Well hi everyone, don’t think that I’ve forgotten about this blog this February. I know I normally do a little playlist to set the tone for the next year of my life around my birthday but seeing as how life in 2025 thus far has been every level of chaos, I opted to wait for the inspiration to hit so I can tell you how I really feel.

And boy did it hit me in the last week. Once could say I was being called to “feel everything at once”.

By that I mean, I went to go see the band Hippo Campus in concert and I realized something really big about the last 3 years of my life. Yeah it may have taken me 8-9 months to realize it. But the peace coming from being able to see the bigger picture is putting all my anxieties as of late at ease. And funnily enough, the timeline of the realization happens to coincide with the time I started taking a liking to Hippo Campus’s music.

What I’ve realized is that the last era of my life (2021-2024) may have been great but it is far from the “peak” me. In fact, it was a necessary transition out of my lifelong struggle with self-doubt and people pleasing and into realizing I have permission to do whatever makes me feel the most alive. And the moment that I started to feel the most numb in that time period had been a sign for me to plan my exit into something new.

In my grief from ending something good, I hadn’t really let myself understand how I’d really grown since I last took a leap of faith in my career.

When I quit my job at the end of 2020, I was adamant: I needed to work in music. So I let that motivate me as I tried to understand what could be my entry point. I remember being curious about music law, artist management, music publishing, and music production. I remember looking up Kobalt Music Publishing and thinking it’d be so cool if I could work for them at some point. I remember writing so many songs in early 2021 that I started feeling like I needed to try to make them come to life by experimenting with music production. And you know what’s happened in the last three years? I’ve done that. I worked for a company that makes music production tools for three years AND it motivated me to learn how to produce my own project, including songs I wrote in early 2021. I can officially say I’ve worked with Kobalt Music Publishing since I was part of the team that launched KOSIGN this week. And what am I doing now? I’m learning the ropes of artist management and working directly with artists. And honestly? I feel alive again.

It’s dismissive to say that the three year period of 2021-2024 was just a laser focus on my time at Output. While I was unbelievably present and growing there, I did grow in so many ways outside of my work there. I had learned before not to put my identity in the work I do and I did not want to repeat that cycle. So I didn’t. I tried my best to focus on healing in therapy, dating all kinds of boys, strengthening my friendships, going to every concert I can, continuing to network in music, and getting back to traveling. But because I wasn’t well-versed in that separation yet, I did start to feel like I needed to be first and foremost loyal to what I was doing at work. It paid off until it didn’t. Being completely candid, I remember in my interview process thinking that I’d be there for like 3 years and then maybe consider going to law school. How the hell did 25 year old Kelly clock that and then 28 year old Kelly lose sight of that plan? Anyway lol.

When I look at this arc of the last three years, I’m beyond proud of the ways I’ve grown. In so many ways, it’s laid the foundation for the life I’m building now, for the new dreams being planted and those springing up. God has been good to me in all of this, as painful as the ending of this last era was. I wish I could have seen the arc a little sooner, but I fear my eyes were maybe a little too full of tears to see the storyline. Now my eyes are full of tears again, but this time out of pure gratitude and a sense of radical hope for the future, even amidst a world trying to drag me into hopelessness.

And there’s nothing like a good ol’ indie rock show to give me the space to realize this. So here’s some songs from the Hippo Campus show that really helped me process this tall order of a realization.

Highlights

Paranoid

“Do I love you or am I just too afraid to leave? Am I being honest or am I being what you need? Is there something waiting out there for us at the finish line? Can I have a second just to recollect my mind?…”

This song has been my little anxiety bop as of late. It’s dancy. It’s catchy. And it explains all the generalized fears I’ve been keeping at bay. But one of the main things I’ve been paranoid about is: “do I really know what I’m doing?” The hardest thing about the last 8-9 months has been trying to reckon with the fact that for once in my life no one is laying out a path for me to follow. There is no “right thing to do” anymore. Only a next best step. While it’s been exciting to sit with how the world is my oyster, I’ve had my self-doubt come back with a vengeance. I have been fearing “doing the wrong thing” and I haven’t even taken time to understand what side of me is saying that and why. Anyway, I’ll talk with my therapist on that one. But playing this one early in the set was just for me because we needed to ground me in the present anxiety I’d been struggling to vocalize.

Everything At Once

“I didn’t say it’d be easy, well, just give it a try. You gotta lay down sometimes, be patient sometimes, feel everything at once…”

This song swooped in like a word of encouragement before they played “Flood”. It took the mess I was feeling from “Paranoid” and said “Kelly, it’s ok to be messy, we’re used to this now. The only way out is through. Go for it.” And being at the show by myself made me feel free to express at whatever depth I felt comfortable. It was also nice that I didn’t have anyone next to me to I could dance and sway freely. I started letting the anxieties, the fears, the memories I was holding, the heavy load I was keeping to myself start to unravel a little bit. It felt foreign because I hadn’t really cried in a while. But I had to remind myself it was safe to do so.

