Nov
10th
Thu
10th
You are not the first person to say [that ‘Es-So’ is about having an eating disorder]. I really don’t like to say what my songs are about, because it is and it is not. My songs tend to not be about anything but the state of mind that I was in writing it, or this like, extremely vague theme that would be hard to explain to anybody. But the whole point of them, to me, is to say, “Why yes, I’m glad that you think that’s about an eating disorder.” You know? [Laughs.] To really let other people find what they find in the lyrics and in the songs. For me, [dealing with an eating disorder is] a day-to-day thing. I find that there really needs to be a lot of self-forgiveness. I mean, I do 8 million things wrong a day, and now I’m the boss of other people. For much of my adult life, I wanted to hide from doing anything. If you don’t do anything, and if you don’t make any decisions, then you make fewer mistakes, and you’re taking fewer risks. Now, I’m in the opposite position as that. In order to survive this new life that I’ve chosen for myself, I have to be able to forgive myself for when I get it wrong, which is a lot. And that for me has fed, so to speak, this sense of well-being that I didn’t have before, that I think was really playing into eating disorder stuff. It’s funny, ’cause I never have been in a hospital for an eating disorder. I tend to think that a lot of people have eating disorders, or at least have some kind of illness in their thinking with food. I think it took me just saying that aloud to start to be like, “Okay, there are ways of helping myself.
—
Tune-Yards’ Merrill Garbus | Music | Interview | The A.V. Club Chicago
Arianna Stern did a great job with this interview! I’m glad she asked her about this sort of thing; it takes some guts to get this personal with a subject sometimes.
