Today we’d like to introduce you to Anna May.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Writing and music were always passions of mine from the time that I was very little. I loved to write stories before I went to sleep, and I was always singing, often at school while doing class work or along with CDs on the way to softball practice.
Writing & music were disciplines that I came back to, no matter what else I was focused on in my life.
There was always something that felt a need to get out of me, and writing became my primary form for processing life events.
Early on, I met with quite a lot of resistance from others and disempowering language regarding doing anything professionally with music, but I kept feeling… I can do that and chose to follow my instincts. It was the most satisfying art form, as I saw it & still see it.
Writing was a form of solace & self-discovery that became more prominent in my teenage years as a way to heal from being bullied. I could validate my experience in writing & music, even if I couldn’t speak about it to other people.
I remember instances of being bullied for nearly everything, from the hair on my legs to the color of my hair, to the lunch that I ate, and also for writing, for singing, etc. I was a quiet and introspective young person and was an easy target for bullies, it seemed. I never resisted them, and began to believe what these kids told me.
I was told that I was worthless, thoughtless, stupid, unattractive, etc. leaving me with the undeniable imprints of chronic self-doubt and low self-esteem for many years to come.
During this time, my creative instincts were percolating as a reaction, as if emerging to help me in combating all of these new negative experiences and emotions. Luckily for me, my creativity saved me in so many ways from the helpless nature of what was happening externally, in my life. Art saved me from rage and self-hatred.
I had to find something to help me get away from the hateful and aggressive energy that was permeating and shattering my peace at what seemed like every turn.
That became writing poems, writing songs, and writing stories, almost obsessively. This was a form of reassurance, a form of survival & a form of escapism.
Poetry & lyrics eventually became my way out of depression and a habit that I would maintain throughout my life that helped me to emerge successful in my most difficult times.
I later became a teacher, with a desire to empower young people to find their voice, talent, skill, etc. that makes them tick and that could make them feel powerful & confident in the face of anything hostile. This is how we grow our strength and become resilient, and confront ongoing social issues like bullying.
When you are a victim of bullying as a very young person, the tools that you will have to cope are naturally very limited. What you will have available to you as an adult won’t necessarily be accessible to a child.
I feel that it is so imperative for young people to be given space and tools to cultivate & develop their own survival resources that can assist them in confronting complex emotions.
Implanted trauma is carried & stored for a long time in the physical bodies of those that endure the trauma. People that experience trauma need effective solutions at their disposal for releasing trapped trauma.
Getting rid of this sort of entrenched trauma is an evolution that requires special healing and fierce internal power. I don’t know where I would be had I not found therapies like yoga & meditation & creative writing. These practices seemed to soften all of the edges and eased me off the hamster wheels of proving & surviving & fighting to exist that bullying set me on. These new disciplines taught me skills for avoiding which environments were not good for me and influenced my music in a deep way as my healing progressed.
My goal is to make music that heals listeners…
It is intended to be a space for meditation first.
I like to incorporate structural elements that might be more at home in jazz into folk music. My songs are intentionally more lengthy & lyrically or vocally dense, giving space for exploration and possibility.
I like to tap into more spiritual & less concrete realms in what I do. We live in a truly heavenly & multi-dimensional world, and I hope to reflect that musically.
In a twisted & circuitous way, pain is an essential ingredient for artists to employ as part of their work. Many of us could not make what we have made without our painful experiences and the unique or unfavorable set of circumstances that we might have found ourselves in.
We design the outcome… we configure the pathways that lead us to our healing… and art is a huge part of that for so many people.
I like to speak about bullying, not with an intention to feel sorry for myself or tell a victim – story, but to help others who have had to grapple with the unique perspective of being bullied, see new possibility, if they are in a place where they only see darkness.
It is undeniably a different starting point for navigating the world after you’ve experienced trauma. You can’t erase trauma, but must confront it & cope with it, or it will take over you.
Trauma is complex to understand and is also very common. Trauma & recovery should be given much more light in our society, in a world plagued by racism, anti-Semitism, and extremist views.
Writing music came out of necessity, to process and cope with being targeted at an early age and feeling the visceral impact of what that left in me.
My writing evolved to something more passive and less urgent eventually when I found myself in healthier spaces. It became, reflections on travel, life, and people.
The most beautiful aspect that I see in writing is that it allows us to take some authority that we might not feel we have, in the moment, when we feel dimmed or dampened, or misunderstood.