Flood

“Living in the cages that we built for each other, chasing that sunset all the way, all we ever do…trying to keep it up, the constant flood is not enough the world is always changing…”

As I explained in my fall recap, this song really hit me when I first heard it. Honestly perceiving the space to cry to this song motivated me to see them live. So yeah I cried. I raged. I let out the flood of emotions and overwhelm that had been weighing on me. The anxiety of needing to make enough to pay bills in this transitional season. The anxiety of needing to plan a move out of LA (and America for that matter). The anxiety of needing to finish my music project. The memories of being numb at my job last year and fearing that I’d repeat being a bad employee with my new job. The frustrations with the post-capitalist world I’m living in. The hopelessness of the directions America is going. The grief of the fires from the past month. The memories of the ex I keep going back to and trying to figure out what it was all for again. As I let all that pour out in streams of tears and shouted lyrics at the show, I realized that also in the flood was the growth from the last three years. I remember tearfully explaining to my old manager and the HR manager when I was being let go that I knew I had grown so much. But other than recognizing that, I hadn’t taken time to realize how specifically I’d grown. The world is always changing, but so am I. And sitting with that felt like the graceful, non-dismissive towards myself thing to do.

Buttercup

“‘I’ll be fine on my own,’ she said, ‘I don’t need you inside my head’ (She’ll be fine on her own, she’ll be fine on her own)…”

This song took me back to 2019 when I was getting over my first ex and realizing that I would be ok without him. It was a big part of my “indie rock girl” rebrand at the time lol. I remember this song giving me the strength to pursue what made me feel alive at the time: going to concerts and starting this blog. As I started to invest in these things, I felt myself gaining the knowledge of what I actually liked and the confidence to pursue it. This song connects me back to that 23 year old version of me that didn’t know what she needed to do. The version of me that set the table for my 25 year old self to make the decision to pursue a career in the music industry. That youthful energy to rebrand myself continues to be important I realized. It’s funny how a song can just take you back to a version of you like that.

Way It Goes

“But Lord knows we’re trying, that’s the way it goes…”

I remember liking this song back in 2019 and feeling a hazy resignation to it. It’s a bop nonetheless but it came in handy while processing the grief at the show. I’ve been evolving to make space for myself more and have been sitting with the reality of what I do and don’t have control over. This song in other (catchy) words says “it be like that sometimes” and sometimes that stops the anxiety spiral believe it or not.

Bambi

“I haven’t been much myself and I feel like my friends are being put through this hell feeling, I think that I’m living, if you could call it living, so brash and unforgiven. Ruled by the vibe I’m bringing, serving myself…wait and see, I’ll be making my own way now to where I got to be…”

I remember keeping “Bambi” on repeat in late 2020/early 2021 as I tried to find my way into working in the music industry. (Crazy because I also was obsessing over “Tangerine” by Glass Animals then too.) Hearing it live last week made me 1) joyfully dance my butt off to this absolute groove and 2) realize how I needed to take to heart the lyrics of this song now just as I did back then. In such a sunny way, this song gave so much voice to the courageous need to leave that job that was making me so miserable in 2020. Not to mention it gave me instruction on how to dance my way through the chaos of the COVID social distancing era. That parallels for me (4-5 years later…which yikes time is not real) with the era of me trying out what I actually want to do in music and now dealing with the fresh hell the US government has decided to unleash. The solution then was to make my own way through and make sure it includes dancing. The call is the same now.

Forget It

“Dancing on your living room floor, I’m useless but I don’t care anymore…”

This song really paints the “acceptance” stage of this grief I’ve been moving through of the last three years. I realize that at some point in my last job I lost sight of how I was growing so I really just tried to make things fun like it was my job. And that didn’t go unappreciated. But I did myself a disservice by not sitting with the fact that I wasn’t growing anymore then. I remember feeling guilt any time I thought about work this time last year. It’s like I was trying to convince myself that the work I was doing was important but I didn’t believe in it anymore. And that came from feeling like my priorities were shifting. I had already reached some goals I’d set in my time there, but I didn’t feel inspired when I saw my future there anymore. It’s like all of a sudden a fog set in. So I floundered and made tons of little mistakes that added up. I’ve felt a lot of guilt about that in the last few months. But in the “acceptance” stage of my grief, I’m starting to forget it how much of an ego hit it was. It’s encouraging that you’ll always get new chances to show people who you actually are.

Boys

“Kissing boys, missing work, got hungover from your words…all these nights are a blur, going broke, make it rain, ain’t got nobody to blame, all this time down the drain, I’m the best at insane…”

This song is the end credits of the last 3 years. And it felt poetic for them to end the show with this song. This is the kind of song that bottles up the feeling when you open the sunroof of a car, pop your head out while in motion, and just absorb the joy of it. That picture is how I want to remember this era where I started aging backwards. When I embraced my youthfulness and the fact that I could take PTO to follow Bad Suns on tour in California. When I worked a cool job for a bit that somehow paid me well, paid me to make music, AND introduced me to so many cool people I now call friends. When I realized that it was ok to be so courageously myself at work and on dates because then I would let people actually SEE me. I will forever look back at 2021-2024 fondly. But I operate in the joy of knowing that the best is still yet to come.