Presenting Tarquin Alexandra as The Contortionist
Mustard had the pleasure of speaking with independent singer-songwriter Tarquin Alexandra whose introspective music reflects on nostalgia, the sadism of medical institutions and more.
In a previous interview with Ally Adams Mustard mentioned how they found nostalgia to be a fascinating phenom. Nostalgia while not a physical entity (though humans can be nostalgic over a physical product) is quite powerful. Its allure allows humans to travel back in time to their childhood and remember something fondly. They have observed there are some humans who want to preserve their past; they are threatened by society (and ultimately themselves) progressing further. Ideas (and techniques) that were once the foundation are being uprooted. Conservation can be good but our environment (and those in it) must be willing to adapt.
Independent singer-songwriter Tarquin Alexandra makes a point on their new album The Contortionist that allows listeners to view nostalgia from another perspective; a perspective of accessibility. In our interview below Alexandria notes:
When we long for the return to moments in our personal histories, we often leave out the bad parts of those memories, or alter those moments to preserve the nostalgia.
Nostalgia is viewed with rose-tinted glasses providing humans with comfort. This comfort can also be linked with the concept of conservation. As mentioned above Conversation, in concept, can be good but society must be open to new ideas that progress itself forward. Alexandria is passionate about accessibility and believes it should be viewed at from a creative standpoint. They describe accessibility as a puzzle; where humans negotiate conflicting needs between the art and the consumer along with accessing frictions when different needs conflict. The ideas they present in our conversation are possible.
In our interview you will get an opportunity to learn more about Tarquin Alexandra. Together we discussed their love of behind the scene videos, accessibility, theatre, and so much more!
1. Mustard is grateful and appreciative to you join them at Music Shelf. How are you doing today?
Well Mustard, the reflex response to this question is usually “I’m good, how are you?”, but I’m actually feeling really itchy today. Itchy everywhere. And I’m experiencing a distinctive sensation like there is molasses in my bones. I’m also feeling some existential dread towards the ongoing horrors of this world, wondering what my future will look like as a queer disabled woman as people are becoming less accepting of difference. And when my body reacts to every minor stressor like it’s a major health setback, it can be hard to feel like it’s possible to make real progress.
But I’m also enjoying the warm weather! I went swimming yesterday :)
2. Mustard has observed that you have an obsession with behind the scenes videos. Is there a music documentary that made an impact on you? How has this documentary influenced you creatively?
Mustard would be correct in this observation! I’m actually not sure that a favourite immediately stands out. I will consume everything – from a major label artist’s Netflix documentary, to an art museum’s TikTok video detailing how a sculpture is restored, to a YouTube video of a recording session, to the special features on an old musical in which the costume designer talks about how the clothes are a crucial character in the film. The process of creating something is completely enthralling to me!
3. Mustard wonders what your relationship with music was growing up?
When I was a child my grandmother gave me piano lessons, and she listened to a lot of Louis Armstrong. I’m told that my mom also listened to a lot of jazz when I was in the womb – that counts as growing up, right? One does a lot of growing in the womb. In terms of my own relationship to music growing up, it was very limited. I refused to watch or listen to anything except for the few things I already knew and liked. It was pretty much “Under The Sea” or bust. Then for a while I became obsessed with the soundtrack to “O Brother Where Art Thou” at which point it was “Under The Sea”, “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow”, or bust.
As a teenager I discovered pop music, so of course artists like Taylor Swift were really formative for me, but it wasn’t until I was around 19 or 20 that musical theatre came into my life and completely opened up my understanding of songwriting. I had come to understand that the Disney music from my childhood was something that I wasn’t “allowed” to enjoy anymore. Discovering musicals opened up a world of music and genres and writing styles and techniques that gave me the same feeling as the Disney songs I loved as a child! It felt so freeing! Don’t get me wrong, I love pop music, and I don’t think it’s credited enough as a valid and respectable art form. I wish I had been more open to discovering new things as a child though, there’s a whole world of music I would have loved.
