Kiss Obedience Goodbye
On my first private rebellion, the mold we were never meant to fit, and the song that starts the record.
Because of the viral success of Bossi’s Finishing School for Difficult Women and, frankly, because the world keeps offering fresh material for outrage, I’ve been pouring a lot of my time into the series.
It has been giving me life in these absurd times. It has given me a place to channel rage into something useful. Something funny. Something sharp. Something that might help women, and the men worth keeping, resist the narratives being thrust upon us: be smaller, be quieter, be grateful, be palatable, be productive, be obedient, be easy to control.
But the Finishing School did not appear out of nowhere.
It grew out of my album, Tell All The Other Girls.
Music is how I process myself and the world. It is where the things I’m still trying to understand often reveal themselves first: through instinct, through melody, through a lyric that arrives before I fully know what it means. Through that strange alchemy of conscious effort and unconscious magic that allows deeper truths to rise to the surface before the mind can edit them into something polite.
And performing this music is where I get to shed the layers of expectation and containment that have followed women, myself very much included, for generations.
Because rock and roll is not polite.
When I perform these songs, I get to let loose. I get to take up space. I get to be loud, ugly, beautiful, furious, funny, sexual, wounded, defiant, and alive, sometimes all in the same breath. And when one person gives herself permission to break containment, it can remind others that they are allowed to do the same.
That, to me, is political.
Not because every song is explicitly about policy or power, but because every song is about the inner architecture that power depends on: shame, obedience, silence, fear, femininity as a cage, and the long, difficult work of becoming ungovernable from the inside out.
So, because I am a musician first and foremost, I want to take you through the backstory of each song on Tell All The Other Girls: where it came from, what it revealed to me, and how it connects to the larger spirit of Bossi’s Finishing School for Difficult Women.
Because before there was a classroom, there was a record.
Before there were lessons in how to respond, there were songs about what it costs to stay quiet.
