“Writing From My Heart Again” by Freddie Lewis

In January of this year, I wrote down for the first time on a piece of paper that I wanted to self-produce my next EP. I was alone at home, hopping around with a broken foot (much to my downstairs neighbours’ dismay); I couldn’t go to my day job, and so I took the leap. I opened up a Logic project and began to make something — alone, properly alone — for the first time.

For context, I’ve been making and releasing music for four years now. In my first year, I released my debut EP Lilac Underpass Mixtape, with its lead single Growing Pains, both of which gave me a very jammy introduction to the music industry. I got to play The Great Escape, Glastonbury, and some of the biggest Pride festivals in the country. I travelled more than I ever had and performed to thousands of new people, and it was all incredibly exciting. I wrote and released a further six songs the following year that maintained this momentum. I was making music I loved — music that represented my appreciation for the everyday, my affection for small things, and my love of love. And then, if I’m honest with you, I lost my way a bit.

Cut to: the great dirge of 2023, where I tried to juggle two jobs, an HRT-induced menopause, and the creation of my second EP, More Than That, which centred on the narrow perceptions people had of me as a trans man. It was a careful, thoughtful project, but it didn’t resonate in the way I had hoped. Looking back, I think it was built on foundations laid by my (small, but notable in the context of my life) success of the previous year. Suddenly, I was being talked about more — interviewed, commented upon. And my primary frustration arose from being made small by this. I found myself reduced to identity markers over artistic qualities.

I remember being invited onto a podcast, listening to the previous guests’ episodes — all laden with amazing, insightful questions about their art — only to be asked almost exclusively about my top surgery, my coming out, my testosterone. All I wanted was to be an artist, but instead I felt like a fascinating thing, an insect beneath a magnifying glass. Of course, the irony was that making a project about this very feeling meant all the press surrounding it caused the cycle to repeat.

A bitterness I’m not proud of ensued after that. I carried it with me always, my little dark friend. A queer events organiser — now a dear friend — booked me for a show during this time and told me recently over dinner how distant I was. I’d never been described this way before in my life, and I don’t think I have been since.

Then, toward the end of 2023, I had my heart broken. And something in me shifted. Grief has a way of rearranging your priorities; of softening you where you didn’t know you were hard. I had to give myself this great abundance of self-compassion, because I was sad and childlike and hurting. And something in that process allowed me to let go of all those previous tensions in me about my career. They suddenly seemed beside the point — pessimistic, ungenerous.

I realised that people’s intentions, when naming me a trans artist, are mostly good. That they mean well. They want to signal to people what we can do. That this is a good thing. This sounds so obvious now, but I truly could not see it this way for a long time. I was caught in a fear of being boxed in, and placing far too much power in other people’s hands by deciding they would — or even could — do that.

I let go of the idea that any one organisation (or even one person, to be honest) can wholly know me, but that my art can be my great effort in showing them. It can be a painting for them to look at, if not always fully understand. After all, I don’t think understanding should always be the aim of art — but feeling. And of course, there’s the wonderfully romantic argument that feeling is the best understanding we have, anyway.

And with this new clarity — this letting go, this want to feel — I made that great declaration at the start of the year that I would self-produce my EP, kiss and run. Because I wanted all of me to be there in the work, in the music, as part of the story. I wanted to allow myself to feel it all, to touch each part of the songs as though fingers on fabric.

I wrote to you from my heart and not my head again. And I promise to keep striving to do so for as long as I am here.

You can listen to kiss and run now.