An interview with musician & performer Pussy LeBouton
By JD Goulet
9 May 2024
I’m really excited to have interviewed my dear friend and musician extraordinaire, Pussy LeBouton, about their latest EP, “Hold,” available on streaming services everywhere. Check them out!
There’s a complete transcript below for those of you who prefer to read or aren’t in a place where you can listen right now, but I hope you will give it a listen if and when you can.
This was a republication of a podcast originally shared on Spotify and Substack. I'm trying this atproto blog out as an alternative avenue for making connections while avoiding the exploitation and surveillance of the technofascists' walled gardens. Your interaction with and redistribution of my content is encouraged and greatly appreciated. If you liked this and you are financially able, please consider leaving me a tip at Ko-fi! My content will always remain free to enjoy, but every bit of support helps me to keep going.
Transcript
Welcome to Disenchantments & Discoveries with JD, the Podcast! I’m JD and this is my very first episode. Many of you already know me from my Disenchantments & Discoveries with JD newsletter, in which I discuss a variety of topics from my point of view as a queer, agender, neurodifferent, disabled immigrant in Portugal. I’m looking forward to doing many more interviews like this one, with artists and musicians, dreamers and doers, the people who envision a better world and embody the Active Hope necessary to get us there. So if you like the sound of that and you like what you hear today, please be sure to subscribe and share this podcast with like-minded folks.
I’m so excited today to share a conversation with my very special friend, Pussy LeBouton, who I met several months ago in a very rustic and dimly lit basement under a tattoo parlor in Porto where a friend had invited me to enjoy a literal underground concert. The moment I heard the raw emotion in the lyrics of their first song, “Anchor,” I knew I had found a Kindred Spirit. It brings me great pleasure to gift my listeners with the knowledge that this incredibly talented being exists. Here’s our chat.
JD: So how about we start with, you know, your stage name. Pussy LeBouton. What's the story there? And how would you describe your presence when performing?
Pussy LeBouton: I think it's a bit of a… it’s a little bit of a fuck you in that… the story behind it is when I lived in Kingston upon Thames in greater London… some ten years ago, maybe? Yeah, whatever. I was crossing the road, and it was one of those zebra crossings where you press the button. I looked at the button and I was like, “pussy le bouton.” And I was like, “Haha, okay, that's quite funny.” So that's as deep as it is. I've heard people read into it something to do with like, “Louis Vuitton.” I don't know what. It just makes it even more hilarious. So it's kind of an anti-name in a way, the way I see it. It's just, you know, it's all it is, it’s just something funny. And like, I think you mentioned that association, just pressing the buttons, which again, it’s an afterthought, but very much a valid one. There are many, many layers to this very deep name.
JD: That's so deep.
Pussy LeBouton: It is really deep, isn't it? Yeah, but that's what, you know, it's kind of… it's the essence of what I do, in a way, because it's just, you know, when you ask me, who are you? I just find these questions, like, “What do you do?” I find these questions so hard to answer that very often it just… it just goes into absurdity. So that's kind of… it's an absurd name, really. That's what it is, you know… and I appreciate that it has… I mean… then you can go into whether it's drag or not, I think, in terms of presence. Right? So how would I describe my presence when performing? Well, this is an interesting one, because for me, I don't… I know for some people there is a clear, like, demarcation between when they, you know, they have their ordinary selves and then they put on the makeup and they put on the wig, and then they do a grand show, and they become someone. Right? And I find it very hard to become someone, especially because my material is very personal, and what I'm communicating is me. So the me that is Matt and the me that is Pussy LeBouton, I just really… I see Pussy LeBouton less as a character. It's not a character. It's just a stage name and maybe a slightly heightened version of whatever I am day to day, you know, because it's staged, so it's just a bit more dramatic. But I don't believe in any, like, you know, “Oh, it changes the essence,” or like, “It is not me anymore. It is that different character.” It is me. Pussy LeBouton is me, Matt is me, and whatever other names I want to give myself, that is me. So I hope that… yeah… so that is… My presence when performing is just me doing my shit, you know?
JD: Yeah.
Pussy LeBouton: I guess… I mean, that's all I've got on this, I'm afraid.
JD: That's fine. No, great.
Pussy LeBouton: Yeah.
JD: How has your identity and experiences influenced your music, both lyrically and sonically?
