Author, poet, songwriter, and painter Lauren Napier on conversing with your younger self

The immediate thing I feel like I need to ask you about is the diary as a form, and how it feels to look back at your old entries and to make them public. You also added annotations to your original diary entries from 2004 to 2008, inserting thoughts and context from your 2026 perspective.

Revisiting them has been fascinating. The younger self is not someone that you get to converse with very often, particularly not tangibly, through text. Writing those annotations on the diary entries, it wasn’t just reading it and pondering with my younger self, but it was actually being able to communicate with her. It was a not-always-gentle reminder of who I am, and some of those really foundational, inside of your gut, “you can’t get away from them” pieces of myself. You realize that who I was at 16 is who I am as I near 40. It is the same being, but also a reminder of the pieces of myself that I had lost that I needed to find again. Young Lauren was bold. And of course the world has shifted in ways that sometimes it’s scary to be as bold as she was. I’ve learned too much to be quite as courageous every day. But she reawakened some things in me. At the same time, she made me realize how vulnerable I was being.

What is that difference between pondering vs. conversing with oneself?

So there’s that inner voice, where I go throughout my day kind of talking to myself, for lack of a better phrase. You think about the decisions that you’re going to have to make. Maybe it’s which foot is going to step in front of the other to avoid the butterfly that’s landed on the sidewalk. You’re consciously pondering with yourself. But it’s this self. It’s my current self. When I go back and read my diaries—which I do from time to time, because I write quotes in there that sometimes I want to go back and find—it’s reading them quietly to myself and allowing these feelings or consciousness to bubble up… When it was talking with her, doing the annotations, it was almost like sitting her down and saying, “Well, this was a very nice idea. However, look at how things shift. Maybe that was a little naive, or that was a little cold. Haven’t you grown and learned some things?”

I noticed and admired how bold your younger self was. Of the decision to move to California and just work and live, instead of going back to college in Maine, you write, “I do what I want, leaving behind all reason and doubts.” You’re so full of conviction. It’s almost like a manifesto or something.

Almost, yes… I don’t doubt myself. I know that if my gut has that particular tingle, that it means this is the right thing. Or maybe it’s horrendously wrong. But either way I listen. After I chose to stay in California, years later, the school called me back and said, “Hey, we don’t really know what happened.” And I was like, “I left because I’ve been wronged. I felt like it was not healthy, and to advocate for myself, I need to leave.” I remember the counselor that called me goes, “That was basically a ‘fuck you’ to the school.” And I was like, “Well, yeah. It was a response to how I felt that I had been treated.” Tit for tat, in that moment.

After being out in the world and seeing that you don’t need school, why did you return?

It was a healing moment. I guess slightly less aggressive than an ouroboros moment. I also waited five years, so by the time that I set foot on that campus again, everybody who had been there before was gone. It was as clean of a slate as I was going to get, and my scholarship was still there for me. Being an only child from a single-parent household, that was necessary. And being an older student without a lot of bureaucracy and paperwork on my end was probably the easiest route to take in terms of getting an education. And it was a beautiful education. I’m very grateful. I needed to reclaim that for myself. That wasn’t something that someone could take from me, so I went back and did it on my own terms. I lived off-campus. I removed myself as much as possible. At that point, I had already been working a 40-hour work week. So five or six courses in a semester, it felt like, “Well, I don’t have to deal with humans. I just have to deal with book pages.” It was necessary to move forward.

It’s so crazy how normal it is to send 18-year-olds, even 17-year-olds, off to live in totally new places, alone, in high-intensity environments…

I mean, I’m a military brat. So I was in Europe when I was younger. Came to the States and then moved back. I guess a small example is that you don’t get a sippy cup [in other parts of the world]. They give you a glass cup, and you learn to be gentle with the cup. Because why are we going to spoon feed you if, as an adult, you’re going to drink out of the glass cup? Learn not to break it. Coming back to the States where everything is handled with kid gloves, of course, once you reach a certain age, you rebel against that. You glut yourself on alcohol or whatever that vice is that you’ve been told you can’t have yet, and you consume it in an unhealthy way. If you allow someone to have it gradually and you don’t demonize it, you consume it much differently, right? Maybe they just learn how to interact with the world a little sooner.

In your book you reckon with the personal, but also with much bigger ideas or issues in the world that you can’t solve. One of those is the idea of a subculture. Is it completely tamped down now? Can it still exist? What did subculture give you know 20-something years ago, and what is your relationship to it now?

It gave me a place to exist as myself. Even just aesthetically. I was talking about this with my father yesterday: he drives a flashy car, but he doesn’t like the attention because that car’s for him. It’s not for everybody else. I’m like that with my clothes, my hair. I enjoy it; that doesn’t mean that when I step out of the house that I need 50 people to comment. I would rather you didn’t. I would like to live in my own little bubble. The subculture, the punk scene in particular, gave that to me, because we’re all existing somewhere outside of these aesthetic lines, and so we’re not looking at each other as some sort of exhibit or oddity.

