Welcome, you are listening to Every Song. A series where I play songs I’ve written throughout the years and share the stories behind them.
Today is the 18th of August 2025. Meaning, it is my 34th birthday today!
I started tossing up the idea of writing music over twenty years ago, and here I am now, just playing to the void in my little corner of the internet. I am mainly doing this to get it all out of my songbooks and onto soundwaves. Because what good are songs if they are just sitting on paper and not making their way through someone’s ears?
My songbooks were a mess for the last few years when I stopped taking music seriously. Whenever I would write—whenever I would write songs, at least— they would be in fragments, unfinished, and I would write maybe only one or two songs a year. As opposed to when I was younger, I would write a half dozen or so within just a few months, as you can tell with how many I’m playing from the early 2000’s and not so much in the 20-teens. I will eventually get to my songs nearing these years, but I plan on playing them all in batches of the situational life contexts they were based on because they make sense that way. Unlike a lot of my early songs that were mostly songwriting exercises as I was just learning to write. I’ll get through these for now, and play you all the hard-hitting stuff soon.
But let’s start with this. This is a song called Gloriavale, written on the 26th of May 2020. I wrote this in the last year and a bit of my twenties and had started to feel some typa way about turning thirty within the next year. During this time, there were also a few documentaries and books out on this creepy Christian cult here in New Zealand called Gloriavale, where a lot of the factors of aging were gendered.
As per usual, in any Christian sect, being born with a uterus and vagina meant that your existence centred around reproductive labour: both biologically and within the home and community. I express a few of my thoughts on aging and what it means to age as a woman in a traditional sense in this song.
This is also the only song I’m going to play for today. So, enjoy.
200526 Gloriavale
I’m scared to sing because I hate the truthThat every second drinks from my youthFountaining childhood and mountainous laughterAll of which could be a wondrous disaster
This vale hails Gloria, no longer servingAs a symbol of prudence, my thoughts are worldlyRid the reign, drain the riversBe still the spine that shiversGloria, Gloria
If I say I need you just know I don’tI’m still unlearning all I’ve been taughtAbout being financially dependent on menI’ll be dead before I take his name
They say victory is sweetBut only while one’s breast and ribs don’t meetThe worms they waitThey salivateI always think I want to dieBut really I would just like to start livingAnd start believingIn anything
Thank you for listening to episide 13 of Every Song. Until next time.
