WHAT ELSE?

what else what else what else

I love this song. At its core, it just feels like summer to me. Having fun, letting loose, enjoying yourself, not taking things too seriously, following your intuition wherever it leads you, doing something because it feels right in a moment. I wrote so much of the new record from different places of reflection, growth, exploration, change, hurt, and healing. But WHAT ELSE? came from a moment in time where I was fundamentally giving myself permission to just have fun and find pockets of joy through it all.

We wrote it last August in Los Angeles during a chaotic summer that I spent flying back and forth every few weeks between New York and California. Between all of the travel and couch surfing and studio lockouts and summer antics, every week of my life felt like a new adventure.

One of those adventures was that I had started intermittently hanging out with a girl in LA, and one night when we were laying in her bed, she pointed out that I would often ask, “what else?” in moments of silence between us (welcome to dating with ADHD!). The next morning when I arrived at the studio, all I wanted to do was write a song called “What Else?” My only goals that summer, other than continuing to write my record, were to have as much fun as possible and to not take myself so seriously, so I loved the idea of writing a song that loosely poked fun at my desire for constant conversation and affirmation. I also loved the idea of writing a song that felt playful in the midst of writing so many songs that felt incredibly intentional and significant in subject matter.

Surprisingly, as much as we loved writing WHAT ELSE?, it was not a contender for the record until a week before the whole thing was due. It sat untouched in a Dropbox folder for almost a year until we (kind of randomly) decided to take one more look at it. When we opened up the file, we fell back in love with the song - so much so, in fact, that we decided it should not only make it onto the record, but should also be the next single. I love that the song initially came to life in a gust of spontaneity and will now enter the world in another.

I’ve said this before and will continue to say it again and again: I wanted to be vulnerable with this next record in the sense that I wanted to really write about every experience I was having. There are songs about heartbreak, about questioning my future, about changing and growing. There are also songs about having fun, meeting new people, trying new things, letting myself go through every stage in the cycle of healing. I’ve always defined vulnerability in a bit of a one-dimensional way. This record is home to all parts of myself. It is my place to live authentically and unapologetically. There is beauty – and vulnerability – in letting yourself have fun, in letting yourself make decisions on a whim, in letting yourself live with abandon. I’ve found that it actually requires a large degree of self-compassion and understanding to do so. I’ve noticed that whenever I feel the desire within myself to be more calculated in my decision making, it often coincides with when I’m operating more from a place of self-protection, of trying to predetermine outcomes and experiences. Sometimes true vulnerability and authenticity thrive best when the space between intuition and action is actually a smaller (but healthy still, of course) distance. Life mostly happens in the undetermined and in the incalculable: the unforeseen circumstances, the person you didn’t expect to meet, or the spontaneous night you didn’t plan to have.

So this song is me doing my best to live in the fun, in the joy, in the spontaneity. I hope when everybody listens to it, they are able to feel all of our laughter and excitement in the studio that day. Happy summer, go do something fun. xxxx