Softcore Revelations Perspective on If I Go

i'm penny ash, a poet, artist, and reluctant musician. i was born outside of ottawa, then i lived in la for a while, and whatever's next i'm still trying to figure out. softcore revelations is the name i make music under. the newest album is called src 3, and it marks the end of a trilogy, the other two being the great unmaking and ruinable. i'm 23 but my singing voice sounds like a thousand-year-old woman who is happy to have company all of a sudden but has forgotten how to act.

“if i go” came from that very specific ache of realizing you’ve already begun leaving a life before you’ve admitted it out loud. i was in los angeles, which i did love in my own dramatic, sun-damaged way, but i could feel myself thinning out there. like i was becoming a beautiful caption for a person instead of a person. and at the same time i was looking around at the people who had loved me better than i knew how to notice in the moment. the friendships. the artists who kept echoing my work back to me until i could hear it properly. the little rescues i didn’t even clock as rescues because i was too busy narrativizing my own sadness.

so the song is me mocking myself a little, because i do that when i’m closest to the nerve. all those lines about leaving softly, disappearing into writing, kissing strangers, being pathetic and clumsy with love... that’s me dragging my own mythology by the ankle. but it’s affectionate dragging. it’s me saying, yes, i can be melodramatic and avoidant and way better at metaphor than texting back, but also i did love people. badly, maybe. indirectly. with a weird amount of weather around it. but truly.

i wanted to make something that sounded like a goodbye you don’t entirely trust, because the person saying it doesn’t entirely trust herself either.

a lot of softcore revelations songs are messy in a hot, bruised way, but this one needed to be smaller. more exposed. almost under-arranged. i wanted the odd time signature to feel like emotional imbalance without turning it into a stunt. like the song itself is trying to walk calmly while its heartbeat is doing something a little wrong. i wanted warmth and grief in the same breath. a song that kind of smiles while bleeding through a tissue.

and i wanted it to hold two truths at once: that leaving can be selfish, and that it can also be the first honest thing you’ve done in a while.

desire, obviously, but not just desire as sex. desire as projection. desire as religion. desire as the story you tell to make your own hunger look noble.

i’m always drawn to shame too, because shame is such a stylist. it dresses itself up as taste, standards, irony, detachment. i like peeling that back. friendship, more and more. i think for a long time i wrote as though romance was the only weather intense enough to matter, and i don’t believe that anymore. friendship has rescued my life in ways sex never did. friendship is often the real love story, even when i was too oblivious to write it that way the first time.

i write about beauty a lot because i don’t trust it and i’m still seduced by it. leaving. exile. the body as a rumor. home as something you keep misplacing in other people. and lately, i think, i’m drawn to motion itself. not reinvention exactly — i’m too superstitious for that word — but movement. what it means to leave a project, leave a city, leave a version of yourself that got good reviews but wasn’t keeping you alive.

taking softcore revelations offline feels sad, but also tender. i don’t want to drag her past the point where she can still tell the truth. “if i go” feels like the right doorway for that. not a slammed one. not even fully shut. just... me standing in it with my bag, laughing at myself a little, crying a little, and being grateful. especially grateful to lacey lune, anton donovan, and nada uv for carrying these songs into other mouths and making the whole thing feel stranger and less lonely than i ever could have done alone.

sorry, that probably didn’t make sense. but maybe that’s also the song.

when i’m between selves a little. after a train. before dawn. walking home from somewhere i was looked at too closely or not closely enough. after performing, especially, because performance peels something back and leaves me weirdly electrically available to my own thoughts. heartbreak is overrated as a sole engine, honestly. confusion is much richer. so is tenderness. so is the moment after you realize you’ve been forgiven by someone you didn’t deserve to lose.

also, and this is maybe the whole answer, i feel most inspired when i can sense an ending before i can explain it. that transitional ache. the suitcase still open. the text unsent. the room no longer feeling like yours. that’s where the good lines start begging.

usually language. almost insultingly early language. there are softcore revelations pieces that began as poems or diary fragments years before they were songs. sometimes i perform a thing in one form for ages before anyone — including me — realizes it has been humming under the skin the whole time. so for me it’s often not “lyrics versus music,” it’s more like: when does this text admit it wants a body? when does it stop being content with page-breath and demand actual breath?

i love that transition, though. when a line i’ve lived with privately suddenly has to survive rhythm, repetition, audience, failure. music makes language keep its promises.

tension, specificity, mercy.

tension because a song should want two things at once. it should ache against itself a little. i don’t really trust songs that know exactly what they are trying to say too early. i like when a lyric is half confession, half alibi.

specificity because “i was sad” is rarely the line. but “the hum that stops when the fridge dies” — that, to me, is grief with a body. i want an image i can bruise against.

and mercy because even the cruelest or funniest song has to understand something about being human, otherwise it’s just posing in a good coat. even when i’m mocking myself, i don’t want to abandon the girl in the song. i want to tease her and tuck her in.

getting past the first fake version.

