Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Towse. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Towse, thanks for joining us today. Earning a full time living from one’s creative career can be incredibly difficult. Have you been able to do so and if so, can you share some of the key parts of your journey and any important advice or lessons that might help creatives who haven’t been able to yet?

It’s been two years now since music became my only job and that has felt like such a dream come true. Corwin and I have been touring full-time as an acoustic duo for the past full year now, we gave up our home in London and have been living in my 2008 hatchback with duct tape holding the bumper on, sleeping on friends’ couches and gigging about 4 times a week around the US. Definitely knowing what I know now, I think I would have made some different decisions years ago when I first started trying to make this happen, but that’s why they say hindsight is 20/20. Mostly I wish I’d taken feedback better and not tried to do everything myself, I’m a really sensitive person and that has a beautiful tender side, but it also has a defensive stick-in-the-mud side. Now we’re working like a well-oiled machine; Corwin and I are a great team, we’re writing songs together and brainstorming on all our projects, we travel well together, and we got married last year, but we’re so tired. We’re a 2 person team doing everything. Corwin books all our gigs, sending thousands of emails a week and balancing hundreds of conversations, usually working 9-months in advance. I’m in charge of the creative side, songwriting, production, photo shoots, music videos, social media, marketing, PR—it’s exhausting! The gigs take up around 8-10 hours a week on paper, but we’re both working more than full-time all the time. So yeah, while this is a dream come true, we both know doing it full-time indefinitely is not sustainable for us. We’re also trying to figure out how to get some support and grow our team a little, so that’s the current focus for us.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Towse is a folk/pop band with core members Grace Fellows (singer/songwriter/guitar/piano), Corwin Zekley, (fiddle/vocals) and other rotating members. Corwin and I are a married, queer, neuro-divergent couple who love sharing our real-life stories through songwriting, always with a little whimsy and sense of humor, but never shying away from hard truths or heavy topics. We love the constant challenge of blending our love of soft, warm folk and tight, satisfying pop, which are often considered opposite genres. I’m always in the studio like, “check out this totally 80’s Chappell Roan production, can we do it like that but with only acoustic instruments, no synths” or “I love this guitar solo on a Maisie Peters track, do you think you can do something like that on fiddle?” Every producer I’ve ever worked with has been skeptical of this blend and of my maximalist arranging tendencies. It keeps coming together in a really cool way though! That’s creativity, right? Not copy-paste but throwing stuff at the wall until it sticks. We’re also playing with the fun and ever-evolving, rich and colorful aesthetic world around each song. I grew up in theater and no one in history was more of a diva than Shakespeare, so I cherish the opportunity to bring this life-long love of costuming into the world of Towse. For our first single, We’d Start a Garden, we had the era of garden party dollhouse Towse, sad and soft and sweet. For Feels Good, it was delusional pop star Towse, always bright and happy and PINK set in a mundane and gray world. Crazy Friends was like an unhinged indie-sleaze crashing out beauty queen sort of vibe. Now, for our most recent single, Stay On The Road, we went full cuntry—glam cowgirl, rhinestone hat, metallic boots, line dance and all. We made a queer cowboy contra dance music video with original choreography in the Bay Area, CA and hosted a Honky-Tonk release party in London with a costume contest. It’s been such a blast building this world for each song from the cover art to the music video, even down to social media posts, all coming together to form this distinct era for fans to get to soak up. Songwriters have always talked about the prosity of lyrics and music, we’re just adding another layer of aethetics and experience to the music.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I realized a few years ago that I was my own worst enemy when it came to achieving my dreams of being a touring musician. My poor health and poor mental health were the biggest obstacles to my progress. The depression got in the way of the discipline I needed to practice my craft. Rejection sensitivity dysphoria made it impossible to put myself out there and market myself, post consistently on social media, or deal with criticism. C-PTSD rendered me a regressed pile of mush, crying and shaking in bed, making it difficult to keep a job or even keep up basic hygiene. I say all of this not so you’ll feel sorry for me, and I know it’s maybe a little TMI for some people, but I really wish I’d seen “successful” people talking openly about their mental-health and other health struggles back then, because I’ve always been relentlessly ambitious but I simply couldn’t conceptualize the road from that dark place to where I am now if you’d asked me in 2018.

So what did the road look like?

