Karaoke

My friends Perry, left, and Al.

My friends Perry, left, and Al.

After I moved to Philadelphia in 2011, 2012 came down on me. As I began to deal with the facts of my transness and my memories of childhood sexual and emotional abuse, I found myself with the feeling of having nothing to lose. I decided that I had to make myself sing in a band, or I would always regret it.

I was sitting in the basement living room of the sublet I lived in, drinking milk stouts with my friend Perry of the band Bike Crash, and I asked him if he knew of any bands looking to audition singers. “Why don’t we just start a band?” he said. He emailed me some demos that he’d been working on; I didn’t know what to make of them, but I found that when I tried to sing over them, vocal melodies came naturally to me.

One summer day after I moved to West Philly, Perry and I sat on the grass in Clark Park and ate the weed brownies his friend had given him, and we got to talking the bands we’d loved in college, like Guided by Voices and Wolf Parade. While weed has fucked with my life a lot, at that moment, the weed numbed my fear, and I said that we should go to Perry’s place and work on music. It was fun.

Later that summer, I went to Punk Rock Karaoke, a traveling karaoke project that only plays benefit events. My friend Al San Valentin, who I didn’t know well at the time, got on one mic and started to sing the Pixies’ “Debaser,” a weird, fun, poppy post-punk song I’d loved in high school. I jumped on the other mic and sang along with them. At first, we both screamed the Frank Black parts, but as the song went on, I moved to Kim Deal’s scratchy harmony and Al wailed Frank’s part. During the guitar solo at the end, we jumped up and down and high-fived over and over.

The next night at an after-party for the music and zine festival Ladyfest, Al said, “Annie, can we please just be in a band together?” I looked to Perry, right next to us, and said, “Well, Perry and I have been talking about playing together. You can totally play with us sometime.”

What Al didn’t know was that I had been waiting my whole life for someone to realize how amazing I was at karaoke, and invite me to be in a band.

Al, Perry, and I formed See-Through Girls, and I invited my housemate Zach to play with us after I laid on the couch one day, heard drumming from the basement, and thought, “That sounds good. I wonder who that is?”

I had so much fun with my bandmates. They supported my weird ideas, my dog yelps and songs about kink and bugs and the Bible. As a trans woman walking around Philly, people made my voice into a constant liability. People used it to read me as trans, and then to use it against me, to taunt me about how obvious it was that I was “not a girl.” Through making rackets with See-Through Girls, I continue to swim through a long process of feeling my voice resonate in my body, and letting go of my fear of its sometimes deep rasp.

As much fun as I was having, when I saw amazing guitar players/singers like Mars from Aye Nako, or Audrey from Little Waist, I heard the voice in my heart saying “but that should be me.” When my bandmates asked me what key I was singing in, I felt embarrassed to tell them I had no idea what that meant, and I knew that knowing an instrument at least a little bit would allay some of that feeling of incompetence. I told myself that I was satisfied with just singing, because I was afraid. What if it was hard? What if I sucked?

I heard about Ladies Rock Camp, and decided to sign up to play guitar. Ladies Rock Camp sets strangers up together with instruments and instructors, and asks them to form a band, write a song, and perform within the space of a weekend. “It totally destigmatizes the songwriting and performing process,” my friend Meredith says, and she’s right.

I learned two or three chords, and played sharp, angular tones over my bandmate Terry’s drumming and my other bandmate Naima’s funky bassline. I sang words I’d sang into my phone’s voice memo recorder in Montréal, after a 10-hour bus ride: “Oh Montréal, when I’m gone, you can take it all.” When we played the Ladies Rock Showcase that Sunday night, I felt a rush and a sense of confidence. I listened closely and found that the racket I made sounded way louder if I waited for crucial points to unleash it.

Gig poster, linework by Al San Valentin, colors by me.

Gig poster; line work by Al San Valentin, colors by me.

For See-Through Girls, we wrote a song called “Hidden Beach.” It starts, “Oh! My teenage bed, I would long to write a song or draw a comic book that would draw you close to me…”

When See-Through Girls played in Providence, Rhode Island, on our first tour, I introduced this song, and said that I’d wanted to tell my origin story, like Morrissey’s in “Late Night, Maudlin Street,” or Batman’s. I stood, smiling wide, in front of an audience filled with friends and artists who inspired me: artists like Cathy G. Johnson, O Horvath, and Victoria and Joey of Malportado Kids and the incendiary Downtown Boys. “This is my origin story. You have one, too,” I said into the mic, my voice filling the room, “and I wanna hear yours.”