The first time I saw Amelia Jackie sing was at the old Spectrum space in Bushwick, on Montrose Avenue. The Spectrum was typically a sweaty, windowless club for trans and queer people with wall-to-wall mirrors, but that night they were having an acoustic show. People who usually stayed there dancing all night sat on the floor in a circle around Jackie. I could still count the number of “queer spaces” I’d been in on one hand, and every time I witnessed people with non-normative genders, I was captivated. Then Jackie started singing and it was like someone was putting sound to feelings I didn’t know I had, or had buried so far down I’d convinced myself they weren’t there. Because what do the greatest singer-songwriters do if not show us the way to feeling?
Everything the body feels / is a fantasy / I will believe / whatever you tell me
And I call you / whatever you wanna be called / yeah, I call you / whatever you wanna be called
Those lyrics lodged themselves inside me. This idea — that we might regard our lovers and our beloveds as they ask to be regarded, that we might believe them — would change my life. It was while watching Jackie sing that it first occurred to me I might actually have a different name some day; a different body. A different life.
Just as important, there was a romance in that possibility. In the world of Amelia Jackie’s music, love and violence were sung about in equal measure. Queerness was both beautiful and transgressive.
After traveling for much of her 20s, playing music across the country, Jackie settled in L.A. two years ago to record her forthcoming album, Velvet Leash, to be released in 2019. This past summer, she shot a music video for the album’s single, “Velvet Leash.” The video, directed by Lessa Millet, features friends and collaborators of Jackie’s, many of whom were sitting in the Spectrum the first night I saw her play. To celebrate the exclusive premiere of the “Velvet Leash” video on them., I sat down with Jackie to discuss how one becomes a singer-songwriter, songs as gifts, and secret worlds made by music.
When did you decide you wanted to be a singer-songwriter?
I remember dragging my older sisters, who were twins and seven years older than me, into the bottom bunk in their bedroom and looking at my sister Adriane and being like, "I need to talk to you. I really need to talk to you." And she was like, "Well, what is it?" And I said, "I just really wanna be a singer." And they both busted up laughing, like, What is your problem?
When I think about my childhood, I remember carrying around some kind of really deep sadness. I feel a lot of children are like this. I definitely had a kind of heavy relationship to making art, you know? Even as an eight-year-old. But I wasn't very good. I was a bad singer. And that was kind of a hell, to have a thing you wanted so badly, and felt so strongly about, and to be really, really bad at it.
So how did you teach yourself? How did you learn?
I guess I did what people do, just tried, kept trying. And then I created a sound around what was available to me, you know? That's it, I guess.
I wrote a lot and I tried to sing for a very long time and I remember people telling me, "Your writing is really powerful." Which I think was a soft way to say I couldn’t sing...
When did you start sharing it?
My whole life I've always been a part of a community of people making music. That's more my relationship with music than performing. Part of being young, too, is that you’re sharing it with your friends, as opposed to making something for a stage.
As a teenager in Maine, we’d go to this place called the Slack Factory, in Belfast, which was full of weirdos. Then when I moved to New York, everyone I was around was making music. I met Alynda [Segarra, of Hurray for the Riff Raff] and the first time she came to my apartment she played this extremely painful song for me. She was like, “I’m gonna play this song for you, but it’s going to be intense.” And I just lost it. Music was a way of doing intense bonding over pain and suffering, a way of saying, Okay, I’m gonna let you see this, I’m gonna show you this.
Then I lived in a house and we had shows. We started out having punk shows there. We had this one show — it was a Leftöver Crack show, and actually The Slits were supposed to play, but they ended up not being able to come — that show was so fucking disgusting. People were puking off the porch, they were breaking our shit. After that, we decided we wanted to have more intentional shows. Not that I don't love those bands, but we wanted to create a more unique space, one that was meant to be queer, meant to be feminist. And we were surprised by how many different people came out of the woodwork for that. The structuring of that space really encouraged us to perform.
Do you think about your songs as queer love songs?
Are they love songs?
Well, it often feels like they're for someone.
I think there's not one beloved in any of the songs. I think who is being addressed sort of trips all over the room. And that makes them queer alone, I guess. I’m rarely writing for one person. And the love and relationships I’m talking about aren’t necessarily romantic, or they are, but not in a typical kind of way.
