About Me

I live in Nebraska with my husband and our son. Most of what I make happens here, somewhere between ordinary family life and whatever has followed me into the room that day. Music. Magick. Mirrors. Paint. Old memories. A weird animal. Something my son says while eating cereal.

I pay attention to things.

Then I make things out of what I find.

Sarah, Joy & Loui

Sarah was my first name.

For a long time, she was also the name I gave the woman who survived my life before I knew how to live comfortably inside it. She was good. Useful. Pleasant. Frightened. Angry in places she could barely reach. She could openly want to die and still worry about making everybody else uncomfortable.

I eventually wrote her a funeral.

At the time, I thought I was burying her.

I understand that differently now.

I think I was trying to stop confusing survival with identity.

Joy, my legal name, came after. Loui, my artist name, came later. Then came Crow, ghosts, mirrors, rituals, songs, animals, and a growing suspicion that every version of myself I tried to bury had probably been doing a job.

Lately I’m more interested in learning the job.

Some of my work comes from places where I wanted to disappear completely. That feeling has changed shape a lot, especially over the last year. I have more language for it now. Sometimes it is despair. Sometimes shame. Sometimes panic.

Sometimes an overwhelmed animal searching for the nearest hole.

ANYMALS became a way of giving those reactions bodies.

Porcupine turns toward danger before she has the whole picture.
Seahorse gets swept away by perception.
Skunk wants to disappear and learns to stay.
Coyote gets hurt, fucks up, licks wounds, and keeps walking.

I used to ask, What is wrong with me?

I’m much more interested now in asking:

What is happening here?

Why I Create

When I was little and people asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I kept my real answer inside my head:

I just want to make a splash in the world.

I had absolutely zero information about what that meant.

Apparently the splash is a kitchen, a mirror, a voice seed, a crow on a wire, a pile of albums, paint, rituals, a website full of breadcrumbs, and a toddler meowing like a kitty for me to pet him while I try to write lyrics.

I think the little girl who kept that answer inside would recognize this life.

She might be surprised by the amount of laundry involved.

I make things first because making them helps me understand what is happening inside me. Sometimes I know exactly what I’m writing about. Sometimes I think I know and discover three months later that the song had better information than I did.

I make art from whatever is alive in the room, whether it’s in my head or around me.
That is probably the closest thing I have to an artistic philosophy.

The Music

I write music for myself first.

The songs hold things I’m trying to understand, things I need to hear, things I’m angry about, things I love, and occasionally something I only understand after I’ve finished writing it.

I use Suno as part of how I make music. I write the lyrics, then build the concepts and world, shape the sound, and use a vocal persona developed from my own voice. It gave my writing a singing body at a time when I had songs in me and very little idea how to get them out.

I probably would have never tried writing songs again if I hadn’t heard about Suno.

Years earlier, in high school, I wrote lyrics. Then a hard drive crashed and I lost them. Life went somewhere else for a long time. I just never wanted to try again.

Then this strange little technological door appeared.

I walked through it.

I love sound itself. Prepared piano. Bowed psaltery. Musical saw. Udu. Rusted metal. Glass bottles. Cowbell. Whatever makes the world in my head become something I can hear.

I still dream about learning to sing these songs myself someday.

For now, this is one of the tools in my hands.

The Albums

I accidentally made a lot of albums very quickly.

Looking back, I can see an arc I never planned.

GORGEOUS screamed.

FVNERAL of False Selves buried.

INTERLVDE and BYRDS opened some windows.

Crow Family built somewhere safer to return to.

Adore the Sun practiced devotion.

OLD BONES excavated.

MIRROR, MIRROR OFF THE WALL turned toward the reflection.

ANYMALS crawled underneath language and gave the reflexes bodies.

I keep thinking I know what the next project is about.

Then it tells me.

Crow

Crow is the witness that keeps appearing in my work.

I used to explain her more.

Higher Self. Source. Universe. The voice behind the mirror.

These days I’m happy letting her remain a crow.

She watches. She notices. She carries things between songs. Sometimes she has something useful to say. Sometimes she’s on the wire watching me stand in the kitchen while cereal sticks to my foot.

She has survived every mythology I’ve built around her, which feels like useful information.

The crow has become one of the ways I recognize my own attention.

When she appears, something is usually alive.

