ADAM KEITH

Effective music evades capture. It does not need me to describe it. By the time I can piece some words together the music has already happened. Instead, I write about other things disguised as music-context, personal experience, associations. The sound has already passed through me, done its thing, and disappeared.

Vancouver-based producer & performer Debby Friday’s music is no exception here. Writing about it feels like a futile exercise, but not because her approach is obscure or the content is obtuse. The basic form is familiar, and the constituent parts are all more or less recognizable. Friday’s debut EP, BITCHPUNK, distills the strengths of industrial, club music, rap, and noise into something violent, cohesive and natural. Her follow-up, DEATH DRIVE, expands this palette in even fewer tracks. The songs are less taut, and the sounds are given more room to breathe. Haunting melodies and cinematic scrapings emerge. Both offerings are concise, withholding, and seemingly effortless. There’s a sense that the listener is being taunted, or dared.

Friday’s music is distinctly feminine-physical, sexual, and scary. It is to be received, not understood. My attempts to box it in are futile, like some engineer trying to appreciate an ice cream cone by taking its measurements.

Discussed: BARE BONES, dreams, directing, punk, boxes, erotic potential, identity, The Runaways, empathy, streaming.

You’re from Montreal, right?

Yeah, Montreal is my hometown. I was born in Nigeria and then I moved to Canada when I was about two with my Mom and my Dad. Montreal is really the place where I grew up. We moved around a lot, but it was always move somewhere else, come back to Montreal, move somewhere else, come back to Montreal. [Eventually] my parents were like, ‘Alright, we’re going to stay in Montreal.’ And that’s where I spent the majority of my upbringing.

What was the transition from Montreal to Vancouver like?

Well, that happened at a very turbulent and transformative part of my life. My time in Montreal just came to an end, and there was nothing I could really do about it. I think I tried to fight it for a while, because I didn’t want to leave. It was all that I knew, you know? So much of who I am is because of having grown up there. And then it came to a point where that was no longer sustainable, and I knew it wouldn’t be good for me, so I left. Moving to Vancouver was really an adjustment. Things are just really different here. It’s a slower pace of life, a slower pace of everything almost. I’ve built up my patience muscle being here. Everything takes longer, but it feels deeper and sweeter, if that makes sense.

Interesting. Vancouver is a lot bigger though? Or maybe I’m imagining that. I haven’t been there in so long.

You mean like population-wise?

I don’t know what I mean. Just picturing the look of it… Maybe it’s more the architecture I’m thinking of.

Yeah, population-wise it’s not bigger, but I think Vancouver feels bigger, because it’s a lot more green and tropical. You have the feeling that, yeah, you’re in the city, but the country or forest is not far away at all.

Did you shoot the “FATAL” video there?

We did. We shot in three locations. The parkade is in Vancouver, and the purple sky stuff was shot at this place called Iona Beach. And the tunnels, that was shot in this place called the Othello Tunnels in Hope B.C., which is about two hours outside of Vancouver.

I think of your music being really physical. I’m curious what it’s like to keep creating during this pause in live performance. How has that affected what you’re working on and how it develops? I’m imagining you had stuff lined up before COVID hit.

Yeah, definitely. I was supposed to have one of the biggest tours of my career thus far this summer. I was geared up to be touring on the East Coast of Canada and to head to Europe from there. I would’ve been gone for a whole month or even more playing all these really huge shows and festivals I had lined up. It’s funny, because at the time, in February, I had just played a show in New York and had come back to Canada. In the span of three or four days they had closed the borders down, and everything was totally shut down. At first I was super bummed about it, but very quickly I just adjusted and realized that this was the way things happened, this is the way they were supposed to be. I think I have an acceptance for change; I deal with change pretty well. I kind of reoriented myself and refocused. I had the opportunity over the summer to do a lot of teaching stuff instead, which I find fulfilling. Just like, teaching and music research, working on my thesis, and also working on other aspects of my creativity. I made an experimental short film, and I’ve also been working on my album, and just taking the time to situate myself better amongst my artist friends. [I’ve used the time] to discover other aspects of my creativity that I wouldn’t have had time for if I were touring. Writing a lot, too.

What kind of writing?

Every day I just sit down and write something, anything. Before I started with music, writing was my first creative endeavor. I always thought I was going to be a writer, and when I was younger that’s all I wanted to do. I have boxes and boxes of notebooks just filled up with my writing. I still have all of that creative energy, but now it’s just going into different channels.

Does it help you creatively to have a community to bounce things off of?

