“INVITATION TO A PAUSE”

january 2025

Lovelies,

This was GOING to be a newsletter about my new app launch.

"Hey everyone my new app launched," etc., etc.

I even wrote the newsletter!

But then, BEHOLD, my new app DIDN'T LAUNCH!!

It is ricocheting between Apple App Store and Developer as they check every box, including nonexistent boxes, for registration issues. I've bided my time, but it comes down to this: IT IS GETTING FAR TOO LATE INTO JANUARY FOR ME TO BE WISHING YOU A HAPPY NEW YEAR!

So here you go: A Newsletter about something much less comfortable than a new app.

A newsletter about PAUSE. 

My first couple weeks of January were like my last twelve of 2024... an unfathomable race slash juggling act to finish the app. I recorded fourteen creativity meditations on such topics as creative disappointment, anchoring, and forging new creativity relationships; I created an image for every assignment from beautiful original sketches; I began working with a social media consultant on a strategy for vlogging and memes. That's a few of about twenty immense and interesting things I did.

And it all culminated in a BIG PARTY!

Then... pause. As mentioned, the app did NOT launch. And as not mentioned, I got a flu that had me literally in bed for eight days. Full disclosure, I am still more in bed than not, including at this very moment!

I didn't welcome the pause, but whoa the pause welcomed me with the intensity of NO ALTERNATIVE. To go from 100mph to 0mph was... FASCINATING. Maybe the only thing more fascinating than the work I'd been doing.

First: How quickly the race is over, how easily the balls fall to the ground. Second: Void. Third: Soft re-emergence of emotion (Oh, THAT'S how I feel?). Fourth: Recalibration (bridging the distance between my values and choices). Fifth: Resolution (I'm going to have to do the rest of the year differently). 

January 24th: Happy New Year! 

May all of us do it sustainably.

All my love,

Rachel

“I MADE AN APP”

DECEMBER 2024

Lovelies,

It's been a great year of producing albums, writing songs, and coaching songwriters.

And there's something else that's been going on.

I've alluded to this "something else" numerous times. You could almost say I've teased it. But it's been a teasing so unfocused, so opaque, that I doubt you even noticed. 

Well, it's the moment you didn't know to wait for!

I made an.... APP!!

Um, what? 

That's right, for the past TWO years, alongside (and underneath and on top of and between and through) my music, I have been making an APP.

Muzi

Backing up...

You know I'm obsessed with creativity.

Creativity is top-shelf human experience: It's communion with yourself. It's your irreplicable voice. It's alchemizing the ether into the tangible. It's the history of beauty. It's giving the world what only you can give. It's spiritual practice. It's intimacy with others.

It's my favorite part of everyone. 

I love being creative. I love helping other people be creative.

I REALLY WANT YOU TO BE CREATIVE!

Muzi is this... My love song to the creativity in all of us.

It's a PERSONALIZED GUIDE to help you explore, develop, and expand your creativity.

It's the work I do with songwriters -- the attuning, the coaxing, the supporting, the challenging, the celebrating -- in your pocket. A creativity coach available at all hours, and at every step of your singular creative journey. 

What I love most about Muzi is that it's not ME. I mean it is me. If ever there was an extension of my mind. But it's not me in the sense of being a book of my experiences. Rather it's YOU. It helps you discover YOU, so you can finally give your creativity everything it needs to thrive. 

I'll say more about it in the months to come, but know this: We're releasing it in January!

And it will contain specific tools to help you vision the most creative year of your life.

For now, the action items are just this:

LET ME KNOW if you want to receive MUZINGS -- the Muzi Newsletter wherein I will offer creativity thoughts, approaches, and exercises.

BE THE FIRST to follow our BRAND NEW INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT -- wherein I will offer content on all nature of creativity experience -- profound to absurd, serious to deadly playful.

I am truly so excited to share this with you.

All my love,

Rachel

“ELSEWHERE”

NOVEMBER 2024

Lovelies,

I fell in love with liminality on a bus headed to southern Costa Rica.

I was eighteen, my memory and the calendar inform me.

But the point was I was ageless. Also history-less. Persona-less. It was as though between departure and destination a crack formed and I fell through. I watched a fiery sunset through a dusty bus window and felt, in the absence of everything I was meant to be, who I was. 

Perhaps it takes the abject thrill of traveling alone through Central America as a teenager to completely untether me from the trappings of selfhood. But I get a little kick of this, the power of the in-between, every time I get on a bus. Every time I get on a plane. Every time I walk to the store!

Really every time I concede that for the time being, anyway, I am constrained to bodily form. And so I’d better go ahead and get this body from one place to another.

The picture is from a New England forest. But currently I write you at altitude. Headed back, as ever, to California.

Those who keep up with my newsletters are aware they’ve been a bit play-by-play ever since my home burned down a few months ago. First: fire. Then: displaced. Then: new home. Well the latest installment of the Phoenix Chronicles is this: I got out of town. To leaf-covered Maine. To slanted-light Massachusetts. To the shatteringly beautiful southern coast of Jamaica.

Not only am I in-between on this plane flight. I have been in-between for thirty five days. I have been so thoroughly in-between that I feel like an untethered eighteen year old.

So thoroughly in-between that there is no way my destination will feel anything like the Oakland of September.

Cause not for nothing, I am INTACT.

With a breezy resolve for the remainder of this formidable year.

All my love,

Rachel

I'm delighted to announce the release of the debut Jay Clemens album, New Nirvana.

Jay and I met in the first weeks of the pandemic, when he enrolled in my class, Songwriting, at the Berkeley Jazzschool. He was so inspired to write that I didn't even wait for the class to finish before inviting him to join Songwriting Salon! In the years since, Jay and I crafted a sparkling batch of songs and I had the great honor of producing him. It was an exciting project because the songs run the gamut -- jazz, funk, country. But there's a through line deeper than genre, which I think you'll find in the words, melodies, and chords.

Fun fact: Halo Above Her has gotten a gorgeous 38K streams on Spotify. (Album overall has already passed 60k!) Ts'ao Ts'ao is one of my personal favorites. 

Sincere thanks to the stellar musicians who brought the songs to life: Jason Slota (drums), Daniel Fabricant (bass), James DePrato (guitar), Omree Gal-Oz (piano/keys), Max Cowan (organ), Erik Jekabson (trumpet), Rob Ewing (trombone), Shaina Evoniuk (violin/viola), Evan Price (violin), and Lewis Patzner (cello). And three different singers! Scotty Wright, Maurice Tani, and Jay, himself. That's a lot of musicians! Tracking by Gabriel Shepard. Mixing by Reto Peter. Mastering by Ken Lee. 

I co-wrote, produced, and sang background vocals. And yeah, that's me holding the cowboy.