My body is a sword / it gets sharper when it gets ignored.
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That observation—just as cutting as the weapon in question—is made by IAN SWEET, a.k.a Los Angeles indie pop artist Jilian Medford, in “Sword,” one of the most raw and terrifying and transfixing songs on her third album, Show Me How You Disappear, out March 5 via Polyvinyl.
Medford wrote most of the record while recovering from a mental health crisis, then teamed up with different producers—Andrew Sarlo, Daniel Fox, Andy Seltzer, Will Van Boldrik, and deadmen—for different tracks. Still, Medford’s visceral lyrics and vocals—backed by dreamy synths and distorted guitar parts—are the core of the project.
The final product charts Medford’s effort to “get better,” as she sings in a song called—what else?—“Get Better.” For Medford, this is a journey from self-deprivation to self-care. Over the record’s ten tracks, she literally catches her breath—and finds her voice in the process: In the album opener “My Favorite Cloud,” Medford sings, My psychic told me I’d die / Cuz I’d forget to breathe, nodding to a real session she had with Harmony Tividad’s mom. Later, in “Dirt,” Medford realizes she’s breathing for the first time / I was underwater. In “Get Better,” once again, she’s gasping for air. But finally, in the clear-eyed album closer “I See Everything,” something shifts: I got that air in my lungs / I can breathe.
“That’s definitely a common theme throughout the record—finding my breath,” Medford recently told American Songwriter over Zoom. “It’s the same as finding my voice, standing my ground. If you can breath, you’re pretty good. You’re making your way in the world if you can breathe, and that’s something that I have to remind myself of—something so simple.”
Chatting from her new digs in Silverlake, Medford spoke to American Songwriter about writing her most honest record yet, giving herself space to process her emotions, and drawing inspiration from misheard lyrics. Check out the full interview and listen to IAN SWEET’s latest singles below.
American Songwriter: I just read this interview with Ezra Furman, and in the interview she says, “Making music, for me, is an effort to say things that can’t be said in social life, and can’t be said with just words, but need rhythm, melody, and harmony to be brought to the fullest expression and the infinite.” Do you find that you say things in music, or as IAN SWEET, that you can’t say otherwise?
Jilian Medford: I really like Ezra and I know her brother really well from my Boston days. I highly relate to what she said. Definitely there’s a lot of things I don’t say in my real life or don’t give attention to until I’m ready to sit down and explore the feelings with music. It’s a lot more of a freeing opportunity. And also, day-to-day stuff gets so busy. I also have a day job, so when I make the time to play music it’s like a meditation—I’m finally giving myself a rest and then I can actually explore some feelings. It doesn’t always happen like that, but when it comes naturally, that’s the case.
AS: I read that you wrote Show Me How You Disappear on two sides of a mental health crisis, or at multiple points around that crisis. How did that unfold?
JM: You might hear my dog [Blueberry] bark a little bit.
Blueberry: [howls]
JM: He sees his friend outside. His best friend. But yeah, I obviously had a mental health crisis, as you’ve read about. It was pretty hard for me to express what I was going through when I was going through it in the moment. Sometimes writing music is really painful, and if you’re not ready to address the issues or if you’re not ready to fully dive in, it can almost be more detrimental. That’s how I feel about writing music. I don’t want to force myself to feel the feelings until I’m ready, because I’m fragile. I am a fragile person. That’s why I ended up in this sort of situation.
Long story short, I ended up in an outpatient program. My therapist had [said], ‘I think you need more support than just therapy once a week. I think you need to go to a program where you’re talking to therapists and getting constant help for an allotted amount of time,’ just ‘cause things with my mental health had gotten so bad. So I did that, and I checked myself into an outpatient program. Not right away did I start writing songs there, but as I was feeling release and as I was finally addressing these issues that I’d been going through for the last few years regarding everything, I finally was able to address a lot of my emotions and in a healthy way process.
A big piece of the pie of outpatient therapy was that we would journal every morning and then we’d share with each other if we were feeling comfortable enough, because it was a group therapy setting most of the time. That’s where a lot of the lyrics for the song [‘Show Me How You Disappear’] came from. I normally don’t write lyrics before melody. It’s usually something, in the past, [where] I sit down with my guitar and I write lyrics and melody—even if it’s just mumbo jumbo lyrics at first—I like to just have it in the moment. But this record was different. I had more time with the lyrics to sit with them, because they were the first thing that came through this process. [It was] a really unconventional way to write a record, but it led me to writing the most honest music yet.
AS: In “My Favorite Cloud,” you sing, My psychic told me I’d die / Cuz I’d forget to breathe. Is that something that actually happened to you, or is that an imagined reading?