Oh definitely, definitely. And this is the first time that I’ve had that in my life. When I first made BITCH- PUNK, my first ep, I did that in complete and total isolation. I had already left Montreal, and I was living in my Mom’s basement in Calgary. I lived there for a couple of months while I prepared to move to Vancouver. I was just completely alone. I did not see anybody, I did not talk to anyone. I was so isolated, and I spent all of my time in that basement. That’s where I made BITCHPUNK. It was such a solo kind of process. I didn’t really have any feedback or anything until I put it out into the world. I’ve been in Vancouver now for two years. I’ve got the feeling of, ‘OK, now I can say I’m making friends. I have creative collaborators and people I’ve started to work with more regularly.’ And things are kind of shaping up. Everything is becoming this really collaborative process, both in real life, and also keeping the collaborations via internet and with people online. This has definitely been a really collaborative moment in time for me. It’s helped a lot.

The film you finished, is that BARE BONES? Can you tell me about that?

That film idea came about two months into lockdown. I was just spinning my wheels, and I wanted to do something, I wanted to make something. I was going through emotional upheaval as far as getting adjusted to the idea that I wouldn’t be performing and touring the rest of the year. And there were other things going on in my personal life. So I was like, ‘OK, I’ll make a movie.’ Actually, I didn’t even think of it as a movie. I thought I would just make this 30 second, or minute-long, experimental thing. I started talking with my friends Antonia Ramirez and Jeremy Cox. They helped me to really let it take shape and get as big as it needed to be. It turned into an actual production. That was such a learning process. I learned so much about film, and so much about bringing ideas into visual material, which is another area that I’m kind of new to. It was really enjoyable; it was a really great process filming with them and the rest of my crew.

The film itself is about a woman who finds a bee. She swallows a bee, and from there time kind of begins to fragment around her. She undergoes this really intense transformative experience that’s symbolized through a lot of abstract shots that we see throughout. I’m playing the character of the woman. It was my first time directing by myself, directing myself and everyone on set while also playing the main character.

How long is it?

It’s about nine minutes.

You said that was your first time directing. You had some hand in the production of the “FATAL” video also, right?

Yeah, that video I co-directed with Ryan Ermacora. He’s a director based here in Vancouver who I work with on many things. That was my first time ever doing anything involving film and directing or anything. Having him there was such a huge help. I felt like I learned a lot through that process, working with him. We work together really well. He helped this time [with BARE BONES] in a different capacity, but the day of our shoot he wasn’t available. I was really all by myself, but it didn’t feel that way, because I had so much support from the rest of the crew and the other people that I was working with.

You work behind the scenes and in front of the camera produce and perform, act and direct. Is there one role that you prefer, or do you need that balance of the two?

Right now, in the space that I’m in, I need both. I need to feel like I have a sense of control, and a sense of actually knowing what it is that I am doing or saying or making. I prefer to be in charge of the message and in charge of things that I am a part of. I really want to be there, behind the scenes and know, ‘OK, what’s this, what’s that, what are we doing?’ Instead of having someone tell me what to do. And as far as the other side, where I’m in front of the camera—the actor, the dancer, whatever it is, I think that’s just my performer side. I need to express myself in that way.

Did you have an outlet for that side before music?  When you were writing primarily, was there a performer side?

There was a performer side, but not really an outlet. When writing was my primary thing I would do slam poetry shows, [laughs] which sounds a bit funny. But it was never the right fit for me. A lot of my writing was very morose and melancholic, and kind of depressing, and I wasn’t very active on stage.

I think a lot of slam poets have this very certain rhythm and way of presenting themselves, and that felt very inauthentic to me. 

It wasn’t authentic to my way of expressing. So I didn’t do that often. I should say that. Then I stopped writing for quite a while, and it wasn’t until I found music that I was like, ‘Oh ok.’ Finally I had an outlet for that part of me that likes to be on stage, and to command attention through physicality and physical connection with the audience and the space.

Have you ever produced a track for someone else?

No, but I have collaborated on productions. Me and DJ Haram produced a track together last year called Searching. I also collaborated with Lana Del Rabies on my last ep, on a track called TREASON. The most recent collaboration I can think of is, a musician friend of mine, Kae Sun, is putting out an album, and he asked me if I would record something, so I just recorded myself reciting a piece of poetry I had written.

Can you tell me about the performance THAT WET, ELECTRIC DARK ? What was the guiding concept there?

