My Mama Taught Me/ Dinner with the Devil

Dinner with the Devil is a song about trying to survive in the presence of powerful people. It's about how you have to sell out your community and yourself if you want a piece of that power. It's about how powerful people and institutions control our actions and shape our options and decisions and morals. It's about how those who actively oppress you are never going to respect you, no matter how smart or kind or perfect you are. I wrote it as a way of processing the ways in which I do and do not experience privilege as a bisexual, physically/mentally ill, mixed-race, woman. My Mama Taught Me is the intro for Dinner with the Devil. It's supposed to sound like a crackly, old, live recording from a smoky jazz club. I wrote Dinner over three consecutive summers so the intro is what I wrote as a fifteen-year-old. At the time I had just started becoming more politically active and was struggling to reconcile my angry, radical, political ideals with my deep-seated conviction to always be kind and forgiving. These are the eighth and ninth tracks off my album, Songs to the Monster Under My Bed.