You take a piece of text (book, newspaper article, flyer) and blackout parts of it with a marker to make something new. In that way it feels more like I’m a sculptor chipping away at a block or an archeologist brushing in the dust. There is a secret in the text I’m about to uncover.

Here’s me turning an article in the San Francisco chronicle into a poem:

Now I’m a kid again,

listening to the mighty roar into the sky,

(a seemingly endless ballet accessible without place)

five minutes run like a feral cat, you hop

without a ticket.

I know that the Sky, one of two decks,

offers views, long lines, critics who love,

oh and an elevator, doors open.

I really like ‘critics who love.’

Now I can expand on it if I like. I could include a few more words I originally blocked out to create something resembling crossing over, like:

I know that the Sky, one of two decks,

offers views, long lines, critics who love, and new places.

Over a long lunch, the smile in me

enters and walks just short of

an elevator, doors open.

Pick up a marker and a page of anything - junk mail, a menu, whatever's lying around - and see what's hiding in it. If you find something, send it to me.

Today we’re moving into part 2 of Fishing for Gems, the exercise I introduced early on in The Artist’s Almanac section of my Substack.

Today we’re going deeper to that dark part of the psyche where our disgust and dislike hang out like creepy fish.

A real photo of my feelings about Ed Sheeran’s music being captured for the first time in public.

Yes yes I know, it’s hard to really lean into this for some people. There are many great artists I’ve rarely heard say a bad word about anyone, who are so busy engrossed in their work they don’t even have time to neg on others. But I’d argue that’s because emotional equanimity is already operating inherently in what they’re doing.

A quick aside before we get started: I have an apology to make. I’ve been so deep in organising this Preatures tour that I’ve neglected the offerings I promised paid subscribers.

So I’ve decided to open up a few Monday Afternoons to 30 minute 1:1 chats, during the time I’ll be in Australia for The Preatures Tour, June - August 2025, for all subscribers only for a short time. I remember my experience coming up as a new artist and not knowing who to turn to for advice, and I’m passionate about offering support that is free and accessible when I have capacity to balance it with, you know, my life.

More info on that below.

All of this sympathy is just a knife.

This exercise is not about feeding comparison, envy and hatred but rather creating space for them in genuine ways that leave room in your work for complexity to thrive, and reveal more about what you are trying to do.

After completing the first five questions of the Fishing for Gems exercise, the questions follow on:

6. List at least 3 things you are actively working toward, and 3 things you would do if there were no barriers.

7. Think about the people, fictional or real, living or dead, who inspire you. Who are your heroes, artistic or otherwise? List them and a brief sentence about each. What qualities do they embody?

8. Now think about the people, fictional or real, living or dead, that irritate, challenge or trigger you. Don’t worry about appearing ‘nice.’ List them here and a brief sentence about why each of them give you the ick.

I think about Charlie XCX’s song Sympathy is a Knife, where she not only sings about comparison and its corrosive effect on her, but also her inability to reckon with the position of another woman in the industry (very Nemesis-Coded). In the process of naming the things (and person, we all know!) she is comparing herself to, she both frees herself from its power over her and embeds herself within her own mythology.

'Cause I couldn't even be her if I tried
I'm opposite, I'm on the other side
I feel all these feelings I can't control
Oh no, don't know why
All this sympathy is just a knife
Why I can't even grit my teeth and lie?
I feel all these feelings I can't control (oh no)

Considering your answer to what you’d do if there were no barriers, is anyone on your hate list doing something similar, or embodying something you’d like to be expressing/doing/feeling but aren’t?

Now consider the list you have before you, including all your answers to the Fishing for Gems exercise, and begin to tease out words that correspond to what you’ve written down, and write it all out on a big piece of paper / board.

It’s really powerful considering who you look up to, and who you don’t, and why.

Here’s a photo of my friend Eliza who was my first victim of this process way back in 2020. Big stuff has shifted for everyone I’ve done this with.

Wine and cheese optional.

1:1 Chat now open to all Subscribers for a limited time.

