Lacey Lune Perspective on This Is Becoming Really Painful for Me
Honestly? Spite, romance, vanity, loneliness, a totally delusional faith in transformation, and the vague but persistent feeling that if I can just get the bridge right, my life will briefly make sense. Music is the one place where all my worst qualities become employable. I can be obsessive, melodramatic, superstitious, hungry, needy, glamorous, petty, heartbroken, horny, and weirdly sincere, and suddenly it’s called authorship. Also, I don’t really know how not to do it. Some people journal, some people relapse, some people marry financiers. I write songs. It’s cheaper than rehab and prettier than a public breakdown.
The absolutely sick little blur of modern dating. The way nobody says anything directly, but everybody leaves a vapor trail. The read receipts, the tonal shifts, the “baby what are you talking about” of it all. Being just close enough to someone to feel chosen and just far enough away to feel insane. I wanted it to sound like your girlfriends fixing your eyeliner while you explain, for the ninth time, that no, actually, this one really is confusing. It’s a nervous-in-love song, but also a song about emotional outsourcing. Like, if you need three friends, two screenshots, a location history, and a psychic to understand whether someone likes you, babe, we are already in retro-pop tragedy territory.
I’m terrible at choosing just one because gratitude is kind of my love language and also my kink, spiritually speaking. Anton Donovan is a huge one for me because he understands mood as architecture. He can make a song feel like cigarette smoke in a velvet room without it turning into cosplay. Penny Ash, my sweet doomed angel, reminds me that vulnerability doesn’t have to be tidy to be beautiful. She makes yearning feel artisanal. Amy Winehouse, obviously, because she could make damage swing. Dusty Springfield because no one ever sounded so elegant while emotionally coming apart under studio lighting. And Laura Vargas and Alison Cartwright from Nada UV — I love them so much. They’re fearless about texture and tension and ugliness and beauty living in the same synth line. Working with them felt like giving my heartbreak better lighting.
Eve Babitz, forever. She understood that intelligence can wear lip gloss and still ruin your life beautifully. She gave a lot of us permission to be unserious on purpose while secretly being very, very precise. And Vesper Sinclair, who I realize is dangerous to say out loud because now it sounds like I’m in a cult, but whatever. Vesper has this way of moving through the world like collapse is just another styling choice. She’s taught me a lot about charm, self-invention, and the art of surviving your own mythology in good fabric.
My girlness, for lack of a less explosive word. The performance of femininity, the comedy of it, the grief in it, the narcissism in it, the pageantry, the tenderness, the way being looked at can feel like power until it doesn’t. I write a lot from the intersection of desire and self-awareness — wanting to be adored, wanting to disappear, wanting to be understood, wanting to punish people by becoming incandescent. There’s always some California in there too. San Diego ghost-light, L.A. delusion, cheap glamour, parking-lot heartbreak, gas-station holiness. And addiction brain, if I’m being honest. Not always literally, but structurally. The fixation, the loop, the bargaining, the “maybe this time it’ll save me” of it all.
So many, and they are all humiliating. I have to light the same candle three times if I’m stuck, which I know sounds fake-witchy, but if I don’t do it and the song goes badly, then whose fault is that? Mine. Tragic. I also get weird about moons, specific lipsticks, demo titles, whether I started the lyric in bed or at the kitchen table, and whether I’ve recently seen a bird behaving ominously. If I write the first line after midnight, I’m convinced it’ll be better. If I sneeze while recording a scratch vocal, I save the take, because apparently my nervous system thinks that’s a blessing from the patron saint of codependency. I fully mock myself for this, but not enough to stop.
Right after being ignored. Right before doing something I know I shouldn’t do. In the ten minutes after a party when your makeup is half gone and your whole personality gets weirdly honest. In cars at night. In grocery stores when a song from 1964 comes on and suddenly buying sparkling water feels cosmically devastating. In pools. In hangovers. In that little click when humiliation becomes style. Also, weirdly, when someone is kinder to me than I expected. People assume I only write from chaos, but tenderness gets me too. Sometimes inspiration is disaster in heels, and sometimes it’s just someone handing you a cold drink and not asking you to perform being okay.
A telephone, absolutely. Not in a glamorous vintage way, either — in a pathetic, staring-at-it-like-it’s a hostage negotiator way. There’s something so awful and perfect about a phone when you’re waiting for somebody to either tell the truth or continue ruining your week with plausible deniability. It becomes this tiny glowing altar to uncertainty. I’ve also written from a smeared bathroom mirror, a pair of boots I should not have sold, a hotel pen, a plastic cup full of warm champagne, and one truly devastating tube of lipstick that survived three bad decisions and a crying jag. But the phone is the big one. The phone is where modern romance goes to become administrative. And that, to me, is very fertile songwriting territory.
