Lesbians, Enbys, and EPs.

an interview with Carlos Antonio.

4: Okay, “Flower Skin”.

CA: Yeah, “Flower Skin”. I made it in collaboration with my friend Poet Mystery. I found him on TikTok because he does production breakdowns of a lot of my favorite artists. I was interested to see what he could bring to some of my songs, so I just reached out to him on a whim and he got back to me. And the first thing that he said to me was that he really loved my music and was really impressed with my work and wanted me to get dirtier and wanted me to get messier with it. That everything was too clean, everything was too polished. I thought that was really, really interesting. And so we started working on some songs together, and he lives in Vermont, so we would just send files back and forth. And at the same time, my relationship was falling apart. And while I was writing these songs, I was watching myself be the partner that I wish I had. And he would, my former partner, would often get very critical. He would often shut down emotionally, get very distant, get very cold, he would call me sensitive. And it started to make me feel overly dependent, overly eager, but then I didn't think there was anything so bad about wanting some connection and wanting to be sensitive. I realized the most sensitive parts of myself, the parts that he was critiquing, are my favorite parts of myself. And parts of me that I'm also kind of looking to touch on another partner. So that's what “Flower Skin” is about. He knows about the EP. He's very mad about it. And I haven't said a single mean thing about him. Not even in the EP, because it's not about him. It's about me. It's about me getting back in touch with myself because I was also watching myself make myself smaller for a man, which is a horrifying thing to discover in yourself. This EP is about how we can keep ourselves soft, how we keep ourselves vulnerable, but also stick to our guns and stick to what we want, stick to who we know ourselves to be. So Christian and I, Christian is Poet Mystery, we have a lot of the same influences and we started working towards the sound called “industrial dream pop.” So it's very ethereal, beautiful synths, a lot of strings, a lot of gritty beats. And I just find it really, really beautiful and exciting. They're my favorite songs I've ever made.

4: Now, it's interesting that you say in order to be more sensitive and give yourself over to your softer side, you had to sort of embrace this industrial, almost techno, grittier side of your music self. 

CA: Oh, that's exactly it. I think a huge part of it has to do with allowing yourself to be messy. My ex and I don't speak to each other, and the last conversation we had, we did the exact thing that I had wished we'd done more in our relationship, which was fight. We fought for 45 minutes, and we bitched at each other and we were crying and it was awesome. A huge part of it was over the course of our relationship, I was always trying to fix things. I was always trying to make arguments go smoothly. I was trying to make sure everybody was understood, make sure every side was represented equally, and make sure I had a clean and clear conclusion. I think I'm a perfectionist to my own detriment in a lot of ways. And a huge part of this EP, and a huge part of my relationship, was learning how to allow yourself to be messy. Like, you can be messy without being vindictive or malicious. You can be a good person and also stumble and mess up. Christian and I, we would send each other files and a lot of the songs just didn't work. A lot of the beats just didn't work. A lot of the beats weren't great. But I had never really done that before. I had never really gotten into the mud and spent time on things that were not working. And then digging through the mud to find the gems that were really, really cool and really, really exciting. So, yeah, that was a huge part of it. Learning how to be messy. Learning how to be gritty. Learning how to be more flippant, how to be a fucking bitch, how to be a pain in someone's ass because you're pissed off. I don't get angry often. And I got angry on our last phone call and I'm so glad I did. And I don't think I would have done that before making this project. 

4: Now, are there any moments in your relationship that are directly correlated to anything that's specifically said in the EP? 

CA: Well, it's a chronological EP. it's five tracks. The first two songs I wrote while we were together. The third song I wrote the day before and the day after we broke up. And the last two songs I wrote post breakup. So it's very symmetrical. The first song, “Untouched”, is about how scary it was meeting him and going on dates and discovering how much we felt for each other because it really was so instant and so fiery. And I really didn't even realize how much of a fortress I built up for myself. And so I kind of knew going into the relationship that it was going to require me getting very, very vulnerable and letting go of this very tight-held, perfect idea that I had of myself. The next song, “Porcelain”, is about the process of that breaking and laying there bare for someone, being exposed and how fragile it feels to actually be seen and be known by someone. “Flower Skin”, I wrote the day before and the day after we broke up and I knew something was wrong. I knew something was severely wrong with the relationship and I was gonna talk to him because I just felt this was at the point where he was getting really cold, really distant, shutting himself off. And I just felt like a dog waiting for him to come home and play, to come home and feed me. And I knew that something was just gonna have to change. So I addressed it with him and he completely gave up and just tossed the whole relationship away, which was very necessary. “Wide Eyes” is about some moments that made me angry in the relationship, namely when he wanted to open the relationship. He stopped wanting to have sex with me, but he wanted to have sex with other people and so “Wide Eyes” was kind of me fantasizing about what if I had done that. What if I had gone off and found somebody? And there was a period of time when I was thinking about my other dating options. I was with him and I was thinking, “This can't be it. This can't, this can't just be it.” And I was thinking about what it would be like to have sex with someone else, to go off with someone else, to maybe find someone better, but also realizing that I really love commitment and I love being with one person. And I knew as long as we were committed, I would never be able to separate my body and mind. And then “Breathing” was written when I went to Puerto Rico with some friends and I was salsa dancing. I was on the beach with friends. I was speaking Spanish to my family members. He never met anybody in my family. I met his whole family. He never met anybody in mine. I went to his hometown. He never went to mine. And I was watching myself tap back into parts of me that he never saw, never tried to see, so it’s really about finding peace within yourself and a little bit of "fuck you" One of my favorite lyrics is "Does it astound you just how proud you are of me for breathing without your love?" We get so competitive with our exes. We can be so vindictive with our exes. I don't really know how he feels about me. And I like that in the song I gave space to ask, “Aren't you proud of me?” 