4. You have had the pleasure of performing a part of Charitindie both this year and last year. What does this event mean to you?
Well Mustard, the thing is that I have very inconsistent mobility and I’m high risk for COVID – and both of those things mean that I just don’t get to perform live. Also, the nature of being a small artist with minimal energy, minimal income, and lots of existential dread is that I have a lot of causes that I care about that I don’t have the resources to support.
Charitindie is great because it’s an opportunity to do both of these things! This past year the event raised money for the Sunrise Movement. Organized political action towards the climate crisis is really important to me. Participating in the event also meant that I got the chance to watch my friends play music! And I love watching my friends play music! Sometimes we even collaborate and do a surprise duet! It’s a great event all around and it’s a big priority for me to participate in it each year.
5. Creativity is intrinsically moldable. What are some steps that you think the music industry can take to become more neurodivergent and chronic illness friendly?
This is actually something I’m really passionate about. Accommodating disability so often gets talked about as a burden, or a nuisance, or a “you get what you get and you can be satisfied that someone tried the bare minimum” kind of situation. I don’t understand that mindset at all. I think accessibility should be treated creatively. I think we should get excited about accessibility and we should get energized by the unique challenges it poses. I think we should imagine accessibility as a kind of puzzle – negotiating conflicting needs between the art and the consumer, and negotiating access frictions when different needs conflict.
Wouldn’t it be cool if live music got creative about offering a special slot of the same performance but lower stimulation? Like a special version of the show but with dim lighting and spread out seating and maybe even bean bag chairs on the floor. Don’t just imagine how many people might be able to attend live music if there was a chill performance without strobe lights, imagine how many people might not actively need that but might just prefer that experience? Taylor Swift will put out ten different versions of the same vinyl, each with a different cover art – why can’t we put on five different versions of the same show, each accommodating a different accessibility profile?
Or audio descriptions – what if these were incorporated into projects as part of the fiction or the branding of the project? What if they were presented as a narrator or a journal entry or whatever fits with the theme of the work? What if the experience of watching a music video changed when you had audio descriptions toggled on and off? What if new information or story details were revealed in the descriptive audio that you might not have heard otherwise?
People look at these suggestions and the first thing they think is that they would require time and money – and I ask why should that stop us? We put so much time and money into creative projects to polish them and make them the best they can be, why not direct some of that creative energy into making them the most accessible they can be?
6. Mustard has also observed that you have a background in theatre. How has your experience in theatre helped you as a musician? Are there any elements between theatre and music that overlap?
My album The Contortionist is very theatrical. I came to theatre in my late teens after I had just started writing music, and it took a while for this influence to bleed into my writing but once it did the influence affected me in a major way.
One time, when I was discussing my songwriting with the director of a show I was in, he asked me how I envision my music playing out on a stage. I hadn’t previously considered my music outside of the context of putting it in a concert as a pop artist, because to be honest I don’t think I felt like there was another kind of artist I could be at the time. Something about this interaction stuck with me. You can see a strong pop influence in my early releases, but you can also watch me slowly start to find myself in my music and this one question was a major part in that. My music has slowly become more and more inspired by musical theatre since working with this director. I really look up to him as an artist, and if I am ever able to transform my music into a theatrical context, I hope the show would be something he might be impressed by.
7. Mustard would like to wish you congratulations on your new album The Contortionist which was made in the spirit and nostalgia of the Golden Age. Mustard wonders what films or music during this time you used as a reference that helped inspire this album?
Thank you, Mustard! Tarquin (aka The Contortionist) appreciates that greatly!
I think nostalgia is an important word here because it can be deceptive. Nostalgia can make us see things through rose tinted glasses. The eras of show business I explore in my album – the 20s, the 30s, the 40s – are often referred to as a “golden age” of Hollywood, or Broadway, or Vaudeville. That itself is a form of nostalgia-as-denial. When we watch a comforting old musical, we often forget that the performers and production crew had very few protections against being mistreated. When we long for the return to moments in our personal histories, we often leave out the bad parts of those memories, or alter those moments to preserve the nostalgia.
