CR 021: Jocelyn Mackenzie Explores Creativity in its Many Forms
CR 021: Jocelyn Mackenzie Explores Creativity in its Many Forms
The prolific musician, artist, and psychic medium discusses her songwriting process, her views of the afterlife, and her new musical, “RUTKA.”
It’s difficult to encapsulate all that Jocelyn Mackenzie has accomplished in just a few sentences. The Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist is constantly creating, leading to an ever-expanding list of achievements. A few highlights: Her former band, the folk-pop trio Pearl and the Beard, released six albums and had their work featured in various film and TV projects. Her debut solo EP, Unlovely, was referred to by Consequence of Sound as “a perfect slice of indie pop.” Iconic singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco included Mackenzie’s debut full-length solo album, PUSH, on a list of her favorite albums. She has written and performed music for ads by Citi and Rothy’s. As a fiber artist, she’s created knit and crochet commissions for the Jim Henson Company, the Tom Hanks film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, and numerous fashion brands. She is the founder of the Push Collective, a community of female and non-binary identifying musicians. And if that’s not enough, her first Broadway-bound musical, RUTKA, for which she provided music and lyrics, opens at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park on October 13th and was named by the New York Times as one of 15 shows to see this fall. Oh, and she’s also a psychic medium.
Despite her overflowing to-do list, Mackenzie is clear about one thing: there is so much still to come. “I’m 41,” she says. “This is not the end; this is the beginning. People don’t hear that enough. It’s like, if you don’t have a platinum record out by the time you’re 28 then you’ve missed your opportunity. No, you haven’t. I’m making my first musical now. I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of stuff that I want to do.”
Over a recent Zoom call, Mackenzie and I had a long chat about her music, her creative process, communicating with the deceased, and more.
SANDRA EBEJER: Your bio says that you’ve been a “musician since memory.” Were you raised in a musical family?
JOCELYN MACKENZIE: Yes. My parents are both artists. My dad worked in construction, but identifies as a musician. He was big in the experimental music scene, so he had me going to gigs with him from the time I was a toddler. And my mom is a seamstress and an incredibly creative person. My mom can make something out of anything. She can make castles out of garbage. So, yeah, we were always singing, always making stuff around the house. It was something that was part of our language.
I’ve read articles that have compared your music to Tori Amos and Kate Bush, but you really have a sound all your own. Who are your influences? Who do you turn to when you’re seeking inspiration?
I’m a huge Tori and Kate fan, so thank you for that. One of my other favorite bands is They Might Be Giants. I love their music. I feel like my personality is somewhere in between—this spooky, witchy woman vibe and this consistent, overly productive math nerd. But when I’m listening for inspiration, I listen to music that I don’t like. My inner spite and my ego kick up in a way that is really healthy. I go, “Oh, I could do better than that,” and I write some spite music. So that’s what I listen to for inspiration, and not any specific person or genre. It’s not a hate nozzle that I turn on. It’s putting on something I wouldn’t normally listen to, or something in a realm I’m not attracted to. I have a cringe playlist that I keep adding to. [Laughs]
What is your songwriting process? Do you begin work on a song knowing that there’s something you want to address? Or do topics and themes come up organically?
More often than not, it’s the lightning strikes moment. It hits me, and I am overtaken by the song. I have to stop what I’m doing and let it come out, especially the stuff that feels deeply personal. I learned in my work as a psychic medium that that process is called clairaudience. A lot of artists talk about this, where they see a vision or hear it coming from somewhere else, and they have to pause and take a moment to translate it. I identify that as clairaudience, where I’m hearing it from this other place. It’s not completely separate from me, but it is something that needs to come through me.
When I’m writing on purpose, where I am sitting down and saying, “I want to write a song right now,” that’s often going to be inspired by word combinations. I love words. I wrote down “quench echolalia” in my songwriting journal the other day. Those two words just came back-to-back, and I was like, “Oh, that’s juicy.” I have a bank of word combinations that I think are interesting, and when I have the time, I go back and look at my notes and go from there.
I first learned of your work through Pearl and the Beard. Was there anything you learned from working as a trio and collaborating with your bandmates, Jeremy Lloyd-Styles and Emily Hope Price, that you’ve carried on into your solo career?
I never thought I would be in a band. I always thought I would do the solo thing. When I met Jeremy, it was so effortless. He invited me to be part of a project that he was starting, and it took off right away. We met Emily shortly after that. When Jeremy and I got together to write, it was just like, pop, pop, pop. We could crank out songs like nobody’s business. And then Emily brought this beautiful knowledge of the editorial process in. I learned a lot from both of them that having an editorial process can be really important.
The thing that made our sound unique was that the only thing that made it a Pearl and the Beard song is if all three of us liked it, which was very challenging, because the three of us appreciate different things musically. I write tons of songs that I don’t like, and that’s okay. The process of writing is more important to me than the product of writing. So to write and go, “Which one do I like? Which one can I not get out of my head? Which one can I imagine singing in front of a crowd? Which one can I imagine developing and putting on a record?” [That] editorial process was a huge learning experience with them.
