Songs for and against Memory

My latest single "Cherrier" and replacing the bad with the good. TW: domestic abuse

Steam “Cherrier” here // photo by Karla Ximena

The first song from my next big body of work comes out today. It’s called ‘Cherrier’ and it’s named after a street on Montreal’s Plateau that I used to walk along everyday when I lived at the corner of St. Andre and Duluth over decade ago. At the time, I was in my last year of jazz school at Concordia University and was trying my best to ascend through the ranks of hipster-bar-stardom. I stomped around clubs like Korova, Bluedog and Salon Officiel with half my head shaved, in skimpy outfits under mean looking leather motorcycle jackets.

During that time, I met a guy that I can only describe as a very short cross between P. Diddy and Ye outside of a Crystal Castles concert. He was just about as terrible as we now know Diddy is. It started off fun though - we went out every night, hopping from bar to club to bar and didn’t have to pay cover anywhere. I thought he was just a beloved figure in nightlife until I finally realized that he made his living doing *ahem* business with partygoers. Without going into all the sordid details, I was in an incredibly physically and emotionally abusive relationship with him. He isolated me from all my friends and family and convinced me to move in with him and start making plans to let go of my lease on St. Andre. Thankfully I managed to escape the relationship before giving up my apartment, but I didn’t feel comfortable living at an address that he knew of, so I ended up leaving the Plateau for another neighbourhood shortly after.

I started avoiding the area for fear of seeing him out at night - I changed my routines and I stopped going to all of the clubs I used to love. For years, I would turn down DJ gigs on lower St. Laurent because I was too afraid of what would happen if he walked in. Years later I was explaining this to my therapist and she broached the idea that I might be suffering from PTSD. That was the before Instagram psychology - I thought PTSD was something only veterans got diagnosed with, and it was the first time it really dawned on me how much this relationship continued to affect my life.

With the support of my therapist, I slowly started accepting DJ gigs at the lower St. Laurent clubs. Sometimes my ex did show up and I would get spooked but I felt somewhat protected by the bouncers and the physical barrier of the DJ booth. The last time I ever saw him was at Blizzarts - he walked in, saw me, and walked right out. Somehow that little interaction felt like a triumph, like I finally claimed a small little safe space behind the booth, as if he acknowledged he was trespassing in my domain and not the other way around.

So, partly that’s what the song “Cherrier” is about - revisiting these streets with a sense of ownership where once I felt so afraid of walking along them. My dear friend Simona Lepadatu helped me shoot the music video on camcorder. We loved the idea of using an analog medium to shoot a video in 2023. The haziness of the Video8 tape captures a kind of intentional misremembering. With the video, Simona and I paint over the painful memories of the past with a new version of me - one that is a creative agent, a fully fledged artist in control of her own story, a girl that has finally carved out a space for herself on Cherrier.