In July of last year, my band Practicing Sincerity played its last show. It was an emotional night. We had been playing together for years, all reaching milestones in music we hadn’t before. We went on tour together, made merch that we sold across Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, made friends with people from all over the country, got to play with some of our favorite artists, recorded an album, and released it on a label. It was hard for all of us to let this thing go, but I have to own that the decision to end it was ultimately mine. After months if not years of consideration, I announced to the band in December 2023 that I felt it was time to call it quits. I played over in my head how I wanted to say it, and I cried on my way to band practice knowing what I was about to do. It felt like getting ready to break up with a romantic partner you still love deeply but who maybe you no longer feel in love with, and I questioned myself as much or more than I ever have in any decision I’ve made. At the beginning of practice, I told the band about my decision. We were all sad, but they all understood. I really couldn’t have asked for sweeter people to call my bandmates. After talking for a bit, we decided to set a date sometime in summer 2024 for a final show and to play whatever shows we could in the remaining time. I think they would all agree that these ended up being some of our best shows. Of course, this made feeling confident in my decision even harder. Was I making a huge mistake? I had to believe no, that I was doing this for the right reasons. I made a social media post announcing the decision in the form of a multi-page Notes app confession, briefly outlining reasons I felt it was time to end the band. At the time, I felt it extremely important to specify that while the band was ending, Practicing Sincerity as a project was not. Now, a year later, I feel it might have. As I’ve looked back on this project I’ve thought about how much went into its creation that no one ever saw or knew about. So, I decided I wanted to write a sort of biography for Practicing Sincerity. Does it feel silly to write a retrospective for my own art project that was never even particularly popular? Of course it does, but I’m writing this for myself as much as I am writing it for the few people who might find it interesting. It was incredibly touching, the night of the last show and the months leading up to it, learning how impactful our little band was for many in the community. People who came to our shows and were touched by my lyrics about grief, who got to get their feelings out dancing to our music, people who met their chosen families in the courtyard between sets, and people who were inspired by seeing a person of color fronting an indie band in an extremely white music scene in an extremely white town to start their own bands. So, if for no one other than myself, if I just described you, this is for you.

Practicing Sincerity started as an idea. 2013 was one of the worst years of my life, and I came out of it a different person with different priorities. In addition to a close friend dying in a freak accident, a breakup and some subsequent drama led to me essentially losing most of my close friends in a few-month span. I was depressed, angry, and lonely. In this state, my tastes started to change. I found myself less drawn to abstract expressions of feeling in art and more interested in raw emotion. The Monitor by Titus Andronicus was on heavy rotation, as was American Weekend by Waxahatchee. At one point, I sat down with one of the close friends I had lost and he said something that, while I knew was being said with ulterior motives, rang true. He told me that, for how much time we had spent together, he felt he didn’t know me that well, that I never really talked about how I felt about things or what I wanted. It was true. At the time, I was deeply uncomfortable sharing my feelings and desires in any direct way, and it was clear this was becoming an impediment to my life, so I decided I needed to address this. I looked for ways to exercise emotional vulnerability in different places in my life. It was hard, but I pretty immediately found it rewarding. Even if it resulted in rejection, just allowing myself to say I wanted something or felt a way was freeing. Eventually, it resulted in me entering a long-term relationship with someone I had been interested in since meeting her several years prior. I wove it into my art, learning how to write fiction and poetry and eventually songs that more plainly conveyed emotions, and I saw my art improve through this. Soon, it was time to decide what I wanted to do after graduating from UCSC. I decided to move to New York. My dad had moved to the city when I left for college so I had spent a considerable amount of time there already, including a month when I was 19 that I spent subletting an apartment in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, so I felt like I knew I could handle it. In my last months in Santa Cruz I poured myself into finishing writing my senior project for my Creative Writing major, a novella about a boy with depression living in a punk house, and honing my music project at the time – a solo project called Olivia Rose – into something I would feel proud to bring to the East Coast. I wrote a song that, in retrospect, was the beginning of what would become Practicing Sincerity. I never recorded it or even officially named it, other than calling it “Downer Song” on setlists because of an audience comment during the first show I played it at. It somewhat plainly outlined my feelings of abandonment and loneliness mixed with self-loathing and my decision to basically run away to New York, and it was the first song I had written in almost 10 years of songwriting that was about my feelings and plainly expressed those feelings mostly without metaphor or symbolism. It was simple, both lyrically and musically. It felt embarrassing to play in front of people, but it felt important. In the couple months I spent living at my mom’s house in Thousand Oaks, I recorded my Olivia Rose songs and released an EP on Bandcamp called (((OLIVIA ROSE))). My intent had been to release this, get tapes made, move to New York, and continue playing shows as Olivia Rose. Instead, this EP became more or less the last thing Olivia Rose ever did.

