Pink Balloons and more

An update on some exciting creative projects

Hi folks! It’s been a minute since I’ve been able to post any new content here and I just wanted to give an update on why. I’ve been spending some time on some big and exciting projects that have consumed the time that I would normally have put into this series. I can finally talk about one of those. The others will have to remain a mystery for a bit longer. 

Ekko Astral’s debut album Pink Balloons dropped today and I’m very proud to have contributed writing to it. I first met Ekko lead singer Jael Holzman at the Society for Environmental Journalists conference in 2018. I’d been out as trans for like five minutes at that point and I was anxious about just about everything but we went out with a group to what passed for a gay bar in Fort Collins and had a great time with some incredible people, and I started to see some upside to this scary thing that was dominating my life at that time.

 Jael and I played phone tag about getting coffee for months after the conference, but before we managed to meet up she told me that she had something important to tell me: she’d been working through accepting that she was also a trans woman, and seeing me out living my life in the world had finally made her feel like it was possible. 

You never know what to expect when a new friend tells you that she has a band, but she sent me an early version of what would become Quartz, the Ekko Astral EP, and I was absolutely blown away. It remains some of my favorite transition art to this day. Give it a listen if you have not. 

I especially love the song 1000 degrees on Quartz - its simultaneous acknowledgment of struggling in the moment while vowing to come through a better person on the other side of it gave me goosebumps the first time I heard it, and I listened again and again and again. 

The piece of art that got me through the rough early days of my transition was my poetry collection, thoughts on weightlessness. There’s something so difficult and exhilarating and alienating about suddenly having real feelings for the first time as a grown adult, and for me, those feelings poured out in poetry. 

I didn’t make much of it when Jael asked if Ekko could perform one of my poems. One thing I’ve learned with writing poetry is that you can’t set your expectations too high. There’s a certain type of person in a certain type of place that resonates with it as an art form, but if you don’t like it you REALLY don’t like it. I figured she’d play it a couple times and move onto something else.

Still: there’s something so surreal about somebody else performing your words from the stage and watching it connect with the audience. I finally got to see Ekko live in the fall of 2022. Once again, I was blown away. They’re phenomenal in person. 

That poem went on to form the thematic backbone of Pink Balloons. It’s the first thing you hear on the album and nearly the last. Jael’s rendition of the full thing in ‘somewhere at the bottom…’ makes the hair on my neck stand on end. 

As trans people grow and change, our art must, as well. Pink Balloons isnot transition art. It’s an album that tries to answer the ‘now what’ question. I love the way that the poem is superimposed with a conversation about growing old and followed by the album’s most earnest track, ‘makes me young.’

As Torrey Peters wrote in the 2021 bestseller ‘detransition, baby,’ this generation of trans people has the opportunity to find our own way through what she called the “sex and the city problem” that women in this country have been faced with since their entry into the workforce: covering the ennui of growing older with a career, a relationship, a child, or a life dedicated to art.  

Much has changed since 2021, which now appears as an aberrant moment of relative optimism in the trans community. When ‘detransition, baby’ was published, a small chorus of detransition activists were not yet regularly appearing on Fox News to campaign for restrictions and outright bans on transition care.  

I and many others slipped through the messy phases of our transitions before everyone was expected to have a take on it, when the arc of history appeared to be bending rather quickly. That all feels naive, today, but we still have to wake up and go to work in the morning.

Pink Balloons is about the surreal experience of trying to live your life - and have fun doing it - with just a little too much information about the state of things to unselfconsciously talk of such a luxury as ennui. And isn’t that how we all live now? How many of us have sat down for a meal with friends and family immediately after reading something on the internet that ruins our appetite? In this world, you always know ten good reasons not to dance. But you can’t let that stop you.

I’m obviously biased here, so listen to the critics: Stereogum says that “pink balloons accurately captures this shit-hole time, but feels activating instead of depressingly hopeless.” Pitchfork says: “It’s bleak out there, but Ekko Astral aren’t trying to make you aware of it; they know you know. The power in their songs lies in the way the music gurgles up, emulating the acidic paranoia gnawing at us and encouraging the urge to fight it back down.”

You can stream Pink Balloons just about everywhere. I had it on repeat while I went for a long spring walk around my neighborhood this afternoon. It's got bops! You can also buy my poetry collection here. The e-book is just 99 cents. Maybe you’ll be the next person to give it new life.

Can’t wait to share my other exciting new project with you all!