I grew up in very white communities just because of where we were, but inside the family structure, what we were was normal. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized my race was also odd within the punk scene. It was only once I knew a little more of the world and I had interacted with it more, that the subculture gave me a little less comfort. Because I wasn’t necessarily looking at anybody that looked like me. And as other people get older and perceive more of the world, they ask different questions at 17 than they do at 15. At 17, they want to know if I flat-ironed my hair and what’s with that frizz on the side. “Oh, is your dad Black? What’s up?” At 12, we’re not asking that. Those are learned behaviors.

The subculture allowed me comfort at first, and now I’ve removed myself from it, in a way. There’s a falsity to it now. It’s performative. It all seems to be a bit of a costume, and it’s like the flashy car or my clothes. It’s for me. What I’m listening to is mine. Even looking back at some of those passages in the book, I get really possessive over certain bands, right? That was mine, and so I would see these people show up that weren’t there for the music, and it tarnished it and took it away as a safe place or a comfortable place. It was yet another performative social room.

How do you hold on to things that still feel yours now? There was someone you interviewed who paid you an amazing compliment, saying, “Lauren, you are an example of someone who still maintains an analog relationship with the world.” What does that look like?

To an extent, I think it’s important to keep it tangible. In terms of music, that can mean finding my old CDs from this time period, with their booklets and all of the liner notes, I mean, even the smell of the ink on the matte paper—it’s this particular, sharp, chemical smell, and it was so nostalgic. I got goosebumps. I feel like I am back to when I first opened this album, and that’s not something that you can recreate. Like, you can’t show me that in your social media post. You can’t wear something like a butt flap or two studded belts and have that tell me how that felt to you.

Writing the book, and writing anything, I first handwrite everything. And then it goes to the typewriter, because I enjoy that percussive and tangible connection. Then it’s to the computer. But nothing that’s coming out organically is going to go to the computer. It doesn’t feel as good. I think that having things like the liner notes, the typewriter, the film camera, it keeps us connected to a thread that we can trace back. Whether it’s the thread of your relationship with the object, or the timeline of its existence on the planet since its invention, it keeps us connected to something that’s real. I can learn how to repair it. We lose this, because there’s objectification, there’s commodification. We lose something when it becomes about owning it and not about existing within it.

I don’t take as many film photos anymore, but I finally finished a roll recently, got it back last week, and I was floored. I forgot how magic it is to see photos and to remember advancing the film with my fingers, remembering exactly where I was when I made that movement.

Absolutely. Plus, it’s this exercise in patience. You have to get the lighting right. You have to get the frame right. You’re thinking about it. When I carry my camera around with me, I’m thinking about the world differently, because now I’m pausing and looking at… I don’t know, at the corner of the house and how it’s parallel with the tree. That’s not how I’m looking at the world otherwise. Not purposefully. We could all use a little exercise in patience. Everything’s instant gratification these days.

I certainly thought about patience when considering the long span of time that the book covers. Why put this out now? Is it just coincidence that this all came together when it did? How does hindsight play a role, or how does time work as a medium?

I have an odd relationship with time. Somewhere in my live shows, I have to check on how much time I have left in the set. And I already know, once the question’s out of my mouth, that I’m not going to respect it. Because the next sentence is, “Well, time is a man-made construct anyway, so who cares?” I feel like I want to play these songs for you. I can’t even adhere to a set list anyway because it’s all about seeing. The book is odd because people ask, “How long did it take?” I don’t know. It’s basically a large portion of my lifetime. So, it’s just been compiling and collecting, without the intent of publishing.

Daisy [Alioto, Dirt Books founder] still had the self-published version, which of course came out when I was younger and was done all myself. I think she saw this thread of nostalgia that’s bubbling up in the world, and thought that it was a good time to revisit. So that was coincidental on a wavelength that I wasn’t involved in. But I had been revisiting my old stuff separately, as you do when you move and you box things up, and then you find them again. You go, “Oh, here are a hundred copies of SMASH magazine that I didn’t know I had.” There are a lot of beings that I had lost consistent touch with, that were such touchstones and important pieces of my life—and as I’m a touring being, and a restless-footed being, they’re dotted all over the globe. It’s not like I can call them up and get coffee next week. I had already been consciously reconnecting for my own sanity and reminders.

In terms of hindsight, that was also a really big piece of it. I think you can see that in some of the re-interviewing process—even if I didn’t talk to them every week anymore, they were still very present in my life. It was this reminder of, “Oh, not all the humans are horrid. The ones who stuck around, they stuck around. They’re there for the long haul.” It’s important to have those connections outside of ourselves, even when you want to be a hermit.