I first heard your music when Pearl and the Beard toured with Ani DiFranco over a decade ago, and then I saw you open for her as one of the Righteous Babes in 2022. Your solo albums have been released on her Righteous Babe Records, and she’s shared with her fans that the two of you are working on an upcoming project together. What impact has she had on you, both personally and professionally?
Oh my God, she’s the best. I fucking love this woman. She has changed the lives of so many people. This idea that good art makes people want to make more art—if that is the cornerstone of success, then Ani DiFranco is the most successful person who will ever live. After a show, somebody would come up to me and be like, “Tell Ani she made me write my first song. She made me pick up the guitar for the first time.” She has inspired so many people. She’s so approachable, so open hearted, and she’s said over and over that if she has a platform, she’s going to put other people on it. She’s like, “I’m going to do everything I can in my power with the platform that I have to shine a light on new artists, and to make sure people know that they can do this, too. This is not some superpower that I have. Everyone has access to this work.”
When Pearl and the Beard was on our last tour, opening for her before the band was going to come to a close, I was like, “This might be the only chance I ever have to do this.” I went up to her, and I was like, “Would you ever want to write a song together?” And she was like, “Sure. Send me what you’re working on.” I sent her something I had been working on, and later that night, she sent me back a bridge to the song. It was the same day. That was such an incredible moment for me as an artist, to be like, “Fucking Ani DiFranco likes my music enough to, first of all, have me on her stage. Second of all, to work with me as a collaborator.” That was an incredible moment. She’s so real, so legit, and she wants the world to know that everybody should and can do whatever the fuck they want. This is not a gatekeeping society. It’s up to us to live the lives we want to live. She shows me that through the way she lives every day.
One of the ways that I can see her imprint is through your work with the Push Collective. Can you talk about how it came about and what your goals are?
It’s a group of female and non-binary identifying musicians. As a solo artist, you are doing everything yourself. You are writing the songs. You’re producing your own records. You’re fundraising for your work. You have to be your own promoter. You have to be your own booking agent. You have to be your own Instagram manager. You have to be your own graphic designer, because somebody needs to make the flyers. You are literally doing the job of 15 people. And on top of that, you have to be your own pep talk person. You have to convince yourself that all this hard work is a good idea. It doesn’t take me any effort to convince myself that writing songs is a good idea. That’s effortless. But all the other shit—that’s a job that most people get paid for, and you’re not getting paid. So if you work your ass off and it turns out there’s a snowstorm and only five people come to your show, it’s heartbreaking.
I put it out to a bunch of singer-songwriters that I knew, and I was like, “I’m burnt. I need help. What can we do for each other here?” The idea was that we all have our own individual skills, so it was a combination of skill sharing, but also opportunity sharing. For example, I know how to do graphic design. Not everybody knows how to do that. So it’s like, “I can do graphic design for your record.” Maybe somebody else is like, “I love to babysit, so I’ll watch your kid while you go play your show.” Or “I have a connection with this recording studio, so I’ll book your thing for you, and then you can help me with my music video.” It was this opportunity to take the burden off with each other’s individual skill sets.
You have a video on your website in which you describe how you became a psychic medium. One of the things you say is that you believe that everyone has some psychic ability. Can you expand on that and talk about how you learned how to tap into your intuitive abilities to help others?
The term “psychic” is this taboo, woo-woo, witchy thing. Like, “If you’re into that, you’re that kind of person. Normal people don’t do that kind of stuff.” Okay, thanks, capitalist patriarchy. Another thing that you’re gonna sap the goddamn joy out of.
So, have you ever had a day where you’re like, “I don’t know why, but I feel like I should bring my umbrella today”? And then, lo and behold, it rains. Or you walk into a bar, and you see somebody in the corner, and you’re like, “That person’s creeping me out. I’m going to sit in the front.” That’s a psychic experience, because you have had no conversation with this person. You have no quote-unquote proof. You just know. You have a feeling. Businessmen talk about it all the time: “I invested in that stock. I went with my gut and it was right.” People talk about it constantly. We just don’t use [the term “psychic”] for it, because that’s considered other. We all have that extra sensory perception. It’s just a matter of how tuned into it are we. Nine times out of 10, we ignore those impulses, and we go “I knew it. I should have brought my umbrella.” We ignore them because we live in a culture that does not promote this as something to explore. I aim to, with my work, normalize it as an experience that we have and not something that’s a special skill.
What happened for me was that I’ve always been very sensitive. Literally, if you think of the word sensitive as being connected to the senses, my senses are heightened. So to have had experiences of psychic input, meaning extra sensory input, makes sense to me. We all have access to it. The thing that was fun for me was to go, “I’ve been having these experiences my whole life. Do I want to develop it or not?” I took a mediumship class. I found other mediums, and I sat in a mediumship circle with a teacher.
