In typical Rachel fashion, I’ve had this new site set up and looking pretty for about a year, but haven’t posted to it once. Time to fix that. Let’s catch up!
I just had a look at my Spotify Wrapped for 2023 and I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised! Over 700 people had me as one of their top ten most streamed artists for the year, and I was in over 300 top fives. Most mind-bogglingly to me, though, was the fact that fifty-seven whole people listened to me more than any other musician. Fifty-seven! That feels crazy. Fifty-seven people wouldn’t fit in my house.
Seeing everyone’s Wrappeds (is that the right pluralisation? It doesn’t look right) is always fun to me. I like seeing the weird and wonderful combinations of acts that people listen to. The wilder, the better. While I don’t think mine was too crazy this time around, I do think I’m probably the only person in the world with both AFI and White Moth Black Butterfly as their top two. Rounding out the rest of my top five, we had Ghost, Unleash The Archers, and My Chemical Romance. Tell me about your top artists! I’m so curious! I originally put the thinking emoji here, but it doesn’t seem to want to work for me. Boooo.
Spotify chatter aside, my health has been the same up-and-down situation it’s been in for the past… forever, I guess. It’s a whole ‘second verse, same as the first’ kind of deal. As time goes on, I pick up more ways of dealing with and getting around it, but it’s an omnipresent problem, and it’s pretty much always getting in the way. Because of that, I’m never going to be able to create as quickly as I used to aim for. But I’m getting better at accepting that. It also prevents me from setting concrete timelines for goals, because there’s no way to definitively know whether I’ll be able to work or stuck in bed on a week-to-week basis.
That said, as of right now I’m able to work on music a little! I’ve just come off a several hour recording session today. Most likely I’ll need a couple of days to recover from that, but for now I’m riding the high of having done something. Here’s what I worked on, if you’d like to have a listen! Or, if you’re not on board with my Patreon, you can at least listen to this little bonus snippet here of my sweet baby angel dog Cannon interrupting and ruining a take. As he does. A lot.
It always feels good to have been tangibly productive. I get very restless very quickly if I’m not creating, which as you can imagine is a pretty frustrating combo with being chronically ill and constantly exhausted. Going into 2024, I’ve been trying to actively seek out more ways I can work within my own energy budget, I guess you could call it. At the moment I’m figuring out ways to squeeze in music in particular, as that’s always been the hardest thing to do when my body’s giving me a hard time. At the same time, I’m trying to be vigilant of making myself stop working at a reasonable time when I am doing well. Because of how few and far between those opportunities to really put some work in seem to be, I have a tendency to throw myself into working at full throttle until I completely burn out, which feeds into the vicious cycle of exhaustion and restlessness.
Honestly, stopping is probably the trickiest thing for me. I’m going to stop now, though! I hope you’re all doing well, and I’ll catch you later 🙂
