Haley

It's 🌈fruit✨ szn yall 🍑THRILLED to announce my album "FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT" is dropping off the tree🍎MAY 8🍌 🔊Sound on for a lil song preview 🎶 And 🍈mark yer calendars for my 🥝album release show at 🍏THE EARL 🍉 In ATL 🍉 With very special guests: 🍓 @haley___james 🫐 @kellyromo and 🍒@gritters_band ! --- 👉 swipe for full album art REVEAL 💖 by @meredithannewhite 💕🍅🍊🍒🍋 --- Y'all im so incredibly proud of this record and I cannot wait to share it with all you cuties. Been many years in the making and finally she ready ✨🌈💖🍒🍎🍇🍌🍓🍑This one feels super personal and the most full artist statement Ive produced to date. --- Shout out @brendantrinkle for producing and mixing, @berlin.mastering for mastering and @tommyuribet for engineering at @maze.studios.atl 🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓 --- All the love in my heart to @ldubzies @maddiecrichardson , Jake Greene and Mac Isseks for lending their musical talents to this special collection of songs 🍍🥭🥝🥥🥑🍋‍🟩🍏🍐 --- Keep your eyes PEELED 🍌🍌for my first EVER Vinyl release (!!!) , limited edition merch, music videos, and a ton of more fruit that is just about ripe and ready 🫦

✨SOLD OUT✨ So beyond delighted to be playing and singing from a @press.shop cubby to a full room of y'all tomorrow night. 🥹 Extra grateful to have my guy @ryan.plumley playing alongside me. Thank you to @imbenagain for this beautiful artwork and for dreaming up this concert series. These tickets sold out in like 24 hrs of posting them and I can't thank y'all enough for that. More shows to come!

When I first started this work in 2022, I lead with the intention that it would be some type of documentary — maybe even a short film of sorts. Since then, my journey has led me down new paths, windy roads, and even welcomed me with a few detours; what remains is a quiet but urgent conjuration that is not finite, but continuous. A altar of work, that breathes. A place where tabby meets the red clay; a moving archive for memory to continue - a unrefined, holy ritual, a unraveling of initiations; a filmic exercise —— examining themes of death, decay, and regeneration; an incantation to create necessary space and new coordinates for resurrected identities. These images took shape and form on August 2023, a week ahead of my 33rd Summer. I’m not sure if I’ve ever been seen or witnessed in this way before. Or if I’ve ever even allowed myself to be witnessed. But seeing myself, in the act of communication & ceremony with this red soil, on my family land - land that my feet touched before I could even walk; has softened me, undoubtedly. These images have created a gateway for me to be with the dead and most things that go unseen. These artifacts and heirlooms serve as a motherboard that my descendants can carry as memory, proving that this red soil existed, with us. Haley @haley___james , I give many thanks for this offering of work and being able to exist on this journey along side you. There are many intersections in our stories that only you & I truly know; but the one thing that remains constant is that you too know what that Red Clay looks like. Word to Rebecca Carol. Keeping the Texture - December 🕯️

All the ways it's not DIY: @alimakesthings let me take this wavy wooden vessel and willowy plant for 5+ weeks because I felt the warmth and aliveness were crucial for the vibe. @cherinighobrial gifted me some glowy concealer because makeup is not exactly my forte and she knows what's up. (In more matters than makeup but also that). Much of the reason I feel the invitation to show up fully as myself in this life is due to (but not limited to) reading work from people like (in order of appearance in the stacks): @camonghne , bitchesgottaeat (Samantha Irby), Audre Lorde, Ross Gay, @melissafebos , @sonyareneetaylor , @jennyslate . There are so many more, but it felt good to be in the company of these books while we recorded. Establishing a vibe was not a merely aesthetic endeavor. That being said, recording at @oakhouse.studios was aesthetic AF as pictured in the pictures. @ryan.plumley helped so much in lending stands and gear and beep-booping the settings on the recorder and then again on the finished audio tracks so that our audio sounds as crispy as it does, despite the spectrum of whispering and hollering-laughing we cover while talking. Last but not least, @sheji.mp3 sent over some beats for us to try out for the intro song and 😮‍💨 we are blessed for it and stoked to share the lil intro bop with you! I've been joking with @cherinighobrial while in the throes of editing that I've been #humbledbythepod, but honestly—I've been mostly good-humbled by all of the ways collaboration and connection are inevitably a part of the human experience. You shine, I shine. When I move, you move. And so on, just like that. 🌌

We got into a little ritual that slowed us and nourished us so we weren't slipping into the energy of *cranking out content* (couldn't if I tried). A few weeks into recording, Spring sprang. We'd get coffee/tea at @minrostudio , sit outside on the patio, walk to/from @oakhouse.studios if we'd given ourselves enough time to (sometimes past horses, who, in the moment pictured, *had each others' backs*), and then we'd set up gear and books and plants (which always took longer than I planned, oops), I'd press record on the three cams and the recorder and sometimes we'd remember to clap and then we'd be off to the races, which never actually felt anything like a race and that's the only way I'd ever want it to be.

