INTERVIEW: Chelsea Hodson by Brittany Ackerman, "The Sound of Endurance"
Chelsea Hodson Shares Her Voice in “Belong to Nobody”
I first met Chelsea Hodson at a reading in Los Feliz at Skylight Books. She was reading from her debut collection of essays, Tonight, I’m Someone Else, with that infamous purple cover with the sensual eyes and lips– iconic! The book is luminous, searing, as Hodson writes at the threshold of longing and endurance, asking How much can a body endure?How much can a body bear, and what does it mean to survive desire, pain, and transformation? She questions the shapes of beauty and knowledge that arise in the act of embodying the porous borders between self and other, performance and truth, vulnerability and power. Needless to say, I was instantly a fan.
The reading was one of the best I’ve ever attended, one where I left wanting to go home and immediately sit down to write. I remember it was July and I was living in Glendale in an apartment without any air conditioning. I wore a white t-shirt and jean shorts and I had a red stain streaked across my chest, a mishap from eating a slice of pizza in my car before the reading. But I showed up anyway and was enamored by Chelsea’s voice as she read from my favorite essay in the book, “I’m Only a Thousand Miles Away.” Now, I teach that piece to my Personal Essay students, and I continue to marvel at how Chelsea crafts such intimate, yet expansive, portraits of the self.
And now, Chelsea Hodson is debuting music that she’s been “quietly working on for the past couple of years.” She will release a series of singles in the upcoming months and an album next year. The book trailer for Tonight, I’m Someone Else from 2018 included a beautiful song written and produced by Hodson herself, along with stunning visuals that she filmed in the Castelleto at Villa DiTrapano. I was thrilled to be an early listener for the release of her first song, “Belong to Nobody,” out now on streaming platforms.
Brittany Ackerman: When you moved into music, did you feel freer to be abstract or emotional in ways prose doesn’t allow?
Chelsea Hodson: Not necessarily—I think I’ve found ways to be abstract and emotional in my prose as well. And the process of writing was similar as well—I’d start with some small idea (a line, a title, a chord) and let myself write the song from there, which is similar to how I write my prose. I try to not plan everything out, and by moving intuitively, I think abstractions and emotions can come through when needed.
BA: How does your writing practice inform your songwriting? Do they draw from the same well, or feel like different muscles?
CH: I think in some ways, I applied less pressure to my songs, just because the form was newer to me. It’s easy for me to overthink my writing—I constantly have to remind myself to make decisions based on instinct or intuition, which is how my best writing emerges. But in songwriting, I felt the freedom of being an amateur.
For instance, my instinct was to not book any studio time before having a song fully planned out. My friend and collaborator Adam Lee immediately urged me to go against this instinct and instead use the studio as a space in which to work the songs out. The pressure of being there with him worked the same way a writing deadline can work—the time limit pushed me through my default mode of overthinking. Adam would simply press “record” and we’d figure it out as we went—a looseness I soon learned to embrace.
BA: Do you feel your themes of desire, endurance, identity, transformation, travel across both forms?
CH: Yes, definitely. But grief is present in my writing now in a way it wasn’t previously. I found a lot of my songwriting gravitating towards themes of loss, what could have been, what never was, and so on. When I couldn’t bear to work on my novel (which often feels heavy and intellectually demanding), I could often write a song in a day, just by letting myself feel a certain emotion. So, these songs often became a container for my grief, which is something I hadn’t really written about before.
BA: What surprised you most about yourself in crossing disciplines?
CH: One thing that surprised me was how much I enjoyed collaborating on my music. Writing prose has always appealed to me because I thought that I could do it entirely alone, and I assumed that I could have almost total control over the writing. The more I wrote, the more I realized my romantic ideal of “The Writer” wasn’t even real—I’ve benefitted greatly from collaborations with editors, for instance.
When I started recording with Adam, I could immediately feel his influence and contributions making the songs better. This continued when I watched Vincent LiRocchi play drums in a way I couldn’t even have anticipated, much less asked for, and when I watched Josh Klinghoffer reach for a string of bells we didn’t yet know a certain song needed. When I hit a wall with a song, instead of feeling like it was my obligation to fix it, I’d ask Adam, “I don’t know, what do you think?” It was such a relief to be in conversation with him in that way.
Belong to Nobody
Love has one philosophy
It belongs to nobody
A prayer that goes nowhere
A feeling that I can’t hold
I thought I belonged to you
Like the blood to its moon
I thought I would die for you
Try and find me now
Through the stained glass window
I saw your shadow
I saw your hand
And I thought it was my own
Love has one philosophy
It belongs to nobody
I thought I belonged to you
Like the blood to its moon
I thought I would die for you
Try and find me now
Through the stained glass window
I saw your shadow
I saw your hand
And I thought it was my own
Love has one philosophy
It belongs to nobody
Nobody
To nobody
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Credits
Written by: Chelsea Hodson, Adam Lee
Producer: Adam Lee
Recording Engineer: Adam Lee
Mixing Engineer: Adam Lee
Mastering Engineer: Mike Nolte at Eureka Mastering
Arrangements: Adam Lee
Vocals, Piano: Chelsea Hodson
Guitar, Bass, Synthesizer, Keyboard: Adam Lee
Drums: Vincent LiRocchi
Chelsea Hodson is the author of the book of essays Tonight I'm Someone Else, the publisher of Rose Books, and the founder of the Morning Writing Club. She lives in Sedona, Arizona.