Exit Music For Exit Wounds-Ash Nataanii
Ash Nataanii’s “Exit Music for Exit Wounds” released today on all streaming platforms
“Empty Nest” by Ash Nataanii plays
<HOST>
You’re listening to Ash Nataanii’s “empty nest” off her brand new album Exit Music for Exit Wounds, which is out today on all the streaming platforms and it will also be released through Anything Bagel, which is an awesome local label, they makes beautiful limited-edition screen-printed tapes and CDs. Holy smokes, this music feels so important for Missoula to be hearing, for the world to be hearing really, but I am going to let Ash and the music speak for themselves. You're listening to KBGA College Radio 89.9, this isNoelle Huser, stay tuned in for a run down on this incredible work of art.
“Empty Nest” continues to play
“But only tasted ash, when the blood is dried enough I’ll shed in time’s martini glass,”
<ASH NATAANII>
You know what makes Ash, Ash, a lot of what it is is a summation of everything that burned up in my previous life and now gets to be beautiful in its own sculpture, you know?
“Empty Nest” continues to play
“...hold my son, just like he’s mine, pretend i'm your dad, pretend that it’s fine, ”
<ASH>
And when I was listening too it in the car, I was hearing it and really enjoying it but there was like something else, I was listening to it and listening too it and listening to it and it got to the end of the song and as soon as the song ended and I had finished listening to it, it felt like somebody had punched me in the stomach because of like just how, like I don't even know it was just this release it was very magical and intense, but it was just this release of energy that like plunged out of me um. And yeah I mean it was like the realization that I now, as an Indigenous queer person in Montana, who has grown up with a lot of oppression from the church and society and myself and everything else, I had every reason to not feel free and then in listening to that song it was the first time that I had felt like I had properly represented myself. Um, because it's a song about being a trans parent first off and about wishing for a better life for your children and it's a very spiritual song about regret and also healing. But it was also a very proper representation of subtle things like parental abuse that I grew up with and the different types of abuses that I’ve suffered over the course of my life. In having that be the first song I recorded for Weird Spirit like that, yeah I just broke down, I broke down crying, it was a magical thing a really intense thing…
“Empty Nest” continues to play, cathartic music crash, “Ldgf” by Ash Nataanii fades in
“ All these houses that I’ve resided in, with the miles of skeletal roads that rail the shadows of who I've been,”
Ldgf plays
<ASH>
Its like this idea, there's this kind of thing that I want to have happen, that I want to set aside money for, there is like this service, this like recording service where you can have your body ashes sent to them, along with an audio message of whatever you want and they will take your ashes and reform it into a record. They’ll print whatever voice recording you have to wag, or well to your ash in wax now, and you can leave a message for loved ones, and I feel like that's a lot of the same sentiment behind this. I feel like there's been a lot of extreme experiences that I have had in my life that have are really weird, for lack of better words, it's made me feel like i've grown up in a very strange and magical way, in a hard way, but it's come out for the better all the time, not to say it hasn't taken a massive amount of work, yeah I think that's really what it is it just becomes about my perspective and my fight to survive having gone through a lot of experience I have in life. I think that energy flows into what Weird Spirit recordings is going to be, it's going to be a lot of the filter of who I am and a lot of the kind of just sentimental, dark, joyous, deep intensity that I’ve had to go through that runs not only just in me but in Indigenous voicing. I am of Diné descent on my mom’s side and on my dad’s side he’s Oneida.
“Everything Must Go” by Ash Nataanii plays: “Please,please, please give us money. Oh please, please, please”
<ASH>
You know, I do firmly believe Indigenous people have a different type of spiritual make up,I think we are closer to our land, we feel a lot of the energy from the earth. We feel a lot of energy just around us all the time, I mean you ask any Indigenous person about any kind of ghost stories they have and they're gonna get spooky on you real quick because it's one of our favorite things to be that way. So you know, its like in our blood to be spiritual but also when I was teenager having been really invested in the church, you know I am not a Christian at all but I was really strongly when I was a teenager and I do think there is power to human consciousness and especially to human spirituality regardless of religion. So I think if you can tap into that vein, if you can for lack of a better term right now, tap into what we’ll call God,
“HUNNY” by Ash Nataanii plays in the background
<ASH>
Then you can really connect with people in an intensely conscious way and you connect yourself to that as well. It's like grabbing onto a live wire, basically, grabbing someone else's hand and if they grab that other person's hand, but the source comes from the conduit right there. That is something I learned early on, a lot of times by watching my dad. My dad is really an incredibly charismatic person and has a really good heart and is a really humble person when it comes to specialty spiritual things and um you know he taught me alot about how to basically love unconsciously and how to seek something that you don't necessarily understand,
“Sleight of Hands” by Ash Nataanii plays
<ASH>
It just found its way into me, I mean I was born into it, it became a part of my identity since I don't even know when, it wasn’t really like a continuous choice, it wasn’t really a conscious choice, it was trained into me. When I was a teenager, I joined onto our local worship teams and stuff like that and I had a hard time dealing with it, like dealing with all the white kids and also the youth pastor because there is a lot of blatant racism but also they were, they were nervous about a lot of the inherent power that i knew how to connect to the crowd, to other people. I learned a lot of that from being a minister and being in a ministers family.