Pussy LeBouton: I once had a Jungian therapist whom I played my material to. Bear with me… bear with me… and her observation was, like… The meaning was, “You don't put out anything you don't believe in.” And I thought that was pretty, like, astute in that I often ask myself why I create so little, but I think it is that I'm really focused on my songs being really mine and communicating something about myself. With Pussy LeBouton, that is as personal as I can get, as opposed to, you know, I'm playing someone else's music, or I'm using some… I'm interpreting someone else's lyrics. Here I am just… the fruits of an internal journey. It's more of an accounting of what is happening inside of me. I think that's probably the best way of putting it, is just me looking at my internal landscape. What is happening at the moment, what's my state of mind, what is pressing my buttons, as it were, and then just searching for the right words. The process will be very different. I used to be much more… sit down with a dictionary, you know, do it like the classical way. Pay attention to form, make it more cerebral… and some really good material came out of it. But lately, I've just been… it has just been much more improv based. So you know, I'll put some sounds on, and then I'll just see what words want to come out, and then I'll build around that through trial and error. And I think it's changed the quality. The quality… not quality in a value judgment sense, but quality in the kind of music that I make… it's changed a little bit. It feels more direct to me rather than… I mean, it's storytelling, but it's a different kind of storytelling. I think my music, you know, my music's always been a side project, in a way. So you know, when I studied music, worked with choirs, worked as a teacher, worked as a performer, it's always been a case of me lending my voice to express something that… whose origin is not me. Right? So this has always been very clearly focused around my identity and my experiences, and I think, to me, this material is very, very deeply queer and very, very deeply genderfuck, because these are subjects that stir a lot of emotion. And, you know, I think a job of a singer, especially, is that's the material you're working with is the emotion. Right? So that's what's worth saying to me. That's purely making a choice of, okay, this part of me is worth saying, and I think a lot of, in terms of identity and experiences again, I would say that there is a lot of me dealing with religion, with me dealing with the intersection of religion and sexuality and especially Catholicism, which was my experience growing up in a… I would say strictly religious household, an intellectual religious household. But there is a lot of externalizing the traumas that I went through that were never allowed to have a name. I was never allowed to be angry publicly. I was never allowed to be out of control, you know, so a lot of… especially on my first EP, there is a lot of very angry, raw material on there. And my first EP, there was actually quite a… very deliberately… I didn't auto tune, I didn't correct many things, and it was a bit scary to release it as such. But I think it was also quite important for me. I wouldn't say this is comfortable even for me to listen back to, but I think it was a very, very important step because I now can look at it from a bit more distance. And also, because it's outside of me and other people can have different perspectives, it also enables me to look at it from a different perspective, if that makes sense? I'm no longer tied to the perspective that I had when I was making this music because I can learn from others about it as well. And that's cool. That's what I like about making music, you know?
JD: Yeah, yeah, it does. And speaking of the process of making music that you mentioned you like, what is that creative process like? And what challenges or breakthrough moments would you say you've encountered in this process? I know this process has been kind of different with your new EP compared to your first one. So tell me about that.
Pussy LeBouton: Very. So when I talk about my latest release, which I'm very, very proud of, I really want to stress it's a collaborative effort between me and my friend Szymon, aka D Prime, whom I know from secondary school and who is a wonderful producer and has a very distinct style, and I've always looked up to him and his breadth of musical interests. I'm quite a... when I listen, I listen to like, one thing on repeat. Sometimes I don't listen to anything, whereas he listens to a shitload of stuff. And he has a really broad knowledge, which I've always found extremely impressive. And it so happened, we fell out of touch, and then I think he saw my song “Sweetness” online, and then he messaged me and we started talking about doing an album together. And as we started talking, part of the process was us talking about our identities. What was really incredible for me was that one of the first things he did, he was like, “How should I address you?” And we had a big discussion about what he is comfortable with, because obviously we speak in Polish. He's Polish, I'm Polish. So, gender is very complicated in Polish. You know, you can do the classic thing of X-ing it out, which I do when I write, but then when I speak, I'm like, “What do I do?” You know, I don't want to use the masculine pronoun when I speak. So he was actually like, “Well, I'm just going to use the feminine,” because I was like, “Okay, my preference is no gender. Second preference is the feminine. Third preference is the masculine.” So he went, like, “Gonna keep it simple and just going to address you in the feminine.” And by doing that, he made me much more comfortable in me talking about myself in the feminine, too. And that has been, I think, key in our collaboration. Absolutely crucial, because I feel seen by him and without… you know, I don't want to go into his story too much, but I know that there are things that he struggled to be seen in throughout his life, and there is a connection between us that is very important and that we talk about a lot and that we pay a lot of attention to, which is something that I've always dreamed about, to be honest. I've been making my music alone up until now because I just haven't found anyone whom I would like to collaborate with musically who has the skill and also the sensitivity to do something worthwhile with, you know, and time and energy. So it's been an absolute blessing. Sorry about this big preamble, but I just needed to put it out there because…
JD: No, that's… I mean, that is like, the breakthrough moment, isn't it? Finding and reconnecting with this person who makes you feel seen.
