Show Me How You Disappear

In moments of distress, Jilian Medford rarely reaches for a guitar. “It's too fragile,” the IAN SWEET mastermind tells Apple Music. “It's like I know that once I start playing music, too much emotion is going to come out.” And yet that’s how things began for Show Me How You Disappear, a set of shape-shifting indie rock that charts—in chronological sequence and piercing detail—her journey from a “very, very bad” state to somewhere “much more clearheaded.” Many of its lyrics were written while Medford was undergoing therapy in an outpatient facility for acute anxiety, during daily journaling sessions each morning. In the evening, she’d set them to music and hit record. “I don't think I would have written this kind of record or had the strength to keep writing if I didn't go to treatment,” she says. “I was processing things in real time. It is exactly what was happening in my life—I just made it to these songs.” Here, Medford tells the story of every song on the album.

“My Favorite Cloud”
“I saw a psychic, or a channeler. A friend of mine, their mom does that, and I was really desperate for some help or some answers, someone to just tell me, ‘This is going to happen in your life,’ just give me some sort of direction. But the psychic kind of freaked out when she first started channeling for me, and she was just like, ‘You don't know how to breathe. If you don't start training yourself to, something bad is going to happen.’ I don't do it as much anymore, but I hold my breath by accident often, and I would get very light-headed. Something as simple as breathing that you shouldn't have to even think about, I was like, ‘Wait, I need to do this.’”

“Drink the Lake”
“I was still really struggling from a bad breakup—I wanted to do literally anything to get myself to stop repeating the scenarios and the things that I kept replaying in my mind, because it was a pretty tumultuous and abusive relationship. That lyric ‘I'll start saying your name backwards so I'll forget’ came from a place of desperation, from just wanting to move on so badly. It's kind of just like thinking about everything in reverse, doing weird tricks to get my mind in a little bit of a maze so I don't need to think so linearly about it all.”

“Sword”
“‘Sword’ came to me really quickly. I was with a partner who would blame everything on me, like, ‘You are the reason I feel bad about this.’ I was always the weapon that was hurting him and I just constantly felt like a bad guy. I would just get more dangerous and more dangerous in his mind. I was like constantly hurting this person unintentionally and I didn't know how to make it stop.”

“Dirt”
“‘Dirt’ is like, ‘I'm like the ground you walk on and you're the water, you're so pure.’ Like you can do nothing wrong. So, just say you're the water, let's get over this. I'd rather somebody just admit that they're treating me like shit than try to avoid it for years.”

“Sing Till I Cry”
“This is definitely peak treatment time. I was living at my parents’ house. I’ve never really thought about my parents dying, but I was spending so much time with them and I was in treatment and they would come to sessions. I got so emotional about how much they cared about me—it was the hardest time, my parents seeing me go through that. I felt like a fucking child living at their house, eating dinners with them, and this song is very childlike to me. Like the line ‘There's still spots in my eyes from looking up at the sky/But I don't care, I’d rather be blind’: I would do anything again to get that back, to go back to being a child, to the life where I didn't live with a lot of trauma. Because it holds me back from being truly who I was.”

“Dumb Driver”
“I was driving and I ran a red light—literally because I was just zoning out thinking about something else, really distracted with what was going on in my life at the time with my relationship that had fallen apart. You know when you're driving and you kind of black out and end up where you're supposed to be and you have no idea how you got there while you're thinking about something else? I had one of those realizations and I immediately went home and wrote that first line and then the rest came. It’s pleading, like, ‘I want to stop loving you. This is putting me in danger. I almost killed myself, and I almost got in a car accident thinking about what's been going on with us and I can't focus on anything else.’”

“Get Better”
“‘Get Better’ is my favorite song on the record, the most freeing fucking song that I've ever written. I remember writing it and I immediately started recording it and I was just screaming, ‘Better, better.’ I knew that everybody could hear in the neighborhood, but I didn't care. While I was singing it, I was feeling so much better. This one is very mantra-based and brings me back to really, really taking care of myself in therapy and doing the work and just trying to get through it.”

“Power”
“This song is definitely heavily based in trauma. The relationship I was in was pretty abusive, and so that line is like, ‘I want to feel what it would feel like to never know you, to never have these memories.’ It would be so freeing. I would feel like the most powerful person in the world if I didn't have to go through this. At the time, writing the song, I couldn't imagine putting myself through something like that again.”

“Show Me How You Disappear”
“All these songs are just sad, huh? A big theme in this song is that I just wish I didn't have to spend so much of my time being in treatment. I'm so glad I did, because it changed my life, dating back to when I was a kid. But there's a realization that that's not how it works. Somebody could just walk out of your life and you could forget it all and never think about it again, but what good would that do you? I wouldn't have written this record. I wouldn't have gotten a dog this year. Whatever it is, it's just my life wouldn't be the way it was if I didn't go through what I went through. For anyone, every step of the way is creating another step. So for as devastating as this song is, it's also a realization for me—a moment to just be like, ‘Yeah, you want it all to go away, but it isn't. So you better just deal with it.’ And yeah, I did.”

“I See Everything”
“I wrote this song in lockdown. It just gives me a lot of clarity, and I don't think I've ever written a song that's so straightforward lyrically. Very like, ‘I know it now. I'm not afraid anymore. It's loud and clear.’ There's no hidden messages—just, boom. And that's just what felt right for the song, because there was nothing to really hide at the time I wrote this. I was feeling much more clear, and so why not write a song that feels just so clear as well? It's not like everything is shiny and amazing now. I still every day put in work to be healthy. I know that we're in a pandemic, but this is the best that I've ever felt mentally. The load was just lighter, and I wanted to give a little hint into that with this last song. I feel like the next record is going to be way more of these songs. Let's hope.”