I actually did that one as part of my Masters’ program. I wanted to experiment with sound-making, and also this concept I had been building in my writing around this idea of erotic potential. I made this sounding instrument, which is essentially this wooden box, and I painted it white. It’s six feet by three feet tall. Inside of that box it represented the raw material of erotic potential – and as a space also within ourselves, that’s represented externally. Outside of that box, the rest of that space, is kind of this negative space where anything goes, anything can be created. So it pulls from inside of that erotic raw material, and then things get shaped and made into what is tangible on the outside. It’s connected to this framework that I’ve started building in my essays on this idea of erotic potential as something that inhabits all of us individually, but also collectively. It’s something that comes out when we gather in spaces, in music spaces and in music venues, when people are touched by music and are connected through this thread of sound.

Is there any virtual equivalent to this energy exchange during times like these?

Hmm… I’m not sure yet. Quarantine is still very new, and I am biased, because in my province it’s been pretty easy-going. And truthfully, I stopped self-isolating in June. I am leaning towards ‘no.’ I don’t think there is a virtual equivalent. Because in my framework of erotic energy, one’s physical body and physical space itself are necessary components to conducting this energy. If we can’t see or touch or smell or taste each other, there is no charge.

The Internet is amazing, but it will never replace real life modes of connection and tangible togetherness.

The box, is that sort of what you’re interacting with during the performance to create the sound?

I had contact microphones and a regular dynamic mic in front of me. What I’m doing is rubbing and touching or hitting the box, and from there it goes into an audio process I’d set up. The microphones make different sounds depending on which channel it’s going through, and I programmed the channels to change throughout the performance. That’s why you’re hearing a lot of different things. Sometimes I use my own voice as well. So that to me is representative of the ways in which we do the shaping of this erotic material, this raw material, the stuff of life. We are the ones that shape it into the things that we are able to see, hear, taste, and touch.

As an artist, you think about the power and responsibility of transmitting that kind of energy  to others. But for those who aren’t thinking about it, what’s happening to all that erotic potential? Where is it going without their awareness, or their direction?

Energy can never be created or destroyed. Only channeled, only transmuted. It’s going somewhere. Whether that be constructive, destructive, or a little bit of both depends on the person, on the conditions of their life, what they have inherited, and where they want to go. Cultivating awareness of yourself as a vessel of metaphysical forces and an active agent in the world, someone with power over their environment and over others, is important, because it gives you the self-respect that is necessary to actualize your erotic, creative potential, to see what the fuck you’re made of, and to live your life as true and as deep as possible. I believe that we can only do this work together, and I also believe that the deeper I go, it will spark something in someone else, somehow and they will go deeper and spark something in another person, and so on and so forth, until it inevitably comes back around to me, and then we begin again.

I haven’t had a chance to see you perform live. Is there typically a visual element to your solo shows,  or do you focus on the performance?

It’s kind of both. A friend of mine, Rebecca Ladds, did visuals for the DEATH DRIVE tour of performances last year. And I usually have those videos playing in the background, or somehow integrated into the performance, when it’s available. Sometimes the venue is just a straight up punk show: there’s no space for visuals, there’s only space for the performer and the audience. It depends.

I’m curious about the use of the word “punk,” what it represents  to you. I wouldn’t think of your music as being punk. What does that word mean to you?

Well, I don’t know moving forward, but the music I made thus far, if I had to pick a genre I would call it electronic punk music. To me that means electronic music that has a rebellious aspect to it, that doesn’t fit into categorizations of genre. Even punk itself as a genre is all about rebellion and the outrageous. Things that are considered outsider arts in a way, or violent or resisting, things that defy authority or convention or control. BITCHPUNK and DEATH DRIVE fall into those categories for me, not only because of the mental space I was in when I was making those things, but because of the goal that I aim to achieve with music. I’m not interested in making things that aren’t dealing with the real emotional material of life. I’m interested in music that confronts us, music that might make us uncomfortable, but also could be entertaining or soothing or this and that. I’m just not interested in any rules. And I don’t think of my music as falling into any categorization of rules, especially considering that when I started, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. I just made whatever I thought sounded right to me.

A lot of people will try to box me into this idea that I’m making hip-hop music. I’ve had people call me a rapper. And I feel that a lot of those designations come from me being a black woman and the auto- matic conditioned associations that come with that. A lot of people have been like:  ‘You’re a black person, you’re making hip hop music, you’re a rapper.’ And it’s like, ‘You’re not actually listening then.’