Pussy LeBouton: Absolutely.
JD: And that helps you overcome a pretty big challenge right there.
Pussy LeBouton: I believe in collaborative music making, be it... even if it's a band, even if I'm the solo artist with a band, there’s always the band. There's always someone producing. There's always a team of people involved in making music, whatever you do. I mean, you know, if you go busking with a backing track, someone made that backing track.
JD: Right. There's no pulling yourself up by the bootstraps in music.
Pussy LeBouton: I've tried. I've tried, you know, for years, I've tried. There's a meme, which is like, “She came looking for a hero, but no one was there, so she became one herself.”
JD: Yeah.
Pussy LeBouton: My music education was basically, “I need to acquire all the skills so I can be totally independent.”
JD: Ugh… yeah.
Pussy LeBouton: So I had to do things that I like doing that I'm competent in doing, and I had to do things that I have to do. And now it's such a relief because Szymon is such a wonderful producer, and he loves it, and I fucking hate it, you know?
JD: Yeah.
Pussy LeBouton: And he does an amazing job at it. I’ve studied music and I have conservatoire knowledge about like, part writing and, and arranging, and sort of… harmony, music theory, et cetera, et cetera. So Szymon put it this way… he said, “Together we make one cab driver because one of us knows how to drive and the other has, like, knows the city, you know?”
JD: I like that analogy.
Pussy LeBouton: Yeah. That’s good.
JD: This next one, you've kind of already touched on it, so if you want to add any more, or we can skip it. But as an international and multilingual music artist, have you had to face any linguistic or cultural challenges in terms of ensuring your identity and pronouns are respected?
Pussy LeBouton: So…
JD: Like, I know you've been telling me about the process of figuring out how to, like, introduce your music to the radio stations, for example.
Pussy LeBouton: Oh, yeah. Writing a bio, that's always a nightmare because you're imagining what the … the gatekeepers might accept or not, and then you're in a situation where... how authentic can I make this? And the decision has been, for me, I've been very insistent on every bio in every, you know, every form… I am describing myself as a nonbinary person, avoiding the pronoun issue as much as I can. I feel that, you know, even though it's not super comfortable, sometimes you have to look for a way of saying certain things. I don't have a problem with that because it's just a matter of practice. It's just… it's like learning a new language. It can be done. It's been a hurdle… if we try to pander to the mainstream in a way, potentially some other avenues would open that would require us to keep it down. But it's something that neither me nor Szymon are interested in. So I think that it's a hurdle that, you know, we accept that exists and we just focus on doing our shit and producing something really authentic. And then the reception of it is up to the stars, you know, the… whatever… the moon… whatever astrology there is out there, or isn't. If it happens, it happens. I would love for it to happen. You know, I really believe in the music we're making, and we'll just keep doing it. Sorry if that was… if that was a slant.
JD: No, no. I think you kind of maybe went into answering the next question, though. But we'll see if you have anything else you want to say to this. But how do you hope your music will resonate with listeners, particularly those who may relate to your identity and experiences?
Pussy LeBouton: You know that feeling like when you read a book and you're like, “Shit, this is about me,” and you really find yourself in something? Like, that is my highest artistic ambition is to create something that comes from a place of... well, a transpersonal place. Talking specifically about trauma, if you leave aside the individualistic paradigm, we begin to recognize that every horrible thing that happened to us, in some incarnation, parallel things happen to people like us. And even though the specificities of it won't be identical, that is recognizable. And I don't think it is possible to lie on stage. I always believe we can recognize fake stuff if we hear it. We might be okay with hearing fake stuff because we might be… we might not be ready to hear the true stuff. Right? And also, we might not always be in a place where we want to dig that deep. One artist I really, really admire is my… just absolute goddess… is Tori Amos. And… and I think that she, you know, her musical career has been about this… has been about going to very uncomfortable places that make you feel things, that move you. So my hope is that I manage to speak about a pain, as well as just a joy of well… gender nonconformity or queerness or whatever… of somehow being an outsider, maybe… isolation… that is new to someone, that gives someone an experience of… it touches them in a place that didn't have a name until now. I think giving names to things is very important, you know, finding new names for things... finding... like what I was talking about before, you know, just putting it out and, like, having a song built around a feeling, it just somehow captures it and externalizes it, and I really just hope that this music brings relief... it thaws some things that are stuck… it generates a movement, it generates a conversation, it changes things. There we go. That's like, that's the hope. That's the hope. That's the only reason I'm doing it.
