12 Months - Synthed
I played the first song on this album 41 times between June and December.
When I turned 10 my parents stopped homeschooling and drove me 50 minutes north to fifth grade. Not long after these mornings started, I found the radio part of my alarm clock. With help from various school bullies and careful listening to background music in the cars of nicer girls, I discovered the radio stations to which I should tune that alarm clock radio. With no TV, nothing but public radio, folk songs, and a parent’s record collection that stopped in the early 70’s, I had a lot of catching up to do on pop culture.
Beevis and Butthead and its analogous radio station The Buzz didn’t make sense to me yet (with the exception of Cake and Violent Femmes) so I settled on 95 Triple X. (That’s 95.5 on the radio dial if you are in Chittenden County). I lay in bed at night, dreading Monday morning, the return to Mrs Carter’s homeroom, ecstatically listening to The Real McCoy and Total Eclipse of the Heart by Nicki French at low volume, falling in love with….I choose the next word guessing at the degree of music snobbery in the person I’m speaking to….trashy? catchy? bubblegum, you know, that song playing on the radio all the time, POP, POP, POP.
During the first couple years of V Smiley Preserves I never listened to music and cooked. It was too emotional. As I’ve written before, I was in a state of low grade terror and very, very lonely as I figured out how to do business. As I cooked, cleaned and labeled, I listened to voices. KUOW came through Amy’s paint splattered boombox, then WAMC on a greasy kitchen boombox from the eighties and finally, hours and hours of podcasts when I landed in a kitchen that lacked internet, cell service and a radio signal.
A switch began to flip for me at the end of 2018. The anxiety eased. I found a new confident stride in the kitchen and for the first time in years, I started listening to music again. At first the openness to the tupsy turvy emotion of lyrical sound only opened inside me while driving a car alone, but sometimes in the kitchen I’d slide into a joyful, carefree mood and I wanted to extend it, grow it. Then I pulled the last tray of jarred jam from sanitizing in the oven and it was time to scrub down the kitchen. I walked over to the speakers, paused the Eater podcast, scrolled for a song to meet me right here and carry me away from the mop bucket. That song let me be in two places. Magic.
2019 was the first year since my early twenties that I took music everywhere with me. The music became a mate, a buddy packed with feelings with whom I could hang out anytime. I know, this isn’t original. Anyone who comes to music, comes to be taken, heard and moved. This year has been extreme. I asked more from my body this year than any other year. I have taken this business as far as I can with my two knees, matching arms, 10 fingers, 2 wrists and one neck. This year is not repeatable. At age 35, I’m getting into the territory of doing irreparable damage to my body if I continue business as usual. The solution? Equipment, beautiful, functional machines.
I introduce the subject of the body because increasingly I think of work as an athletic endeavor. I’m always looking for motivation, pops of energy that re-focus me and allow me to push into hour 13, 14 and 15 of the day. How do you roll up the part of the brain that cooks and unzip the part that writes emails. I suppose drugs are always an option, but not a very sustainable one. Whether it’s smoothing a transition within a day or digging for energy, I’ve done it this year with a soundtrack and a lot pop music, steadied by heavy bass and rhythm.
I think about EVERYTHING NARRATIVELY. When I scroll back and look at what I listened to constantly in February, the sounds for summer heat and autumn cooling, I see (or is it affix?) an arc, the curve of figuring out self-employment and fucking going for it.
Late Winter
Molly Nillson Every Night Is New & A Slice of Lemon - Hjaltalin Baronesse- Yoyou Les bruits de la ville (feat. Yelle) - Christine & the Queens Tiltedbut really you should look up the various live performances of this as Christine shifts to Chris and sometimes it’s in English and sometimes in French.
Winter is marmalade, driving to and from tastings/demos at stores outside of Vermont. Winter is also planning, buying plants, a time of year when I rekindle a relationship with hobbies like embroidery and writing, maybe exercise? And winter is a time of year to see people. There is more space and time. It’s luxurious (though bittersweet bc it’s infuriating how—especially with a fledgling food/agricultural operation—different, reasonable-feeling, this time of year is compared to summer and autumn). And yet, this time is completely tinged with anticipation for spring (growth). We are always peaking around the corner, is it here yet!?
