DRAGONFLY (TILE BLUE VINYL) | VINYL RECORD (LP)

Ava Mccoy, This project started in 2022 in the basement of Graham Jonson's (Quickly, Quickly)'s home in Portland, Oregon. We made Scared (To Admit It) in a day, and I let it sit for a looooong time. I had a song blow up online, which led to new creative friendships, people I didn't know listening to my music, starting to work with Acrophase Records, Jai Paul reaching out to me about working together; it all felt very new and unreal. What followed was a writing frenzy, going through old voice memos looking for promising song ideas, and working with four different producers that each allowed me to tell a different story with their incredible help and talents. I spent a month in Nashville recording the majority of the project with Josef Kuhn. He and I were paired up by our label to work together, and I can't imagine working with anyone else on these songs. I felt free to experiment, ask questions, change my mind, and we ate so many epic sandwiches on our lunch breaks. "Dragonfly" feels like a patchwork quilt of me post-college. Realizing the dumb decisions I had made (maybe don't get that tattoo in your dorm room), the things I should've said, the ways in which I've changed. The actions I've taken that have resulted in self-sabotage. Friendships and relationships that have gone sour. Traveling the world solo, and how fun and scary it can be. Surviving sexual harassment and assault, and allowing myself to speak about it freely after spending almost a decade being ashamed. It's kinda all over the place, but so am I. I'm no longer afraid to say everything on my mind since working on this project. My friend Amelia McDonnell made the Delft tiles for the album cover. She and I worked together at a paint-your-own-pottery studio in Boston when I lived there, and she is one of my closest, most talented friends. I sent her lyrics from the project that I wanted to be turned into drawings, and then into individual tiles. Amelia studies printmaking and ceramics, and I adore her style. The tiles were then shipped to me once finished, and the tile for "To Lose Your Mind" broke. I found it symbolic, as that song discusses topics of SA- it's definitely the heaviest song I've ever written. The visual identity of the album pairs perfectly with how the songs feel to me. The songs are fragile, imperfect, each of them having their own feeling and details, but ultimately they fit together into a beautiful picture.