JD: I'll skip ahead to one of the other questions, because you mentioned Tori Amos being a big influence for you. What other artists or genres would you say influence your sound and your musical style?
Pussy LeBouton: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Well, I love Bjork. I mean, I listen to really varied stuff. I go through phases. Obviously, when I studied jazz, I listened to a lot of jazz. I very much like just soft electronic music, instrumental electronic music, and then Brazilian music. There's a fair bit of West African drumming bands that I have listened to that I find really inspiring in their rhythmic complexity. And I also had the… this is something that… someone I studied… studied under… that sounds bad… but had extensive knowledge of... so that has been… that musical language is just very interesting to me and something that I could learn a fair bit about. There'll be classical influences. So this is, again, using, you know, using the knowledge of, like, tonal harmony and common practice period’s part writing, polyphony… these are the techniques that I also, as a choir arranger, I will have used… work writing for voices. There will be a huge influence. You know, a lot of my music is a capella, and a lot of my vocal arranging experience comes from working with choirs. And, you know, I sang in a variety of choirs. There was a Jewish synagogue choir in Poland. There was a gospel choir. There were two gospel choirs, actually, in Poland. Then there was a classical LGBT choir in London and a bunch of others I can't even remember. I've led, directed, and arranged for three choirs of my own that I started myself. So that maybe is not a very direct answer. I mean, genres. Okay, in terms of genres, I think that's... that sort of... another artist I love to bits is Sara Tavares, who is very sadly no longer with us as of, I don't know, a few months ago. Incredible Portuguese singer with Cabo-Verdian origin, who's also gay. That was quite important that she was someone I really, really liked, loved listening to, and then I found out, you know.
JD: Yeah.
Pussy LeBouton: Loreena McKennit, as well. Big, big fan. I'm going to see her very soon.
JD: Ooh!
Pussy LeBouton: Yeah. In July.
JD: Nice!
Pussy LeBouton: And then, you know, James Blake. Radiohead. There’s a beautiful singer called Sarah Fimm. F I M M, like a Seraphim, I suppose.
JD: Clever.
Pussy LeBouton: Whom I found through this website, AlwaysOnTheRun.net. That website's been around since, like, the nineties and has the most amazing artists on it. Anthony and the Johnsons, as well. There's probably some big names that I love that I can't remember that I'll just be like, how could I not have said that? But…
JD: If it’s important and you think of one later you can be like, “Add this one in!”
Pussy LeBouton: Amazing. I hope… in this brief moment of lucidity slash reflection, I just thought that… [quietly reading] there we go… “How do you hope your music will resonate with listeners, particularly those who may relate to your identity and experiences?” I hope I didn't get too waffley about it, but I just want to, like, very simply, just… just go back to it and just say, like, that... I just hope that people like me, whatever… or that you know, those who might… may relate to my identity and experiences, don't feel alone, and they feel like there are more people like them because there is so much silence around it, and I've experienced so much silence and isolation in my life that I don't want that for anyone. And yeah… I just want, you know, I want the conversation. I want… I want things to be named. I think… I want things to be said. I don't want for people like me to feel alone, and I want for there to be dialogue and connection. There we go.
JD: Awesome. All right, so I will backtrack if you want to talk about this one. How about, tell me, what was your time studying music in London like, and what kind of challenges did you experience?
Pussy LeBouton: Okay. We’re doing this. Can they... I'm just wondering if they can take my degree away from me.
JD: Well, we haven't specifically named which university it was.
