know that.  I thought the best that I could bring through, with my okay-but-not-great-voice, my okay-but-not-great-guitar playing, was as good as it could get.  Turns out it can get a lot better.  Turn some professional musicians loose on that shit and stuff gets epic, FAST.  

So, I released this single first (in a long line of impending singles, stay tuned) because it was one of the first times I sat in front of a pair of speakers — on a battered seat that I think had been removed from an AstroVan, I wanna say — and listened to my own halting song, transformed into something...splashy.  Sexy.  Commercially viable.  And more itself than before.  

I hope you enjoy, but I can guarantee you, you'll never enjoy it as much as me, because I was with this song when it was just a another plaintive snow cone thrown into the volcano of hapless art :)

Hannah Pralle: song, lyrics, melody, vocals, harmony vocals, and acoustic guitar

Jeff Lusby Brealt: drums, electric guitar, emotional support, production, possibly some shakers idk, mixing, and mastering

Rich Neville: bass, and as you can hear he tore that shit up