Believe it or not, it's been more than ten years since an offhand tweet birthed the collaboration that would eventually result in this album. Cut to the fall of 2012: Spektral had recently asked me to write a short piece for them, and I was considering adding a vocal part that I would perform myself. Then one day Julia, who I'd been friends with since long before anyone had heard of either of us, happened to be playing Schuba's Tavern in Chicago. We met up for so-so Thai food, and I tweeted that I was hanging out with her for the first time in ages, because back then Twitter was still mainly for that sort of thing rather than hate speech and conspiracy theories. Doyle replied, half-jokingly suggesting that I ask her if she wanted to sing on my piece for the quartet. I did, and she did.
The cycle went through many iterations after that. Originally just four songs, premiered at the Hideout by Connie Volk due to a conflict with Julia's tour schedule. (She was great, by the way.) Later, an expanded version and a mini-tour in three cities. Talk of a studio album was bouncing around pretty early on, but life kept lifing all over the place. And now, at long last, a personnel change and a kid and a covid later, here we are.
Theo has already written about the revelation of getting into the studio with production wizard Zach Hanson — of realizing, there in a converted barn full of synthesizers on the outskirts of Eau Claire, WI, that this could be a piece of aural cinema rather than just a high-fidelity document of a live-ish performance. That certainly has changed the piece immensely. But as I think back over the last decade, the change that hits me hardest is one of personal and social context.
Behind the Wallpaper isn't literally about being trans — unless "trans" is short for "transforming into some sort of alien" — but much of it was inspired by my experience of transness. It's not hard to spot the metaphors in the lyrics. (I'll skip the details for now, because soon you'll be able to read Sandy's wonderful analysis in the album notes.) And they're not metaphors for positive experiences like gender euphoria. The cycle is pervaded by a sense of alienation, and it reflects where I was in my life when I wrote it. Back in 2013–14, I often looked at the world around me as if through a veil. My transition wasn't new anymore, but I was still plagued by a sort of imposter syndrome when it came to my gender presentation. I also used to have panic attacks, which sometimes manifested as derealization. It was important to me that I give the piece a happy ending, but I set it in the future tense, starting with the word "someday." (A little formalist secret: all but two of the songs in Behind the Wallpaper begin with an indication of time.)
And now? These are frightening times for trans people, as they are for marginalized people of all stripes. We're living in the midst of a global surge in neo-fascism. Here in the US, right-wing politicians are introducing hundreds of bills a year targeting LBGTQ+ rights: banning drag shows, banning gender-affirming medical care, banning the teaching of anything gay-related in public schools. Some are worded so vaguely that they could be used to outlaw being trans in public altogether. The specter of 1933, when the original Nazis burned 20,000 of Magnus Hirschfeld's books on nonconforming genders and sexualities, is hard to ignore. And yet, even in the shadow of this looming threat, there is one aspect of my life as a trans woman that's better now than it was in 2013–14: I'm not alone anymore. Back then I only knew a handful of other trans people, and many of my cis friends didn't know a single one besides me. There were so few of us in the contemporary-classical world that I managed to become the top Google hit for "trans composer" just by writing one article that used that phrase in its title. Now we're everywhere: LJ White and inti figgis-vizueta and Sarah Hennies and Mari Valverde and Han Lash and so many more.
In Behind the Wallpaper's final song, our future-tense, second-person protagonist finally meets others who are like them. "And you will understand," Julia sings, "that you have finally come home." Sometime in the last ten years, it seems I've done the same. Now we're everywhere — and we're not going away. I'm a naturally pessimistic person, but I'm still going to say it: those who want us gone will lose. It might take a long time, but they will lose. Their gloomy vision of the social order will be blasted away by our bright unbearable reality.
–Alex Temple