After nearly a decade, Mary Lambert is bounding back to center stage with a righteously impassioned track. “There’s no other way I would like to come back than with this song, ‘The Tempest,’” beams the songstress. “It is a song I’ve always wanted to make but didn’t have the language for, or maybe the permission to be angry and embrace my rage. I think anger for me has been an unfamiliar, maybe uncomfortable emotion, and to be able to channel it in a song feels really empowering.”
The ceaseless whirlwind of political and social despair can feel all-consuming. “ I think so many of us are tired. I think it has been this gradual grinding and wear of our liberties and our right to self-determination and autonomy. You wake up and think, ‘What’s the next thing? What else is going to be eroded? How else are we going to be oppressed and cast aside? And in what other ways is the state going to tell us that we don’t matter?’”
Mary wants to reimagine our relationship to anger beyond gender normative frameworks. “My only relationship to anger and rage for most of my life was toxic masculinity, like men yelling or punching holes in walls. Especially for women, we don’t allow ourselves that permission to feel that because we don’t want to be violent. We’re really comfortable with processing our feelings through crying. But we have to tap into the anger because it will galvanize us. It allows us to be more active, and that’s what we need. We don’t need each of us going inside and being insular. We need to connect with each other. A good motivator for that is justified anger. Hopefully this song is a soundtrack for that.”
While our initial instinct may be to check out, complacency only creates more ideological erosion. “I know that for a lot of us, in order to protect our peace and for self-preservation, we’ve decided to get offline. Go touch grass, be with nature. That’s very helpful. But I think to disengage completely with the news and what’s going on globally is a disservice to yourself. Getting comfortable with having those conversations with people that don’t agree with you is really important. There’s this belief that you have to pretend that everything’s okay when you’re interacting with someone from the other side – you have to put on a different face or make them like you or you have to stifle yourself in order to do that. That’s a disservice to the conversation and the possibility of change.”
There should be space and time for grief, but the kinetics of that anguish can also be put towards a more fruitful purpose. “Hopelessness and despair requires that you submit. It requires you to lay down your sword. It’s not that these emotions are static and you can’t ever feel that way. There would be no fidelity to an honest experience, but allowing yourself to sit in that for too long is part of the harm. The best thing we can do is create change in our little corner of the world. And that can be enough. Ego tells us that we should be able to change it all. That’s not what’s being asked of us. What’s being asked of us is to organize and to work together collectively to create change and to not allow further destruction of our humanity.”
Progress is frustratingly incremental. Regardless, we must continue to push the boulder forward. “Protests are one part of this large puzzle of collective care that will look like we are still falling down. But it doesn’t mean that it’s not important, and it doesn’t mean that it’s not worth doing. That is something we have to get comfortable with, that you do the work, even if you don’t see the result, because the result will happen over time. It will be slow, but what’s the other option? To just let it happen? No. Get angry. Let it radicalize you.”
“The Tempest” provides a permission structure for a positive release of negative emotions. “Embrace the full spectrum of emotion in your daily life and allow anger into your life, because there is much to be angry about, and it’s okay. It doesn’t have to lead to despair. It can lead you to activism. It can lead you to collective liberation. ‘The Tempest’ is a musical iteration of choosing each other and believing that there is something beyond helplessness. It’s also fun to just rock out. Sometimes it’s fun to roll the windows down and have a little scream. It’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to be angry. I hope this song becomes an anthem and a soundtrack to people’s activism.” Stream “The Tempest” HERE.
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Mary Lambert Issues a Rallying Cry with Her New Single, “The Tempest.” Photo Credit: Kim Selling.