Invitation: show up as your full self. Let it be clunky. Let it be learning. Let it be liberating. Mostly: let it be in the company of people who meet you there, who reverberate GO OFF, YES to your silly and your serious, who you cannot imagine a world in which you did not want them to be their full selves, silly and serious, who start questions with "I'm curious how..." so that neither of you are really in the habit of hot takes without cooldowns. The pod (@andalsoandalso.pod ) is very close to actually being born and I'm grateful for the ways it's already changed the way I show up in the world. @cherinighobrial set this thing into motion with a lil question and we've been "living the [question itself]" (IYKYK) since. I like what it's becoming. I like who I'm becoming along the way. (Shoutout to @oakhouse.studios for being the immediate solution in my mind after brainstorming best approach "to make it beautiful".)

We joined the podcast industrial complex to tell you that nothing is simple and everything is complex. Coming March 2025! #andalsoandalso

POV: You're starting a podcast in 2025 and somehow it's not about true crime or finance bros. Coming March 2025! #andalsoandalso

What happened was this: Cherini and Haley were two human creatures who found themselves constantly tripping over the edges of their own certainties, discovering that every time they thought "THIS IS THE ANSWER”, life would whisper "but wait there's more," and in that period they began collecting these moments like sparkly rocks or particularly interesting fragments of colored glass. And then they would bring their treasures to each other, creating a kaleidoscope that shifted and changed with each turn, revealing endless new patterns while never claiming to show the entire world. And they wondered if there were possibly (they actually knew there were) more human creatures who might want to experience this kind of play (aka conversation) so they decided to start a podcast to talk about it, and also laugh about it, and also microphones about it, during a time when everyone and their goldfish also had a podcast. This one did not involve a goldfish unfortunately but did play in that delicious space between knowing and wondering. Herein lies a podcast that explores the complexity, the nuance, the *and also* told through conversations that might begin with skincare routines but somehow end with existential revelations, or start with 2am impulse purchases and somehow illuminate the nature of human connection, all while refusing to take itself too seriously, because honestly, who has the time? Coming March 2025! #andalsoandalso

This year has been a hundred years. It would take me another year to try to write everything I've learned, and I do plan on writing very much of it, but I plan on living this next year even more, more than ever. Because what else is there to do? In the meantime, I am going to be posting some of the things I got to create and experience this year because it hardly serves me to keep it secret, although it's been a good exercise in where I place my values and I'm still convinced we're toddlers at the internet and this will not ever feel exactly like *it* for me. These are snapshots of little "yes, that" moments and then also photos of myself and then also the water in the lake I live nearby in various forms, reflecting various things, to which I can very much relate. ✨It's good to see you again.✨

I really did. And I once had a reality that I put my first little first chapbook of poetry out into the world, now stapled and wrapped in a resealable magic. They're mostly poems I've shared online, except now they can live on shelves and coffee tables and in hands and totes. I'm not too precious about these poems (we keep on learning and growing, don't we?) except that I'm glad I wrote them and thankful for the things they helped me say that I couldn't have said any other way. Catch and release, baby. Catch and release.

Around this time last year, I excitedly created six months worth of prompts with images meant to be a big ol' bucket of inspiration to swim around in. I shared them with a group I called A Place to Share Things (Hey y'all. I miss you!). The instructions? Take the prompt, pull the thread, anything goes. Paint some colors, journal some thoughts, write some poems. Heck, even just join the call to talk and see what comes up. Life happened, as it does, and other things became priority (like tending to our aching hearts while the world kept breaking them). But, my friends, July is giving THICK again — in more ways than one, as the prompt intends. And I figured why not share these here, which is certainly A Place to Share Things. I'd love to see what you make if you want to post or DM me about it, but you can also take these prompts as they come and keep your creations offline or in your heart. #APlaceToShareThings if you'd like. (Applicable photo creds in comments).