“25 to Life” by Ash Nataanii plays
“Sleeping below the pews, and waking up too light, too bright to use,”
<ASH>
So I knew how to charismatically pull people up and to get them to be excited and then spent the years after that in workshop teams and doing music and house shows or whatever as a teenager learning how to I guess help people to feel something, or help them to feel what I was feeling. Cause more so than anything else, I never wanted anything that I did to be fake, you know, I wanted everything that I did on stage to be what I was feeling. You know if I’m having a bad time or whatever, i’m not going to fake it on stage, I’ll just do whatever I am doing , but like it became a thing where like I didn't know how else to communicate to other people what I was going through, you know the power of being on stage and the empower of being the vocalist and a guitar player and stuff is that that no one gets to tell you to shut up.
“Cheshire Cat” by Ash Nataanii plays
“Delilah, I want you blessed but can’t hold my tongue, oh Delilah, I just want what's best but keep sighing alone, just tell me one thing before you go, baby what's that Filistine got that I don’t? What’s he got that I dont got?”
<ASH>
You know something, there's this kind of allegory of when you cook something on the stove, you don’t want to let it sit out for so long or else it goes rotten, but there’s some foods that have a longer shelf life and you can pull them out of the fridge and reheat them a different day and they taste different, like I think of like spaghetti, you know sometimes day old spaghetti tastes way better than then the first day you made it. You know that’s how these songs are for me is like, when I wrote them, I wrote them with a specific attitude and then I put them away, and put them a way for a while to revisit them, but you know, the context of which I wrote the song has changed because like continues and changes the way we feel about things. A lot of things and the situations that these were written about, became a lot more layered and a lot more effective in how they changed who I am but also became a lot more enriched and I needed to feel a way in which to properly express that… to be able to like process things in real time and put it on pause. Right now um, I think you know my primary thought processes have been on relationship and healing, which is why I have switched to calling this record, cause I was going to write a record last year and finish up all the songs that I had been recording and I was going to call that “Hexistential Crisis,” but things kind of like, well they got better um and they weren’t so beak anymore. So revisiting these songs and stuff they still can be hard but I’ve taken to the idea of calling this album “Exit music for Exit Wounds, so I’ve switched the title, and yeah I mean a lot the music I’m working with right now, it is biographical, it's really veiled, you know so I don’t think that anyone can really understand, what’s happened in my life if they wanted to read the lyrics, you get everything about what I feel, with none of the context, which is great and that’s kind of what I want it to be is I want people to understand exactly where I’m at and to feel really complex emotions, but not necessarily have to understand it from what I went through.
“25 to Life” by Ash Nataanii plays
“We’re senior kids as freshmen in a holy sophomore slump. Caught some drum beat as a little girl, now every mirror’s some haunted world, my breath gives beneath these chains, but every cross bears Jesus’s name,”
<ASH>
The music I write gets to be whatever the hell I want it to be because I feel like part of the reparations as to what music is to me is that I get to do whatever the hell I want, whether that be a country song or an emo song, or a metal song or whatever, um it’s owed to me to be that representation because we’ve been denied that and not only that but the rest of the world has been denied these types of voices in these types of music from an Indigenous perspective for a long time,”
“You Look Like Elliot” by Ash Nataanii plays
“...make it on the witness stand, I said I’ll never imitate white man’s hands, they panoramic, esoteric...Connor sing it man I felt that sh***, but why does everybody have to sound like Elliott Smith?”
<ASH>
You know like basically what I have always wanted to be is the intensity and fullness of life and that that life thats lived gets to be represented and also color everyone else's life
“Munny” by Ash Nataanii plays
<ASH>
You know being able to observe my autonomy in a way that I was able to fully represent myself and say like, I did this but not only that but feel like for the first time I was able to be painter at the canvas as opposed to having too go through someone else and pay a bit of money just to get one song out. It was like you know, I have the ability to do this whenever and you know that’s all I have ever wanted is just to be a blot to represent myself properly and to feel like, you know, nothing is holding me back in that way, nothing gets to tell me that I don't get to speak anymore.
<NOELLE>
This has been Noelle Huser for KBGA College Radio 89.9 Missoula, it was a pleasure to discuss “Exit Music for Exit Wounds” with Ash Nataanii, the album is out today on all streaming platforms and with tapes and CDs through Anything Bagel. To wrap up the show, I am going to play one of my favorite tracks off the album, this is “Cassie Oh.”
“Cassie, Oh” by Ash Nataanii plays
*CORRECTION: There are no Anything Bagel CDs of “Exit Music for Exit Wounds”, but there are lovely tapes!