I’ve been so deep in organising this tour that I’ve neglected the paid offerings on substack. I’m sorry but also not sorry as the tour announcement has been going well and there’s been a lot to do!

So I’ve decided to open up a few Monday Afternoons to 30 minute chats, during the time I’ll be in Australia for The Preatures Tour, June - August 2025, for all subscribers only for a short time.

Are you curious about doing the Fishing for Gems process 1:1, or maybe just wanna talk about a project?

You can book in here.

Izzi

Influences aren’t everything when creating, but as someone who grew up between Cassette Tapes and CDs, Napster and Myspace, and the rise of a globalised internet culture, pinpointing my influences often felt like drawing names from a bottomless hat.

With the exception of poor Bryan Ferry who I put in the ‘Americana’ category (he’s about as English as you can get), I instinctively grouped acts together according to the movements, genres or eras they belonged to. What I’d left out was as revealing as what I’d included. If I’d done the same map for The Preatures, there would be more British Soul and Manchurian influence, and late 70s-early 80s New York Punk, whereas solo I was more focussed on singer-songwriters and alt-country.

What I loved about this process was that it offered up specific and unexpected combinations from the cauldron of my taste - like the synths and fretless bass on Joni Mitchell’s Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm and the chimes on Brandy’s Never Say Never, which I combined in Birthday Wish.

Even simply seeing two artists’ names next to each other, like XTC and Santo & Johnny, sent off a chain of sparks in my brain.

It was this map that led me to phrases like “Prince producing Bonnie Raitt” and “Bruce Springsteen if he was in an all-girl UK pop group in the 90s” to explain the sound I was chasing for my first record. And making connections between sounds, albums, songs and artists was useful when I stepped into the studio with producers, engineers and musicians.

Not to say there are deeper ways to develop this language, but I recommend this as an easy initial exercise for any of the artists I mentor.

Draw a map, like the example above, of all the musical influences that define your practice right now. Artists, albums, genres, periods, singles, whatever. If you favour one artist’s period over another, write it down. Draw the weirdest, most unexpected combinations. Share yours here if you want. Discuss.

You can extend this into writing down lists of acts you’d love to tour with or support one day, artists you feel aligned with, or that you’d love to be friends with [beware! haha. I remember hearing somewhere that anything you write down multiplies itself by seven. When I did this I wrote down Marlon Williams, and ended up supporting him on tour less than a year later. I’m still waiting for the other six though.]

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For example, what did it mean to be the best band in the world? Did I mean commercially, irrefutably, number-1 around-the-world-best? Number-1 for weeks on end-best? Did I mean critically acclaimed, or culturally-beloved-best? Or always striving for the next creative milestone-best? I could have been valuing any number of things with these statements: mastery, quality, grit, artistry. But most likely I was placing a high value on money, power and prestige.

“I just want to do it and keep getting better,” was my way of saying I valued prolific artistry (the opposite of perfectionism), longevity and transformation. And making a living was about a certain level of dependability, freedom, and independence, which was really important to me, and grated against our signing to a major label.

This post is part of the Artist’s Almanac section of Izzi Club, free to all subscribers until April 2025. Subscribers can opt out of this section at any time.

The Preatures at St Kilda Fest, Melbourne, 2019.

As I write this, my husband Rupert is pacing our living room floor, making I’m frustrated please drop what you’re doing and talk to me noises.

He’s a few months deep into founding his own startup here in San Francisco - a company called Unternet. In a nutshell: he’s trying to save the internet from en-shitification. Good luck Rups! Last year he had a round of successful pre-seed funding and now he’s in the weeds of actually running a company: employing people, taking meetings with new investors, figuring out who to bring on to do his accounting, tax, design, engineering, operations, the list goes on. You know, all the shit that has nothing to do with the thing you are passionate about putting into the world but nevertheless must happen and happen well.

