talker – Queen City Sounds and Art

“Return to Sender” is talker’s Triumphant Song of Liberation From Emotionally Stifling Relationships

“Return to Sender” from talker’s 2024 debut album I’m Telling You the Truth (out June 21, 2024) is typical for the songwriter in its dramatically unorthodox presentation. The music video begins like a horror movie with perhaps undead pallbearers bringing a casket into view and opening it with talker inside and seemingly liberated from a living death to dance in choreographed moves like a vampire film in reverse. The song’s lyrics seem to be directed to a loved one, former or potentially so, who seems to find it hard to deal with her how she is in the moment. No one is always going to be how you think they need to be all the time and human life is full of flux and struggles that if we don’t feel them and express that reality and instead bury that pain and flux it can fester in your heart in unhealthy ways. The song with its richly triumphant tones are a declaration of self-acceptance. After all, if someone you love can’t talk with you about what’s going on with them in a real way is it really love? If you’re always trying to “fix” them rather than share in a moment of empathy for regular human frailty is it the kind of love you’d want to have? Sometimes you just have to listen to people and not offer what you think is a solution because a part of getting through tough emotional times is just being able to express those feelings without judgment and dismissing them. Talker’s song is about that set to music that feels like it’s bursting free of emotional limitations. Watch the video for “Return to Sender” on YouTube and follow talker at the links provided.

“Old Enough” is talker’s Exuberant and Poignant Song Mourning the Special Connections of Youth Lost When Your Life Moves Forward

In “Old Enough,” talker almost brazenly broaches the topic of personal boundaries and how those change across a lifetime. Friends you once spent so much time around when you were young with no seeming boundaries with time limits and shared subjects who in some ways help define who you are as a person. But then as you grow older you will often grow apart because maybe you develop in ways that push you apart and if one person continues to cling to how things were without the self-awareness to realize that things are different it can prove painful, recognizing that barrier where once there was intimacy. The song is so upbeat and exuberant in talker’s typical fashion with spirited vocals and emotionally-charged melodies it can be easy to miss how insightful it is about changing interpersonal dynamics that work best if both people recognize and accept growth and even some natural distance that develops when you can’t spend so much easy and free time with each other that conveys a sense of closeness that is, to a large extent, circumstantial. It’s special for a time and that connection can stay special but it also has to change. The songwriter speaks poignantly to that moment of realization and a willingness to grow even if it means it has to hurt a little bit, even if it means we can feel lost for a time before we come to recognize and value the new connections we form as a natural outcome of growing up and yes being old enough to know that having a slumber party every weekend in the summer or hanging out until all hours because you feel like you have all the time in the world in a certain part of your life isn’t part of your current life and knowing that’s okay and even desirable. Watch the video for “Old Enough” on YouTube and follow talker at the links below. Look out for talker’s debut album out later in 2024.

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The Video for talker’s “Easygoing” is Like an Elevated Horror Short About Being Fine With Having Zero Chill in Love

The video for talker’s new single “Easygoing” may disturb you or be eerily relatable (either in the moment or at some point in your life). There’s blood, obsession, scenes of anxious attachment taken to the extreme and yet there’s no denying it’s compelling like an Ari Aster short on a lower budget suiting the subject. And the song with its upbeat and earnest melodies serves as a great contrast to frank lyrics about real feelings in the moment and some of where they come from. When talker sings “I wish I could be easygoing/But that’s not me at least I know it/I’ll wear you out til you get holes in your sleeves/I wish I could be easygoing” it is clearly melodramatic but honest with a touch of self-awareness. When we see talker chase the object of her affections after she accidentally (was it accidental, though?) injures herself in an outburst of emotional excess and unself-aware expression of love looking like a maddened and driven stalker who immediately reminds one of the scene in Wild at Heart when Diane Ladd’s character smears on her lipstick in a desperate pantomime that in her mind probably feels like some measure of normal. In this video the chase scene seems ridiculous as well yet somehow funny though some may disagree. Whatever one’s interpretation, “Easygoing” is a well-crafted, indie pop song with poignancy and like the bombastic music video its unique charms linger with you.

The Oceanator Remix of Talker’s “Don’t Want You To Love Me” Amplifies the Triumphant Feel of a Song About Overcoming Your Brain’s Broken Inner Narrative

The Oceanator remix of talker’s “Don’t Want You To Love Me” adds a layer of disorienting sound on top of its already luxuriant and bright melodies. The songwriter already turned a song about insecurity and desperation and the anxiety and ambivalence that can come from strong emotions. Especially when you’re not sure that’s what you really feel. The song is a both a reaching out and an acknowledgment of being kind of a mess that you might not want to inflict on someone else and often times not on yourself except that you have to live with the familiarity of your own drives, passions and as yet un-processed dysfunctional ways. But talker, particularly in this remix, makes it seem so exuberant like she’s owning her flaws in the song and encouraging others to do so and daring to have those feelings in spite of the voices in your own head that undermine your efforts. Listen to the Oceanator remix of “Don’t Want You To Love Me” on Spotify and follow talker at the links below.