4: So, what's next? What are you working on? 

CA: I'm working on an album. The current working title is “Chekhov's Gun” and it's messy. It's gritty. It's heavy. It's gunmetal and steel and muscular atrophy and rib cages and it's grotesque horror. The inspiration came from my upbringing in Texas and my upbringing in the age of social media. One of my best friends, who's no longer with us, when we were growing up, we were so neglected in our home lives. And we were starving for affection. And we were also on the internet and being fed an image of what was beautiful. And so we were monitoring our own bodies. And we were surrounded by guns and gun culture. And I really like the image of Chekhov's gun because all of it is to say years down the road, there's no way that any of this wasn't going to be a problem. And I have a distinct memory of her wearing a corset under her t-shirt going to school. We were literally trying to get ourselves to wither away and fade into nothing, like dying to be seen, dying to be touched, dying to be heard, but also incredibly embarrassed to even be looked at and incredibly embarrassed for the light to touch our skin. Growing up around so much, I mean, it sounds dramatic, but growing up around so much bloodshed, you know? Like, one of my best friends killed herself. A couple other students from my high school died. One of my best friends back in Dallas just had an ectopic pregnancy and had to fly on a plane with an active infection because they wouldn't perform a procedure to get an infected IUD out in Texas. She had to fly to another state. There's so much visceral horror that happened. And so much of it has to do with sex and gender. The genres that I've been thinking about are Spanish guitar ballads, industrial music, and trip hop. I love trip hop. The whole project has kind of a “heroin chic” kind of feel to it in my head. And the interesting thing about heroin chic is it's so fabulous. It's so glamorous. They look so good. The clothes are amazing, but also it's so unhealthy and it's so problematic. And I think if we were to bring that back, I think it’s interesting to ask, is it ethical to bring it back?

4: If it's not already back…

CA: If it's not already back! I think I'm interested in making something that's really beautiful and interesting and also grotesque when you reveal all the ways in which we are told we should be beautiful, you know? 

4: Yeah. I feel like especially in the age of social media we're becoming aware that that was an unhealthy thing. Those people were experiencing sickness. There was, you know, that whole early 2000s Kate Moss era where Lindsay Lohan is in rehab and Britney Spears is shaving her head and people are publicly doing cocaine before cell phones had cameras…

CA: It's a very desirable aesthetic, but when you look back at it, it's like, what were those people actually going through? And then how have those people grown since then? And for what reasons? And like “heroin chic” is also reserved for just a very specific era and demographic.. But when I think about my upbringing with my friend Grace, that's all we were trying to do. To be young, fabulous, desirable, wanted. And I think a huge key is to be troubled enough that you're deemed interesting and worthy of a story. There was this writer. I forget who it was, but they were talking about the ultimate princess fantasy. Which is that you're beautiful, you're in a high up position, but something indicates that you know something that other people don't and that secret makes you so melancholy and your suffering is so much heavier than others but it has to be beautiful suffering. That's the ultimate princess fantasy. And it's so sad because what if we were just given proper attention as kids? Why must we suffer in the first place?

4: Now, does that have anything to do with your queerness? Was that more so like a product of your Latino background? 

CA: My queerness put me in conflict with my upbringing absolutely. In my home life, in my school life, I didn't have many friends in school at all. So my friend Grace and I were pretty special to each other. I always thought I would have been happier as a woman and I think that's why Grace and I suffered in a similar way because as I was neglecting my nutrition, I thought that would bring me closer to womanhood. I was being mean to myself in all the ways that I saw my female friends being mean to themselves. I was conditioned to believe that a form of self-torture would bring me closer to womanhood. 

4: Is this happening around the same time that you're feeling that you are non-binary?