https://oliviarosesc.bandcamp.com/track/forgive-forget-2

I don’t remember when exactly I came up with the name, but I know it was before I had finished writing any songs for it. Sometime between releasing (((OLIVIA ROSE))) and getting situated in Brooklyn I realized it was time to move on to a new music project. I had become obsessed with Allison Crutchfield’s solo EP Lean In To Me and was otherwise engrossed in bands like Nana Grizol, Radiator Hospital, and Hop Along. I knew I wanted to write songs that directly expressed emotion like they did, but I knew it wasn’t something that came naturally to me. So, I decided to create a box for myself. Within reason, I would not use figurative or symbolic language at all. I would write about my feelings and experiences the way I would in prose. In my fiction writing work I had become familiar with the term “new sincerity,” a loosely-defined trend in literature, music, and film that in summary rejected the irony and cynicism of post-modernism in favor of finding beauty in the mundane and banal aspects of life on the cusp of the 21st Century. This very much embodied how I wanted to write songs, and so I wanted to work it into the fabric of this new project. I came up with Practicing Sincerity. “Practicing” I thought of as meaning not only trying to improve at something, which I was, but like how you practice a religion. “Sincerity” took on this “new sincerity” meaning, and since I still didn’t have a great capacity to talk about emotions in words, I applied this mostly to narrative. I decided I would write lyrics like how I would write stories, and the music and my vocal inflections would convey the underlying emotion. That’s an oversimplification but essentially that was the idea. The first song I wrote with the new name I wrote mostly on the Q train heading home from my job in Manhattan in Winter. I wouldn’t figure out how to set instruments to it for a long time, but it became the song “At Newark Airport.” It was about looking back at the life I had left behind in Santa Cruz, the leap of faith I took with my girlfriend E at the time to move to New York together, and the gut-wrenching feeling I was stuck with when she left to spend the holidays with her family in California and told me she didn’t know if she would come back. She did come back, and we lived together in Brooklyn for 5 months before she left to return to California. I spent another month or two there before also returning to the West Coast. In that month or so I spent a lot of time on the stoop of my apartment in Bed-Stuy chainsmoking and drinking beer in the summer heat, thinking about what I would be returning to in Santa Cruz and what I would be leaving behind in New York, and wrote the song “Stoop Life,” another song it would take me a while to figure out how to set instruments to. At the time I had acquired a vintage Alesis drum machine off eBay and a Casiotone off of Craigslist and was trying to work these into the sound. I recorded a couple covers using the Casiotone and the drum machine but while the drum machine would become a part of the early Practicing Sincerity sound, the keyboard would take a while to make its debut.

https://practicingsincerity.bandcamp.com/track/stand-next-to-me-bad-banana-cover

When E told me she was moving back to California I resisted the idea of following her at first. That is, until I couldn’t take the pressure anymore. Eventually I succumbed and agreed to move back but insisted that we move back to Santa Cruz rather than staying in LA where her parents and my mother lived. I felt I needed a better reason to move back than that I was following her, so I came up with a plan to begin booking shows at SubRosa and to try to turn it into an established DIY venue that could be central to the local indie music scene the way some of the venues I was going to in Brooklyn were. Soon after moving back to my mom’s house in Thousand Oaks, an opportunity presented itself. Matt, the singer of a band called Real Life Buildings whom I had met at some of their first shows back East, reached out that the people who were gonna book their show in Santa Cruz fell through and he wanted to see if I could help. Not only did this feel like the perfect chance to get my foot in the door at SubRosa, but also to premiere Practicing Sincerity as a music project. I contacted a friend who was active in the collective and asked if I could book this show there with her supervision. She agreed, and I went about preparing a live set. It would consist of a song about becoming addicted to cigarettes at age 13, a song that was basically an apology to my ex whom I was on bad terms with (that was probably the closest to what PS would eventually sound like), a cover, and a version of “Stoop Life” that I tried to make sound like a punk song using my drum machine. I rented a car, and I drove E and myself up to Santa Cruz for the show with my gear. It was my first time seeing my friends since leaving the previous summer and it was weird, considering I had accepted I would probably never see most of them again. I was also trying to play host to Real Life Buildings while, after my set, trying to placate my partner who was mortified I had played a song about my ex when we had just almost broken up a few nights earlier. I never played that song again, or the one about addiction. I don’t remember that night fondly, but that was the first Practicing Sincerity show. After that, I began figuring out the logistics of moving back to Santa Cruz and becoming a collective member at SubRosa so I could start booking shows there. 