Pussy LeBouton: Good point. I just won't pick up their calls. I mean, I have it as a piece of paper, so they can suck it. Mixed is the answer. Mixed. I would say that it felt a bit Promethean in a way. It was like getting the knowledge that I needed and wanted, and you know, dealing with the wrath and the homophobia and the bigotry and the institution, and you know, the fossils. I would say that I was… after having done, you know, I spent a few years studying… doing a cultural studies degree in Poland. Almost did it, two and a half years… and environmental protection, out of all things, for a year. Like, I have synthesized aspirin in a lab, you know.
JD: Wow.
Pussy LeBouton: Yeah, but what I was expecting was that this would be more like a university where critical thought is encouraged, where creativity is encouraged, where you know… imagination is encouraged, and my experience was that none of this is true, that you know, studying jazz is potentially… in my experience… was potentially even more limiting than studying classical music, so… Internally, people would refer to the university as “jazz factory,” you know. There was a point where… it was a four year degree, and the way it was structured was like the two years, the first two years, like, you learn the history, you do your aural training, you learn about what's been before you, the way I understood it, and the second two years was more doing projects, doing your projects, you know, and deciding what you want to do, where I thought, okay, this is the point where I get to like, do some stuff, you know? And I had this idea about… there is this idea by a composer called Stockhausen about, I think it's called seven octaves of transposition or something that I heard about, which is this idea that, you know, an octave is just something times two. So you can… if you take something that happens a few times per second, that's like a note. That's a vibration of a note, you know? But if something happens, you know, every... every few seconds… that will be a rhythm. And then, you know, if it happens over an hour, that would be like a song form… will be a whole cycle. And then if you go over a year, that can be like, the seasons changing, and if you go, you know, and then you've got the planets and stuff, and then you go on a micro scale, you know, the frequencies, as they get higher, they will become like, timbre and stuff like that. So I wanted to explore this idea and do a performance that would combine some more performance arts. There was, like a drama department there, and I had a very clear idea about what I wanted to do that I was super excited about. And when I presented this idea, my head of faculty laughed in my face. And from then, it was, you know, it was... it was just about surviving. It was about, you know, it was about just getting the piece of paper so that… don't know… so that… well, just… just getting... yeah, so that I can wave it at people if I need to.
JD: Yeah. Well, congratulations. You did it.
Pussy LeBouton: Thank you. It took a lot of Ritalin.
JD: Yeah. Speaking of, there's another question. As a neurospicy musician, how do you navigate the music industry and creative process? And what changes would you like to see in terms of inclusivity and accessibility?
Pussy LeBouton: Okay. I think saying that I “navigate the music industry” is an overstatement. I am more like a raft. You know? I think navigation is where you actually like, have a steering wheel and a sense of direction.
JD: Right…
Pussy LeBouton: With me it's more like just, you know…
JD: Like a soccer ball that got loose in the river?
Pussy LeBouton: Yes! I don't have paddles or oars or anything. It's just like, flapping about. That's the experience. And it's in shallow waters as well, of like, you know... so… but jokes aside… I actually have a very limited knowledge of the music industry because I don't like the idea of the industrialization of music.
JD: Right, right.
Pussy LeBouton: So I am, in many ways, blissfully ignorant. I just focus, you know... I think that possibly, and this is, I mean, I know I'm not just speaking for myself because I know either, you know, neuro… insert neuro… This is so difficult. People who have been diagnosed as autistic, who embrace that as part of their identity, who are amazing musicians and it pains me to see how many incredible artists there are who, because of the way maybe they're wired, find it difficult to engage with the networking aspect of the music industry.
JD: Yep.
Pussy LeBouton: Which obviously has to do with much more than the music. It has to do with how you present yourself, how you talk, how you look. And so I am… when I listen to music, I'm always super interested in niche stuff, like stuff that few people listen to. And… Hold on, let me look at the second part of the question. What changes would I like to see in terms of inclusivity and accessibility? Okay. One big change I would like to see is I would like for Spotify not to fucking take my money all the time… to pay me. Please check with me on how to say it, but I think that the streaming industry has like, just really kicked the musicians in the cooch, you know?
JD: Mmm hmm. Absolutely.
Pussy LeBouton: I mean, how do you value art? But there has to be a way that is not “You just don't.” Right?
JD: Right.
