Six
For forty years I built a life on top of the girl I used to be. This year I went looking for her, and I cut my hair to look like I did at six. This song is about finding her still there, waiting, and choosing to stay.
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Independent Projects
Music
It always begins with journaling.
An entry may become a poem; sometimes it becomes a song instead.
Most people think using AI to make music means pressing a button and letting a algorithm guess what you want. For me, it is entirely different: the song begins when an idea hits, I sit down, and I start writing.
From there, AI becomes my instrument, helping me translate the arrangements and voices in my head into actual sound. I listen, reject, revise, and direct every detail before handing the track to a human sound engineer for final mixing.
I’m drawn to this process because it fundamentally expands what a writer can build. I don't need to learn an instrument to bring a song to life; I can stay a writer and let new tools take the words further.
I documented how one of these songs was made, from journal page to release, in a Futures Lab case study .
Released Singles
From the Road
From the road, it looks like peace. Nobody sees how long it takes to get back up. This song is about surviving a season of exhaustion and uncertainty, and learning, for now, to stay where the light is.
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I Knew This Time Would Come
This song came onto the page like a breakup that had been going on for a year. It is a goodbye to a version of myself I had outgrown, written with gratitude for everything she did to get me here.
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I Am the Season
Other people were blooming while I felt stuck in frozen ground, watching milestones arrive for everyone else. This song is about letting go of the life I thought I’d have and returning to the one in front of me.
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Quiet Revolutions
An EP connected to Behold: Life Beyond Grief. Each track began with a selected poem in the book, returning to the same period of infertility, failed adoptions, and learning to live without making my worth depend on becoming a mother.
Featured track: Promised
Promised began with a dream I had years before I knew I wanted a child. In it, I was told I would have a daughter named Maria Tereza. The name stayed with me. Later, it became the poem “Maria Tereza” in Behold, and then this song.
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From the Beginning
An album written with the memoir series, built from a diary I kept in 1998.
As I wrote each part of the series, a song often came with it. The album follows the same return to those pages, but the songs take their own route through the people, scenes, and feelings I found there.
Featured Tracks
Back Page
Years after high school, my classmate Ronaldo told me he used to check which library books I had borrowed. If I had read it, he assumed it was worth taking home.
I wrote this song from his perspective, imagining what it felt like to follow someone through every book they had read.
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Spell for a Girl Who Remembers
When I was a teenager, I wrote about a witch named Possidonia. She was clever, curious, and free in ways I did not yet know how to be.
I wrote this song as an incantation. Possidonia sings it to the girl who created her, saying her name softly and calling her back.
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These tracks are part of a larger album that follows the memoir series from beginning to end.
Songs from Lu's Story
I wrote Lu's Story when the state of the world was making me anxious. Rather than let it harden me, I brought those fears into a fantasy story.
Each chapter has a song from inside Lu's world, sung by Lu or by the characters she meets in a land changed by the Harsh Winds.
Featured Tracks
Chapter One
Sway
Alone in a gray land after the Harsh Winds, Lu finds a single flower that refuses to fade, and feels a faint pull north toward something she cannot yet name.
While writing it, I kept returning to the tenderness of impermanence: the way something can be precious because it cannot be held forever. The Japanese idea of mono no aware, a bittersweet awareness of life’s transience, helped me find language for that feeling.
Lu wakes in a world drained of color, far from the Deep Groves and everyone she loves. Her flowers bloom briefly beneath her paws, then fade in the harshness of the Between-Space. But one small blue flower remains.
It does not promise a return to what was, but it becomes a reason to move: a light that lasts one moment longer than she expected.
Sway is Lu listening to that small light. Her wings remember how to fly before she fully believes she can. She is learning to let change move through her without letting it take all of her with it.
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Chapter Five
Dangerous Dreamer
Lu reaches the floating islands, close enough to see one another but kept apart by fear. When she tries to build a path between them, they answer with weapons.
This song stays with that doubt: the moment when believing in connection begins to feel like a liability, and hope is made to seem childish or dangerous. Lu does not yet have an answer. She only has the unbearable question: what does it cost to keep imagining a future when those in power would rather convince you that no other future is possible?
Dangerous Dreamer came from reading about journalists and democracy advocates around the world who continue to speak, organize, and imagine a different future under enormous pressure.
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Encantada
Encantada is a conversation with the girl inside me who learned, very early, to earn love through performance. It's written in Portuguese, and it arrived after I understood that she had never needed to prove her worth to me. That girl had only been waiting to be met.
This song is part of an ongoing inner child project that lives on Substack.
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“Come out of the room / it has passed.” The song begins at the threshold of a room where a child has waited too long. It may be a childhood room, but it is also a duration: years spent inside an old fear while life continued elsewhere.
Then the door opens from within. No rescue arrives on command. The girl opens it herself, and the adult who spent a lifetime trying to become worthy of love is finally able to enter.
“Lay down the weight of the medal” is for all the ways I learned to make myself impressive: through competence, usefulness, charm, achievement. It did not feel like performance at the time. It was survival wearing the clothes of personality. But the song offers another kind of love: not something to earn or display, but something that sustains.
In Portuguese, encantar can mean to charm or win someone over; it can also mean to cast a spell. Não precisa me encantar / eu já cheguei encantada holds both meanings: you do not need to perform for my love, and you do not need to change me. I arrived already transformed by you.
The song ends with a promise: pode dormir sem susto / eu fico aqui acordada. You can sleep without being startled. I will stay awake. The child no longer has to keep watch over the adults, the house, or the weather of the room.
The viola caipira carries the sound of the Brazilian countryside and some of the first music I knew. The violin, music box, and violão gather childhood, distance, and return around it. At the end, the words give way to humming, the sound I use in meditation to come back to my body.
Listen and read
Additional unreleased tracks and their stories live in Figments of Creativity.