Once in Santa Cruz, E and I started trying to build a life together. It was hard. I wish I could write this without including so much about her, but the truth is that the story of our relationship is enmeshed in the story of this project getting started. The first song I wrote at our new house in Santa Cruz was a song about how difficult it had been for us to get there and trying to feel like we were at the start of something good. In October, I would release the first original songs I had recorded under the Practicing Sincerity moniker; that song, which at the time I called “cool breeze of a new era” but would become just “Cool Breeze,” and “goner,” a song I had written near the end of Olivia Rose that I felt fit this project. They were simple, just electric guitar with reverb and my vocals. It felt good to put these songs out and to finally have some songwriting to pair with the name, since the lyrics were such a big part of why I chose it.

https://practicingsincerity.bandcamp.com/track/cool-breeze-of-a-new-era

Despite me not putting any drum machine or layers on these tracks, I was in the process of dialing in my live set with prerecorded tracks behind me that I would play on my laptop. At the time that was not a popular mode of playing in the area, and I felt amused with myself like it was my little piece of the East Coast indie scene I’d brought with me. It also allowed me to change the feeling of some of the songs. “Goner” and “Cool Breeze” became upbeat and poppy, I was able to turn “At Newark Airport” into a fuzzy drone that would turn into a punk song backed by drums that were as close a ripoff of Dan Deacon as I was capable of (which was not very close), and with that I allowed “Stoop Life” to be a slow, sad song, rather than trying to force it into something it wasn’t. Once these felt solid, I went about recording them into an EP. This one I put a lot more effort into than the “goner/cool breeze of a new era” release. With this, I really wanted to establish an aesthetic and some general themes. I wanted the name to be heartfelt and tongue-in-cheek at the same time. I ended up calling it I never thought I’d miss palm trees so much, and the cover was the title in white Helvetica font over a picture I had taken on my phone in my mom’s car driving back to her house from LAX when I came back from New York. It was meant to be a nod to alt lit chapbooks and poetry collections with names like you are a little bit happier than i am and i will never be beautiful enough to make us beautiful together while also leaning into the trend in both emo music and the burgeoning bedroom pop scene to have whole sentences as song titles. Finally, I felt like Practicing Sincerity was a fully formed project.

https://practicingsincerity.bandcamp.com/track/at-newark-airport

Shortly after the release of I never thought I’d miss palm trees so much, my relationship with E came to an explosive close. She decided she needed to move back to LA to be with her family, an announcement that came after I had already tried to end things with her multiple times. I told E I supported her decision but that I would not be following her this time and I would not do long distance like we had when I was in New York. I don’t think I can convey the relief I felt knowing it would come to an actual end. One day while sitting on the beach alone contemplating this I wrote the song “Bigger Mistakes” in mostly one take. Our last few weeks together were torture as she dragged her feet on leaving and found ways to blame me for it until finally, as I left for New York for ten days, I told her to be gone when I got home. I knew it would be bad, but I had no idea how bad. For two weeks straight I was bombarded with texts and voicemails from E telling me I was a selfish piece of shit who only cared about myself. I had expected some degree of this from her, but the sheer cruelty of it threw a giant red flag in my brain that finally got the gears turning on how I had been treated by her over the last couple years. I also, while in New York for those ten days, had realized I had feelings for a friend of mine I’d grown closer with my last months of living there, and so spent much of this time writing the song “Mood Lighting,” the ending verse of which I had mostly written weeks prior without fully understanding what or who it was about. I played that and “Bigger Mistakes” at every show I got added to that summer. I felt liberated to be able to sing whatever I wanted without someone policing my lyrics and the topics I wrote about. I also fell into the deepest depression of my life so far. Among the many maladaptive ways I found to cope with this, I found purpose in throwing myself into my work as a musician, show promoter, and community member. I met some of the most important people in my life during this period, and made some of my biggest steps up. At a house show to see Stephen Steinbrink, I ran into a coworker from a different department I didn’t know very well but knew played in a band. His name was Mike Nick. He told me that his band Our Dad Loves Bikes that he was in with his friend Ryan and Ryan’s sibling was breaking up due to the sibling moving away and asked if I’d be interested in them playing drums and bass respectively on my songs. I said yes immediately, and we went about setting up a first practice. Ryan Halberg would only end up playing bass with us for a few months, but would go on to remotely help me engineer and then fully mix Will We Feel This Way Forever years later. We played our first show together in September that year at Verve Coffee’s then-annual Record Swap. In those few months only one new song got finished, but we knew we needed to record it before he split for LA. Within a couple sessions in Ryan and Mike Nick’s garage we recorded an EP, the centerpiece of which was this new song, “Sincerity,” about my feelings of loss and directionlessness while realizing I was the reason I was feeling those things. The name was partly a nod to the band name, but also I couldn’t think of a good name for it to pull from the lyrics and so named it after one of my favorite short stories at the time. That song has stayed a band and audience favorite since. It marked a growth in my songwriting and an evolution in the project’s sound that would only become more prevalent: guitar solos.

