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Evelyn Gray Blooms Into Her First Album

Lucy Gellman | July 29th, 2019

Evelyn Gray Blooms Into Her First Album

Music  |  Arts & Culture

 

EGray
Evelyn Gray Album Cover. Courtney Brown Photo. 

The beginning of “Sprouts” is a little like breathing itself. Low and slow, one long inhale with fuzz and reverb. Musician Evelyn Gray already knows what she’s doing, then she breaks through on vocals. She is an exhale rising, deceptively calm with the power to shred just beneath the surface. 

I know that I’ll never be/Where the grass is greener
Pump my body full of gasoline/Cause I’ve been feelin’ empty

“Sprouts” opens Let The Flower Grow, the first full-length album from Gray with production from Sans Serif Recording. The album, which was released over the weekend, is available for download and in CD and vinyl form on Bandcamp. Richly layered, paced and crisp, it lays out ten tracks that are revelatory and vulnerable, each melting into the next. In them is the story of an artist who is medically transitioning on her home turf, with all the the beauty and baggage that comes with it.

“It’s like nothing else I’ve ever done before,” Gray said in an interview last week, leading up to a release party at Middletown’s MAC 650 Gallery & Artist Co-Op Saturday night. “Before this project, I had never really written a song with words that I sang in front of people. It wasn’t until I started writing songs that were so personal—I had so much to say all of a sudden, and it just started falling out of me.”

In some ways, the album feels like it has been decades in the making. While it isn’t Gray’s first foray into the music scene—she has been playing on and off since she was 16, released a three-track EP last fall, and has been performing her material since last year—it draws from years of musical influences, from metal bands Between The Buried And Me, Underoath and August Burns Red to indie sweetheart Julien Baker, whose performances still leave Gray in tears.

But in other ways, it feels exactly like what it is: a fresh and triumphant return to music and to herself. After spending several years away from playing, she started thinking about the album in April of last year, after returning to Connecticut from New York City. At the time, she was medically transitioning in the same place where she had grown up, and found it incredibly difficult.  

“I was miserable,” she said. “I felt like a snake trying to fit back into the skin that it just shed. I fell back into all these expectations of who I was rather than who I was.”

“A lot of people don’t understand the trans experience fully,” she continued. “I think that there’s a lot of unlearning that has to happen. And that’s on both sides of the equation. That’s me having to unlearn all these falsities that were drilled into me growing up too.”

When she started writing about her experience, it was difficult and cathartic in a way that she’d never experienced before. She sold her television and canceled her Netflix subscription. She stopped playing video games. When she wasn’t at work, she was thinking about the next track on the album. With distractions gone, she found that she could pound out an entire song in one sitting.

From that first note of the album to the last, there’s a wonderful hodgepodge of her influences—metal and progressive rock, but also indie music that’s tender enough to make a heart split right in two. Gray opens her lungs fully, then dials back the guitar to evoke an intimate discussion, the kind where white lights are strung up and pulsing softly in the background. Her voice is wonderfully complex: steely and strong but also melancholic, soft until she wants it to be scorching.

Even in a tender, measured bloom of instrumentals, the lyrics are sharp, warranting a second, third and fifth listen. On “Deadname,” Gray calls out the process of deadnaming—referring to a trans person by their former name, which usually corresponds to a different gender identity—with personal anecdote that leaves the listener feeling wounded and heartsick.

I thought you knew who I was/I thought we had that conversation
Maybe I was wrong/Maybe you don’t know me
Well, I know myself/Even still, I feel it now
The bruises coming underneath my skin

She’s not confrontational. She’s not pugnacious, even though she has every right to be. She’s gone for something much more interesting: a voice that sounds injured, with a question mark at the back of her throat. She's been betrayed. Now she has to pick up the pieces, to clear the garden, to pull away the weeds and ready the ground, so it can bloom again.

The tracks that follow do just that. As she leaps from “Deadname” to “Catching Feelings” to “Gardening,” a sort of image emerges with the lyrics: Gray there on a bright plot of land, tending to a rich soil that nourishes her own body as much as the plants around her.

If the lyrics are self-conscious, they don't show it. In “Take With Food,” she is self-aware and ready to de-stigmatize mental health. In “People Like Me,” she pushes it a step further, letting listeners know they’re not alone without ever saying the words “depression,” “anxiety,” “trans” or “fear.” There’s a personal geography there: her body a raised bed, her chest open with something green taking root. She is the flower, and she is letting it burst into glorious bloom.

For her, the record “is exactly where I wanted to be." She praised Carlson for his work on the production end, before which she tracked everything for the album at home. As she releases it this month, Gray added that she hopes it can be a source of the same shelter, clarity and catharsis that music has provided in her own life.

“This is the first thing in my life that I’ve ever been proud of myself for doing,” she said. “It’s the first thing that I’ve accomplished. It’s the first thing that has my name on it … this is the first time in my life where I’m really, genuinely proud of myself for the work that I did, because I had to do so much work on myself to do this, and it is the most honest way that I can try to translate how my experience as a trans person feels.”

“I’m just ready,” she said. “I feel like the first half of this process has been the planning, whereas now I get to do the actualizing.”