I would not consider myself a rapper. I play with hip-hop influences, definitely, and I play around with words in similar ways to a rapper, but I wouldn’t consider myself a rapper. I wouldn’t feel authentic calling myself that. It’s just not accurate.  That’s what I mean when I say ‘punk.’ I see it in this kind of new definition where myself and lot of people I know are making this music that really defies convention. I think ‘punk’ is the perfect way to summarize that. That’s what punk was originally all about.

That makes sense. It’s funny, I grew up around punk music, and it was really eyeopening at first. But I think at some point I… I wouldn’t say I turned against it, but it became this orthodoxy that I was grossed out by. The initial idea of it was a good one though. It’s cool to see someone use that idea, rather than the style it’s calcified into.

Mm-hmm. Because even that itself is a whole other issue. When I think about the music I grew up on, I’m very much a child of the Internet. I would listen to anything I could download on Kazaa or Limewire. So I was exposed to a lot of musical influences, and I always had a penchant for rock-n-roll and punk music, and loud, abrasive sounds. And I agree with you. I noticed throughout the years there was this calcification that happened where things became very stale. I think a lot of this has to do with genre conventions, not really having any true innovation in those scenes because they just became very closed in this way. It just became really closed off to, ‘Who could be considered part of these traditions, what kind of music is part of the tradition?’ The rules became so strict for something that is supposed to be all about freedom, about not having any boxes around you.

Right. At some point it becomes a fixation about what is allowed in. What role do electronics play in this?

Electronics also exist in this realm of freedom. Whereas I see punk to be more about an embodied freedom from whatever might be keeping us caged, I think electronic music is more about a cognitive freedom towards something, towards somewhere. The fact is, if you have a computer, Internet connection and common sense, you can actually do anything. Anything. In terms of music, you can make any kind of music you can think up and create sounds that would be otherwise impossible. 

I really do believe that the advent of the Internet, like the printing press, is one of the most influential developments in human evolution. 

However, the catch is that anything made in digital space is almost exclusively maintained in digital space unless there are mechanisms in place that open the channel into the physical, tangible world. This is the reason that in my theorizing I say ‘electronic punk music’ instead of just ‘electronic music.’ The ‘punk’ part of the equation is what brings it back to earth, back to the room, and back to the body.

What records or artists from that Kazaa era grabbed you or drove you to experiment?

From the Kazaa/Limewire days, it was really the start of the idea of internet sensations. It was how I was able to come across people like Soulja Boy, who was essentially inescapable. If you were on one of the download sites, you downloaded some Soulja Boy at some point in time, whether you wanted to or not. I also downloaded a lot of emo, punk and rock ’n roll bands; I truly cannot remember most of their names. Lots of older music, too, because the archives were there, and they were free-people like Betty Davis, The Runaways, lots of old jazz and blues records. I always say some of my biggest inspirations are people like Betty Davis or The Runaways, for sure. Or people like Amy Winehouse, even. People who have this kind of punk spirit about them, and about their music, their methods of expression. Betty Davis’ work is so formative to me, because she was a woman who was not afraid to engage with her sexuality in the way that she expressed herself musically.

Betty Davis was not afraid to get on a track and moan and growl, really standing in her feminine sexuality, and be really in your face about it in a way that wasn’t pornographic.  It was very much her own authentic erotic essence. I’d say the same for Cherie Currie from The Runaways, and Joan Jett, the way that they perform and the way they go about expressing themselves musically. It was like, ‘I’m here, I’m a woman, I’m giving you my sexuality, I’m giving you my aggression. Like it or not, this is who I am and this is what I’m doing.’ I appreciated that so much. I was so fixated on The Runaways especially, so fixated on them growing up. ‘I wanna be where the boys are,’ that kind of stuff. I love that.  [Laughs.] Near the end of the Limewire era is when I started getting into electronic music, but then myself and everyone I knew stopped using Limewire because all the anti-piracy propaganda was getting intense. We were scared the government was going to hunt us down and arrest us. I was still a kid so I was particularly worried.

On Twitter you expressed some frustrations with identity discourse. You talked about an interview you did a couple years prior, saying you wouldn’t have framed your music the same way today as you did then. What’s changed?

Most of my frustration doesn’t come from the interview itself. It was one of the first big interviews that I had ever done, and I was finding ways to articulate myself as a brand new artist. The frustration is with things that have come after, where people will use little sound bytes from that interview to create this context of, ‘Debby Friday makes music because she’s a queer oppressed black woman,’ just setting up this framing that’s a misrepresentaion. I don’t ever describe myself in that way, and I don’t ever present myself and my music-making in that way, because it doesn’t come from that space. Yes, identity is a part of it. But I don’t feel like that’s an accurate representation of how I go about thinking about identity in everyday life, or the way that I present myself via music. I think it’s this really convenient narrative that people cling to now because of everything that’s going on socio-politically.

