Musician Emily Wells on being dedicated to art as a daily practice

I was listening to your music this morning and I found myself thinking about an interview with the poet Ross Gay where he talks about joy as a refusal of the “me-against-the-world” mentality. He says, “[Joy is] a refusal of the alienation they tell us that we ought to believe is true.” This felt really relevant to my listening experience of [your album] Regards to the End, which addresses the parallels between the AIDS crisis, climate change, and your own lived experience as a queer person.

Despite the album’s subject matter, there’s real hope—or dare I say joy or maybe hope for joy—embedded into the album. I wanted to hear what your relationship was like to hope and joy when writing “Regards to the End” and how, if at all, that relationship changed through the process of writing.

Making the work is in itself an act of hope. It’s a belief in your life as it is, as it will be, and the way that your art carries through your lifespan. It’s a belief in the future. Hope is such a tricky word because of how it’s been co-opted. Maybe joy has been a little co-opted too, but I think particularly [with] hope—I mean, there was a whole presidential election based on that one word. But hope can be so generative. It’s the thing that gets us out of bed and makes us keep practicing the sonata or whatever the thing is that you’re trying to do that day. In that sense, it’s a daily practice. In a more general response to your question, I would say that immersing myself in the work of the artists that I was turning to when I was writing that record was a hopeful act. They were working in the face of abject hopelessness. People were dying and they kept going. I was like, “If they can, I can.”

I teach creative writing to undergraduates, and I’ve noticed in the past few years, there’s been a large uptick in a lack of motivation to create art, not because they’re lazy, but because they’re disillusioned. They say things to me like, “What are we doing? Why am I just making people up?” I can give a corny, canned answer, but there are times where I’m just like, “Yeah, I don’t blame you. I understand. Things are really bad.” How do you manage this question?

I think there’s two sides to it. On the one hand, it’s the responsibility of the individual to take [art] in and create value in the experience of taking the work in. It’s always on us to engage with art, to give it value. That’s where the value lies, in that friction of engagement. But it’s also up to the artists to make work that’s worth engaging with. It’s a relationship.

I’m curious if the dread and hopelessness around the future is in some ways eroding that relationship or if there’s something that’s innately changed about living in modernity and trying to have a relationship with work that doesn’t resonate anymore. It’s just a bad alchemy. I have given my entire life, at its own peril at times, to the practice of making work and the practice of engaging with work. You must always be engaging in that exchange. It’s not just making. It’s also experiencing.

How do you stay motivated to continue working on a project and see it through when the aims of that particular project might no longer be of interest to you, and also, what is that process like of changing through art, changing through your own creation?

Making art has this epic aura about it, but actually, it really is just made by a daily dedication. In terms of my process, there’s two sides. There’s the research part of my work. I don’t mean research in an academic sense. It’s more chaotic than that. I choose things that make my mind turn. ‘Influences,’ to put it really plainly. Those things help me get up. They move me from the place of the reader to the place of the writer. Again, it’s that relationship of going back and forth. One hand is engaging, one hand is making. Sometimes you’re in both places, and then sometimes one hand is idle. I want to be clear that it’s not that call and response. It’s more like, okay, this is the thing that makes my mind move. That’s where the discovery comes in. You can’t even really trace it. It’s this trust line that you throw out and you follow back.

What’s the relationship between being diligent with art on a daily basis, maybe even treating art as a career, versus something that you do only when the mood strikes?

The older I get, the more I believe in [daily dedication]. I was a child musician. I played the violin from a very young age. There’s basically not a time in my life I don’t remember having daily practice. The last couple of years, I’ve been obsessively giving myself to classical piano, which is something I always wanted to be able to play, but never really got there. I’ve had that relationship again of having dumb hands and watching them become undumb. It’s a really amazing thing that can happen, that transformation and the absolute humility that’s required for it. I absolutely apply this to writing music and performing. You have to have moments of humility.

I’ve had different plateaus and experiences of being a professional musician. I still aspire and I have my own weaknesses and all those things that can creep up when you’re trying to be a professional artist. But I really do feel like music feeds me so much more than I feed it.

I keep coming back to this idea of trust, but as we’re having this conversation, I realize that’s the thing. I think that was also a big part of Covid. All the things that I usually would do, I couldn’t do anymore. So, then what is my relationship to music? It’s not a public relationship. It’s a private one. [To realize] that was such a gift.

As you were speaking about having dumb hands, I was really in awe of you. I kept thinking, “Oh, they must be really comfortable with failure and being bad at things.” Joan Didion has this quote where she talks about how she doesn’t like doing things she’s bad at, and she says something like, “I don’t like to ski. I tried it once. I was bad at it. I never want to ski again.” When I was younger, I thought, “Oh yeah, I don’t like doing things I’m bad at either. It’s uncomfortable.” But then you never learn something new. You never learn to ski.

You never get to see the mountains from that point of view.

You said that you realized your relationship to music is a private one, and yet you do strike me as an ambitious person. You are putting music into the world. How do you balance ambition with creating art?

I really don’t know. Part of that is because the world around me is changing. I started releasing albums when people were still buying music on iTunes. I could make a living off album sales. That’s just not viable at all now. Touring is not really viable either. From a very practical standpoint, [the costs] are high. From an environmental standpoint, they’re high. From a physical, spiritual standpoint, they’re high. The reward of that one hour on stage is the highest potency nutrients that you could possibly imagine when it’s good, so you keep going back out because you want to get that. It’s not about adulation. It’s really not. It’s the exchange between yourself and the audience. So, I don’t know how to manage those things, those needs with the practicalities, the desire not to take more than I give. It’s tricky.

