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The new 14-song album from Flora ElmColone
Notes from Flora about the circumstances surrounding the making of I'm Not Dead Yet!
Today my first full-length album comes out, I turn twenty-seven, and I celebrate four years living in San Francisco.
I moved to the city on my twenty-third birthday. Claire drove us straight from the winery in Napa to my new apartment, where most of my things had already been moved in the day before. I said goodbye to my best friends and roommates of the past five years, and went to get Thai food with my parents, where I couldn’t stop crying throughout the whole meal. They dropped me off in the two bedroom apartment I would be sharing with a random tech bro from Craigslist, and began the five hour drive home. That first night I sat in my mostly empty room listening to Hejira (Joni Mitchell’s best album btw) and reading the Fleabag scriptures, squeezing and stretching myself into my teenage self’s idea of a girl’s first night alone in her new city.
Since then, I have found life both more exciting and harder than I’d imagined it would be. It sounds like a cliche, but it really is both. Many of the most joyful days of my life have happened in the past four years, times when you float out of your body for a moment, or sneak from the present into the future, asking, could it really have been that good? before returning and understanding that yes, it was. It is. I love this city and the people I have met here deeply, a love that is not tempered by the other side of the coin, the nights spent crying on the N or on a bench in the Panhandle or on my bedroom floor. Those nights reinforce that love, and are often born of a frustration that I can’t feel it enough, that I’m not connected to it. There are times when the abject badness of everything takes over and fighting against it feels futile, when I’ve thrown my hands up and gone the world is fucked, what can I do, and there are times when I am dancing or singing or sharing a meal and my conviction returns, the understanding that that there are things worth enjoying and protecting.
That’s the duality that this album was created within. In the spring of 2024, my partner and I broke up for the final time (of many). I had known it was coming— I spent that day at work re-reading Bluets and telling Sarah that I thought I was gonna get dumped that night. I told her to wait at the bar for me. An hour later, after telling him that this was it this time, if we broke up now we would never do it again, searching for resistance and finding none, I texted Sarah, “I’m single and I’m coming.” I sprinted back to the Haight through the Panhandle in the dark, listening to “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl” and laughing manically. I texted Lizzie and Caroline, “I’m single, who want me.” I texted Maddy “I got dumped which is embarrassing but also somehow dignified because I possess a depth of love unknown to any man.” I know I would not have been able to accept the end of that relationship, which I had refused and dodged so many times before, if it weren’t for the friends I had made in that final phase, ready as they all were to pull me to the other side and to begin something new. The transition period was rough– we still talk about the months-long bender of that spring. We would stay out every night and go to our jobs hungover, and by the summer all of our hangouts felt like a Sunday afternoon at 5:00 pm, tinged with exhaustion and the sense of something coming to an end.
All of these people are all over this record. I’ve never been able to pretend that my songs are anything other than autobiographical. I know that women’s art is often viewed as inherently diaristic, and I respect immensely the artists who refuse this characterization, who insist that their work is intentionally crafted, a labor of creativity and craftsmanship, that they are storytellers and writers, not merely chroniclers of their own lives. But I believe my work is diaristic, and that this does not take away from its merit. I believe my own life is a worthy line of study, a creative undertaking that can be a serious project. Joanna Walsh writes in Girl Online (one of my favorite Books About The Internet), How can a girl give an account of herself in all innocence? and What happens when the personal, the private, the amateur, insists it is work?
That’s not to say that everything here is absolutely, fundamentally true, but it was all true to me, at one point. It does not tell the full story of what it was like to love and be loved in those years– that story cannot be told because it spans too many years and people and places and no one is qualified to tell it.
The cover art and the title came before recording had even started. Lizzie took the photo on a trip to Joshua Tree during our bender spring, and I had brought the shirt I got when I saw Spamalot with my mom when I was eleven. I thought the Monty Python quote perfectly summed up the vibe of what I wanted to make, which I was conceiving of as equal parts breakup album and worldly exasperation album. To say I’m Not Dead Yet that spring felt like a miracle, a revelation, a point of pride, and still a wish continually uttered. Now, at (freshly!) twenty-seven, it feels like… well, duh. Something to be grateful for, not to be taken for granted, but also no longer so surprising.
It’s strange to release an album about a phase of life that I’m already past. Recording took over two years and lasted until just last month. By the end of the process, the songs felt like they had come from a person who doesn’t exist anymore. The final song on this album was written over Labor Day weekend (as the title suggests), shortly after I turned twenty-five. It originally wasn’t going to be included, but I decided a couple months ago to switch out one of the other songs that had been recorded in 2024 for it. I mostly wanted to leave the portrait of my early twenties I had decided on at the beginning intact, but there is a bitterness and a commitment to your own narrative that is hard to see past in the early stages of a breakup. The song I nixed for labor day weekend was called hanging on, and had the lyrics let’s not pretend there’s a right and a wrong / but you were the leaver and I’m hanging on / I’ve never, not once, stood firm in my convictions / and you got the last word ’cause I always listen. It was so committed to victimhood, an insistence that felt cathartic in the aftermath of being left, a shoving aside of all the diplomacy and enlightened perspective, a solipsism that felt earned. But that insistence is already palpable in songs like animal, any more, and kill me, and I think the benefit of spending years working on this project is that I got to see how those feelings changed and grew into something less angry over time. It ultimately felt important to me to include the final line on the album, I‘ll give it to you now, I know you tried, a recognition that I was not the only one left wounded, a step beyond my own limited perspective, even if it’s just a glimpse.
This album has been my main creative focus for years– it took so much mental energy and willpower to get through, and at times I didn’t know if it would ever be released into the world. I feel relief that it’s out there now, out of my hands, something that exists for others to listen to and think about and absorb, if they choose to. Thank you for listening, for reading, for engaging. Thank you to Lizzie and Caroline and Tommy and Kevin and Edward and Matt and Josh and Brian and Sophie and Quinn and Maddy and Mel and Sarah and Jae and Kalea and Katie and Claire and Talia and Eliza and Elena and Becky and Danny and Kyra and Riley and mom and dad and Booksmith and Bazaar and Melissa Etheridge. Yippee! It’s done!! That’s all!!! Come to our album release show tonight and dance with us!!!! There are things worth enjoying and protecting!!!!!! I’m not dead yet!!!!!!!