A lot of people want to be good people, and they want to do this anti-racist work, but at the same time they get stuck viewing every single black person through one single narrative, or one single story, and it’s a little ridiculous. Because then you reduce peoples’ humanity; you reduce the complexity and nuance of what a lived experience actually is.

I don’t think this whole idea of intersectionality should just be about associating specific kinds of victimization and oppression with specific identities. That’s not what it’s about.

I follow this woman on Twitter, Ayishat Akanbi, who does a much more elegant job of describing what I am trying to say. No two people that have the same ‘identities’ I say that in quotation marks even interpret it in the same way, and neither do they have the same lives. Sometimes their lives and worldviews are even more different between them than with someone from another identity group, you know? And a lot of the times I see this flattening happen with black people, or black women, or queer artists. Because it’s easy, it’s the easiest and laziest way to engage with the artists. It’s easy to spit out and digest, and there is no nuance and no complication. But you don’t even really get to truly engage with the music or the person if you’re setting up the narrative like that.

It was kind of crazy for me to see how quickly ‘antiracism’ became sort of a brand following the explosion of the George Floyd case. It was suddenly like, ‘Oh, it looks like Amazon is taking a stand  against racism?’

[Laughs.] I don’t want to hear what Amazon or Nike have to say about human rights! It’s disingenuous, is what it is. Right now, a lot of people are preoccupied with wanting to be good, and they’re chasing ideas of goodness that are not actually rooted in what it means to be a good human being, but more so how to appear righteous. We’re all just in this weird phase. We want to be good people. So what does it mean to be a good person? And this is the easiest answer. How can you argue with not wanting to be racist? It’s obviously a good thing. How can you argue with that? I’m not arguing with that, but I do think that preoccupation, and that anxiety around goodness, is going to do more harm than good.  Because then you get things like, not to stir the pot or anything, but then you get things like cancel culture and woke-scolding, and everyone living in fear of saying the wrong thing, and all this stuff where everything just gets flattened. And there’s not really any conversation, there’s just this kind of zeal towards wanting to punish each other for being human and, therefore, messy.

Do you see an antidote to that sort of flattening? I agree with you, but I don’t know what the solution is.

Honestly, I don’t know either. I try not to spend too much time thinking about it, because it can be really depressing at times, you know? I don’t know. I don’t have the answers. But I know that at least one step in the right direction would be for people to start thinking about how the Internet has created this global community and what that actually means moving forward. You end up being in a community with people you don’t even know, or you haven’t even seen in person. It’s very intangible, and I think our brains haven’t adjusted to what that means. When you’re in community with somebody, how do you actually want to treat that person? And how do you want to be treated as part of a community? If we’re in a global community, I would hope that the people who actually care about me and actually love me would be gentle with me. And I would hope to be gentle with the people that I love and I care about. It doesn’t mean that you make excuses for people, but it means that you have to approach mistakes or wrongdoings or hurt with compassion for another person, and see them as a part of yourself, really. If you knew the true root of a lot of people’s bad behaviour it would break your heart. We have all been ‘bad,’ and we will be bad again, and we will hurt others and say stupid stuff, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t deserve patience, gentleness, the benefit of good faith and the space to grow.

Yeah. It’s particularly easy for things to become transactional online.

Yeah, it just becomes this flippant thing. It doesn’t take anything or cost anything to get on your computer and type stuff. And I say this as someone who has been there. I get it. I understand how you don’t realize the impact that your words and your actions have online.

It seems to function similarly to road rage or something. I’m remembering I read that you don’t drive, so maybe that’s a horrible analogy [Laughs.] But like, you’re in the car and you get angry at the other car. You aren’t seeing the physical person, their eyes, the physical things that humanize them. It’s just this anonymous Other that you can release your hostility on. The Internet seems to operate in a similar way, with even less physical cues.

Definitely. There’s no way to really get empathy across the Internet right now. I think that’s what’s missing in a lot of discourse. Ever since March I’ve slowly tuned myself out to things that are going on online, because it’s so chaotic. I can tell that people are really angry and really hurt and frustrated, and I understand that.  I think those emotions are valid. I just don’t know if people are going about dealing with each other it in the right ways. But also, who am I to say what ways they should be dealing with their anger or their pain? I don’t know. I can’t make decisions about other peoples’ lives, so instead I’ve tuned myself out. I just don’t think it’s the space for me right now.

