A TRANSGENDER musician, animator, and filmmaker working in Seattle, Clyde Petersen has released ten albums with the band Your Heart Breaks. He regularly tours with Kimya Dawson, whose childlike voice sweetens the movie Juno’s soundtrack. Despite Petersen’s gentle guitar riffs and soft-spoken lyrics, his musical influences include jarring artists from the feminist punk movement known as Riot Grrrl, which emerged out of Olympia, Washington, in the early 1990’s. He has animated and directed videos for bands like Thao Nguyen & The Get Down Stay Down and the Shaky Hands. In 2010, Petersen released a documentary film, The Unspeakable, which explores the work of fifteen Northwest artists.
Kenneth Logan: Your music is tough to categorize. How do you tend to describe it?
Clyde Petersen: I haven’t been able to describe it very well to people who aren’t familiar with the genre of low-fi indie rock or Plan-It-X Records or K Records. I’ve decided just to categorize it as vocal-driven indie pop.
KL: I’ve read descriptions of it as punk, and to me that term always calls to mind the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. Your music sounds a long way from the discordant and aggressive style of those bands. Do you consider your music to be punk too?
CP: I would consider myself a punk, but fairly soft-edged. Punk seems to have changed a lot over the years. Plan-It-X Records’ slogan is “If it ain’t cheap, it ain’t punk.” So, I always think about that. There’s also the idea of punk being folk, a music of the people. I’d say that’s a strong contender for a definition of punk these days: music of the people.
KL: Queercore is another label I’ve heard attached to your music.
CP: I’m pretty into reclaiming that genre in terms of new queer bands. I put on a show this year that was Northwest Queercore 2010 and got a bunch of bands together that were very different genres. There are bands in Bellingham, Washington, that have a really strong Riot Grrrl sound. Bellingham has experienced a Riot Grrrl resurgence in the last two years, with a lot of consciousness-raising groups, a lot of women getting together to address issues in their community, become strong friends, start bands, and make art. I hope that queercore and Riot Grrrl are back and that I can be a part of them, because I can’t think of better terms to define what’s happening these days.
KL: You’ve described Your Heart Breaks as a “musical collective” rather than a band.
CP: I would call us a band too, but there’s a rotating line-up. There are core members who have toured more often than others, but when it comes to recording, there are often forty to fifty people that come through the studio in a week’s time.
KL: Do people come in and out by invitation or by chance?
CP: Both. I have an e-mail list that I send. The first time I did this experiment, I was able to make New Ocean Waves at Dub Narcotic Studio with Karl Blau, and we had a CD of the demos, just mish-mashed, twenty songs. I burned probably 25 discs and mailed them to people who I thought would be good on the record. It was Publishers Clearinghouse–style. They got this CD in the mail and a letter that said, “We will be recording at Dub Narcotics studios from this day to this day and it would be so great if you would come. Here’s the demo.”
KL: That was for the album New Ocean Waves?
CP: Yeah, and on Sailor System. We recorded them at the same time. We recorded as many songs as we could in ten days because we had access to the studio, and then it was apparent that there were two very different records going on. New Ocean Waves was the daytime record, when we were drinking a lot of coffee and a lot of friends were stopping by. And then on Sailor System, a lot of the tracking was done in the middle of the night, when Karl and I were doing experiments in audio feedback. There are a lot of quarters and dimes hitting windows on that record because the studio doesn’t have a buzzer or anything.
KL: It seems even well-intentioned people tangle their sentences when talking about transgender people. I end up stumbling over every pronoun that I use. What do you see as the biggest misunderstanding about transgender people?
CP: Probably the biggest is just a lack of knowledge. Most people really want male or female, not acknowledging the possibility that there might be more options than male and female.
KL: In identifying yourself as transgender, you must have expected some rejection. Has anybody surprised you along the way?
CP: Having a conversation about being transgender with my dad was hard. I knew that it would be okay, but my stomach was freaking out. I had been a roadie with the Sex Workers’ Art Show one summer, and on that tour I felt really safe and encouraged to identify as transgender. In my touring world, I was identifying as Clyde and with male pronouns. But as soon as I came home it was awkward. I hadn’t even talked to my roommates. But one of the people on tour with me had talked to my Dad at a festival in Washington. I wasn’t home yet, but they had outed me to my dad. He’s great, so I figured it would probably be all right. I have awkward experiences still. I teach animation to junior high school kids. I’m not taking testosterone or getting surgery or anything, so my boss still calls me “she,” and I’m thinking, “I don’t know how to talk to you about this. And I don’t want you to fire me.” It could take just one parent being like, “What the fuck? You weird queer. Don’t get near my children.”
KL: Much of your music is so easygoing that it slips past people’s defenses. But even in just singing love songs, you’re taking a political position. Was it a conscious decision to eschew combative stances, or is that just the way the music came out?
CP: That’s just the way the music came out. I also play bass in a very aggressive, very loud hardcore band that plays queercore shows. Our goal is just to bum people out, basically. As far as Your Heart Breaks goes, that’s just how the music came out. The music developed by playing with Karl Blau, who produces the records.
KL: You’re an animator as well as a musician. Do you find yourself telling the same stories in the two media?
CP: They’re really different things for me. My interests tend to rotate between different art forms. Right now I’m working on a documentary, and I know that eventually I’ll come back to writing more songs. But they seem pretty separate for me. When I’m animating, I’m usually making music videos for other bands, trying to get inside their heads and negotiate with someone else’s artistic mind about what their music might look like visually. When I’m writing music, songs just show up, and I don’t know where they come from. I can’t really force it. When I’m making visual art I can say, “Oh, today I’m going to make some dinosaurs, and they’re going to walk around and eat some grass. And that is going to be just so satisfying.” I’m not too interested in storytelling with film, either. So it feels like a good release to say, “OK, I just told a bunch of stories through music, but today I’m just going to make something that’s visually pleasing and might not make any sense to one person, but another might think it’s beautiful.”
Kenneth Logan is a writer based in San Francisco.
