GORGEOUS - Album Streaming Everywhere

(Keep scrolling for lyrics — blogs still being written)

I grew up in a world where staying small felt safer than taking up any space. Saying no felt dangerous. Having needs felt rude. My body learned to fold in on itself long before I had words for why. This album is me walking back into every room where that training took root and letting my own voice speak there for the first time.

Every track is a scene I lived, a silence I swallowed, a wound I pressed into sound. Sometimes I am the one harmed. Sometimes I am the one who harms. I don’t separate those versions of me. GORGEOUS lives in that tension. I am both influenced by violence and responsible for my own. The songs hold both truths at once.

The story inside this album didn’t land on the page in order, because that’s not how trauma remembers. PTSD stacks time into a messy pile—childhood, marriage, panic attacks, sex work, deep depression, body dysmorphia, chronic illnesses—all humming at once. The track list follows that nervous-system logic, not a neat timeline.

If you line up the first letter of each song title, the spine spells GORGEOUS FEMINIST. The word “feminist” used to make me flinch; it sounded like a fight I wasn’t qualified to join. Now, for me, it simply names something my body kept trying to say:

my body belongs to me.

The right to say no without fear. The right to safety in my own skin. The right to stop treating everyone else’s comfort like a commandment while my own needs sit in the corner like they don’t count.

I didn’t arrive at that through theory. I arrived there through the mirror.

For years, my reflection was the scariest witness in my life. I could survive rapes, coercion, religious control, panic, and still be more afraid of looking myself in the eyes the next morning. A turning point in my healing came when I started standing in front of the mirror and refusing to look away—jaw trembling, tears, anger, but staying. I’d touch the glass and whisper things like, “I approve of you,” even when I didn’t fully believe it yet. (Thank you Louise Hay). That practice became its own kind of quiet feminism for me: mirror feminism. Reflection as rebellion. Self-recognition as armor. Every time I choose to meet my own gaze with less hatred, the whole architecture that profited off my self-rejection loses a little power.

GORGEOUS maps how consent actually works inside a nervous system like mine. On paper, the question looks simple: Did you say yes or no? In my body, it was never simple. There were years where my mouth said “sure,” while my throat locked up, my hands went cold, my thoughts fogged, my body went still, I smiled. Freeze and fawn responses look gentle from the outside. Inside, they are terror responses. Many of the “yeses” in this album are survival moves that kept me breathing, not expressions of desire. These songs put that difference into language so my body never has to carry it alone again.

Abuse doesn’t show up as one dramatic event. It builds like architecture. There are rules you can’t question. Rituals you’re expected to perform. Rewards when you comply. Punishments when you push back. That structure shaped me in work, in marriage, in bedrooms, on sets. Reading Lundy Bancroft’s work gave me a model for that architecture; this album let me crawl through the house and mark where my own blood had dried in the walls.

Some songs move through the classic victim spaces: the coercive marriage steeped in scripture, the photographer in the basement, the Tinder date where the air turned sharp and my body went somewhere else to get through it. Other songs move through the places I’m least proud of: the dog who felt my rage when I had nowhere for it to go, the partners I hurt while my nervous system replayed patterns I never meant to carry forward. “Why Does He Do That?” and “I Am The Abuser” sit side by side on purpose. I wanted to show the pattern from both sides: the man who wields it and the woman who accidentally learns it. Abuse is a pattern anyone can absorb; healing is the moment you finally see it clearly enough to stop passing it along.

I’m not offering GORGEOUS as a finished healing story. I’m still uncoiling. I still flinch. I still have days where my reflection feels foreign, or where my body reacts like I’m in danger even when I know, logically, that I’m safe. Healing, for me, hasn’t looked serene. It has looked like panic in grocery store aisles, late-night breakdowns on bathroom tile, blackout tattoos turning my skin into a new kind of scripture, mirror work through tears, and learning how to say, “I want,” without apologizing afterwards. It has looked like telling the truth about the times I caused harm, not to erase my own pain, but to keep the cycle from hitting the next generation.

Loui Crow—the name I use for the voice that watches all this from the wire—shows up in the way this album speaks. Crow language is the part of me that names what most people look away from and still finds something sacred in the mess. A crow will sit on a telephone wire above a crash site and remember. That’s how these songs feel to me: witness perched over wreckage, not there to fix it, just to refuse to forget. The melodies carry the grief. The words pin it to the page so it stops flying loose through my body.

GORGEOUS isn’t trying to lead anyone out of pain. It guides inward instead—toward the places where the first “no” disappeared, toward the earliest moments where safety got rewired into shame, toward the quiet corners where I still believe I deserve less than I give. Each song is a little map fragment: the girl who never got asked, the young woman whose fear was sold back to her as foreplay, the wife who mistook terror for devotion, the worker who monetized the way men already saw her, the mother who refuses to hand this script to her child, and the artist who stands in front of the mirror and decides to stay.

If you’re here on this page, you’re probably not just skimming. You’re likely carrying your own drawer of out-of-order memories, your own body-logic that never made sense on paper. I don’t have answers. I do have a record. These sixteen songs are the clearest record I’ve made so far of how a body like mine breaks, adapts, and slowly learns to love itself without making a new sacrifice out of that love.

I’m still learning. I’m still listening to my own work in reverse and hearing things I didn’t know I was saying. Forward, the album walks through the wreckage. Backward, it climbs up out of it. Somewhere in the middle of those two motions, I finally start to feel like Joy.

—

I write the lyrics. I use Suno for the vocals and the instrumentals, because sometimes you just need to hear your own words sung back to you to believe they’re real. I don’t care whose voice carries them—I just needed them out of my body. Suno made all the childhood dreams I buried possible again. If you’re a closet writer like I was, I can’t recommend it enough. Scroll down for the lyric blogs if you want to walk through each room with me.

May the words you couldn’t say out loud find a home in sound.
May the voice you borrowed make space for the voice you’re growing.
May every song you write pull you one inch further inward,
toward the girl you were and the woman you’re becoming.
A black-wing sits on the wire for you—quiet, steady, remembering.