Bring Back The Lyrics

There’s this thing Sara used to do with September Rave—write lyrics that were intentionally disgusting, loaded with the filthiest expressions she could find, talking about vomit and fucking and all of it—but underneath all that obscenity there was something genuinely moving about love and friendship and the ways people destroy each other. It shouldn’t have worked. You don’t pull off beautiful poetry using basically the internet’s worst language as your foundation. Except she did.

Now she’s doing dragstripGirl, which is a different creature entirely—music and design and the internet as subject matter instead of as a language. The kind of evolution that makes sense when you’ve exhausted one specific lane and want to explore what else is possible. I get it. I’m not pretending I don’t.

We were supposed to show up to this Vimeo thing at a pool bar in Wedding, the kind of event that looks promising on paper and feels like a funeral once you’re there. Except we never actually went. Stuck with her Australian roommate instead, drank beer, and basically lived on Scrubs for a night. The party wasn’t worth the effort, so we saved ourselves. Though we did lift some of those massive promotional posters on our way past, just because they were absurdly huge and stealing them felt like the only worthwhile thing about the whole scene.

What gets to me isn’t that Sara moved on from September Rave. It’s that certain kinds of writing stay with you in a particular way, and hers did. The way she could find something genuinely beautiful inside deliberately ugly material—that’s a skill. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to see that collected somewhere, maybe in book form, or maybe just brought back one more time. But that’s not my call. She knows what she wants to make and what she’s ready to leave behind.