When I caught up with Cyrena Wages in the summer she was at her home in Memphis, Tennessee. We spent just over an hour shooting the breeze. Welcome to part one, which covers CW's debut solo album, Vanity Project, so this is the place to start if you have not met Cyrena Wages before. You can read the full transcript below or listen to us chattin' on Spotify!
Vanity Project is very much last year's thing for you. How would you describe this year's tunes when you compare those to Vanity Project?
It's so different. I'll try to only say this once because otherwise I could start every answer about my music with this statement, but I can never see things accurately being so close to it, you know?
So I will today attempt to have my reflections on Vanity Project and my reflections on my new record. Also, I mean one of the things that I found really captivating about your reviews is that they put language around something that exists inside of me that I can't explain at all.
They always say your first record is something you've been making your whole life, you know, and they talk a lot about how like artists sometimes really struggle on their sophomore record and it's not until their third record that they can tap into the same magic from their first.
Everyone always says a lot of things and who knows. I'd been in bands for forever, but I'd never done a solo project obviously and I live life as someone... I look around at other people sometimes and their experience of being human seems to be so much more linear and simple.
For myself, there's always been this endless journey to try to make sense of my past, and my present and my future. It's a heavy cross to bear, I suppose, relatively speaking. And so for better or for worse I let all of that come out into this first project.
It was like every story from my youth into my 20s, the good, the bad, the indifferent, you know? It was deeply personal and every word was true – really. It ended up being like a niche, more indie project because it was so deeply personal and it wasn't written for anyone but myself. And I'm so proud of that. I'm sure we'll talk about it more, but for the second project... it's still honest. It's honest, but it's not like bleeding out on the floor, you know?
I remember sitting on my balcony writing the first project. I was living in downtown Memphis by myself, newly out of a relationship and deeply heartbroken and self-destructive and lost and like wholesome and also wild as hell at the same time.
And so I was, you know, having these crazy wild nights and waking up at 5 am and sitting on my patio and listening to tracks that Joe Restivo, my co-writer, had sent me and writing these poems set to that music. It was all just like line by line autobiographical. And with this second record, I'm in a different place. I'm in a place of like the same level of confusion and moments, but it's lighter.
I don't feel like I'm in the midst of despair anymore (laughing) which... this all sounds so dramatic, but that is how I experience life. I experience it in really intense colors. And so the second project is there's a bit of a sarcasm and a swagger and a sense of humor that I forgot for a long time. And it's all back.
I think I've said to you before, not to be cliché, but Vanity Project was definitely in the middle of a wound and this is on the other side of that. It's like scarred over a bit and it's still there and I still feel it in my gut, but it's not like on my forehead anymore.
And so it allows me some freedom to play with different colors. I hope that it comes out as kind of a fun, sexy, wild project, but then again, there are three murder ballads and a lot of really intense heartbreak and drug references. So my version of saying something is light and boppy always has like, you know, an underbelly of despair!
That's what we like! There is fun in Vanity Project but the overriding feeling is heaviness. Is this 10 stories or is it more like 30 stories that you've kind of mashed up and mixed around with? How literally are we to take each of these songs?
I think it's hundreds of stories. And 10 themes, you know, if I were to put all of these experiences under just 10 different umbrellas. And there were other songs that didn't make the record, too. There was a song called Electric Butterfly about finding this new love in New Orleans and it being this like wild, carefree night.
So there's all these different colors that didn't even make it on the final project, but as far as it being a literal interpretation, I'm thinking through the tracks now. I can't think of anything that's not completely true. You know, I think it was pretty spot-on, even the kind of oversharing moments.
There was some vulnerable lines that I don't think I even realized till it came out and people started asking me about it. It's like when you get a tattoo and you forget that at dinner parties with strangers, they're going to start being like, "What does that one mean?" And you're like, "Oh shit, well, I put it on my arm, but I didn't think I was going to have to explain it to you." Like, I don't know why I missed that.
Essentially the name Vanity Project is something that you've reclaimed but it was sort of an insult wasn't it? You heard that somebody said you're just a vanity project, this dismissive thing about you and you've turned that around in such a cool way and made it front and center of the album.
That was one that you know the Vanity Project thing whether in those words or in adjacent terms I'd heard a million times and they say that it only really hurts when you are afraid there might be some truth there, right? So people's perceptions or projections can work sometimes, they can get to you, you know, and if you don't have the maturity at the time you first start hearing them to block it out, it can really get in there and change the course of things.
I somehow digested the message from a really young age. And this is not from my parents. This is from other sources, but I digested that intellect and achievement wasn't necessarily for me unless attached to beauty and charm.
And when I did finally start pouring myself into something that was brave and wild and hard as fuck and then being proud of it and showing it to the world like, look, I really am worth something here, you know? And then for them to still sort of give it a Vanity Project title was an interesting thing.