“Little Bird” is talker’s Self Care Song About Breaking the Cycle of Psychic Death By a Thousand Cuts

is the new EP from talker and her songwriting experiments in expressing a set of feelings and experiences with great poignancy and invention is obvious across the whole release. The song “Little Bird,” though, finds talker centering her warmly luminous vocals to relate a memory of being in a place in life where you feel like someone else or yourself conditioned by what you’ve learned to expect out of life is chipping your dignity and identity away. With your self-respect thus eroded it feels difficult to break away from that cycle of dysfunction and yet awareness of that state of affairs is a message to your psyche in itself. The song doesn’t promise some miracle rescue or some throwaway line about how things are going to get better and no cheesy sentiments about triumphing over this time in life it suggests that you have within yourself the ability to move beyond that head space simply by seeing things for what they are and sometimes hearing that in a song or, heck, writing the song is the catalyst. Which is a more creative and practical approach to conveying that content. Listen to “Little Bird” on Spotify where you can listen to the rest of the EP and follow talker at the links provided.

Talker’s “My Meds” is a Poignantly Realistic Portrait of Living With Anxiety and Depression

In the video for “My Meds” it may look like talker is rolling about her nicely appointed Bohemian loft but that’s all atmosphere. With the translucent drapery and sheets and soft lighting to enhance a sense of feeling trapped in a fog that won’t go away. At the center of the track are the plaintive vocals sketching a head space where you’re in that place overwhelmed by depression and/or anxiety that you don’t know how you’re feeling or what to feel beyond a formless emotional urgency that has no outlet because the trajectory of these feelings is usually attached to something solid and coherent that is a source of those feelings. You lose a loved one, your source of income, an opportunity, a friendship, a relationship or any number of other factors and you can wrap your emotional state around that and it makes both intellectual and intuitive sense. Unfortunately, depression and anxiety don’t always and maybe even rarely work that way and it can be an accumulation of things or a subconscious response to complex issues in your life or just plain a chemical imbalance triggered by who can say what. But it is a feeling where you kind of wish time would disappear and you have no psychological anchors that bring you back from that edge. You don’t know what or how to feel but you feel that aforementioned momentum that feels like raw desperation even if you’re in a low energy place. Yes, a beautifully ethereal pop song with talker’s typically evocative vocals but one that truly captures what it’s like to be in a place many of us have been or are in now because the world and society in general has been in such a corrosive place with seemingly no one taking steps to reduce the ambient weight of challenges carried by most people. And meds can get you through some of the worst times but long term significant change is long overdue. But for now some solidarity on at least mental health issues is welcome and talker provides a bit of that with her song. Watch the video for “My Meds” on YouTube, follow talker at the links below and look out for her new In Awe of Insignificance EP due out 3/25/22.

Talker’s Video for “Don’t Want You To Love Me” is a Retro Therapeutic Shock to the Temptation of Falling Back Into Toxic Love

When the mannequin in talker’s video for “Don’t Want You To Love Me” it seems like an eccentric affectation. But the shiny figure with no emotions is a perfect totemic device for putting someone bad for you and/or with whom you have a bad dynamic behind you even if some of your impulses and automatic emotional reactions draw you to them or in the case of this song back to them and right into the same context, the same kind of emotional turmoil that sidetracked your life. The visual style of the video looks like something out of the 80s with the awkward yet dramatic and colorful montages and that suits the song well as its themes of bypassing emotional self-sabotage is reminiscent of many of the pop songs of that era that treated conflicted feelings with a surprising level of nuance while tapping into the energy of those moments when you can pull yourself out of the psychic quagmire and get a few glimpses of clarity. But talker’s songwriting and vocals are more in tune with more recent artists like Japanese Breakfast and Mitski and their masterful blend of poignant storytelling, exuberance and engrossing melodies. All three have a knack for writing melancholic songs that sweep into a will to defiance against being dragged down. Watch the video for “Don’t Want You To Love Me” on YouTube and connect with talker at the links provided.

talker Finds Her Inner Power and Self-Confidence on the Triumphant “Learning the Feeling”

talker_LearningTheFeeling1_crop_Sm — talker, photo courtesy the artist

“Learning the Feeling” begins with talker talking about how time gets away from us when every day seems the same and echoing how habits can become their own kind of prison until we decide to change them. The song’s dark undertones paired with Suzanne Vega-esque vocals, elegantly moody guitar figure give the a nice contrast to when everything kicks into more blustery emotional spaces crossing over into the realm of modern pop. It reflects the emotional journey of the song that transitions with the line “I’ve been keeping quiet, what has silence done for me?” From thre our narrator breaks free of her old habits and finally feels like she can breathe, a metaphor for living, by not keeping in her feelings, in fact “learning the feeling” of what it’s like to be able to come into one’s full truth and not having to suppress it at long last, to learn to embrace and trust her feelings rather than give heed to any gaslighting. Listen to “Learning the Feeling” on Soundcloud and follow talker at the links below.

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On “Keep Me Safe” talker Examines the Moments in Our Lives When We Feel Like We’re Losing Our Emotional Anchors

talker2_lg — talker, photo courtesy the artist

“Keep Me Safe,” the debut single from talker’s new EP puts a calm face on a place of deep uncertainty and anxiety. The song begins with a gentle melody and transitions to a moment of intense tranquility like the calm before one’s own storm, and back before the song erupts into fiery passages in which the fears blossom and the root of those fears manifests strongly—the painful recognition of inevitable change and the terror of being cast adrift. It’s something we’ve all experienced, the important relationships in our lives changing or ending for whatever reason they do and even in relationships with a complex dynamic we adapt to the situation and it represents the stability in our lives upon which we build the rest. The contrast with the first two thirds of the song and the final third or so is dramatic and breaks with standard song structure in a way that really amplifies the emotional impact of the song by also showing how allowing ourselves to feel and articulate that fear and pain can be cathartic and essential to our ability to cope and move on from that moment. Listen to “Keep Me Safe” on Soundcloud, watch the music video and follow talker at the links provided.

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