Girls of Salzburg (2017-18)

During a trip to Austria in 2017, I found myself reading a plaque in the wall of Nannerl Mozart’s childhood bedroom, a recounting of her life dictates that once her father, her child, her brother and her husband are all dead, she is finally able to return home where she dedicated the remainder of her life to the musical education of the “girls of Salzburg.”

This namesake became the band around which I rallied a once in a lifetime group of friends and collaborators once I’d returned home. We played half a dozen shows and recorded half a dozen songs. I was blessed by collaborators just as varied as they were talented, hoping to create a creative space where we could develop our skills, enhance our sense of entitlement and ensure that whatever barriers real or imagined existed between us and creative fulfilment and community, we would do our best to ignore or destroy them.

I made a zine documenting my travels in Austria and the early (and only!) days of the band that included excerpts from the Mozart family correspondence showing the institutional and cultural alienation of one of its most gifted members, Wolfgang’s older sister Nannerl.

We recorded our first album Judgment of Solomon in a series of basements, cloisters and bedroom closets with the help of several ex-boyfriends and other happy accidents. It serves as a perfect time capsule and testament to the joys and exhaustions of being me, us and hopefully nobody else.