CA: No, this was way down the line. I started embracing my non-binary identity when I came back home from Berlin where I lived for four months and. I guess I just didn't know it was an option for me. It was either be a boy and be marketable or I always had the vision of the woman that I could be on my mind. And then the older I got and the more I played with my appearance and got more comfortable with myself, the more I would get comments that I looked like Mila Jovovich or, like, someone came to my table while I was on a date with a guy and said that I reminded her of Angelina Jolie. And the fact that I clearly am not someone that has a vagina, but the way I dress and the way I moved and the way I walked reminded them of these beautiful icons that I looked up to made me feel really excited. There's something that I find really exciting about balancing both, and all of my favorite artists have balanced both. I love Marlena Dietrich, I love David Bowie, I love Madonna, and I also love the movie “Bound”. That's why I haven't transitioned yet, because I just want to look like a lesbian.

4: And you do. You're doing a great job. 

CA: Thank you. I actually walked into a bar one day and my friend was like, “I didn't realize it was you at first. And when you walked in, I was like, ‘Look at that beautiful lesbian.’” It was so gender affirming. 

4: I told you that too when I first met you, that you look like a lesbian. 

CA: And thank God. Shout out to the lesbians.

4: So you said that your non-binary identity emerged after your time in Berlin. Was that from the party scene? Was that from the culture there? What exactly about Berlin? 

CA: I mean, you have to understand my relationship to myself did a complete 180 while I was in Berlin. I went  to Berlin being an Americana artist and being very shy and very embarrassed and very ashamed of myself and very insecure and I had never been to a club before, by the way. Like, I was 20 years old. I didn't have a great social life. So I wasn't sneaking into bars. Nobody taught me how to do that. Nobody taught me how to, like, get a fake ID and do all that stuff. And I wasn't being invited out to places. So I'd never been to a club. Literally the second club I ever went to was Berghain. I moved to Berlin. I spent a month there hearing about this crazy electronic music scene and then I woke up and I was in the middle of it and I had blonde hair that I slicked back to look like David Bowie and then there was one week, it was the anniversary of my friend Grace's death, my childhood dog died, and then my uncle died of cancer, and then a day later I chopped my hair off to look like Madonna in the “Papa Don't Preach” music video. Then I came back and one of the first things my dad said to me was “You're not angry anymore.” Something completely changed. I think we all hold the best version of ourselves as kind of a secret. And we kind of secretly believe that if something were to give us permission, then we could unleash this part of ourselves that a lot of us hold quiet and dear. And I think Berlin just helped me unleash something. When I was surrounded by strangers in a foreign country and clubs that I'd never been to, completely out of my depths, and discovered that people thought I was beautiful and that people liked me and that strangers came up to me and wanted to talk to me and I could make out with men in the crowd, I just completely stopped thinking about anybody that didn't really matter to me. I very firmly believe that when you're making work, you can't hold other people's opinions in your mind. And for so long, I was thinking about what my parents would think, what my grandparents would think, what people from high school would think, what people from middle school would think, what people in my college would think. And it is so suffocating and it's the worst thing that you can do for art. I actually think that that is the case, not just for art, but for kind of your life. I mean, for your sexual life as well. Like if you're engaging in sex, but you're holding other people's shame in your mind, you can't move forward. You need to let go of that shame. You need to let go of your own shame, let go of other people's shame. Shame is something that I think about a lot. It's one of the core themes of the album that I'm working on because we were taught to be ashamed, which is so sad. I think it's almost even worse than being taught that we're not beautiful. You can be not beautiful and be proud, but to be taught that you should be ashamed of yourself and ashamed of what you want and what you desire and what you're trying to do, I find that so sad. 

4: So how do you now, looking back on that shame, how do you not revert back? How do you stay in that proud space? 

CA: I mean, I do kind of think the first step is to just fake it ‘til you make it. I think fashion has helped me a lot. I think having clothing, something on my body that reminds me of who I am, helps. It's like a superhero uniform. It helps you walk a certain way. And so wherever you go, even if you're feeling bad about yourself, even if you're feeling like shit, if you're wearing something that reminds you of who you are, and you're wearing a shoe that helps you walk, and your stride is strong and confident, then people respond to that. And then people will respond to you well. Even if it's fake and even if it's a facade, I do believe that self-manifestation follows. Fashion is my saving grace. It's very, very important for me to have something on my body that reminds me of who I am. Hair too. Fashion and style. I would say style over fashion actually because fashion is just what you wear, which I think is important. But style is how you walk into a room. And I think style also includes things like politics. I don't think you can be a Republican and have style. It's so tacky. Even if you show up in a great outfit but have beliefs that go against everything that that outfit probably came from, I just find it so tacky. Where you get your clothes, what your clothes mean to you, how you walk into a room, how you talk to people, how you treat people, what your beliefs are, I think that's the best way to go home and look in the mirror and say, “Yes. I like what I see.”