Hi, I’m Victoria.
I’m a singer-songwriter from Seattle. Thanks for stopping by to hear my story — in musical and written form. I hope you’ll stay awhile and enjoy yourself!
P.S. If you’re a musician too and like what you hear, please feel free to reach out. I’d love to make connections in the community!
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Feeding Time: The Lost Album
11/6/2023
People say a joke that needs to be explained is a bad one. That might be the same with albums. But here goes anyway.
Back in 2014, I was just learning how to play guitar. I was finally teaching myself after five years of having it but being too scared to make any sort of valiant effort at learning it. It had been a dream of mine to be a singer since I was a kid, and I started writing lyrics, sometimes with a melody, sometimes not, when I was nine. As I got older, I knew I would need to learn an instrument if I wanted to write songs for real. Guitar seemed like a good option.
I started writing songs right away as I learned, even though I was a guitar newbie who knew just a few chords. I remember getting so frustrated and thinking on several occasions, “How the hell do people strum and sing at the same time?!” And then I would go weeks without playing, disgusted with myself and thinking my guitar hated me.
The other thing to know that would probably put this more in context is that I’m a shy person, and at that time in particular, I could barely look myself in the mirror let alone anyone else. I felt delusional thinking I could ever have the confidence to actually get on a stage and perform for people or even just put my stuff online. I had so much self-loathing that, while I might have been excited for a few moments, maybe a day, after writing a song, that would be followed by absolute contempt for it, thinking that there’s no way I could ever create something good or interesting or valuable.
But in 2015, in one of my moments of grand delusion, after practicing for about a year and accumulating a small collection of songs recorded on my iPod (albeit shakily played and sung and hitting bum notes left and right), I got excited feeling like I had enough for an album. I titled it Feeding Time after one of the songs and arranged them in the order I wanted to tell the story and put together an interpretation of what I wanted for the front and back covers (done in Microsoft Paint, see below). I actually knew a graphic designer/visual artist at the time, and we went to lunch together and I asked if he could help me with the cover saying, “I want like a picture of a woman’s naked body that’s been hollowed out so the skin is see-through and it’s kind of decomposing and it’s being used as an aquarium with fish swimming in it and seaweed and algae and stuff.” He stared at me for a few seconds and then said, “I don’t get it,” and I said, “Oh never mind!” and we never spoke of it again lol.
I thought I was ready back then…but then the doubt crept back in. And I felt it wasn’t good enough and that I needed to keep practicing and trying to write. Which I did. But always with that crippled limb of fear slowing me down.
Over the past few years, I’ve done a lot of work on myself, trying to understand the ways I’d been conditioned by the world around me, trying to unlearn the values and ways of being that were never really mine, trying to get back to who I really am and live as a whole being. A being that can unconditionally love. And music was always in my mind with that. I would think, “Maybe one day I can get to a place where I feel okay enough with myself to do it.”
So here we are now. I’ve been working on a new set of songs that I’m excited about. And then a few days ago, “Nothing But Water” popped into my head. I had not listened to that song in years. Like others on this album, it was a song where I had been practicing chords and then started singing over them, stopped so I could grab my iPod, hit record, and then just let whatever needed to come out come out. One of the thoughts that held me back eight years ago was, “Can a four-minute musing over two or three chords even be considered a song?” But then there I was a few days ago, singing it to myself out of nowhere, as if it was someone else’s. And I knew, it was a song.
Listening to this album now, I love it. I loved it back then. I feel like some of my biggest influences, the people who I’ve spent so many hours listening to that I have absorbed their very essence into mine — Cat Power and Lana Del Rey (especially the early stuff that we weren’t supposed to have heard!) and Black Francis/Frank Black and, dare I say, even Mr. Cobain — to name a few, are definitely there, which makes me happy. I thought about re-recording the songs to play them better, sing them better. But I kind of like how raw they are. I like that my 23/24-year-old voice is the one singing them. And I like what I’m saying in them. It’s the truth of the way I felt about things at the time. And still sometimes feel now. And my silly jokes in them still make me laugh — so do the bits of TV you can hear because I would turn the volume way up because I’d rather my neighbors in the apartment complex hear a loud TV than me playing. I also like that you can hear my dog Kirby’s collar jingling in the background of some of them. He’s my little percussionist.
Okay, okay enough yammering — without further ado, here is Feeding Time. Thank you for reading and thank you for listening and thank you for existing!
Update: I uploaded the wrong recording of Reluctant Muse! I think this is the first one I had, but Kirby is sadly not on it. I added the take I did where you can hear him rocking out!
There’s one more thing I want to add about the subject matter of these songs. Three men appear on this album. One of them is my dad. He left the family when I was eight. And, four years before making this, we found out he had died the year before. It was a strange feeling because we hadn’t seen him in so long. So it was kind of like, oh okay, I guess we just keep moving on with life. We didn’t know how to grieve it. I think so often we as people stuff our feelings down when they’re in the in-between, hard-to-define places.
There have been times I’ve felt like I was sleepwalking through my life. Listening to these songs back, now I know I wasn’t sleepwalking. I was just processing things in my own way, in my own time.