Pussy LeBouton: The fact that I can, you know, spend hours and put thought and emotion and… work... work into making my art, and that's going to be played, you know, alongside Uncle Jerry, who has just learned to use Garageband, you know, and... it's very disheartening and discouraging. I would love… I think Bandcamp is really good. I would like for more people to use Bandcamp and know about Bandcamp because I think Bandcamp does it right for artists. I understand why people don't use it as much because it's a bit, you know, it's a bit harder to make playlists and it's less customized, et cetera. But my dream would be for there to be, you know, something that is as easy to use as Spotify and as good for artists as Bandcamp. And then obviously we get into, like, you know, the whole music, the whole elitism of music education in general of having, you know, access to… obviously, I was, you know, I was lucky enough for my parents to have paid for my music education and to have encouraged it, as well. But, you know, things like reading music notation, or like music theory, that is kind of a very specialist field that now has been a bit democratized with YouTube, et cetera, although the content there is usually… if you want to get beyond a certain level, if you want like, systematic training, as opposed to just, you know, beginner’s tutorials, that is obviously much harder to access. So I would like to see more tools for making music that are not just toys… that can teach you something about music making as you use them. It's a whole big, big debate, you know, about just music education and conservatoire education. It's pretty grim. I think it's… I think the situation for, you know, especially like, alternative musicians who want to question things, and I think that's pretty grim. And it's grim because of predictability, because of what monetizes is what's expected, right? And we're trying to… we try to do what's not expected.
JD: Right.
Pussy LeBouton: So we’re kind of, you know, commercially, we're shooting ourselves in the foot, but I think we're… we're just prepared to, you know, live with the pain of a hole in a foot.
JD: So if I feel like that kind of also leads into the next question I had, which is, you know, given all of that, that you just… that you just mentioned. What advice would you give to other gender nonconforming, queer, and neurospicy artists who are trying to navigate their own journey in the music industry? Again, not liking the fact that it is an industry, but you know, it is what we've got.
Pussy LeBouton: So keep the focus on what's inside of you. Listen to yourself and believe the truth… that is, your story matters. What you have to say matters. Your voice matters. Even if it feels broken, even if it feels fragile or even if... even if it feels, you know, like you're stuttering or there are periods of silence where you can't get anything out. Always, always, always believe that what you have to say matters. Never get discouraged by not being able to do as much as you imagine you can. So if you want to write a song but all that comes out is a sentence or a word, that is more than nothing, and honor that. Also honor the fact that if you make something and never release it because you think it's too shit, you will have still learned a great deal from that experience and will have grown as an artist. As much as you can, show yourself, because you have the right to be seen and you belong and we need each other. And, I mean, connect with me if you want to, by all means. I need you and we need you. And I believe in you. And I already have, like, a deep feeling of love for what you're going to create. And I am curious about what you're going to say. Whether you succeed or not commercially, don't let that influence your creativity. Don't compromise. Don't hide the thing that you really want to say for fear of it not selling.
JD: Yeah. Sounds like really great advice for writers, too. In general, that's really good advice for anyone whose voice is less likely to be heard, but still valid.
Pussy LeBouton: I think that's been one of the biggest lessons I've learned, that thing about… even if I do little, I'm doing something. We need to tell new stories. You know, the gender nonconforming, neurospicy stories are just so often invisible because... well, for obvious reasons. Right? Because of all the external pressures of, you know, being like, a niche within a niche or whatever. And that's... I think that's why it's just especially important that we collaborate, that we don't feel lonely. There's an article about this, about the New York stand up scene where some of the queer artists were like, you know what? Fuck that. We're just going to start performing. We're going to like, start doing our own thing. They weren't trying to pander to the mainstream, and they just started doing their own thing. And then a community was formed around that new thing, you know, and they're wildly successful. And I think that is very much the way forward, is fuck the mainstream. You know, it doesn't have to be either. It's like a mainstream big river and then there's drought all around, you know, we can, like, have a stream of our own. You know what I mean?