Magick

Magick has been part of my life for years, although my relationship with it keeps changing.

My husband introduced me to The Book of the Law, the LBRP, the Thoth Tarot, and ceremonial magick. He had practiced quietly for 10 years before. He never shared it with anyone until he met me. That trust opened an enormous door in my life.

A lot of my work is inspired by my husband’s breadcrumbs.

Other people left breadcrumbs too.

Louise Haytaught ways of speaking to myself that helped me recognize how vicious my internal language had become.

Abraham Hicksgave me language for emotional movement and reaching for a slightly different thought.

Aleister Crowleygave me ritual, correspondence, Will, and a giant strange architecture I still enjoy climbing around inside.

I hold what I can.

These days, I'm especially interested in what happens when all that study comes down out of the books and enters an ordinary body and an ordinary life. What does ritual actually do while I'm practicing it? What happens when I turn, speak, move, orient myself in a room, establish a boundary, or deliberately return to center?

That's where a lot of my current writing about magick lives.

I can study the machinery in adult language. I want to bring it home in language the little one inside me can use.

Follow my notes on ritual and magick →

Why Loui Crow

Loui is my artist name.

The name carries pieces of two people whose work changed mine: Louise Hay and Aleister Crowley.

What stayed with me from Louise was permission to treat myself with love.

What stayed with me from Crowley was permission to take my own Will seriously.

One gave me permission to love myself. The other gave me permission to wield myself.

Crow arrived somewhere in the middle and apparently declined to leave.

Loui Crow became big enough to hold the songs.

Eventually she became big enough to hold me too.

Breadcrumbs

I share because other people shared.

Books found me. Songs found me. Teachers found me. Strange sentences arrived at exactly the right moment. My husband handed me things that changed the direction of my life.

Someone else left breadcrumbs.

I followed some.

Now I leave mine.

When somebody tells me that one of my songs changed something in their life, I receive that carefully. I know what it feels like to find somebody else’s words at the right moment.

I also know I’m simply a person making things from my own life.

A woman in a kitchen. A mother. A wife. An artist. A scorpio hermit with internet access, which frankly seems dangerous enough. 😂

I make what helps me.

Sometimes it helps somebody else too.

That is plenty.

Peer to peer.

Crow to crow.

A Hermit Who Shares

I’m learning to be a hermit who shares.

I leave things here, then I return to my family and my ordinary life. Sometimes that means comments and messages sit longer than I intend. I appreciate the kindness that reaches me.

I used to feel like sharing something created another job immediately afterward. Explain it. Watch it. Answer everybody. Make sure everybody feels acknowledged. Check whether somebody misunderstood. Clean up every little emotional cup left sitting around the internet.

I have enough dishes. 😂

So I’m learning another way.

Make the thing.

Leave the breadcrumb.

Return to my life.

I’ve written more about that relationship with attention, presence, parenting, and the strange little guilt machine of social media in Good Thing We Have Soft Mats.

Where I Am Now

I came into this project with a lot of rage.

I still have rage.

It simply has more neighbors I know now.

There is fear. Play. Grief. Desire. Shame. Curiosity. Protection. Panic. Love. A little animal trying to figure out whether the sound in the bushes means danger. Another one sitting beside her.

I’m interested in the moment before reaction becomes action.

The snappy sentence before it leaves my mouth.

The quills before they rise.

The old recording before I believe it.

The urge to disappear before I follow it.

The second look.

That little space keeps showing up everywhere lately. In parenting. In marriage. In mirrors. In ritual. In ANYMALS. In the way I share art. In the way I speak to myself.

I think I spent a long time trying to become somebody else.

Now I’m curious about staying long enough to see who is already here.

I frequently create first and understand later

I make music.

I make art.

I practice magick.

I love my husband.

I love my son.

I love my cats.

I leave breadcrumbs.

I keep finding things.

And when something follows me home, I usually make something out of it.

Make art in the mess.

Crow above me,
truth within me,
light where I walk.

If you made it all the way down here, thank you for spending a little time in my strange corner of the world. I hope something you found here felt familiar. Maybe useful. Maybe it simply kept you company for a minute.

Take whatever helps. Leave the rest for the birds.

May you find something here that helps you recognize something in yourself.
May you leave with one more way to come home.

A little crow’s on the wire, keeping watch over you.