The album is very transparent in many ways. It feels like you're channeling raw emotion into the song, which is why your voice stands out, I think. But do you find it draining or energizing to be that honest and that open about real events?
It helps me in a therapeutic way and I don't know why. There's nothing hard to me so far about sharing vulnerable truths. I mean, I suppose maybe there was at some time, but it's like I hit my own personal rock bottom and the only way to heal myself was to share what I'd been carrying for so long.
Brené Brown, one of my favorite thought leaders, always talks about how shame thrives in secrecy and dies in public. And so it's not like a challenge for me to share. It feels like a complete necessity. What is a challenge is when I start to bully myself for how it might be received or if I went too far or if I shouldn't have or if I just talked too much or, you know, that's the hard part.
I need to think about that. I don't think as a singer or even as a writer of any kind, you can share too much? Is your music a way to get that out?
Oh yeah! I don't know if you feel this way, but I've never felt understood. And if I can package it into a song, I don't know. It's almost like I don't even need anyone else to understand it once it lives outside of me. At least I know it's been validated by the music that it lies within or something. I don't know.
It's just too much energy to exist inside of me. I literally feel like I have to get it out or I'm unwell, kind of thing. Going back... what you're talking about like chatting in a pub... I heard recently that there's like two different types of communicators. Some need to be heard and some need to be felt or something like that. It might be like understood and felt and sometimes the more verbose types... I speak sometimes in a circle and I'm trying to learn how to tidy it the fuck up, you know, but I want to be felt. I don't just want to be heard. I want the full emotional impact of what I'm experiencing to be properly shared, you know? I guess you put it into a song and then nobody has to talk back or cut you off, you know?
One of the drawbacks of prose writing is that some things can't be put into words. I think music is much better at conveying emotion than than just reading words, right? First of all, you're putting your own voice onto it, and you've got the music to emphasize things and to bring out more emotion. You've got the luxury of writing your poems, which is cool. And I do like the lyrics. The lyrics are what interests me about music or songs usually. You've got the lyrics, and then you can add the music as well. You've got so many more tools to convey your emotion than a writer like me has.
Joe Restivo, who I wrote Vanity Project with, is primarily a guitar player, so he's a guitar player / writer, and his understanding of different musical voicings is what drew me to him as the collaborator I wanted to work with. I play very elementary levels of guitar and piano and he could create these colors and these moments that – to your point – when things can't be put into words, my lyrics say as much as I feel like a song could possibly say with language and then there's a whole part of the story that he brings to life with his voicings and progressions.
And man, I mean, we just got lucky almost like, you know, even if no one else in the world ever loves it as much as he and I do. I feel like somehow the muses struck us at the same time and we were able to tell the exact story we wanted to with our combined skill sets and also with our combined inadequacies. You know, a lot of storytelling comes in the inadequacies as well.
It's a therapeutic thing for me when I get bogged down. I was actually meeting a business coach this morning and he said, "You seem discouraged." And I said, "You know, I am a bit today. Maybe tomorrow it'll be a whole new day."
The mood swings are real in this career. But I'm glad to have this conversation because when I can lock into why I have to do this and remind myself, it like restores my insides a bit, you know?
What are the best things about being an independent artist? Emphasis on independent.
I have creative control. You know, number one, I actually can't imagine at this point not having it. I fought for so long to have my own sense of agency and voice and it wasn't necessarily the industry that was in my way. It was myself. And so now that I've primarily overcome that hurdle, I can't imagine another person trying to keep me from saying and doing what I want to say and do. So, creative control and agency.
Self-esteem. Number two, I'm so proud of what I did last year. I've never worked harder in my entire life. And I didn't know that there were certain creative concepts that lived in my mind until they came out into these pieces that I made. And it taught me something about myself. I think last year was the first time in my life I built true self-esteem. I think I've wanted it for forever and there's no amount of talk therapy, you know, or psilocybin or introspection or journaling or whatever the hell it is that could teach you self-esteem, like doing something hard and standing back and going: I'm proud of myself.
And lastly, the best thing about being an independent artist, I would say maybe being a sort of warrior for the little guy. For the other creative weirdos out there who can't live without this pursuit, who for whatever reason, probably circumstances and luck, haven't been awarded a team, you know, to help them carry the ball down the field.
Just that if I can make it from this place if it could be, you know, a bit of a testament to the others who... there's just so much good art in the world. I mean, I have best friends who aren't even making records anymore, you know, who are the best writers and singers I've ever known. So there's just perspectives everywhere that could like heal us as a people, you know, and make us laugh and teach us so much.
And to be able to launch by myself with the little team that I've accumulated, you know, without the machine. I don't know, maybe that's the way it's supposed to go for all of us.
You can catch up with Cyrena's latest on Instagram. Her TikTok is brilliantly hilarious and she has her own website where you can buy Vanity Project as an actual physical IRL thing like a CD or a record!