I’ve always seen myself as a writer first and a musician second. I’ve loved witnessing the evolution of my voice & expanding my ability. Art forms of all varieties allow so much space for new growth & evolution … an endless vortex & reservoir of experience & passion. It is a joy to be able to commit myself to this sort of work. It helps me to better understand myself and better understand others.
I didn’t sing for a long time. I felt that everyone was a singer, and I didn’t want to be like everyone else, but I finally came back to my love of being a vocalist when I was about seventeen and experienced a reignited joy about using my voice to communicate, emotionally.
I understood why people were doing it. It was another way to feel good and transmit something to other people.
I remember the exact moment when I began singing again…
It felt symbolic as if I were reclaiming a voice that had been muted for a very long time.
A sign of recovery from anything is getting our voice back.
It can be seriously powerful & therapeutic and constantly humbling & enlightening to stay dedicated to processing, reflecting & telling our stories. Without that being available to me,
I feel that I would be so misguided.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Obstacles. Many people and most artists encounter dark chapters. I’ve navigated eating disorders, abusive relationships, crippling doubt, judgment & criticism, etc.
It all shapes us & the work that we do.
If I had to focus on something that has been particularly frustrating for me, it would be, dealing with criticism and judgment.
Judgment doesn’t occupy a lot of space in my world & I’ve done conscious work to avoid being judgmental. It feels foreign to encounter it.
I find that art, music, spiritual practices, etc. help to bring us outside of our usual habits & ways of thinking. These are practices & disciplines that are intended to open us up.
That is my purpose for being… to always keep opening up, growing & refining who I am so that I can be at my best for myself and for other people and ultimately can judge others less.
In my experience as a musician, it has often been a tough crowd. I am used to receiving criticism more than I am used to receiving compliments.
I don’t care. I find my work to be valuable, and I’ve made peace with discomforts such as:
My career being outright ignored and invalidated by several of my family members.
I’ve encountered loads of unsolicited criticism about my work in that many people don’t seem to get what I do or understand what I am after.
The learning process here has been to not care and to do it anyway, moving in whatever direction
I wish to move in or taking whatever shape
I wish to take. People perhaps aren’t habituated to what I am doing. Perhaps there is a generational disconnect. I don’t know. I do know that this is a highly conditioned world riddled with many misconceptions.
I wasn’t prepared for people with a voracious appetite for gossip, drama, and judgment who seek to attach this bad energy to creative people. This just clogs up space for other, worthier pursuits, as I see it.
It feels like sitting from a place of contriving judgment rather than from a place of enlightenment & immersion.
Anything in the arts is a process of freeing, purging, deepening, moving towards something more … it is never about staying small.
I would say to any artist: it is naive to think that most people will like you. Also: some of the best creators were not well-liked.
I’ve been a magnet for criticism for most of my life, as I’m sure is true for many other performers that follow their desires and resist convention in any discernible way, and express themselves openly. A negative response can feel overwhelming or repetitive or anxiety-inducing, regardless of what you know to be true about yourself.
Particularly, my family members have picked apart my lyrics and my voice, have criticized my work, my appearance, my weight, etc., etc.
It is difficult to be someone who reaches to find new avenues for possibility and feel so utterly suppressed by negativity.
It has been challenging to understand why people are motivated to engage in this instinctual cutting down and limiting reaction to my music and why individuals can’t wish to cultivate a rewarding sort of synergy & get behind artists that try to bring fresh concepts to the world, for the sake of a higher purpose. Art extends far beyond the body or the personality of the artist and reaches towards a common good or a common sentiment for the benefit of all.
Good energy can empower great artistic works.
The power of community is undeniable and carries the potential for so much new possibility.
How does one continue doing good & meaningful work when so many people are telling them that they suck & aren’t doing the right thing? How can you exist healthily when several people have expressed that they wish to reshape you or wish that you were something else?
My answer has been to ignore this and simply do the work without a need for validation. The work itself is more expansive than what people might say about it.
I’ve experienced a shortage of encouragement with the more success that I’ve had & I’ve had to really redesign my thinking in order to remain focused and mentally healthy, & do my thing regardless of what anyone thinks, or accepts, or tries to see. Most of the time, people will get you a little wrong, or they will totally misinterpret you. I find that most people rarely get me right.