Rups is agitated because the new operations person he’s been excited about bringing on board has emailed him with a list of questions about the company; its vision, culture, what defines it, that sorta thing. “I don’t have time for this,” he says to me, beginning to make toast. “I just need someone who can jump right in and get to work.” He licks butter off his fingers and looks at me, and I totally get it. It feels counterintuitive to sit and fill out questionnaires and think about the big picture when there’s momentum and a million other things to get to. And frankly, as ‘the artist’ in the visionary role, it can be an annoying point of friction to have to explain yourself and your work. To pin it down feels like catching a cloud mid-air.

There are many good reasons why we resist defining ourselves and our work, especially in the early stages of an idea. I would say that protecting your right to evolve and surprise - even morph entirely - is the number one requirement of surviving as an artist, and the emphasis we have now on the ironically homogenous and cumbersome personal brand is the antithesis of this and so vomit I can’t even with it. But I bring up Rups’ situation because I see parallels in the way the startup world mirrors the signing of acts to labels, with some obvious differences that I’ll talk about another time. For right now I’m looking at it through the lens of my own experience with the band: there’s something people are excited about, an upswell of momentum, hype, investment, and expectation. In the startup world though, there is emphasis on culture building at the outset. I tell Rups that as annoying as it is, he can’t skip this step. I tell him he must hire OpsGuy, my new favourite person (he does). And I tell him I wish I’d had someone like that sit me down in 2013 amidst the crazy clamouring of a band on the brink of success and ask some basic questions like, what is really important to you?

In 2020 my friend and mentor Rachael shared a values exercise with me and I loved it so much I tried it on friends and ended up expanding on it and calling it Fishing for Gems1. Instead of thinking about what your values are, Fishing for Gems draws them out like jewels bubbling up from the deep. With all the artists I’ve mentored over the years, I always begin our time together with this exercise. It’s cool to see them go from puzzlement and slight annoyance at the repetition, to opening up in wonder as the process unfolds.

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I often warn my mentees that in doing this exercise, some proverbial walls may collapse. But ultimately, no matter what stage of your career you’re at, experience will draw some version of this process out of you whether you like it or not.

In classic stories there’s often a quest for a magical item like a chalice, gemstone or piece of gold hidden in a temple or guarded by a dragon. Once the hero finds the treasure and claims it, whether through stealth or cunning or strength, the cave, temple or even the ground beneath them begins to crumble and self-destruct. They have to make a quick escape.

Fishing for Gems is a series of questions like the ones I’ve listed below. There are about 10 questions all up, some I’ll talk about in later posts. I ask my mentees to write them out with pen and paper in a large A6 sketchpad. Do not use a computer or device. This is about being truthful about who they are and what they do, and it’s too easy to self-edit on a keypad. Be specific, I tell them. If you like reading gossip mags and smoking ciggies in the bath, put it down.

1. How do you fill your personal and creative space? What kind of objects, textures, colours and smells are present? What’s the atmosphere like? List as many things as you want.

2. How do you spend your time?

3. What do you devote your energy to?

4. How and on what do you spend your money?

5. When in conversation with others, what topics light you up the most?

From the answers they compile, we begin to draw out threads of things that group together and overlap and what they may represent. For example, if they have a living or work space filled with candles, incense, and flowers, question what it is about those items that they appreciate? Is it ritual? Or maybe it’s quality, beauty, or even scent (sensuality)? If they collect books about punk rock or some niche artistic movement, what is it in them that they align with? Artistry, irreverence, rebellion? Or maybe they devote their energy to moving around from place-to-place? What’s that about? In sessions I have spent sometimes hours with artists drawing maps and experimenting with different words until we arrive at what feels right. Words have flavours and associations that are unique to everyone so finding the right word for a value is important. The more I’ve done this exercise myself, the more refined the distillations become.

Here was my list in 2020. Doing it with a friend and glass of wine is pretty bloody good.

izzi x

This post is part of the Artist’s Almanac section of Izzi Club, free to all subscribers until April 2025. To opt out of this section, go to your account settings, navigate to izzi club, and then toggle off the notifications for The Artist’s Almanac. A gray toggle indicates you've opted out of that section.