We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Puck. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Puck below.
Puck, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
I released my debut album, Best Friend, in November of last year. It’s about an abusive relationship I had, the first time I fell in love. The album was a means of being able to see myself, to climb out of an abusive mindset, and to understand how my experience is way bigger than myself – it’s a too-regular occurrence under centuries and centuries of Patriarchy.
When I was healing from domestic violence, I felt like there wasn’t any music that really soundtracked my grief. There weren’t any songs that both acknowledge the harm I experienced, and held my heartbreak for lost love (or, the loss of what I thought was love at the time). I really needed that medicine. I wrote the title track of my album “Best Friend” as a lullaby to myself and other survivors. It’s got the warmth and catchiness of a grunge track that rolls during the credits of a 90s movie, so it’s very lovely to listen too in a sonic way, but the lyrics talk about something heavy. Writing “Best Friend” was the first time I was able to acknowledge harm and heartbreak, it was a container for the complexities of what I was experiencing while healing. The song is really gentle without sparing truth about abuse.
Other songs like “Woman” zoom out to a macro lens, looking at 6000-or-so years of patriarchy as the cause for the abuse I and many many others have experienced. The lyrics in “Woman” try to imagine, or remember the power women and queers held before the onset of patriarchy. It’s really important to me to remember that oppression always begins for a reason, and that this level of violence continued over millennia is not normal, nor natural, though it may be “the norm.” I think it’s really important to try to remember, or at least think about the onset dates of systems of oppression, otherwise, it becomes too easy to believe that these abuses of power are biological, or natural. (That old argument of men’s bodies are stronger so they did all the hunting and women did all the gathering is really really dumb).
I think for a manipulation of power to occur at the level that patriarchy does, it’s a reflection of how powerful women and queer people are by our birth rite. If it takes this much violence to manipulate people by their gender for economic control, imagine how powerful we must be for this amount of violence to be required? It’s an act of resistance for me to imagine what capabilities I have that I don’t know of, because they haven’t been spoken in several millennia. What if, for example, we are capable of parthenogenesis, the ability to self-conceive? Virgin-mothers are depicted throughout cultures and across time. That would certainly mess up a male-dominated economy, which relies on marriage, homophobia, female chastity, free labor, and the erasure of female identity through surnames in order to secure inheritance of power. Menstruation and sexuality must be extremely threatening to these structures, for how taboo they still are in 2023. My song “Woman” asks the question of ‘what have we forgotten that is right at our finger tips,’ and ‘how and why is it taken’?
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I grew up in Renton, WA, near Seattle, and I’ve been playing piano since I was six. After moving to New York for music school, I gigged around the local scene there, eventually landing in SZA’s band in 2014. I toured as her pianist until the pandemic in 2020, growing as a musician, learning all through the CTRL tour and everything. I’ll forever cherish that experience, it took me around the world, playing shows in New Zealand, and on television, performing on The Grammy’s, SNL, and The Tonight Show among others. At the beginning of 2022, I was invited to join Maggie Rogers’ new band for the release of her album Surrender. Coachella last year was the first time I sang background vocals professionally – that was pretty thrilling. I really loved my bandmates too.
When the pandemic hit, I hunkered down and recorded my debut album. I released it in November 2022. This year, I performed my own music at a festival for the first time, Treefort Fest in Boise, Idaho. And I’m getting really excited, because I just got asked to perform at Capitol Hill Block Party in Seattle, this summer. This is actually my first CHBP, I could never go growing up, so this feels really epic to be playing.
In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?
Lol, end capitalism.
Other than that, listen to local artists in your area and go to their shows. If you like going for drinks with friends, find the small concert venue in your town, their bar is probably great. And clicking “follow” for an artist on streaming services is a small act that can actually make a big impact for indie artists, helping spread their music to new fans via algorithm.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
I’ve been coming back to the question of, why play music? For me, remembering why I fell in love with music before I understood much about it has been really important. I love the meditative space that music takes me into as a listener, I love the way it helps me connect to deeper parts of myself, underneath my daily thoughts. Remembering that has reminded me that when I perform, I help people enter that space. When I enter my own heart in front of an audience, I make a portal for everyone else to do the same. 
Contact Info:
- Website: www.puck.world
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/puckforgoodluck/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/puckforgoodluck
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zgxl940R4U
Image Credits
Joule7teen Zachariah Mahrouche