Show business is also very inwardly focused. Show business loves itself, and show business loves nothing more than it loves itself. Think of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard – she was framed by the film as decrepit and self-obsessed, but sometimes I feel quite a bit like Norma Desmond. I’ll lie in a dark room all by myself, rewatching home movies or clips from when my life felt easy or when my body could do things that it no longer can, longing for a time of abundance that may never come again. She has aged out of the studio system, and the film presents her grief as something vain or self-obsessed, but she’s lost the ability to participate in the community that she helped to build. To go from feeling like a valued member of a community to being dismissed and isolated in favour of someone younger or more vibrant or more able-bodied is a huge loss, and it’s one I relate to. I feel that my illness has pushed me out of a life that I desire, and I frequently find myself caught up in overwhelming waves of nostalgia for that life, but that nostalgia is deceptive. There are plenty of moments when I had a more able body when I was very much not okay – just look at the lyrics in some of my early releases! I have friends now that I didn’t before. I have a deeper trust for the friends who didn’t phase me out when my illness became inconvenient or uncomfortable to them. Holding these truths about nostalgia at the same time – the longing for the comfort of the past and the capacity for that longing to misrepresent that past – is a big part of why the aesthetic of the golden age felt so natural for this project.
8. The visuals and rollout leading up to the release of this album have been incredible. In the past you have worked with Deaegan Lunsford. Mustard wonders if you and Deagan collaborated again on your new album?
Daegan and I didn’t get the chance to collaborate on this album – not yet, at least! Daegan has been moving more towards drawing and painting than photography recently, but he will always be a multidisciplinary artist, so who knows what will happen.
We’ve been bouncing around a couple ideas about maybe collaborating on a music video, maybe doing an illustrated rendition of some songs, but nothing is set in stone just yet. Ideas evolve over time, so who knows what we’ll end up collaborating on next and if it will be related to this album, but I have a very strong feeling that Daegan and I will be lifelong friends and collaborators.
9. Mustard wonders when you first began working on this album?
That’s a good question, Mustard. The thing is, I’m always writing music just to process things that I’m feeling in my everyday life and these don’t really become part of a project until I notice a common story between them.
So if you wanted to, you could say that work began on The Contortionist all the way back in 2017 – before my first EP Pretend even got released – when I wrote the song that is now called Exhausted with the Realities of Life. Originally, it was called Toothpaste and I thought it was just about depression.
It wasn’t until 2020, when I wrote the song Contortionist, that this started to change. Similarly, I wrote this song at first thinking that it was about a strained relationship with a parent, but as the song took on a life of its own, as it developed and grew and changed and came into being at the same time that I was being faced with the increasingly unavoidable reality that whatever my body was going through it was not just depression – I realized that Contortionist, as well as what was then called Toothpaste, and an increasing amount of the songs I was writing were about disability.
The original idea for this album actually had more than twenty songs on it. I spent the summer of 2020 figuring out how to structure the story, and which pieces of that story might be redundant or tangential or better suited to a different project (tremendously special thanks – as always – to my good friend Jared, who would come over, sit in my backyard 6 feet away from me and talk through the structure of this album over and over and over again, going over every possible form it could take). That’s really where this album was born. A couple summers later, Jared and my godmother Stephanie helped me apply for a couple of federal grants, and we were fortunate enough that the grant council agreed that this was a story that needed to be told.
10. This album feels like a stage production made for human ears. When structuring this album were you inspired by any playwrights?
Well, I hope it feels like a stage production for Mustard ears too!
I wasn’t consciously thinking about playwrights when writing this album, but the fact you think this album might have been inspired by a specific playwright is a huge compliment! Lately though I’ve been thinking a lot about absurdist theatre. It feels like such a vivid and visceral way to express how it feels to navigate life. I can’t remember if this extended back to when I was creating the world of The Contortionist though.