Spring
Ider Brown Sugar- RAC This Song (feat. Rostam)
Only two songs for spring? This spring, I woke up from winter hibernation and threw myself into socializing and connecting with humans. Out of the car, outside the kitchen, no headphones, maybe no music. The farmers market restarted in May. It’s not the busiest time of year, but if I were to name the time period when I am steadiest (brain alert, body rested), this is it! I call this state, “feeling human”, and it’s calm and wonderful.
Summer
Roosevelt Falling Back- Cut Copy We Are Explorers & Meet Me In The House of Love - Kelsey Lu Due West (Skrillex Remix) - Work Drugs Method Acting
This summer I developed a fever. It felt like falling in love. It started with a haircut, trying to re-find my androgynous core, that sexy place of total gender freedom and delight in your body. I’d buried this sensibility when I got serious about cooking in Seattle. I did not know how to be green, working in these restaurant kitchens and be my full, queer self. There, I let my hair start growing. My goal? Let’s not ever talk about my appearance, my body or my sex life at work. The key? Slow change. So slow, no one notices and with that invisibility comes relief, no comments.
This year I was ready to slough off the rest of the follow-along, blend-in-anonymity I’d used to survive that skill-building time of working in Seattle. At the start of July, I took multiple financial leaps. I quit one of my few remaining side jobs meaning I had to start paying myself from the jam business. I signed a lease on a commercial building and started this long process of streamlining V Smiley Preserves operations and getting them under one roof. Sure, I was anxious, but it wasn’t the grinding kind. I was really, really excited, giddy.
Ever since I made a soundpiece in college called “spring flings and summer love” where I interviewed the 93 year old yogi I boarded with off-campus plus the two friends who I saw as particularly sensual and free, I always look for that trope of “spring flings and summer love” in the time of May-August. What will it be this year? Where will it fall? What is this year’s romance? For me, it was all about the body, remembering the power and enjoyment there.
Summer love means there is change coming. Sistek’s Combine was my breakup song. I hit a wall in August during a two week period when orders surpassed my production ability. I began to experience new, deeper, insistent pain in my hands and wrists and right shoulder. Every jar is hand poured, cleaned, capped and labeled. It was the height of harvest. Suddenly, the body didn’t feel so free.
Autumn
Fourtet Anna Painting - Ariel Pink Stray Here With You & House of Yesterday - Brothertiger Turquoise
This Autumn I did not hire help for the holidays. Holidays are when a company like mine (gift focused) can do anywhere between 1/2 and 2/3rds of their sales. I think of the entire season, starting in April, as one long preparation for the holidays. The holidays start in earnest at the end of October when wholesale accounts (depending on the size of their operation) start wanting their big orders to arrive in house.
Why not hire help? I knew that the pacing and size of change for V Smiley Preserves promised to tilt up abruptly in 2020. Whether it was moving into a new kitchen or expanding from jam business into restaurant service, 2020 meant spending a lot of money on equipment, labor and loads and loads of uncertainty. I kept putting off hiring until the decision was made by my indecision. I’d hire no one. Although I had help for the holidays in 2018, and I forecasted sales to rise by 15-20% this year, I had a gut feeling I could scrape through one more season without hiring. Scraping is the right work, by the chinny chin chin. Amy rallied and put in some hours labeling during the last three weeks of November and first week of December. And I’m so glad we pushed through! Sales increased by 25% this year and we are better positioned going into 2020 and the changes and expansion the year almost certainly promises.
I was so happy that two artists who I fell in love with while at college, Fourtet (on repeat when I studied in Noway) and Ariel Pink (who helped Los Angeles make sense when I got there) released new work in Autumn. It added a note of familiarity to the mental fortress I built this season to keep my head down and do the work.
Then, suddenly, it was the third week of December, the bulk of production was finished. It was on to finishing out e-commerce sales strong. I listened to Turquoise on repeat on a drive up to the winter Burlington Farmers Market and ideas began to flood in; new images from the farm I wanted captured in papercut by Hannah Viano. I could finally envision a logo for Lil To Do Farm; a farmer lazing under a row of currants and the perspective is from the sky. I began to see a better narrative for the short loop video I’d commissioned from a videographer. My imagination was coming back. Soon my body could rest and would return to me too, changed of course, but very much alive and still crazy passionate for all this.