What’s the new record you’re working on like? You mentioned it was a shift from the previous eps.

Yeah, it does feel like a shift. I know what headspace I was when I made BITCH PUNK, and I know what headspace I was in when I made DEATH DRIVE, but this time I’m not going to know until after it’s done. I’ve been working on it, working on a few of the tracks, and writing so much for it. Just kind of figuring out, ‘OK, what is it that I want to say with this one? What do I wanna do with this album?’ It’s been turning into a project that I only had an inkling of a couple of months ago. It really is taking on a life of its own, and I’m trying to listen to see what this album wants to tell me, how it wants to come out, and what it needs from me in order to be what it came here to be. And it’s been coming, slowly but surely.
I feel like the next few months are going to be really fertile for me. I’m going to have a lot more free time to really sit down and focus on it.  Some of the sounds are kind of scaring me. It’s always scary to do something different than you’ve done before, to feel yourself going down an unknown path.  So there’s always that anxiety, and some of that fear, but I think that’s good.  I’m trying to lean into it, lean into what I’m afraid of, and figure out, ‘Why am I afraid of this? What is it triggering in me,’ or ‘What’s really hitting those tensioned points inside of me?’

How did you learn to listen to your work? It seems like a challenge, to intuit what the work itself wants.

I don’t know if it’s necessarily a learned thing. I think I’ve always been a very intuitive person, and that’s how I live my life, by intuition. Every single day everything I do is informed by my intuition and this sense of inner-knowing. I really try to nurture that gift and lean into it as much as I can every day. It’s a way that I love, and it’s a way that I approach art making, because I do see it as sacred.

I see art and creativity as sacred energy, as a sacred gift, and I feel very grateful that music chose me, that film chose me, that these ideas have chosen me as the channel they want to come through.

I want to do that justice. It’s going to sound a little bit cheesy, but I want to fulfill that destiny, in the sense of just really actually doing what they need me to do, being that person and becoming that artist, and letting these gifts flow through me to the world.

A lot of your writing mentions dreams.  Do you document your dreams?  Do they end up in your music, too?

I keep track of my dreams semi-regularly. I have powerful symbolic and psychic dreams, a gift I’ve inherited through the women in my family. When I was younger my mother seemed to be able to know every time I was up to something, and she would always say that God told her in a dream. I didn’t understand until I got older and got more in touch with my own dreaming ability and sense of knowing. At first it really scared me, and I would be afraid to go to sleep. At one point I was so scared I essentially turned off my dreaming mechanism through sheer force of will and didn’t have any dreams for two whole years. Eventually, I calmed down and just accepted it, and they came back. When I got sober three years ago, they got more clear and intense, and I also started having waking dreams, quick moments that give a kind of déjà-rêvé-like feeling. I’ve seen and felt so many things that end up happening, from the completely mundane, which is most common, to the almost prophetic, which is more rare. Most of it is personal and related to me and my life, but sometimes I get glimpses into the lives of those that are really close to me. I see my dreams as a branch of my intuition, and my intuition is my compass. As far as music goes, I don’t necessarily write about my dreams themselves, but I do get inspiration and insight through them. I got the title of my upcoming album in a dream.

Do u have a goal for when the record will come out?

Oh God, [laughs] I don’t know. I think I’ll finish it early next year, but as far as when it comes out, we’ll see. You know how music goes. I finished DEATH DRIVE almost a year before it came out.

Yeah, that’s always a crazy feeling. You’re like, ‘OK, I’m in this right now. I’m ready for it to come out now. Here it is.’ And then you wait.

Exactly, yeah. And who knows, maybe that will change. That’s one thing I hope changes a little bit about the music industry. Not necessarily always about having a sense of immediacy, because I see where that could be detrimental as well. But just kind of having more flow between being in the zone of your creation, and releasing and sharing it with people when you’re in that same space, versus like a year or two later.

I guess that’s one thing that can be said for streaming mediums. Not necessarily the major streaming services, but digital releasing in general.

Yeah, streaming does allow for more immediacy but there’s a whole other host of problems that come with the format. 0.0000whatever cents on a play on a song that probably took thousands of dollars and thousands of hours in collective labour and effort to make? You’re not serious. It’s disrespectful and it’s unsustainable.

This interview was first published in issue 2 of BAITED AREA. Published with kind permission of the Editor and Publisher Adam Keith. Further info at debbyfriday.com.