The Right to Take Your Time

The phrase "you throw like a girl" doesn’t die. It gets dressed in different clothes—"you’re being too emotional," "you need to toughen up," "can’t you just be confident?"—but the structure stays the same: softness is coded female and therefore failure. Charlotte Brimner grew up with that particular pressure, and it took her years to stop performing a version of herself that sounded like everyone else’s idea of what she should be.

She performs as Be Charlotte. She’s Scottish, she was 21 when Do Not Disturb came out, and she was still visibly mid-process—not reflecting on having found her voice but actually finding it in real time, in public, through the songs. When I started out, I was singing like everyone else, she said. It took a while before I was confident enough to trust my own voice. I think it’s okay for people to know I worked hard for this and I don’t want to present my story as some kind of fairy tale. I know now who I want to be and how my music should sound.

Her influences run from Tracy Chapman and Alanis Morissette through Bob Dylan, then pivot sharply into modern pop and hip hop—something you can move to that’s also quietly thinking at you. Do Not Disturb is built on a piano riff that eases you in before the song gets to its actual subject: the right to take space. Room to process things at your own pace, in a world that treats any delay as malfunction. In Do Not Disturb, I’m trying to explain a need I’d buried for a long time, Brimner said. I think everyone needs space sometimes to work through things, but we live in a world where everything has to happen immediately and at once.

That’s something I understand from the outside—the compulsion to respond immediately, to stay available, to never take the time you actually need because the window closes. Charlotte Brimner put that feeling into a song at 21. Some people spend their whole lives not quite getting there.