The BILL album had just come out. I was suffering under the weight of the expectations for that release, both my own and those of others. It was a big deal. We’d tracked it at Electrical Audio with Steve Albini, invested far more than we ever had for previous releases, and I think we’d built it up as The Most Important Thing We’d Done So Far. And it was important, for visible and invisible reasons alike. It’s no small thing to see something of that size through to completion. It’s no small thing to conquer an abuse-informed set of fears about your own capabilities and worth. We’d done it. We’d slain the fucking dragons.
But then what?
Turns out, Then What is that sometimes the people you used to hang around with are suddenly unavailable. Then What comes with a quiet envy no one will cop to, a silent removal of previously in place support, and there you are, alone with the dead dragons and your own little victories no one gives a shit about. You get some insensitive comments about the guy who tracked the record, all from men. You get approximately two-hundred and fifty thousand queries about the mics (as if that’s what makes a record), also from men. And the truly lazy tell you you’re lucky to have worked with the guy. The press spends a good deal of time focusing on the guy, too. You make a mental note to not do this again, to not let the men be the only ones they talk about in your work. Sexism or what, get bigger. Make yourself bigger than the bullshit.
And then, in a stunning moment of self-betrayal and abandonment, you call a family member.
A mistake.
* * *
There are things that happened to me in my childhood that I can’t make un-happen. I’ve never even set about trying to forget them, much less undo them. Once the sun sets, you either have pictures of it or you don’t. One way or another, it happened. But I have spent the better part of my life standing up for my personal history, a fact that feels weird to even write. These events make other people uncomfortable, including the people who caused and allowed them to happen. Almost as soon as I started to speak up about them (age sixteen, Miami, XL t-shirts and olive green walls with a Terminator 2 poster above the bed), I was told to forgive, forget, be the bigger person, not to dwell on it, to let it go. These things are abstract concepts to me now; I can’t even access what they meant to me then. I owned maybe twenty records, half of which were likely copied from friends. I probably had ten shirts, all oversized, all containing profound philosophical statements like “DIE YUPPY SCUM” or photos of hardcore and metal bands. Why would I have had the sophisticated tools required to let anything go, whatever that meant? And what was there to let go of? The truth?
I still don’t know.
But the years between then and now have been colored by the events themselves, to be sure, but also by the family’s resistance to my ownership of the events. I’m not sure which has been more defining, the abuses, or having to forge autonomy in the face of the pressure to conform to a narrative. It’s probably a murky mix of the two, and I don’t have any way of parsing it out from here. Either way, I’m over here and they’re over there. It’s been more than eleven years since I’ve set foot in one of my childhood homes, and more than thirteen years since I’ve seen some of the principal players. I’m okay with it. The distance has allowed the self-work to happen and has also given way to a clearer perspective on what my choices were back then. I’ll give you a hint: none. It turns out that the little wizard behind the curtain didn’t actually represent the forgiveness of others at all. It represented the forgiveness of self. It’s not very razzle-dazzle, but it’s the plain truth.
Still, I’m a human being. I have questions and impulses that sometimes feel as hard-wired as my eye color.
Sometimes I reach out. And sometimes I don’t get my whole hand back.
* * *
After BILL, I was seeking to be known. My closest friend of seventeen years had left my life the year before we made the record. Another longtime friend had gone radio silent because I set a pretty reasonable boundary with him. (Goddamned boundaries and their many unseen barbs.) Recording with Albini had been a lifelong goal, and here I’d done the damn thing, the record was great, and there was no one to tell. My partner is also in the band, and even though we shared the experience, we don’t do a great job of celebrating each other around these mile markers. We’re working on it. This cycle of creation and release has taught me that one of the greatest gifts we can give to another person is simply to say, “You fucking did this. You really did. Congratulations.” I know the self-help Instagram influencers would have us all believe that we’re just supposed to harvest our gardens of self-worth or whatever-the-fuck, but I think making work is about human connection (not to be confused with approval, which is what the influencers are actually selling you). We need to know that we’re seen and heard. And I didn’t know.
