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Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name is an album I wanted to make since college. I began most of these songs when I was 19 in my dorm room, but I struggled to finish them. I didn’t feel skilled enough as a songwriter and a producer. Finishing this music now, almost 6-7 years later, has been interesting. It is nice to know that there are ideas here that I can still stand by. But the differences in my emotional state, then and now, made this process more difficult than I expected.

Most of these songs were originally about my parents. They were about wanting to be loved and accepted by my parents as a closeted transgender young adult. I tried recording some of these songs with their original lyrics but felt a dissonance. I don’t feel this wish to be accepted by my parents anymore. I have already accepted their love as pretty conditional. I don’t feel the need to tread that territory again for a while.

I fell in love with someone for the first time a few years ago. I have been with that person for over 2 years now. He’s moving soon and we know that’s the end of our time together, that the relationship is now complete. It’s strange because the desire I had for my parents to want me seems to have found a new space in the desire I have right now for my partner to stay with me. So I started to rework these songs, preserving some of the recordings, lyrics, arrangements of my past self and supplementing them with new meanings and sounds.

Listening to this album now, I feel really affected by this parallel between the love in wanting my parents to accept me for who I am and the love in wanting my partner to stay with me regardless of our circumstances. I always assumed that these two loves were separate but I think recognizing that (for trans people like me, or maybe just for me specifically) these loves have overlap has been simultaneously distressing and comforting.

I don’t think this album is any more complicated than that. It’s not a breakup album. It’s just me doing my best to document what I’m feeling at this time. I named the record Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name to remind myself that the more amorphous moments I’ve shared with *you* are the moments most important to me. Because they make me work harder to remember us as who we were together. And because that work means that there is still love for me to mine. To keep.

박승원.

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