behind the blog with Debby Friday
I discovered the music of Canadian electronic artist Debby Friday, as ya do, through social media. Last year, she put out her debut studio album, Good Luck, an industrial-tinged alt-pop album with an almost tactile intensity to it throughout. Her latest single "To the Dancefloor" is, in a word, imperative. It evokes a sweaty, subterranean night at the club, with Friday coolly listing her demands over stormy percussion: she wants to feel the violence; to shake her ass like a nihilist; she wants a room, then a suite, then a bigger suite than the suite she was already offered. It's all perfectly moreish, like a good dance song should be.
Friday does not limit her creativity to the realm of music—when I checked out her Instagram, I was thrilled to see she has a BLOG! thediaries.online collects short dispatches from her life: snippets of both the mundane and the sublime (often living side by side), occasionally studded with mysterious red [redacted]s and illustrated with diaristic photos. This is blogging in the classic mode I remember back from when I used to Livejournal like a fiend; the act of cataloguing particular moments of life helps create your memories in real time, tracking the minutia of your days and giving you plenty of introspection fodder for the future. God, I love blogging. Everyone should have a blog. Anyway...
I reached out and emailed some questions to Friday about her blog, and she kindly obliged...
How long have you been blogging?
Years and years. I've always kept a personal diary and when I was younger, I used to write erotic fanfiction and post it on Fanfiction.Net which then evolved into posting my original poetry and nonfiction to other internet forums. Before thediaries.online, I had another blog while I was in grad school, called CRACKINGCLOSER. I would post my essays and more academic thoughts and research there but also fictional short stories. It was fun but I shut it down once I graduated because I wanted to move in a different direction with my writing. There were some bangers on there, though. Way before that, I used to have a Tumblr where I would blog about my life under a pseudonym but tbh, that was a very dark time that I won't get into.
What inspired you to start thediaries.online?
Writing is my first love. It was my reprieve from the craziness of my early years and I always thought that I'd end up being some kind of author. Which, I guess I am, technically. But all that to say that I started this blog because I needed a space to share this side of myself and my creativity. A place that's just mine and that I could make into whatever I wanted and have total freedom of thought, speech and action. I love sharing art and I love the internet and I think this allows people who are fans of my work to see a different side of me. It just felt right.
How does blogging either tie into or veer away from your music creation? Does blogging feel more "personal" in terms of how you write? Have blog posts ever turned into songs or vice versa?
In a way, blogging is more personal because it's more immediate and matter of fact. With a song, I can be really abstract/poetic and I'm talking about myself and my life but you'd never know any details or who's who or what's what. I universalize when I write songs because I want everyone to be able to connect with them. Songs also take forever to come out so I might write about something I'm going through but by the time you hear it, it's been nine months and things have changed.
When I blog, I'm more direct and it's pretty immediate because I try to update weekly. I blog about my life so I drop names, dates, places. I still try to obscure certain details and there's definitely some stuff I won't write about just to protect my privacy and the privacy of those in my life. But I'm trying to practice a kind of confessional method of writing, where I'm as honest as possible, even if it's embarrassing or shameful or "problematic" or scandalous. I want to push myself to be comfortable with being seen and this feels like a way to do so.
Sometimes there's overlap with songwriting in the sense that I'll post bits from my song journal or rough drafts of tracks I'm working on or I'll write about being in the studio. There's definitely been times where just even having the practice of blogging almost every day helps me with getting into the zone of writing more music.
How has blogging affected your relationship with social media in general?
It's made it more tolerable. The only social media I truly enjoy is TikTok but that's because it's more creative and weird and addictive. There's less pretenses there. Our culture's in a kind of ironycore phase and it's been fun to hehe haha but I'm tired of it. I need earnestness. I need the elevation of the mundane. I need art to be good and to give me something deeper than "content". Make the internet sincere again.
When do you feel most inspired to blog?
When I'm on tour. Being on the road is so hectic but there's a lot of waiting around (for a flight, a taxi, soundcheck, check in, show times, etc). And you're usually alone, even when you're travelling with people. I tend to write so much when I'm on the road because there's not much else to do.
Thank you Debby Friday!! Listen to her album Good Luck and check out her blog of course.
cassandra moth
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