By Buick Audra
For the second time in two years, I found myself working to complete a short memoir to accompany an album. Combing through years of texts and emails from people I used to know, I searched for signs of who I’d been in those relationships. The correspondences revealed a more agreeable version of myself who favored exclamation points, but few usable insights.
The album was by my metal band, Friendship Commanders. We called it MASS, a nod to the state of Massachusetts and the other definitions of the word. It was a concept album—or really, a memoir in songs, as I had come to think of my work; a true story told in music. As with literary memoirs, there was a container; a time-and-place-frame that held a series of events in my late teens and early twenties, in the Boston area, that had changed and shaped who I was and would become. As I had done with my solo album before it, Conversations with My Other Voice, I felt called to give MASS a prose companion. Thirty-thousand-ish words, one essay per song. Tidy, clear, no problem.
Well, one small problem. The Massachusetts memories were foggy. Writing the album had been like going underwater for short bursts, looking around at a buried city, and coming back up to describe the music scene I’d grown up in. I didn’t have an abundance of mental footage to draw from. My mind had hidden the controlling dynamics that were once my daily norm, a rogue act of self-preservation, perhaps. But it made memoir difficult. The events I could remember were as attainable as if they’d happened the week prior. But the bits about my own behaviors sat behind a gauze I couldn’t penetrate.
The story centered around a friendship with a woman seven years my senior. We met when I was twenty and about as pliable as I’ve ever been. A short lifetime of being abused, rejected, and moved around by parental figures had opened me up to being absorbed into the lives of others; adaptability at its most extreme. When writing, I could look at a photo of the two of us on stage, dressed exactly alike and playing music below my skill level, and describe how I got there. But I wanted to tell about after, about how eventually standing up to her and losing the surrounding music community had informed my whole personality. Alas, I was missing the files.
And then, I got an Instagram message. It was in the hidden requests folder, the one reserved for people you either don’t know or don’t want to. A stranger had sent two photos: one of a light blue silk dress with a narrow royal-blue silk charmeuse band under the bust, and a close-up of the dress’s label. It said buick audra in Old English font, with a rose between the two parts of my name, the same rose that’s on the cover of my first solo EP, Rose Ink. It was mine, all right. The person wondered why my name was inside the dress she’d just bought at a consignment store; she’d looked me up.
Suddenly, I could see the missing piece. Right beneath my embarrassment and the low-grade ache in my ribcage was the rest of the picture. My part.
When I left Boston in a swirl of quiet shame that would follow me for years, I’d maintained friendships with a handful of other women I’d known there. Did I say maintained? I meant held onto with the intensity of a thousand suns. Because maybe, if I could make those relationships work, the narrative would be different. I would be likable—loveable, even. And what did love look like? Being the best person and friend to ever walk the planet, naturally. Included in that was the offer to make each of these women a dress. I was a clothing designer for celebrities. My dresses were custom-made and cost hundreds of dollars. But not for my nearest and dearest! For these BFFs, they were free.
I made four dresses, each specific to the requests of the recipient. Of the four, I only know one of those women today, and her dress was the one in the photo, hanging in the closet of a stranger. Hardly the tale of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, or the Traveling Pants gals. Mine was the less-told story of overdoing it to be loved—of unknowingly bartering to be loved, a contract that hadn’t been signed on both ends. People will accept what you give them without question. Worse, they might give it away.
So, I wrote it. The freshness of the feelings took me right back to who I had once been, auditioning for acceptance in Boston, and making everyone more important than me after Boston. Two sides of a dishonest coin I no longer use as currency. The mirror was brutal but clear. Perfect conditions for finishing a memoir.
As for the stranger on Instagram, she was thrilled. I confirmed that I had designed and made the dress, sparing her the details of its origin. Not all things need to be said to all people, a lesson I’ve learned in mortifying reverse. The last message I sent her was, “I hope it makes you feel beautiful when you wear it!”
And I meant it. She got a dress, and I got an ending. Not bad for some pale blue silk crepe. Not bad at all.
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Buick Audra is a Grammy Award-winning musician and writer living in Nashville, TN. She is the guitarist and primary songwriter and vocalist in the melodic heavy duo Friendship Commanders. Their new album, MASS, was released on September 29th, 2023, alongside an accompanying memoir. Her recent solo album, Conversations with My Other Voice, was released on September 23rd, 2022, with a companion memoir in essays by the same title. She no longer sews or auditions for love.