JM: No, that happened to me. Harmony [Tividad] from Girlpool, her mom is a medium or something along those lines. A very talented one. And when I was in my darkest, deepest phase, trying to reach out and grab whatever I could, I was like, “I’m gonna go see Harmony’s mom and see if she has any help, anything to tell me how to get through this.” As she went into her sort of trance and was channeling things for me, one of the first things she said is, ‘You don’t know how to breathe. You haven’t taken a real breath.’ Along with, like, ‘You need to eat more nuts,’ and all this stuff about my body and my health. So she was like, ‘You never take an actual breath, and if you keep going on like this, it’s not going to work out for you.’ And in that moment, when she told me that, I was like—[exhales]. I was like, ‘Oh my god.’ I hold my breath without knowing. Even now, sometimes when I’m at work or working on the computer, I forget to breathe.
AS: The album becomes this arc toward finding your breath. Could you talk about those efforts to breathe differently?
JM: Catching your breath and breathing is the only way to get oxygen to your brain—to stay alive and be healthy. I think a big part of why I had or have a lot of mental health issues is that I don’t put myself first and don’t put my needs first and I forget about the simplest things that contribute to my survival. Music is a thing that contributes to my survival, but sometimes when I’m so depressed, I feel like I can’t even touch a guitar because I feel like I’ll get too emotional. That’s how important music is to me—I know once I go there, I’m gonna be, like, crying all day.
That’s definitely a common theme throughout the record—finding my breath. It’s the same as finding my voice, standing my ground. If you can breath, you’re pretty good. You’re making your way in the world if you can breathe and that’s something that I have to remind myself of—something so simple.
AS: Musically, how would you compare Show Me How You Disappear to your previous albums? Did you have any lodestars when you started to envision what this album might sound like?
JM: Lodestars, I like that. I didn’t really envision what this record would sound like before I just dove into making it. It’s just whatever came in the moment. I knew that I wanted to work with different producers on different songs just because I felt like each song kind of had its own identity and its own story. I wanted to give [each] story its proper teller, so that was very different for me. I’d never worked with multiple producers on something.
I like listening to this record, too. I just feel much more connected to it—when a song comes out, I like listening to it the day of, like, ‘I like this song!’ Whereas before, I would avoid at all costs listening to my music. Something that I mentioned is that on my past records I didn’t feel like I was being as honest with myself. I’m not mad at myself for that, it’s just… I wasn’t really addressing a lot of the issues I’ve had. And a lot of my songs are about dealing with mental health. I feel like on this record I really, really got the help I needed, and so I feel like I could finally tell the truth. Not that I was lying, but on the last records, I don’t think I was being as honest as I could’ve been. It reflects not only in the lyrics but in the music itself on this record.
AS: Were any of those collaborations especially meaningful? Or did any of them yield surprising results?
JM: All of them did. When I collaborated with Andrew Sarlo—we made the songs ‘My Favorite Cloud’ and ‘Power’—he and I just wanted to hang out and demo some stuff. The demos that we made ended up being on the record. We never changed them, we never touched them. We had two days and we made both of those songs. I loved that experience. We were just playing around.
There’s this video of me, when we’re recording ‘My Favorite Cloud,’ where I’m just holding a mic up to a speaker and feedbacking as loud as I can. It just makes no sense. If you isolated some of the tracks on that song, it would make absolutely no sense and it would be kind of scary for someone to listen to. But that’s where I have the most fun, is where nothing makes sense and things are mistakes. Those become the best songs sometimes. Some of my favorite lyrics that I’ve come up with—this doesn’t happen often—are because I’ll hear somebody else’s song and think it was a different lyric than it was. I’ll be like ‘Woah, that was a cool lyric,’ but it wasn’t the actual lyric, and I’ll write it down.
A few years ago, my friends and I were listening to that Smashing Pumpkins song [‘Bullet With Butterfly Wings’] and it’s like, Despite all my rage, I’m still just a rat in a cage, right? And I thought the lyric was Despite all my rage, I’m still just ready to rage. And I was singing along with my friend in the car and they were like, ‘What did you just say?’ I mess up every lyric.
AS: The album closer “I See Everything,” to me, feels like this moment of peace or acceptance coming after this intense experience. Can you still access that serene space, or is the song nodding to a particular moment in time?
JM: That song was written during one of the last days of outpatient, and it’s very relevant to now. I’ve lost touch with some of the tools that I learned in therapy just because it’s quarantine and it’s hard and everyone’s struggling, but I try to stay on track and feel that clarity when I can. That song, to me, is really important. It’s kind of funny because I feel like the whole record is a lot of struggling and then BOOM. There’s a song where it’s like, ‘I’m good!’ But it’s more of a metaphor for feeling some sort of weight lifted—a veil lifted off my eyes. Just feeling a little bit healthier at the end of it all.
Show Me How You Disappear is out March 5 via Polyvinyl. You can pre-order it here.
Photo by Lucy Sandler