https://practicingsincerity.bandcamp.com/track/sincerity

My timeline of these few months is a little fuzzy. In addition to my crushing depression and the effects that drinking excessively and using drugs regularly were having on my memory I was suddenly faced with a recent sexual partner’s pregnancy scare that I was beyond unequipped to deal with and, in December of 2016, I wound up in the hospital for a week due to an abscess in my throat that the doctors told me was the size of a golfball and would have killed me had I not come in when I did, which was at the point of barely breathing and pain so excruciating it was causing full-body convulsions while I rode in an Uber to the Emergency Room (I still think about that poor Uber driver sometimes). Days felt like weeks, and weeks felt like months. I know that at some point between December and January we recorded the EP, and that during that time we asked our friend Steven Kanenan, who had been playing bass in a band called Mary Skate and the Trashleys, to join the band and he said yes and Ryan started teaching him bass parts. Aside from myself, Steven is the longest standing member of Practicing Sincerity. A few months into Steven playing with us, we were asked to play our first “real venue” show with Elvis Depressedly at the Catalyst Atrium. The promoter, Izzy Kaufman, had seen us around and liked our sound. He used to play in a band called Watergate Sandals and we’d met a few times at their shows. After the show, he asked if we’d be interested in having him play second guitar in the band and again I immediately said yes. His presence in the band only lasted a couple months and we only played a few shows together, but he left a lasting impact. I wrote the song “I Think I Like It” during this time, another musical turning point, and while I love the versions we have online, I still wish we could have recorded it with Izzy playing his parts. I believe there’s a video online of us playing it for the first time but that’s it. We went back to being a three piece for a while after he left, but we could hear the missing parts when we played. Before Izzy could be replaced, however, Mike Nick announced he was also moving to LA and would have to leave the band. Feeling extremely uncertain about my ability to find a new drummer and unenthused about my new role needing to replace people in the band so frequently, I asked him who he thought would be the best fit. He told me that Jordie from the band Moonbeaux was in his opinion the best drummer in the scene. At the time I wasn’t sure I remembered who that person was but I knew I loved that project so I reached out. I invited her to a practice between just the two of us to feel things out, and I was entranced by how much power she played with. After that, Jordie Washburn became our official drummer. We played our first couple shows together as a three piece. Then, as has seemed to be the trend with me and finding bandmates for this project, I got lucky. A girl I’d met job hunting while moving back to Santa Cruz and whose music I loved but had disappeared for over a year was back in town and, after seeing her play for the first time in a while, I asked Fernly Mueller-Tuescher if she would be interested in joining the band on guitar. She told me she loved the softer music she was making but that her dream was to play loud and I got to see her face light up as I assured her she would get to play plenty loud with our new drummer who vocally had zero interest in playing any less than as hard as she could. Finally, after replacing three bandmates in about half a year, we had a solid lineup that was in it for the long haul. 

Over the next year and a half, Practicing Sincerity became a staple Santa Cruz band. We were playing multiple shows a month with occasional spots at bars like the Blue Lagoon and more official venues like The Crepe Place and The Catalyst Atrium while also starting to play DIY shows in San Jose and dipping our toes in the Bay Area. We were building a small collection of new songs since the last EP and were getting ready to figure out recording when we got an opportunity to go on tour for the first time. Steven’s other band, Eve’s Peach, was booking a tour and had asked for my help with a few spots since I knew lots of people from booking at SubRosa now and I asked if PS could join. We did seven days and seven shows through the Pacific Northwest, with our first stop being at Outer Space in Arcata, CA where a recording of our set would be made that we would release much later. Unfortunately, this tour took place while wildfires spread across Oregon and Washington and the smoke took a toll on Jordie who, after a few more shows back home, told us she had developed asthma and could not keep playing drums. It was a very sad outcome to what had otherwise been an incredible experience for all of us. We did, however, manage to record one song together. Jordie’s former bandmate Nathan had offered to record us, and in a couple sessions we tracked parts for what would end up a stand-alone single for “I Think I Like It.”