First some context: I have a strange and complex web of chronic illness, a combination of a few genetic disorders that cause vitamin deficiencies and gut health issues that meant I avoided eating over 50 foods (including all the top 8 allergens) for over 10 years. I couldn’t eat in restaurants. I couldn’t eat food other people prepared. On top of that, I have PMDD, a menstrual disorder that essentially makes me crazy during a certain part of my cycle, and I was diagnosed with C-PTSD and major depression a few years ago. Around the same time, I realized I’m autistic! I also struggle with pet allergies, environmental allergies like dust and mold, and fragrance sensitivities. WOW what an exhuasting list, but if you feel exhausted reading it? Imagine living with it…

So in every sense, my body and my brain did not set me up for success to do a freelance, self-motivated job which takes an incredible emotional toll creatively; which forces you to be self-reflective and perceived in the public eye; and which involves full-time travel, late nights, and lots of bar food.

I simply said I don’t care and I’m doing it anyway.

Ok it was not that simple, It took my six-and-a-half-year relationship falling apart for me to face myself and just how many parts of my life were not working for me. I was embarrassed to realize I didn’t know what I needed, but I started asking for help anyway. I started looking for education, growth, support, and challenge wherever I could find it. A dogged mission statement to pull myself out of that funk and get the train on the tracks headed to where I wanted to go. In 2019, I started traveling. I went to VidCon, Lark Camp, and booked myself a trip to NYC to see a Joanna Newsom concert. I spent my pittance of saved-up nannying money desperate for inspiration and knowledge. Beyond that, I was terrified of traveling, so the trips themselves were almost as much of a learning experience as the workshops I attended at VidCon and Lark. I started therapy in early 2020 which helped me begin to process a lot of trauma and grief that was built up throughout my life, especially surrounding the death of my dad from pancreatic cancer when I was only 9 years old. The more I faced myself and my trauma, the hungrier I was for knowledge and experience, so I applied to a course in London and I got in. Don’t get me wrong, every step of the way had resistance, like wading through honey, but it felt good to try. It felt good to chase those metaphorical demons away little by little. And then COVID hit, and I had to defer my studies, but I was lucky enough to be able to spend the lockdown working on my mental health with the support of my family, and by summer 2021, I was ready to face my biggest challenge yet: Corwin, my now-spouse and bandmate, was in another band at the time and I got invited to work as their tour manager and merch person. This was huge for me because it gave me the opportunity to try out the lifestyle I’d always wanted and see if it was possible with my bad health.
Girl, it was crazy. I was so sick and malnourished and exhausted, but I did it. I did all their admin and cold calling and talked to strangers about their merch, and I learned where my limits were and how I could find accommodations where necessary. Then I moved to London! What a beautiful trial by fire that was, everything that scared me wrapped up in a nice package, and yet a chance to start fresh. To leave behind baggage and take with me only who I wanted to become. And it kinda worked. At this point, I hadn’t really improved my physical health at all, but my mental health was shifting slowly but surely. Some of it was my attitude and processing trauma, but some of it was being in a circumstance that really suited me. I loved the course and my new lifestyle, I felt like my music was progressing and I felt like I had a sense of purpose. The more I did, the more motivated I became. My physical wellness continued to feel like the biggest obstacle, however, and I was going to various doctors trying to figure out anything that could help, until finally some treatments started working. The past three years have been all uphill but I think I’ll leave you there for now. This is basically the backstory for my song “Feels Good” so now ya know. I hope I’ll keep doing things I never thought I could, and busting out at all of my seams.

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

I’ve been talking a lot lately with my artist friends about how I had this misconception that if I was experimental, artsy, or weird enough then I could, like, escape criticism and just say “you don’t get it, it’s not for you, I’m just doing something really niche.” And like, artists out there, you may not want to hear this, but that was the biggest lie I told myself, that was just a complex and pretentious defense-mechanism. You can use all the critical theory-driven arguments to explain that your art has inherent value in its creation you want (I actually agree) and some people say critiquing art is like comparing apples to oranges, but in a capitalist society it does kind of matter to me that I can afford to eat, and for that to happen I need to create things that people actually want to pay for. I was so afraid of “selling out” for so long but I really feel like “selling out” is a myth, or at-least an overblown phenomenon. Like, I am creating authentic art which I actually feel happier with and prouder of the more I try to consider its commercial appeal. Now, I don’t think this would apply to everyone’s work AT ALL, but for me that context and structure for growth, like a bench mark, and using comparison as a tool, has actually been amazing. That fear of selling out allowed me to hold myself back, rejecting useful feedback for so long, and tuning out the voices calling me to action to improve. So yeah, a bit of a weird one and I know it’s controversial in the art world, but I hope this might be a useful counterpoint for someone out there. It’s been a hugely helpful lesson to unlearn for me, that purposefully trying to make a “good product” is not a bad thing.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.towselikehouse.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/towselikehouse/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@towse
• Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@towselikehouse
  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0l79yamGYkMV3FBef8PDug?si=kCF_m-pRSdS4EI1cK4Ihnw

Image Credits

Phil Procter, Eva Petr, Lacy Shifflette, Louis La Grange