JD: Yeah, yeah, love that. I am going to see if I can collapse the last couple of questions hanging out here. One is that doozy that we've saved for the end. And I kind of feel like a lot of it's probably really just been answered over the course of this call. But you grew up in Poland. You went to [REDACTED], you lived there for several years, and now you've been living in Porto in Portugal for a few years. So tell me about your journey as a gender fluid, queer musician, navigating these different cultural and musical landscapes. What's that been like? And how does living in Porto influence your creativity and musical direction compared to your previous experiences in other cities? I know that's a lot, so…
Pussy LeBouton: Yeah, yeah, I'll try. I’ll try. Possibly the reason it's difficult for me to answer this question is because I think, you know, my own gender fluidity… it was a process of discovery, so I don't know when you say as a gender fluid person, you know, when I was… when I was back in Poland, I did not identify myself as gender fluid. I identifed myself as gay. But that was less to do with my perception of my own gender, but was more to do with my perception of attraction, you know? And then I think there was a massive influence in me having lived in London, which is a very anonymous city, it's very hyper individualistic, which for me was just what I needed, having come from a very sort of collectivist, everyone's in your business kind of culture in Poland, you know, very monocultural, comparing to London, very Catholic, you know. This was 2006 that I left. Poland's changed a great deal, but the Poland I remember was an incredibly homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic place. So the 13 years in London have really taught me that it's okay for me to be myself. And it was also interesting because speaking about language, where when I speak English in first person, I never have to gender myself. And then moving to Porto, all of a sudden, I'm in the cultural context when I… again, I'm in the cultural context where I do have to gender myself, and I'm kind of realizing I'm not the same person that I was when I left Poland, you know? So… so, as I said, like, in Polish, I will... if I feel safe, I will use... I will speak of myself in the feminine. In Portuguese, I also flip. I try to, like, not pronounce the suffixes, you know, I'll use… I'll X it out in writing. So when I moved to Porto, I lived in a… I lived in a campervan at a campsite, which was a beautiful place to be creative. It was like… it was like recovering from London, because you know, there was a forest and there was a beach, and there was a lot of time, and so I... I could get back in touch with myself and kind of look back. And that's where the first album, the first EP, is from that period where, after the chaos of London. London, for me, is like, if you have an orchestra and you close it in a metal box inside of it, it's just so much noise, you can't really hear yourself. You're just acting. You're not reflecting. So in Porto… in Portugal, the pace is… I wouldn't say slow, but it's much slower and much… so I do feel much more in touch with who I am, and also for economical reasons, I can afford to do a lot of body related practices here, such as dance, martial arts, you know, yoga, contact improvisation, which teach me a lot about myself. And, you know, I think that there is a… there is a whole big thing about, you know, gender nonconforming and neurospicy and all neurospicy people's relationship with their bodies. That, you know, looking at it from, like, a non-dualist perspective of the body is the mind, and it's, you know, it's embodied cognition. So that is musically, I think, as well, evident in my work. I think my work now is… the pacing of it is different. I use fewer words. I leave more space. I let people in more. I don't feel I need to shout as much.
JD: So is there anything else that we haven't touched on that you want to mention in closing?
Pussy LeBouton: I'm very grateful to you for interviewing me. It's just so nice to, you know, have someone who's willing to listen, and I am really… I'm just like, you know, releasing that album and sharing the latest release and sharing it with people and just hearing... hearing people's feedback has been just humbling and very touching and has made me feel like I am being seen and I'm being listened to. And I just didn't have that for a very, very long time in my life. So I have… just didn't… that just brings me a very deep feeling of gratitude.
JD: I think that you help your… the people who listen to you feel seen. And I, speaking for myself, I'm excited to help share you with the world, to help more people feel, to help more people feel seen. Like, I think what you're doing is really, really important and I'm excited to be able to be a part of that… in getting you out there.
Pussy LeBouton: So thank you so much. It really, really, really means the world to me, honestly. I can't... you know, I went through periods of, like… just couldn't sing… because of external stuff, like, economically… I just wasn't doing very well and… or like I was ill or was too depressed. You know, I know that I honestly, I… I'm unwell when I don't make music. It's, you know, it's… it's… it's a... I can't not do it.
JD: Yeah, no, I understand that.
Pussy LeBouton: And so it just brings me… it really... it brings me... it brings me joy. It is, you know, it is... it is a new feeling. I always compare it to, like, you know when you, like, have a forest after the rain, there's like a clearing and there's like, a boulder, and then you lift it and there's all those critters, like, just scuttering away.
JD: Yeah. Pillbugs and…
Pussy LeBouton: So that's... that's kind of... I still feel, like, a bit like that when… when seen and when heard and when recognized, you know, like, “Ahhhh!” You know?
JD: Skitter skitter…
Pussy LeBouton: Yeah, exactly. But at the same time... it is… I sense that it is vital for me not to skitter and just, like, just shine, you know?
JD: Well shine on, my friend.
That was Pussy LeBouton, whose new EP “Hold” is available in all the usual places. I’ll drop their Linktree below. I hope you’ll check it out! And I hope you, dear listeners, feel seen, feel loved, and believe that you have something to say. Get out there and shine!