there’s always a draft of the song that knows what kind of song it wants to be in public, and i hate her a little. she’s tasteful. she’s legible. she’s been edited in advance for the imagined listener. and usually she has to be written so i can get to the messier, truer version underneath. the difficult part is not mistaking control for honesty. sometimes the line that embarrasses me is the load-bearing line. which is rude, but often true.

too many. humiliating number, actually.

i like writing after midnight because i trust myself less, which weirdly helps. i light candles even when it’s impractical. i wear perfume to write sometimes, which makes no rational sense except that i want the room to feel complicit. i keep certain notebooks for beginnings only because i’m scared of contaminating them with grocery-list energy. i also sometimes read a poem aloud before writing lyrics, just to remind my mouth what a sentence can risk.

and i do have this tiny superstition that if a line arrives fully formed, i have to write it down immediately or i’ve offended whatever strange little gods oversee language and longing. they’re petty, but fair.

airports. notebooks. old voice memos. the part of the city where the expensive stores end and the weird little businesses begin. bad dates, obviously. a line from a poem i loved when i was nineteen that hits differently now that i know some things and have survived others. i also go back to my own unfinished fragments a lot. sometimes a lyric has been waiting three years for the right chord, like a girl smoking outside a venue, pretending she isn’t freezing.

and sometimes i stop looking entirely. i clean something. i walk. i let my mind become less managerial. inspiration hates being cornered. she’s very flirtatious that way.

yes, but not in a documentary way. more in the way dreams can be true without being literal. my music is me with the lighting adjusted and the silences mic’d properly. it’s not the whole of me — thank god, because that would be exhausting for everyone — but it is emotionally accurate. maybe more accurate than my casual self is. people are often more charming in conversation than they are honest. songs let me reverse that a little.

my softness, unfortunately. my tendency to romanticize and then immediately become suspicious of the romance. my canadian politeness in collision with my more feral emotional theology. girlhood as performance, yes, but also as weather system. shame. devotion. displacement. wanting to be chosen and resenting myself for how much that still matters. the suburban-origin thing too, definitely — that feeling of growing up surrounded by ordinary surfaces while having an inner life that thought it was in a french film or a motel poem or the end of the world.

i think i’m always writing from the position of someone who is both inside the feeling and standing a little outside herself, wincing at it, taking notes.

there was a period where i kept arriving late to my own life emotionally. people would show up for me and i would only understand the scale of it afterward, when i was already halfway gone into some private storm. “if i go” is very much from that terrain.

i remember one night after a reading, nothing especially cinematic on paper, just people lingering, talking too softly, somebody hugging me a little too long in that way that means they know you’re not okay but aren’t going to force the confession out of you. and i went home with this horrible tenderness in me because i realized i had built such a dramatic internal universe around being unseen, while there were actual living people trying, imperfectly but sincerely, to reach me. the song grew out of that shame. the gentle kind. the useful kind.

musically, i owe a lot to phoebe bridgers, probably in the sense that she made emotional precision feel survivable to me. she can be devastating without losing wit, and that balance matters so much to me because i never want sadness to become self-worship. i love lana too, obviously, because she understands glamour as a wound and as a costume, and billie because she knows how to let intimacy feel almost architectural, like the room itself is complicit.

but poets... god. that’s the real bloodstream. sylvia plath, of course, because she makes feeling seem both holy and embarrassing, which is my home planet. frank o’hara because he lets the mind move like a person actually alive inside a day. anne sexton because she knew confession could still have lipstick on. richard siken for the velocity of longing. mary oliver for when i need to remember the world exists outside my own erotic apocalypse. and leonard cohen, who is maybe cheating because he belongs to both shelves, but he’s in there too, smoking in the chapel of every line break i’ve ever trusted.

honestly? women who are not trying to be interesting. i’m obsessed with people who have opted out of performance in some essential way. the girl at a train station reading a huge paperback with terrible posture. an older woman who orders lunch alone and doesn’t apologize to the room with her face. someone who answers a question plainly when i would’ve wrapped mine in four veils and a dying rose.

i think because i came up so deep in self-mythology, i’m very moved by people who just... are. not branding their pain. not turning every bruise into a thesis. there’s something almost divine to me about that kind of unperformed selfhood. i’m still learning from it. slowly. with many setbacks and outfits.

my music has been called a 'poetry-delivery system,' so, fine, i'll talk about my poems.

i think poetry is the only form that has ever let me be embarrassing at the correct temperature. like, a conversation asks you to be coherent too early, and life asks you to recover before you’ve even finished having the feeling, but a poem will let you stay ruined for a second and look at the ruin under flattering light. i keep writing because i don’t know how else to metabolize being this porous. everything gets in. cities get in, people get in, one sentence from the wrong mouth gets in and suddenly i’m spiritually limping for a week. poetry is the least dishonest container i’ve found for that. it lets me be vain and sincere at once, which is unfortunately my strongest register.

also, and this is less glamorous, i just genuinely don’t know how not to. i’ve tried being normal and it makes me feel like a haunted beige lamp.