11. The Contortionist is a story about disability and grief. Could you share more about how you structured this project?
When I was sitting in my backyard with aforementioned Good Friend Jared, going over the story of this album, one of the earliest lines of thinking we used to structure our narrative was the Kübler-Ross five stages of grief model. It might be a bit cliche, but we organized each song into denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and we debated fervorously over what it meant for a song to signify ‘acceptance.’
I think that the bones of that are still there, but the structure of the album has expanded beyond that early kernel, because grief is more complicated than that. There are songs on this album that fit into two or more ‘stages’ at the same time. There’s also an emphasis on circularity that was a big priority to me – the first and last tracks both mirror each other in how they emphasize the physical space of the theatre. The second, and the penultimate songs (Contortionist and Ballerina) are neither denial nor acceptance respectively, but are about how the experience of becoming disabled is both a form of performance that you put on for other people and a cycle of grief that loops back around and never ends.
12. Mustard adores your storytelling and presentation. Who are some storytellers that helped inspire you during the process of this album?
So I’m going to be honest with you Mustard, I find myself feeling a bit stuck on this question. I know that I am influenced by other artists and storytellers, because no idea is entirely original, but I don’t know if I can actually tell you who those are for this particular project.
One of the most frequent symptoms of my chronic illnesses is brain fog. It feels like information enters into my brain through a series of sieves and clouds and pinball machines and gelatinous substances. So much of that information gets lost or stuck or jumbled along the way. Brain fog hugely affects how I’m able to process the art I consume, and all the art that I make. It’s the reason why I write songs in the first place, to take the bewildering, amorphous experience of life, and make some sense of it.
So who are my storytelling influences on this album? Well I can tell you that the storytelling structure of dodie’s album Build A Problem was really influential to how I think about structuring an album and a story. I can tell you that classical Hollywood and Broadway were big influences on how I thought about this album, and without these influences The Contortionist wouldn’t exist. But I’m not sure it would be clear to someone listening to this album for the first time that I’m drawing influence from these things.
12. Through a manifestation of fate you met your co-producer Natasha Sophia who has made an impact on you both personally and professionally. Did you have a similar process on this album as you did A Tyrant's Demise?
On A Tyrant’s Demise, Natasha and I did everything together. That EP was produced completely by the two of us during the early years of COVID, so we did everything virtually over text and zoom and basically made it up as we went along. I mixed for the first time, Natasha produced for the first time, and Natasha played a really big part in bringing that project into existence.
On The Contortionist, I had grant money, which meant I got the chance to work with a bigger group of people, and Natasha had a much more specified role. They wrote and performed most of the choral parts that you hear, as well as a lot of the backup vocals. Our work on A Tyrant’s Demise really solidified our professional relationship, but right now we’re kind of taking a back seat on each other’s projects as we both branch off in different directions. But we’re always going to be there for each other as friends and collaborators and I can definitely imagine working on more projects like A Tyrant’s Demise together in the future.
13. This album features the likes of Copeland James, Natasha Sophia on both choral and background vocals, and Celia Celia. Could you share more about how these collaborations came about?
There are various friend circles in the indie music community and we all tend to trade small collaborations with each other. I’ve collaborated with Natasha Sophia, Jeremy M, Copeland James, celia celia, Cayt W, in the past. So it felt totally natural to reach out to my friends when I needed some musical bits and pieces.
14. Where can readers listen to your music?
What a great question, Mustard! Thank you for asking. Readers can search for Tarquin Alexandra on their music-listening platform of choice, or they can go to
www.tarquinalexandra.com/linksfor a collection of links to some of the most common platforms to find their favourite.
Talking in the Aisle
Is this your first introduction to Tarquin Alexandria?
Do you have a favorite behind the scenes video?
how can we make human society more accessible?
Music Shelf with Mustard is a publication that interviews independent musicians from all across the globe. It is read in 32 states and 19 countries. Check out previous interviews here.
Music Shelf with Mustard originally began in early 2021. Inspired by independent musicians on social media application TikTok Mustard knew they had to do something to help share their music. Shortly after Music Shelf with Mustard was born. Its goal is to highlight independent artists from all across the globe. Mustard appreciates you taking the time out to read this interview.