It is difficult to live under scrutiny & hard to realize that your own evolution could potentially be something that others find offensive or threatening to their own sense of security.
As I see it, I am not here to be something that has been before or to be something that people that
I remotely know; expect me to be. I am here for the purpose of authenticity.
I am coming to a place where I can feel good about being misunderstood. I am throwing away leftover guilt and am finally being happy with whatever incarnation of who I am is here right now.
The criticism & judgment that I regularly experience is forcing me to do this. Even toxicity can fuel wonderful works into being.
I always try to allow goodness to color how I see others.
I try to imagine that people are just doing their best at being and want the best for others. Maybe that is naive thinking, too.
Success breeds resentment in some people.
Embodying your visions won’t matter to all.
Embodying your visions might scare or trigger others rather than do what you intend … to open or inspire them. Navigating how to not worry about that has been my big challenge.
If my freedom and my expression doesn’t align with another person’s version of freedom & expression, then I certainly don’t need to compromise anything about myself. So much of life is … other people trying to fit you into a pattern so that it is easier to make sense of you. When people can’t make sense of you, they will start to attach, mostly unfitting, labels to you. I’ve experienced this often.
I think of so many visionaries that worked their way out of the cookie-cutter molds that they might have succumbed to, at all cost, to be who they are, and do what they needed to do, and there are so many of those people …
If who they were didn’t exist, then there would be an absence of beauty in the world, one less hit song or one less famous work of art.
Resisting all of the junk and just doing the creative things, regardless of what surrounds it, is the biggest test to one’s artistry.
This is a new situation that I am learning about.
I’ve never been popular, and I don’t have interest in being that.
I’ve moved away from even viewing criticism as an obstacle. I am now seeing it as something to influence & inform my future work.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Alternative tragic Americana, invocations for peace and judgment reshaping with bleeding heart stream of consciousness poems.
My music is about memory and meditation, streaked with tones of jazz, along with fresh interpretations of classic folk music, while honoring a hope to enhance connection, humility, and joy among more people.
I have performed at the wildflower arts & music festival, the Boston arts festival, Treefort music festival, Conor Byrne in Seattle, crying wolf in Nashville, bar redux in New Orleans, the mint in Los Angeles & many more.
I am a musician and songwriter, working primarily with human emotions & spiritual elements. I like to explore loss and rebirth in my music.
Last April, I released my fifth recorded work, Detach, produced by Steve Rizzo in Portsmouth, Rhode Island.
Detach is a blend of whimsical songs and more introspective pieces that took shape in California. Detach is a song that came directly from a dream and is a meditation on parting with what no longer serves us.
The album is a mixture of new songs & reworkings of old songs & includes an exploration of fear written after a bear encounter.
Link to listen to Detach: annamay.bandcamp.com/album/detach-2
My next tour stops are in Colorado, Northern California, and Oregon in 2023.
I am in the beginning stages of writing and recording my sixth album.
I am an organist and also work as a piano teacher to empower people of all ages to find their voices through creativity, improvisation, and explorations into theory.
We love surprises, fun facts, and unexpected stories. Is there something you can share that might surprise us?
There are probably several surprises about me. I’ve been told that I am a hard person to read.
My music can be very meditative & introspective, and listeners have often assumed that is my personality.
When people hear my music, they see one piece of me.
I have a very funky and fun side, and that is the side that people close to me know and see.
Most nights I dance to James Brown until midnight.
I love dancing, beach bumming, Seinfeld, reality TV sometimes, and having fun. I love Latin dance, food, exotic locations, new experiences …
I can be both extroverted & introverted, depending on the circumstance. I’ve felt mislabeled as dark or overly cerebral. I’m not really so serious. Some people have expressed that they interpret me as calm or carefree, but there are days that I experience debilitating anxiety & depression. Humans are often walking contradictions, and that’s a positive thing.
We are endlessly interesting.
I find that creative people are used to immersing themselves in all realms of their personalities, and I definitely am that way, wanting to keep things fresh and varied and wanting to explore all the sides of who I am. There is no rule that we have to be one way, always, or do solely one thing. We have the capacity for so much as people … it is worth it to explore every element that we can, I feel.
I try to maintain a healthy balance between the heavier stuff & the lighter stuff in life.
I do believe that artists are here to reflect both pieces. Both sides, light and dark, are integral in informing our trajectories, and in order to do so, we have to immerse ourselves adequately in all of it.