That felt so warm and relatable. Everyone—I hope—knows the feeling of reconnecting with someone and settling back into your familiar ways.

Right? We commodify our human relationships, too. It’s not always about the value of the older relationship. It’s about, “What can this new person offer in my life? What can they do for me? How can I schmooze in this way?” And we forget those important tendrils.

When you’re touring, what do you need to feel good? Any rituals or practices or practical items?

I’m always surrounded by rocks that I’ve rockhounded or picked up on the beach. Vic [Ruggiero], who is often my travel companion, is also on the rock mission, so his little cubbies in the van are filled with them: little jewels that we can take out and, again, tangibly ponder and remember which rock bed or which gem field it was in, in Nevada.

Books. I always have at least two or three books that are in my bag, much to the detriment of the weight of my travel bag.

Bones. I know that sounds odd, but as we’re traveling, if you find good bones in the woods, I enjoy having them on the dashboard, and around or in my guitar case. Usually it’s deer or coyote—and of course, I always ask first and leave a little offering before I take.

We camp often, in the in-between moments. I’m not a big chain hotel human being, and when you have that much human input and output at an event or concert, you need—or at least I need—that balance in the evenings to recharge, ground with nature, hear nothing except for maybe the raccoon outside of the tent. Just a little recharge in the quiet. That’s certainly necessary. It usually comes across as antisocial, and it’s not, but right after I finish a set, regardless of what kind of set, I need 10 minutes alone. I’ve just given a lot, and I need a few minutes alone. People think that I’m being rude or that I don’t want to converse or don’t want to have the conversations. I very much would like to hear all of the stories, I just need to come back down to where I am. I think that is necessary before re-entering the room.

Other than that, a good road salad every once in a while. There’s always greens in the van because bar food and venue food is great, but you need vegetables.

You’ve lived in so many places and had many different jobs, worn many different hats. I think a lot of people stress about making a change in their career, or their life in general, because their identity feels really attached to what they do for money. What’s your relationship to that? What would your advice be to someone who feels scared to make a change?

I feel like I’m really impatient with people when it comes to that. Like, really impatient. I mean, being a military brat, I understand that I don’t have roots in one physical location, in terms of family… But that’s not entirely true. Right now I’m here at my father’s home; my father’s family has been in Virginia for generations, but that is because we are descendants of enslaved people. We did not have a choice. Maybe that’s where some of my impatience comes from. You always have a choice about where you wish to live. You can always make a change. It’s your life.

Money is unfortunately a necessary evil, but all of the things that we choose to buy with our money are not necessary. The things that we tie ourselves to, like a fancy new car payment—it’s not necessary. You can use that money to be more fluid, to be more intentional. You don’t need new clothes. The thrift stores are full of them. My boots are 70 years old and have been resoled like five times. You don’t need to do all of that, and that gives you a lot more freedom to move as you wish. As a musician, I don’t make money unless I’m traveling and touring, right? But I also have lots of animals that I care for, which is where writing and things like that also come into play. It gives me a chance to be on the homestead.

I moved to Germany as an adult without knowing anyone. I got a job, graduated from college, and I moved to somewhere I wanted to be because America didn’t feel good. I don’t understand why you can’t leave a place. What is important goes with you. If it’s human relationships, then you make a point to write letters and have phone calls. No, I’m not a huge technology fan, but just like you and I are speaking today, we have the technology to be able to stay in touch.

There’s a passage you wrote about feeling accomplished: “My bank account has no padding. Awards don’t line my shelves. My wealth lies within the friendships that have withstood time, memories that offer spiritual fuel daily, fresh eggs I collect from my hens.” How do you measure success for yourself today?

Differently than I used to. I used to see it as monetary, when I was younger, but in a way that meant that I could take care of those around me. Like, I watched my mother struggle and do things like sell plasma to get through my childhood as a single parent. So to be able to provide for those that I loved that needed help—I mean, we lived in the Jetta, my friend and I. Things like that. Maybe my friends don’t have to live in their cars.

Monetarily providing for people is obviously a lovely gift, but you can also provide for people in other ways. I think that we are a reflection of our relationships with others, and that is certainly a definition of success to me. If those around me feel loved, and cared for, and supported, even if they’re furry creatures… I also think that that is a thread throughout the book. I know that Gene [Louis] talks about it a bit. We had these concepts of record labels, lots of money—that’s success. Is it? Or is it the fact that Gene is still Gene from Bullets and Octane, living in L.A., being this beautiful version of himself? That, to me, is success. He hasn’t been watered down or muted by society or become what anyone tells him that he should be. He’s Gene, and I think that it is a success: to have a solid sense of self.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Greta Rainbow.