https://practicingsincerity.bandcamp.com/track/i-think-i-like-it

I didn’t want to accept having to replace Jordie but I knew it needed to happen and somewhat quickly so we wouldn’t lose the momentum we’d built. I enlisted Lauren DiQuattro who was playing drums in Fernly’s band BB Sinclair and another local band called Day Trip, and when I did they told me it would have to be temporary since they’d be moving after they graduated from UCSC in the summer. I decided it was worth it and they played with us for about 6 months, during which time they wrote the drum parts for a song I’d written after getting back from tour called “Complicit” which after playing only a couple times became our set closer until the band’s ending last year. As Lauren got ready to move and I reluctantly looked for a new drummer, Steven recommended his friend Oan Lindblad. Perhaps this is oversharing, but I would be lying if I said I had no doubts after our first practice. The truth is, I was very uncertain, but I was also just exhausted having to teach another new person the songs. Our first show together, however, erased that uncertainty. It was an important show to me, we were playing with two bands I’d fallen in love with while living in New York now years prior and had always wanted to book and play with, Bellows and Gabby’s World. Oan played flawlessly, which would have been impressive enough if it was just his first show with us but it was his first time playing for an audience like that ever. That was July 2019, Oan stayed our drummer until our last show and is who you hear playing on Will We Feel This Way Forever.

At the time that lockdown for Covid-19 started, we had been getting ready to record an album. We had a studio and an engineer lined up, both of which immediately became unavailable. Thankfully, despite not being able to play shows together, we remained mostly a unit. I focused on playing solo shows, since that’s what I could do for virtual livestreams, but we got together as friends during this time and played together as a band once when we recorded a live set from outside in the SubRosa courtyard for San Francisco’s BFF.fm. Later in the year, as things slowly reopened, we booked a session at District Recording in San Jose to track drums and bass for songs for an album, including a new song I had only recently finished and had to teach to the band during recording; “Stoop Life Part 2,” the track containing the album title which would be the closer and would be more musically complicated than anything I’d attempted before. Then, after spending hours going through possible microphone combos over the phone and sending recordings to Ryan to decide on a set up, I recorded all of my own guitar and vocal parts in my basement, then Fernly’s, then set up my equipment at Grandpa’s House (Fernly’s house which hosted shows pre-pandemic) to get my friend Lucas’s guest vocals and their whole house singing group vocals. Because this was pre-vaccine 2021 at this point I couldn’t be inside while any of them were singing, so I had to set up my computer outside their garage. The record wouldn’t be the same without them. I still get goosebumps when I hear Lucas’s vocal and Fernly’s guitar come in for the second part of “Stoop Life Part 2.” I definitely teared up sitting outside hearing my friends all sing together through the tinny garage door. It felt so special. Ryan Halberg offered to mix it for free, and after months of sending mixes and notes back and forth I had a final mix to start sending to labels for release.

https://practicingsincerity.bandcamp.com/track/stoop-life-part-2

The process of finding someone to release the album was harrowing and took a lot out of me. By the time the album came out in July 2022 I was depressed and didn’t know if I wanted to keep going with the project, but I was excited to have it out and felt proud of it even if it didn’t reach the audience I wanted it to. I started thinking about what came next. And, as I thought about that more, and as my life and the lives of my bandmates continued to change and grow, I considered that what came next would not be a new sound for this band, but a new project for myself altogether. The motivations I’d had for creating the vessel that was Practicing Sincerity were no longer prevalent in my life. Not only that, but my tastes had changed. As depression became a smaller force in my life (for the time being) and self-loathing faded as I embraced my identity as a trans person, I identified less with the angsty, punky music I had been writing. I finally had to accept that I wanted something different, that this project I had started out of a need to learn how to identify and express my emotions would now end because I had learned to do just that. It was time to move on. I wanted to make music that reached people, that made people feel in ways that were challenging but healing, and that would bring people together. Learning, at the end of this road, that we accomplished that even to a small degree, was overwhelming. I am still incredibly proud of what we did together. Will We Feel This Way Forever is the only thing I’ve ever recorded that I listen to regularly and I personally think “Stoop Life Part 2,” especially the second half of it, is probably the best song I’ve ever written. That first solo show with Real Life Buildings was ten years ago this month, and I would not be the person I am today if not for the journey this project took me on. If you were a part of this in any way, either by coming to our shows or playing with us or listening online, I am beyond grateful for you. Thank you for being there.

❤

This year I bought a point and shoot film camera in the hopes it would encourage me to bring it more places and take more pictures. Thankfully, it has. Here are some of my favorites from the roll I just had developed. Shot on Kodak Ultramax 400.