People might hear your songs and think they’re about the pain of love, first and foremost, but it always seemed to me they were as much about the pain of living in a violent world, about growing up poor.
In “Velvet Leash,” there’s this lyric, “You have to try not to touch all the shiny things,” which comes from an image in a Dorothy Allison essay, where she talks about being a kid at the houses of her rich friends. For a second the listener might think the beloved is a rich person. And there was some part of my childhood where I had a puppy-dog experience with the rich girls, following them around and them not knowing what my name was. Anyway, the trick of the song is that the beloved is actually some other scrappy kid.
When I was young, I had this formula which someone pointed out to me, which I don't do anymore. Like everything was: first verse political, second verse personal, or the opposite. Chorus, verse, chorus, verse, chorus. And now I think it's a little bit more nuanced.
Your songs aren’t didactic and they're not dogmatic. They’re love letters, like you said, so they deliver politics in a really specific way. They evoke pain and longing. And that pain and longing might be for a person, but also anything that a person wants and can’t have.
I think there’s a lot of longing for place in them, too. That’s probably linked to the fact that I've always been kind of transient. My whole life we were moving around. And I continue to move around. In my songs I was trying to figure out where I was from, searching for some kind of authenticity in myself.
I had a songwriting breakthrough when I was in the Florida Panhandle with my mom and my grandma was dying, eight years ago or something. Florida was where I was born, so it had a big effect on me. But it made my songs really Southern. And that felt scary because I'm not exactly Southern, since we moved away from there when I was 10.
It's always been hard for me to answer, "Where are you from?"
Where are you from?
Now I say, "I was born in Florida, then we moved to Georgia, then we moved to Maine, and then I went to school in New York City, and then the past however many years I've been transient. And now I live in Los Angeles." But that's a mouthful, isn’t it?
When you write, do you feel like you're being possessed or channeling something?
Have you ever written anything rhyming?
I love rhyming.
So then you the know the rhyme will make you land on unexpected meaning.
Sometimes constraint makes it possible to express something even more complex.
Like “name” and “pain.” Well, that’s a slant rhyme. But whatever. I never would have thought of that without rhyming. With a song, there is some meaning in the back of my head that I don't totally understand. All the moments come from such different places, and the song itself brings them together. You start piecing it together and it becomes this narrative that feels complete, somehow.
Why do you always write in the second person? I can't think of an Amelia Jackie song that isn't a direct address.
Really? I didn't realize that. I think I have some impulse that the song is always sort of a gift.
It’s kind of like what you would want to say to your friend who's suffering. Or to your childhood self. I think the songs are usually love letters but not necessarily sexual love, like a letter to my sister or to my mom or to my friend or to a person that I haven't met, maybe a child in their bedroom.
I wrote the chorus of “Velvet Leash” about my grandmother. I guess it’s a love letter to her. “You're not vanilla, you're sweet cream.” That’s her. And every person I’ve ever loved.
I think the best writing I’ve ever done is letters. And everything I ever write that's not a letter I have to convince myself it's a letter to want to write it at all. The only time I can really light a fire to write about the most painful things is when it's to someone.
I like that. Songwriting often has to be devoted to someone. And honestly, my music is usually devoted to my family, which is queer and trans people, and outsiders. My family is who’s in the “Velvet Leash” video. And the whole process of making it was about devotion in a way; there was so much love in the whole process and Lessa Millet is an incredible director, she was so thoughtful on set. And it was really a collaboration between me and Lessa and so many of my friends, who gave so much of their time and skills.
The video is a glimpse into the world that opens up every time you play, I think. It’s always felt like a secret world to me, a secret world where you’re singing to everyone, and that’s part of what makes the world cohere.
Maybe I am part of a secret world. You know, when you're in a secret world you don't really think about it that way. I think there's a lot of suffering in my songs and I'm not scared of that, and I've always had this commitment to darkness in my writing. But also I have a firm belief that playing and experiencing joy is a radical act. So I try to get at that sweet part, too. I think that's what we were doing in the “Velvet Leash” video. At the very least, music can be a balm for the ache.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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