how we relate to the world and ourselves. Bette A: Well, it's similar to what you're doing. Just go make something physical that isn't slick and sleek but interesting and maybe slightly challenging and fun and different each time, perhaps hard to summarize. That is radical at this moment. I think physical objects like a physical book or a magazine, putting on a record, you cannot really multitask. You have to consciously choose this moment: I will engage with this. Even the turning of the pages will slow you down a little bit. That’s why I think the physicality of things also helps us to return into our bodies into the now and not just always in our minds to the next thing. We made this record and we also made paintings. We're selling it as a bundle to raise funds for our charities [Heroines! Movement and Earth/Percent]. The fact that we made a painting is so confusing to some people. They said, "You shouldn’t do that because you need a clear story and you need to just make a record.” Brian immediately said, “I like it when it’s complicated. People can handle complicated, can handle a story that’s slightly unusual and isn’t totally simplified with a nice pink ribbon around it.” Birdy: It’s funny because when I first saw your paintings I thought, This and tinker with it some more. It takes confidence to say, “This is it,” and create a really nice invitation for people to engage with it. Birdy: It also takes confidence to sit in stillness and slowness and not gogo-go all the time. We have this fear of falling behind in life or never being ahead enough. And I think that it’s so crucial for us to have space to just be. Bette A: That’s how we feel. We hope these are stories that help you slow down, the music helps you slow down. And you take 30 minutes for something that would take eight minutes if you read it on the page at a normal pace. It’s very unnatural for people of our day and age to take three times as much time than is needed for something. So we hope that this trains the imagination muscle and trains the capacity for slowing down, which our society is completely geared at us forgetting. We lose that skill because everything wants our attention all the time and people want to know, “Where do you see yourself in five years, in 10 years?” We ask children, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” It’s always something ahead, something in the distance. Even in our Western world when we meditate, we meditate for a purpose. And we might even take a picture of it and post it on Instagram. It’s commodifying this thing that is part of our human nature which is just be. But it’s hard. Brian and I were just talking about this yesterday that we get approached by interviewers as if we are the gurus of slowing down. But we both struggle with it. Brian said, “If I’m on the train, I put my phone away to look out the window and then a minute later, without realizing, I'm looking at it again and I’m completely the same. So I need these oases in my life that remind me to slow down.” Birdy: We’ve always been really attached to the connection of analog formats, because we remember a time when the phone wasn't hijacking our existence, our amygdalas. So what you two are doing is really important work in bringing the pendulum back to having some semblance of sanity with makes absolute sense! Even the way you packaged them by hand with a handwritten “slow” in gold. And the visuals, the abstract images, they’re like representations of the sonic elements, the stories, the music, your voice. If you're holding a piece of art while listening to the album, it helps you expand your mind even further, to think about the story, through those colors and and patterns, they’re like environments. Super immersive. Bette A: I’m very glad to hear it. I think sometimes that’s the thing with art. It very often intuitively makes sense and then the story comes much later and the story can even mutate. It's just feels right and not overthinking is something that I really try to do and just release it, put it out there and see if other people also like it. Birdy: It’s so special that each painting is going to be a unique gift to people, they’re not mass-produced. People are craving slow media. They’re craving getting together in community. They’re craving realness. Bette A: I like things that are flawed. And that’s why I felt comfortable using my for voice for this record because Brian said, “I love accents.” And I had a little bit of a cold and he said, “Well, that will make you more human. You don’t sound like an AI, you sound like a human being.” And that’s what I like about the paintings as well. They’re all individual. Somebody made them, made the envelope. It was not the most efficient way to do it. So, it’s very human. When we get together in person, there's friction, there's flaws, there's awkwardness. Sometimes we don’t get each other. But that is life. And I think so many people are starting to realize we don’t need everything to be so smooth and frictionless or to be able to duplicate it with a perfect narrative. We just want to feel good, to feel alive. That’s what I’ve been practicing in my work. And I like what you said about gathering. I’ve also started something that we’re now raising funds for, which is an online school for women in Afghanistan. It’s part of the Heroins! Movement. I teach there with an Afghan poet [Somaia Ramish], and she talked about women in Afghanistan who are now banned from doing any art, it’s a crime. They’re banned from PHOTOS BY VANESSA PETERSON
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