So, I called a family member.
A mistake.
It is one thing to not be known. It is another to be mocked and still held accountable for daring to speak up as an adolescent, one million years later. It was punishment.
But, I chose it. And it was a mistake.
* * *
People have been asking me if I’m writing music during the quarantine. Interviewers, friends, colleagues, enemies (they dress up as friends, but judge your choices and later use them against you; yes, I’m injured) have all asked. It’s a fair question. In one version of life, I suppose there would have been all kinds of room to write during the shut-down. But I don’t work like that. I’m not writing. Part of it is that my partner is also home all of the time, and I need to be alone when I write, to hear myself. The other part of it is that nothing is beneath the skin, threatening to destroy me if I don’t set it free right now. That’s the place I write from, take it, or leave it. There are all kinds of processes for creating work, and while I am absolutely capable of writing on demand—I do it all the time for professional co-writes—my personal work is from the bone. Those are the songs I call Keepers. They differ from the ones I call Process Songs, which explore ideas and themes—and even the occasional odd tuning—but they don’t make me want to play them a hundred times and cry. If I cry, I've hit it. If I can’t stop crying, I've won.
I wrote “The Enemy I Know” on a Tuesday, five days after The Mistake. And I instantly knew it was something I’d never said before. It was also everything I’d been trying to say since I was sixteen, in the oversized t-shirt from Y&T Records in Miami. All of the questions. All of the boundaries. All of the truth.
I cried.
And I cried nearly every time we played it for the first twenty or so times.
* * *
The first thing I heard was “I’m not your enemy.” That phrase had been coming up since before The Mistake. The two years leading up to the writing of “The Enemy I Know” had been filled with uncomfortable awarenesses and interactions. Who could have known that there had been so many bigots walking among us? People we actually knew, were friends with, or were related to? Holy shit! The Trump presidency was like opening a door to hell you couldn’t just throw your weight at and close again. And it wasn’t just the conservatives that seemed to emerge overnight. No, suddenly there was also this White Woke Movement to navigate. People who had just come into their own awareness that there was actual inequality in the world, suddenly PHD-level educated in how everyone else should behave. White women policing almost exclusively other white women (always giving men a pass, the true white feminist way), a thousand different definitions of feminist and democrat to contend with, and then: living in the South. I don’t fit here. So, I’d had plenty of reasons to both say and feel, “I’m not your enemy.” And now I had one more. The original reason.
The first verse came to me without any effort or even knowledge of what was unfolding. But it had seemed to me for most of my life, that I was not looking at life through the same lens as some of my family members. It wasn’t that we disagreed, it was that we saw different pictures altogether. And so it begged the question of what they actually saw when they looked back. How dimensional had I been? Had I even been central to their story? What did they remember?
I’d like to know
when you’re out there on your own
and you cast your eyes back home
am I in black and white or color?
And from there, to provide some context from my box of experiences. I had become acutely aware that I’d strayed from what they had hoped for me, personally, musically, and certainly behaviorally. The mocking had been about why I bothered with the music I make at all. The answer, of course, is that I make it because it reflects how I feel. But they don’t like how I feel.
do you know?
when you left me there alone
I came away from it too old?
and you don’t like the way I am now
yes, I’ve grown
My fear has long been that the original story was deleted years ago for them, replaced with a sort of static, unmoving image of what should have been. So I wrote the chorus about a television screen that never changes, and how that sameness is safe (even pleasing) to someone for whom the truth so threatening.
and like the liar radio
your mind creates a status quo
and I’m the non-stop news
I am the enemy, the enemy, I know!
and like the tv on the wall
your mind creates a static crawl
Because of my activism around LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, black lives, and HIV/AIDS awareness, I’ve long lived with a feeling that I’m too much. This feeling comes from my family of origin, from speaking up on my own behalf and being told to be quiet. The voice is the problem, and the tone is even worse.
and I’m the non-stop news
I am the enemy, the enemy, I know!
At the end of the phone call (forevermore referred to as The Mistake), I said, “If this is all there is, it’s not enough for me.” There was no response.
where are we now?
do we give up and disavow?
or tunnel through the shit somehow?
