Evelyn Gray Reveals ​“How To Be Alone”

In the first single ​“run” from Evelyn Gray’s new album How To Be Alone, the singer/songwriter/musician explores a multitude of sounds as well as her mind, body, and soul. As Gray sings of fear and sleeplessness, the song eventually builds to a powerful guitar-laden climax that ends with Gray singing the lines ​“how many times must I say no? Now I’m done letting you run me.” But that is only the beginning. 

“(run) is the most recent song I’ve written,” said Gray in an interview outside on a clear and sunny early June day. ​“I wrote it in January and then recorded it and put it out faster than probably ever anything I did before.” 

I told her maybe it felt like it needed to be out in the world. ​“Running not walking,” Gray said with a smile.

The latest release from the New Haven-based Gray, out now on Bandcamp, offers seven multilayered songs that feel carefully curated and observant. They’re songs that require you to stop, sit back, and soak it all in like the rays of the sun. As stated in the Bandcamp description of the album, it observes the ​“all too common queer/trans experience of personal and familial relationships collapsing after coming out of the closet.”

“That’s kind of the umbrella that we’re working within,” Gray said. ​“Some of the songs are old, like from year one of transitioning, but I kind of like breathed some new life into (them), took them from their demo stage, and did some production on them and added some new elements.” 

Those new elements include additional instrumentation, something Gray hopes to continue to play with and layer with her raw yet lush lyrics.

“I think the core of my songwriting process stays the same, but rather than limiting myself to constructing things that can be totally recreated in the live setting by just myself alone, I’m now opening up songs that I write in that way to production later down the road,” she said. ​“I’m adding new elements that I’m hearing, like drums, strings, piano and just things that me with only my four limbs couldn’t recreate solo in a live setting, and kind of opening myself up to larger arrangements in that way.”

Gray played everything but the drums on three of the tracks, which were written and recorded by Nick Restivo of Snowpiler. All seven songs were recorded in a couple weeks, Gray said, even though some of them were written two to three years ago.

“I didn’t plan to put anything out this year,” said Gray. She did end up releasing a couple of singles, but had a different album of songs ready for the mixing stage. ​“These ones all just started coming out, and it felt like a good segue in terms of the sonic exploration that I was doing,” she said. Gray was also beginning to ​“conceptualize arrangements for more than just a solo … bridging that gap from my first record into the newer stuff and incorporating other instrumentation” so this ​“kinda felt like a good middle ground, to be putting these songs out before the other songs.”

How To Be Alone finds Gray sharing her growth and experiences while finding a new way to navigate a world that changed dramatically in those same two to three years, and though she would not necessarily call these her ​“Covid songs,” that time influenced this record.

“Some of them are definitely resultant from a situation that I found myself in largely due to Covid quarantine,” she said.

But she was not one of those people who found herself with more time on her hands due to the shutdowns.

“I was someone who had less time,” said Gray. ​“I did very little writing comparable to the amount that I would spend playing music because I was working through the whole thing. I didn’t get any time off, and it was really intense. I had way less energy because of how physically and emotionally stressful it was to be working and facing a lot of transphobia.”

That coupled with being unable to ​“play guitar loudly and screaming like I do” at home as often as they typically did prior to Covid made it ​“pretty constrictive on my artistic and creative expression,” so Gray found new non-music related outlets to explore. That included getting into foraging, herbalism, gardening, and later, farming. Gray continued with foraging and working with medicinal herbs, and eventually got a job at a farm which she left earlier this year to begin a ​“very rigorous tour schedule for the year.” 

When we spoke for this interview Gray had just finished a month-long solo tour and was getting ready to leave on a two-week tour of England and Wales with the New Jersey-based band Hit Like a Girl, in which she plays guitar. She is also in the midst of planning a three-month long tour for her solo work this summer that will take her all over the U.S. She will return to New Haven in the fall for a couple of shows. After that, the plan ​“is to be a little bit of a snowbird and fly south for the winter … just doing a lot of writing and allowing myself some time and space to be alone and with nature after the very stimulating experience of being on tour long term,” an experience that Gray says she loves but can find ​“overstimulating.”

“You wake up, you drive to the show, you sound check, you play the show, you go sleep on someone’s floor or couch or maybe they have a guest room, and then you wake up and you drive to the show and you sound check and you play the show and you go to the crash spot and that over and over again,” said Gray, though she has worked to be ​“a little more tactful with how I plan my touring.”

“I always try to give myself a day off, or even like a full weekend. I don’t like to do too many shows all in a row like that just because I find its way better for my mental and physical health, and also way better for my performance in turn because if I’m not at my best and exhausted and haven’t eaten a real meal in ten days I’m probably not going to be playing my best shows.” 

Gray is known for the immersive experience she offers at her live performances, and the reception of her music has made her all the more ready and willing to share it with others throughout the world.

“It is definitely a big reason why I tour so much,” she said. ​“Because it’s people constantly telling me how deeply impacted they are by what I’m doing, and it is really so special.” 

Gray has also had an increased social media presence, and has found that it has made people more apt to connect to her and her music.

“It’s cool because now I feel like I have so many friends all over the country and all over the world that I get to meet at shows,” she said.

Her Patreon is another place where she has made more connections.

“I started it in May 2020, which was a terrible time to start anything new because I wasn’t going to be able to keep up with doing anything with the onset of a pandemic. So I was very bad at updating it until just several months ago,” said Gray. ​“But now I am a bit more seriously where I’m constantly releasing things every month and have like a little snail mail club, where I send postcards every month.”

It is also a place where Gray has evolved her sound, creating ​“new sonic experiments.”

“I do this improvisational dark ambient sound exploration work where I’m looping my guitar and my voice totally spontaneously and then creating a lot of those more dark and twisted sound experiments for the Patreon page,” she said. ​“It’s something I’ve always loved to do, that sort of very spontaneous and ambient improvisational work, but have never had a means for releasing it because it’s not the most palatable. It’s very much a particular niche vibe, so it’s fun to have a home for those weird creations of mine, for all my little song children to live.”

Gray believes this album shows how her sound has developed and evolved since 2019’s Let The Flower Grow.

“This collection of songs is a bridge between the last album and what the next album will be in terms of instrumental arrangements, more instruments,” she said. This album has guitar, bass, vocals and vocal layering, drums, piano, synth, ​“and lots of effects pedals, always.”

Gray noted she is ​“always adding new layers to songs as time is moving on, allowing myself to have more freedom with arrangements, trying to limit myself less and less.” She wants to ​“do things that are fun in the recording world and allow myself to do that because there are no rules,” she said. She also used field recordings on this album, including rain sounds. ​“I love exploring those and adding those in,” she said.

And the songwriting muse comes when it comes, according to Gray. 

“It’s kind of like a thing that takes over my body more than a thing that I voluntarily decide I’m going to do,” she said. ​“Like I am just the messenger for the songs from the void to take over and spew out into the world.”

Gray hopes this record becomes whatever it needs to be for whoever chooses to listen.

“I feel like that’s the thing with releasing any kind of art into the world,” she said. ​“You have to be ready for people receiving it to make their own meaning of it.”

“There’s this line in a song by a band called Fever Sleeves from the early 2000s and it says, ​‘A work of art is never complete, only abandoned, then becomes free.’ so for me it’s like that moment of being ready to release it into the world and to allow it to be its own thing that exists for other people to find it and make meaning, in the way that they need to.”

How To Be Alone is available for purchase today on Bandcamp here. Information about Gray’s upcoming solo tour can be found via Bandcamp or her Instagram page.