Just to back up a bit, psychic works on the physical plane to the physical plane. I could pick up information from people, or from the world itself. But when we’re using those extrasensory skills to open portals to other realms that we can’t see, that’s when we get into communication with people who have died, with spirit guides, spirit animals, ancestors, elementals. It’s infinite. I cannot claim that I understand it or that I have all the answers, but I have absolutely had indisputable experiences with people who have died, who have spoken through me in a way that is just incredible. It’s like being a musician. It’s like, “Okay, song, come through me. Okay, other person, speak through me.” I just get to be a translator, really.
Has your work as a medium changed how you view the afterlife?
So, I took a class, I came home, and I was basically in the fetal position for a month because I was so overstimulated, I could barely go to work. Some people have to learn how to tune their openness up; I had to learn how to close the gate, because it was like I was dealing with infinity and everybody’s dead grandma. I was a magnet for this stuff.
The way that it changed my [views]: I always knew that I didn’t know. But you know that analogy of the frog in the well? The frog is at the bottom of the well, and he’s so happy. He lives in his dark little world, and he’s like, “Above me is the beautiful circle. Half of the time it’s bright and blue, and half the time it’s dark and has speckles of light. I love my well.” He has no clue that there’s this whole other world out there, let alone trees, let alone airplanes, let alone other frogs. That’s how I suddenly felt. Not only was I plucked out of my well, but by the way, there is no well. By the way, there is no earth. By the way, we are literally all a collective consciousness in a condensed physical form, like a bouillon cube. By the way, we will never die. By the way, consciousness is everything and nothing all at once. I cannot possibly describe the shatteringness of my reality.
I don’t know if you’ve seen that movie Everything Everywhere All at Once? That was the closest I could come to describing where I started and where I ended. I don’t even mean ending, because it will never end. It was really more a matter of, now I have to get comfortable with how little I know. It’s helped me live bigger on this planet. It’s helped me take more chances. It’s helped me love harder. It’s helped me advocate for myself, for things that I like and things that I don’t like. It changed my living world more than it’s changed my perception of what’s going to happen next, because now I feel super safe. I know that it’s so much bigger than me that I can’t even worry about it. I’m not afraid, and I hope that I can help other people not be afraid, because it’s never the end. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. Consciousness cannot be created or destroyed. Love cannot be created or destroyed. And it’s so exceedingly comforting to me to know that.
You’ve spent the past few years working on a new musical, RUTKA. How did you get involved and how do you feel now that it’s about to premiere?
How it started was a great story. Pearl and the Beard ended in 2015. Now we’re dear friends and it’s wonderful, but at the time, it was a pretty gnarly divorce, and we didn’t talk for two years, which was really hard. In 2017 the three of us got an email from two producers, Amy Langer and David Schwartz, saying, “We know you don’t know who we are. We know your band is broken up. But we want to create this musical, and we cannot imagine our musical without your music in it. We found you on Spotify. Would you consider working on our musical?” And they didn’t tell us what it was about, which was smart, because I probably would have said, “No, thank you.” [Laughs] We agreed to meet with them, just to see what they were up to, and it turned out that they were serious and they had some budget to work on it. The show is based on a diary that had been written by a young girl who unfortunately perished during the Holocaust. So we were like, “Not only are they pulling us out of commission to make a musical, but they’re pulling us out of commission to make a Holocaust musical? Are you serious? This can’t be real.”
Emily had a great response: “For me, if it’s not a hell yes, it’s a no.” She was like, “This is a maybe for me, so I have to pass, but I fully support you two doing this.” Jeremy and I decided to take on the project. And if all it did was reunite me with my friends, I will be forever grateful, because it really was the thing that kick-started our friendship healing, which was wonderful. So Jeremy and I started writing. Never having done a musical before, we were like, “We don’t know what we’re doing!” And they were like, “We don’t care! We just want it to sound like your band.” We started writing music based on things that stood out to us in the diary, not having a story. Usually there’s an outline to a musical that gets written first, and then you fill in the gaps. We just started with a batch of random songs, and then the book writer had to come in and make a story out of that.
What is it like now? It’s been this abstract concept for so long, because it’s been mostly me and Jeremy sitting in our pajamas, writing songs, making a demo, and then sending it off. It’s in the email ether, it’s gone. It doesn’t really hit you. We’ve gotten a chance to see it in different iterations over the years. We had a presentation at Lincoln Center a couple years ago. The performing arts high school in Manhattan put up a version a few years ago, too. So we’ve seen it become real in small ways over the years. But this is something else. The first day we were in the room and introduced to all the crew at the Cincinnati theater, it was 40 people! I was like, “I was in my pajamas working on this. How is this now 40 people’s job to be taking care of this thing?” It’s unbelievable. I’m really impressed with everybody. So humbled. I could barely find the words for it.
To learn more about Jocelyn Mackenzie, visit her website.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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