This new album of mine progressed slowly in the background of all of the rest of that work. And it got even slower as I did two years of grad school while working, then graduated and continued to work more than full-time. All of my recent solo albums have involved a fair amount of learning and research. My Myers-Briggs album, MB-LP, was a lot of interviews and a lot of reddit subs and dubious personality websites. My previous album, Extinct!, was a lot of nonfiction books, textbooks, and papers. This album, Emotional Labour, started with a forum thread and an unhealthy amount of social media. I was spending a night at the Toronto airport on my way home from a trip whose purpose I don’t remember in 2016, staying up at the terminal to catch an early flight the next day. I stumbled onto the 2015 metafilter thread on emotional labour. I was lucky to have a lot of time because it’s super long. I see now that people have made annotated, shortened versions of it, which are probably less chaotic.
The original thread is full of people agreeing, adding perspectives, arguing, trolling, getting back on track, seeing things in their lives differently, understanding their own behaviour or why they felt a certain way about things, written over time but experienced all at once in the reading. I thought it was powerful, not because I’d never thought about some of those things before, but because there were things in it that were new to me and because of the infectious enthusiasm of the (mostly female) participants. It seemed cathartic, not hopeless. People were discussing gender roles and expectations openly, honestly, and critically, and some people were connecting dots for the first time. Overall the thread reveals the extent to which gender is a performance and a construct with less harmful possibilities not out of reach. I’ve read subsequently that much of what was discussed in the thread doesn’t fit the dictionary definition of emotional labour, representing the scope creep of emotional labour into regular or unpaid labour with gendered expectations.
But I still felt that was interesting, and it was a way of getting at the same thing that had interested me on Extinct!, which I would call uncounted or underappreciated value. For the environment, it’s the value of clean water, essential for life and happiness but diffuse in terms of responsibility and difficult to quantify and thus undervalued in dollar terms. In a similar way, emotional labour is the “clean water” that circulates among and between people, essential to make things run smoothly but under-examined, undercompensated, and diffuse but clearly gendered in its structural responsibility. Women do more care work. This was around the time that I stopped working at a landscaping company and started working at the public library, and the two jobs had very different cultures, expectations, and gender breakdowns.
As I started to figure out how to turn this subject matter into songs and themes that could carry an album, it helped to consider my target audience and what I could bring to the conversation with my perspective. My first idea was that the album would be written to reflect and poeticize aspects of feminism, the insights that I had read about in the metafilter thread. I started to keep notes on the song ideas I came up with, and came to realize that what I wanted to do was capture the effect of grappling with these ideas, as they relate to my specific perspective and identity, and that if the songs were “for” anyone, they should be for people (mostly men) like me, just with less time and bandwidth to think about these things. In making this my mission, I think I started to get back to how I used to think about writing songs, before I got so conceptual, where the point of the exercise is mostly to figure out my own thoughts about a topic and come to terms with how doing that made me feel. As opposed to knowing the message in advance and writing a song as an argument for it.
While this conceptual shift in framing was taking place, I continued to add to my list of song ideas on the Notes app of my phone, which were sometimes a sentence and sometimes multiple paragraphs long, whenever I thought of them. I would consolidate them periodically, and put ideas together or pull them apart as I thought about what the songs would deal with. I liked how working on them made me feel nervous, worried about feeling vulnerable or being misunderstood. It was that uncomfortability that made me feel like I was learning or growing in doing so. Of course, with so many of my ideas related to live socio-political and ethical issues, many of the ideas I had would show up in articles and in society in general over the course of me conceptualizing my album and working on the music. The concept of emotional labour itself was picked up more broadly than it had been. It was difficult to know I would be writing about topics and not feel like I had a good answer, or that the issue was settled. What allowed me to still write was the feeling that my job was to capture reflections at a moment in time, from a subjective point of view with an often explicitly named identity. I wanted to do some character work with the narrator and have a range of thoughtfulness and familiarity with the issues dealt with in the songs. Some would be “woke,” others deeply problematic. I thought of the songs as art, not ethics, and didn’t omit impulses and thoughts that felt harmful, with the idea that the listener is savvy enough to determine what they think about the topic. But I still hadn’t written any actual lyrics.
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