Cindy Lee knows the secret
“Doing it is where it’s at I think.”
Has everyone been listening to Cindy Lee without me? Their seventh album, the two-hour-plus Diamond Jubilee, came out last March to widespread critical acclaim, but somehow I only discovered it a couple of weeks ago. Which was good timing, actually, as I was making a big writing push and here was the perfect soundtrack: sprawling yet intimate, full of yearning but also a little sinister, beautifully crafted but messy—all tensions that I’d like my writing to hold, come to think of it. Plus, Lee’s guitar playing is unreal.
Listen to Diamond Jubilee on YouTube (with ads) or buy it on Bandcamp (well worth the twenty bucks)
Cindy Lee is the performance vehicle/persona1 of the Canadian musician Patrick Flegel, who was previously the guitarist and lead singer of the band Women—and who did a Reddit AMA chat five years ago that contained the following exchange, which I read shortly after downloading Diamond Jubilee and which has also been in my head these last couple weeks. (Flegel/Lee is writing as “realistikstudios” here.)
If you were to absorb only one piece of advice about writing or making art, this would be a pretty good one: It doesn’t matter how you practice your craft, what matters is actually doing it. And focusing too much on the gear of your craft—all the stuff you tell yourself you need to acquire or master before you can really get down to work—is always a diversion and never essential. Thrift is paramount! Words to live by, for artists especially.
WHICH OF THESE IS TRUE?
Texting with my friend Anna Brones about our respective book projects recently, I came out with the following formula: “I just keep reminding myself that the quality of a book is (I believe) directly proportional to the number of times the author thought they were going to lose their mind while writing it.” Is this true? Maybe a visualization will help:
OK—on further thought, doesn’t there come a point at which the author has lost his or her mind so many times that the book suffers for it? In which case, maybe it’s about losing your mind the right number of times, Yerkes-Dodson–style, like this:
Or—another possibility—there is no relation between the two things, and I’m just trying to make myself feel better for the last few years of flailing around on my book project and never quite finishing it:
HOW ARTISTS WORM
As you do your holiday shopping this year, may I humbly suggest my two Daily Rituals books as gift options for the writers, artists, musicians, and performers in your life? In them, I compiled stories about how more than 300 brilliant minds tackled their daily work, and I do genuinely think they’re useful sourcebooks for creative people trying to figure out how to best channel their limited time and energy.
You can order them from Bookshop, Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, my publisher, Amazon (if you must), or, best of all, your local independent bookstore.
Thanks for reading! See you in two weeks for my last issue of 2024 🙃
In other words: Patrick Flagel records and performs as Cindy Lee. Does this make Lee a performance vehicle, a drag persona, an alter ego, something else? Every description feels a little awkward and inadequate to me.
I had a similar thought recently as I was working on a painting. You have to be able to manage the waves of frustration that come to kill your creativity and impede your flow state. Or you'll never get to the other side. If I drew a graph it would look like steps but not connected just lines staggering upward. They can't be connected cause it's a mystery how I found the way to start again at each interval.
Oh, fun! Immediate curiosity at hearing their voice.
My bf and i argued over the sentence "Cindy Lee is the performance vehicle of Patrick . . .etc." bc I thought it was clear this person was not one but two, or both one, said rather straightforwardly, but he thought it was oddly vague somehow (maybe because of the word "vehicle" instead of "persona"? idk).