While Lindsay Powell has been releasing music under the moniker Fielded for a decade now, 2020 has seen her project slide into a new sense of comfort. Following features on tracks by Fat Tony and Armand Hammer earlier this year—and ahead of her feature on the new Small Bills LP, the latest project from Armand Hammer’s ELUCID—Powell is fresh off the release of her first record on Backwoodz Studioz, exhibiting a refreshing penchant for blissed-out psychedelic sounds.
Despite the confident nature of Demisexual Lovelace’s eleven seductive tracks, Fielded is quick to point out that the project is by no means a work of self-assurance. “It doesn’t gloat about being transformed, healed, or past anything,” she shares. “It’s lost, it’s lonely, it’s curious; it wants answers to selfish questions and wants badly to validate the experiences contained in each narrative. But still, there’s something that helps us remember that under the anger is sadness, that real change always comes with tears. In Demisexual Lovelace, relationships are never a waste of time.”
With the record dropping earlier this month, Powell took the time to go into more detail on each track, reflecting on the relationships—serious and otherwise—that inspired the LP. Stream the record below (you can order it here), and read on for her thoughts.
1. “Talking to Myself”
This song serves as a reminder that sometimes what we consider to be romantic love is actually an illusion we’ve created. I wrote “Talking to Myself” about a new relationship that I knew wasn’t a long-term fit, but I projected what I could of a long-term plan onto it in hopes that the circumstances would change. In the end, it only made me feel hurt and dysfunctional.
2. “Justus” (feat. billy woods)
I love having crushes. In all honesty, it sort of feels like the best part of any relationship. I wrote this about a crush I felt I had to keep a secret. Mostly because it was so deeply intoxicating, but also because I wasn’t sure if the other person could meet me on the level. Surprise! They couldn’t, which leads us to nearly every other song on this album. Is there a theme going here? Yes! I have codependent tendencies (don’t most of us?), which we’ll get to in the next couple of songs.
3. “Liquid Nouns”
This song, quite simply, is about really, really good sex. The kind of sex that convinces you that magic exists. The kind of sex that makes you forget your own name. The kind of sex that is slow and gooey and deeply spiritual.
4. “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool”
Have you ever been to a SLAA meeting? Well, I have. And if you’ve been anything like me: falls fast and hard, insecure attachment style, think they know someone before giving that person a chance to show their true colors, “reads minds,” “catastrophizes” (i.e. generally codependent)—it’s highly recommended that you check one out. In those meetings I realized a lot about the kind of love I give, and more importantly the kind I expect to get. I think many of us, especially women, expect less than we deserve. We also hold so much shame. Fuck shame, man!
5. “Sherita”
Sherita is my personal goddess. She’s a landmark that I confide in. She’s someone I can whisper secrets to and cast spells with. This song is just a general kiki with my girl. What of it?
6. “Glass Vines”
“Glass Vines” is about that deep longing for a lover; the hurt that you’ve caused coming to the surface in your own mind for the first time, and the realization that you’d do anything in your power to conjure that person back again. It’s a desperate poem for the lonely, a brief surrender to the shadow self.
7. “Grasses Sweet” (feat. ELUCID)
I wrote this song after spending my winter reading about the Columbian Exchange and the environmental impact it has had on life leading up to the present day. It’s from the perspective of Mother Nature and focuses on her unwavering resilience.
8. “High in a While”
Did you ever have a night you regret, and on top of it all wish you’d been sober for the whole thing? “High in a While” is about my last night spent with a lover that took a sour turn. This is me trying to make sense of what we had ever even been to one another in the first place. Turns out we were both just disappearing into the acts of getting high and making love in order to avoid ourselves a little longer.
9. “Looking for Love in the Anthropocene”
This song is about the outdated tropes around finding your “other half,” the patriarchal, heteronormative lack of dimensionality in our deeply ingrained definitions of relationships; it’s about our society’s general absence of creativity when it comes to love. It’s certainly personal, but also speaks to a larger issue—until you can fully free yourself of your own limiting stories, how can you possibly be ready for love of any kind to enter your life in a sincere and profound way?
10. “The Closer”
Ahh, that sweet moment when you can finally look back on a relationship and say, “Thank goodness I am no longer attached to that person!” Officially getting over someone is one of the best feelings. This song recaps the beginning, middle, and end of a whirlwind romance, with the ultimate conclusion being contentment in the solo aftermath.
11. “Valleys & Peaks” (Bonus track)
I think this song is the result of all of the emotional labor I did during the creation of Demisexual Lovelace. It’s about a love that exists beyond selfishness, passive-aggressiveness, and codependency. It’s about accepting another as who they are versus projecting what you want them to be onto the relationship. It’s about learning in love; understanding that love is a place where we meet to grow, to change, to understand ourselves, our friends, our partners and the world a little bit more. There is no hierarchy, no desperation. It is a love I dream of.
