This project is an exploration of uniquely feminine pain, erasure, and stolen agency, reexamining violence centric music all the way from Child ballads and 19th-century broadsides to modern dark country and rap songs we refuse to recognize as murder ballads. By digging into historical song lineages, we find that behind names like Ellen, Frankie, Delia, or Brenda lay real victims of violence whose lives became public entertainment, finding personal grounding and perspective by rewriting and performing these dark folk fragments as an ongoing creative projects.
Growing up surrounded by pop-country and traditional American music, I developed an early, uneasy fascination with dark narrative songs where someone dies. Returning to solo music after nearly a decade away, my taste has expanded into dark stories across all topics. Suicide, madness, and domestic tragedy. Always driven by a deep respect for the centuries old folk lineages that preserve the names of victims long after history has forgotten them.
"Nobody knows, nobody sees, nobody knows but me."
Generative AI Transparency
Fine-tuning intensive historical prompts to visually reconstruct forgotten histories and lost ephemera. I recreate faces lost to time, but necessary for us to understand historical victims of violence as humans just like ourselves.
Notebook LM is used to compile historical sources, track citations, and fact check drafts. It is also used to compile and search for patterns in large amounts of traditional lyrics. Gemini is used to check errors while coding the website. ChatGPT is used for generating simulated historical images. Based on my prompts, these rely on images in the public domain. If images are already available, my use of AI editing on them is minimal.
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