We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Demeter Capsalis a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Demeter , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

My band Druid Stone is the most meaningful project – nay, it is the thing for which I singularly live. I founded Druid Stone in 2011, with my high school best friends in our hometown of Herndon, Virginia. The original formation of the band was quite abbreviated, because we were too busy being bad kids… and we didn’t realize what we stood to lose in wasting our youth. But the disappointment of the first lineup became poetic in the band’s rebirth, exactly 10 years later.

In the autumn of 2021, I was living in captivity with a violent and abusive person in Leesburg, Virginia. I will not mention his name because it is not worth the utterance. He is a very disturbed individual, and obsessed with doing harm unto people he could not control. My family, and my best friend Stephen, helped me escape from him in the winter of 2022. But in the autumn of 2021 I was still an inconceivable distance away from even a fantasy of saving my own life.

Nevertheless, I knew my time would come. So I needed to prepare. I realized that if I began to journal about my torment, he would read my notebook and punish me for speaking out; the same consequences would follow any attempt at an outcry. I needed a cipher – I needed a secret language unto myself. I thought, why yes, yes I could resume my high school band. It was my first dream in life. And he – a sophisticated sadist, but otherwise a foolish person – would think it nothing more than a project of nostalgia for me! Meanwhile, I would be gathering strength. I would be finding secretive ways to tell the truth, to admit what he had done to me.

And it worked. If it hadn’t worked, I would have died or I would have killed myself to bring closure to a life of sexual and domestic abuse.

Now, approaching 3 years of life post-escape, I have Druid Stone as my beautiful beacon. It is the lighthouse that settles the ships of my life into their moors. And they no longer rock restlessly – they bob like contented frogs on a pink-dotted marsh.

My ambition with Druid Stone moving forward is to shatter the taboos forced upon people by a sick, misogynistic society. Suicide rates are the byproduct of a conservative society coercing us to repress our darkest emotions, and act only out of shame in the face of big decisions. Anxiety supplants religion in a nation of over-consumption. I say to hell with it. We can and we must reclaim our dark sides, and become freaks and become whores and celebrate what we are: humans with serious desires. We want the world and we want it now.

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?

My name is Demeter Capsalis, and I am a musician; as well as a community volunteer. I have had a number of musical projects in my 31 years, but my obsession is Druid Stone. As a community volunteer, I co-founded Arts Herndon D.I.Y. with my best friend Stephen Fairfield. Arts Herndon D.I.Y. saw its first concert in April of 2023, and since then it has burgeoned into a national beacon for community events. Our staff of volunteers now includes myself, Lily Monico, Rusty Knives, Isaac Burton-Perez, and many more beautiful friends we are lucky to call our own!

We work closely with our hero, Jo Ormesher, who is the president and CEO of Arts Herndon, to organize concerts that serve underserved queer and trans people of all ages. Together we organized the first ever Pride Festival in the town of Herndon, Virginia; and we regularly host touring bands that are magnets of cathartic energy in the underground circuit.

I am very lucky to have my bandmates in Druid Stone, Carrie and Emy. The two of them have made my life feel so star-crossed. I cannot say how much they have rejuvenated me. Performing with them is the telos of the dream of the band. We take our of-age audience, with their consent, into the twilight zone. There they experience an ecstasy which breaks and reconstructs them – and they emerge into their formerly dull lives with the wisdom of the undead.

I am very proud of a number of albums released by Druid Stone. “The Grateful Undead”, and “Undead Poets Society”, are operative beacons for our message. Destroy your life for love, destroy the lies your society has forced upon you, and be free.

Our upcoming releases include: “Live at American University”, 50+ minutes of unedited performance that will torture your mind; and “WANTED! (songs for the unwanted)”, a full-length album of low-fidelity, old school doom rock with erotic themes of revolution and transexual deliverance.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

Our country does not have a right to exist, and to better our society, power should internationally be restored to the indigenous peoples of the world.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

My years spent in the closet are the albatross that hangs burdensomely on my neck. I wish I had known that the only excuse for remaining closeted was forced unto me by a sick and unconscionable society. I didn’t come out as a transexual woman until I was 24 years old. I wish I began to transition at a younger age.

At the least, it has made me fearless in regards to my hunger for living. Knowing that I wasted time not by my own volition but by the forces of a conservative death-machine – that has made me a fierce woman. And if nothing else, I will accept that as solace while I burn the candle mercilessly at both ends. I desire to live.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://doomhippies.bandcamp.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/druidstone2011/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@doomhippies

Image Credits

Photographs by: Lily Monico, Stephen Fairfield, and Demeter Capsalis