The relationship with me and the music is this sacred, private thing, but it’s not just for me. I’m going back to this idea of the generosity of the artists that left their work behind. It’s not about leaving a legacy. It’s about leaving something for people to have if they need it.

What I’m about to say is certainly true of “Regards to the End,” but I think it’s true of all your work: your music is a reminder of how much we owe one another. There’s this poem in Edward Hirsch’s Gabriel where he says that in his twenties, he admired how dedicated Rilke was to his writing, but now he thinks that Rilke was a jerk for skipping his daughter’s wedding because Rilke was afraid that, if he went, he’d lose momentum in his work. When you’re deep in the creation process, how do you manage personal relationships?

This is something I definitely feel like I’m facing in this part of my life. Now I’ll get emotional.

We can talk about something else.

No, no, it’s okay. It’s important. I just mean that I don’t manage it well. I love people very hard and I believe that they love me hard back, but I could do better. I feel like I could be a better citizen and participant in my community. There are definitely parts of my personal life that are not as refined as my work. My work is the thing that gets everything.

Well, the reason I ask is because The Creative Independent is a resource for artists and pretty much every single successful artist I know has had to make some major sacrifices on a personal level.

You can become so immersed. You really can’t see anything else.

Yeah. You’re like, I can’t come back up for air. I might never get this deep again if I do.

Yes. But then you realize that if you do attend the thing or spend an afternoon with someone, that all you fucking needed was that air. That is the thing that keeps [art] fresh.

Absolutely. And it’s not just about being social. It can be something like cooking a meal that gives you air.

Totally. Last year, I was in a very strange place in writing. I’m not going to go so far as to say writer’s block, but I was working on a song that nearly made me stop writing songs. It was like facing a beast, and I planted an enormous, ambitious perennial garden in response to not being able to finish this song. While I was doing it, I kept having this phrase in my head: when I’m in the garden, I’m a gardener. That has really resonated back into everything else ever since. It really is about giving yourself to something and just being in the thing you’re in.

This year, this garden came back five times the size of when I planted it. I have this song that I fought to make real and then there’s also this garden. They both fed each other and they’re both still here and renewing. I get to play this song and record it for the next record. The garden reminds me that it was worth it.

That must’ve been really terrifying, though. That moment or that period of time where you thought, Okay, I might just not write songs again.

There were a lot of factors. It was this moment of touring like a mad person throughout 2022 and having a lot of beautiful moments, but also a lot of harsh moments. I think a lot of people faced that in 2022. It was a really weird time to be on the road. To come off of that and be faced with yourself again and starting a new project. I was like, what is this for? Now I’m the undergrad in your class.

When you’re in that headspace, how do you manage burnout? Are there practical things you do to get in a healthy space, either physically and mentally?

I run. Once I started running and touring, those two things became inextricable from one another. You’re only in a place for a day, and running is the perfect pace for taking enough in, while still covering some ground. Touring is so wild because each day you are so focused on the details of that day and then it’s like you throw them behind you and keep moving forward.It’s this very fast, intense, bizarre experience of time. You have this expectation that your life and all the people you love are suspended at home, but they’re not at all.

The other piece of advice is to stay in touch with people when you’re in the midst of touring. If you know someone in a city, reach out. That was the other hard thing about 2022. You couldn’t spend time with the people you knew in the cities you were going to because we were so freaked out about our tour getting canceled if one of us got Covid. You couldn’t have those little bits of renewal.

Are you able to write when you’re on tour or that’s not something that you really necessarily concern yourself with?

They’re different modes. I take on way too many roles when I tour. Sometimes it’s just me and one other person, or if it’s me and a band, I’m, like, tour manager or driving. I never have enough time for soundcheck because I have this insane, ambitious, complicated rig that takes a long time to wire. So, yeah, there’s no time. I write in my journal every day. So, in that sense, I do write, but I don’t write music. More like just a document of what’s happening with all the embarrassing tropes of philosophizing in one’s own journal.

Emily Wells recommends:

David Wojnarowicz, specifically his writing, which is always the experience of walking through a door and then another for me. First from the room of myself, into the room of him, and then back out to a new self, changed by his seeing and his humming presence, which remains 32 years after his death. Close to the Knives is a wonderful place to start, but it’s good to spend time with his visual work interstitially while reading.

Beethoven Piano Sonatas, specifically the Pathetique - I’m attempting to learn this one at the moment, and I’ve often looked to Daniel Barenboim’s performance to see what he’s doing with his hands.

Radioooooo. This app (or website) is built by a group of record collectors and DJs culled from their enormous collections of music spanning the world and much of recorded music’s history. It’s essentially a map / time machine for music. Click a country and a decade and it gives you a song, or many songs if you can stop yourself from roving the globe. There are few other parameters you can choose as well, depending on mood. Feels endless and makes time, music, and the world bigger and then somehow smaller and more easily held too.

Nick Cave + Warren Ellis This Much I Know To Be True- A performance movie, a document, a feat of lighting design. It gets at the ephemerality of performance and being in the room when something is really happening.

A creek - Find one and instead of going alongside, go through, rock to rock. The light is different in there.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Michelle Lyn King.

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