Another surprise about me is that while
I am very much into books & learning, and love school,
I opted for a self-directed path in terms of my education, so I didn’t attend a traditional college or study music formally. I met with wonderful mentors, programs, travel experiences, and classes, but it wasn’t in a formalized or traditional way. People that I meet seem to be surprised by that when they hear it.
I couldn’t have asked for a better or more extensive arts-based education. I knew that a rather radical or unusual choice would serve me best for what I was wishing to do.
We live in a different world these days & education doesn’t have to be a source of absolute uniformity or a reason to judge another person.
It is amazing what we can will ourselves to accomplish by a variety of different methods.
At that time in my life, I was drawn to travel & writing music & was immersed in other personal works; and doing anything else in that moment would have been thoroughly inauthentic & depressing for me.
I was super disciplined towards my personally designed goals and knew just what self-work I needed to work through in order to realize my absolute potential.
That is often a very personal path.
Sometimes the course of that work looks different for an artist than it might look for a lawyer or a doctor since art & music are so highly personalized. We require unique tools and experiences, sometimes, to grasp a specific outcome.
I had gone through bouts of really intense bullying & when it came time to choose a school; I wasn’t eager to be around my peers in any intimate capacity. I still had some extensive reflecting & healing to get done before I could jump into an environment of that nature again. I didn’t want to force myself and hinder my healing, which came so much from books & music & mentors & resisting what I was being heavily influenced towards, & restoring peace within myself … along with trial and error, mistakes, and big successes all in one multilayered melting pot.
I felt that my goals weren’t reached yet, and I wanted to live in a fiercely independent way, writing albums, writing poetry, writing short stories, writing a novel, learning new instruments or skills, etc.
I was presented with real-life risks and real-life circumstances that greatly influenced my art & made me grow up in an accelerated way, I feel, while on my own timeline.
While many might view mine as a more difficult or unpredictable life path, I know that it is the best choice that I’ve made for myself & makes me who I am. Being on my own taught me so much about myself that I don’t think I would have learned otherwise. It was experimental in nature and brought me inconveniences, angst & dilemmas that ended up leading me to a perfect balance.
I grew resourceful from necessity. In a way, I got this beautiful opportunity to cut off from so much of the negative energy that had weighted me for several years. It was a personal journey out of depression & anxiety.
My decision to be true to myself also taught me how to resist, ignore and combat intrusive criticism.
Knowing about your own rhythms & your own personal structure for achieving satisfaction is so valuable in a world that can force people into a rhythm that is foreign to them, into oppressive systems, into structures, into boxes … it is tremendously important to know what works for your own mind and body, in order to be you’re at your best mentally, spiritually and physically.
Coming to that awareness at an earlier age feels increasingly important, so that more people can meet their potential sooner. I knew from an early age that some of the rhythms at school, or at home, or in the world didn’t align with my body or my needs, but I didn’t know how to articulate that until I made an intention to break from traditional expectations and do things in my own way, to support my body and mind.
My path taught me about resisting what didn’t serve me. I want to live in a world where holistic awareness is not only taught but is regarded as essential to one’s well-being. If we don’t honor health in our lives, then the quality of the work that we contribute to the world will ultimately decline in quality.
We might benefit from a collective transforming of the normalized view of education & from finding better understanding about how people are educated in this new world of ours. I felt that I grew so much in terms of self-knowledge when I came out of a traditional schooling environment and grew to realize how important knowledge of self really was in informing my future decisions. What I had that I wouldn’t have had was ample space & quietude to do my thing.
If I’ve learned anything about the mysterious artistic process, it is that it moves at a drastically different pace than the mainstream world does, with different fuel and different intentions. It is more lugubrious and more sensitive. The creative process is something to be revered, respected, and never callously rushed.
Those of us that are aligned with that style of process often require a much different structure for being, so that we don’t feel at odds with other forces in the world, or with the expectations of other people.
Often, the best thing for young creatives (at least for me) is to be left alone to learn how to refine the art of doing their thing. Creative works are best done in atmospheres of ease rather than in atmospheres of force.
Pricing:
- $15 for Detach album. annamay.bandcamp.com/album/detach-2
Contact Info:
- Website: https://annamaymusic.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/stardustmemory.annamay
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/annamayfolk/
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/annamayfolk
- SoundCloud: https://annamay.bandcamp.com
Image Credits
Mallory Olenius