I think I’m moving on and living this out loud
In recent years, I’ve come to view my survival as less of a sad story, and more of a victory (though, people who are ill-equipped to participate in discussions around this subject often frame the whole thing with pity). The studies of the Adverse Childhood Experiences scores (ACE) reveal incredible statistics for people who have scores similar to mine. By all rights, I could have been dead years ago, truly. And I’m not. I’m very much alive. I live the life of my choosing. I advocate for myself and others. I see things through. I’m proud of it. The Mistake reminded me of my old familial duties, one of which was to suffer because they suffer. I have choices today.
I’m still alive!
I learned to live and have some pride
your suffering can not be mine
no, not this time
And then, finally, the refrain. The most cathartic thing I’ve ever sung. (It was a revelation that a post-chorus could be just one line, repeated.)
I’M NOT YOUR ENEMY
* * *
When we decided to record this EP, the central songs were this one and the second track, “Among Monsters.” We’d been playing them on the road for the few months prior to the sessions. We knew that this would be a non-Albini record (not because we didn’t love working with him—we did; it was about making something smaller scale all around), so we set about tracking the drums and bass at our home studio. I chose to track guitars at Sound Emporium here in Nashville. My rigs are so loud that it’s just best to do it in a room that can handle it. The sessions were successful, if not a little rugged. Eleven hours of my rigs is a lot. I stay in the room with them when I track so I can get all of the action and feedback from them. But I swear it rearranges my organs to do so. I sang the record in one day, at home, and I did “The Enemy I Know” last. I actually sang the EP from the last song to first, for some reason. One of the last things I tracked for the record was the backing vocals on the choruses. I’d heard them in my head since the day I wrote the song but hadn’t been able to render them, as we’re a duo. It was immensely satisfying to hear them outside of my head. It still is.
We ended up with a mix slot with Kurt Ballou that was weeks earlier than we’d originally planned for. Almost as soon as I was done tracking vocals, the sessions were sent off to him. There was something liberating about that. I couldn’t keep hammering away it, at myself. I knew how the song went. I was no longer crying when I sang it, at that point. I was ready. Sing it and let it go. He had the first passes of mixes back to us about a day later. And my voice was huge. Bigger than I’d ever heard it in my life.
And I thought, Finally, I’m bigger than the bullshit.
No one has asked me about the mics. Most importantly, I haven’t asked anyone who can only see the worst in me, to see the best in me. I’ve moved on.
The Mistake was a great gift. But I don’t recommend it.
Thanks for reading,
Buick Audra
Friendship Commanders
THE ENEMY I KNOW
I’d like to know
when you’re out there on your own
and you cast your eyes back home
am I in black and white or color?
do you know?
when you left me there alone
I came away from it too old?
and you don’t like the way I am now
yes, I’ve grown
and like the liar radio
your mind creates a status quo
and I’m the non-stop news
I am the enemy, the enemy, I know!
and like the tv on the wall
your mind creates a static crawl
and I’m the non-stop news
I am the enemy, the enemy, I know!
I’M NOT YOUR ENEMY
I’M NOT YOUR ENEMY
I’M NOT YOUR ENEMY
where are we now?
do we give up and disavow?
or tunnel through the shit somehow?
I think I’m moving on and living this out loud
I’m still alive!
I learned to live and have some pride
your suffering can not be mine
no, not this time
and like the liar radio
your mind creates a status quo
and I’m the non-stop news
I am the enemy, the enemy, I know!
and like the tv on the wall
your mind creates a static crawl
and I’m the non-stop news
I am the enemy, the enemy, I know!
I’M NOT YOUR ENEMY
I’M NOT YOUR ENEMY
I’M NOT YOUR ENEMY
I’M NOT YOUR ENEMY
I’M NOT YOUR ENEMY
I’M NOT YOUR ENEMY
I’M NOT YOUR ENEMY
I’M NOT YOUR ENEMY
I’M NOT YOUR ENEMY
