“Did you have a lovely shower? Dissociating for an hour” appeared fully formed in my head with melody and chords as I was, as you may have guessed, actually dissociating in the shower. The rest of the song fell out just as quickly, my different Parts taking turns to dialogue. I had been waiting for months to get seen by a therapist and was missing my old therapist from when I lived in Seattle. I was with that therapist for three years of a tumultuous life on the road and during a brief period of being unhoused.

At the end of our sessions, which usually passed with me monologuing for an hour, my therapist, Jacci, would always validate how much I had on my plate by saying, “That’s a lot, Wonder.” When she did manage to get a word in edgewise in our sessions, she pointed out that I tend to be hardest on myself, and that gentle self-talk goes a long way. She was the best at pointing out how far I’d come since I first started seeing her in 2016. The line, “What would Jacci say?” is something I still ask myself when I’m in need of guidance.

The process of putting “Self Talk” together was wonderfully rewarding. Many of my dear friends are singing that last gang vocal chorus with me: Aaron J Shay (who also played banjo!), Vanessa and Andy Dunnells and their daughters Penny, Daphne and Autumn, and Jaron Pitts and Cindy Coppinger. Alex Lee made the drums pop, and my close friend, Rae, created the gorgeous fiddle parts you hear throughout the song.

“Self Talk” was part of an album project I was putting together that abruptly lost all momentum when I got sick with long covid in November 2021. Long covid had me bedridden for the better part of a year, during which time I couldn’t focus through the nausea and persistent brain fog to even touch any of the songs I’d been working on. Enter Alanna Matty, a fellow Twitch streamer and self producer and founder of Riverbank Records, who volunteered to mix and master “Self Talk.” She took the chaos of dozens of vocal tracks, a full stack of drum parts, and the rest of the arrangement, and made it into something that shines. “Self Talk” is the perfect representation of what I wanted to say and how I wanted it to sound.

My hopes for “Self Talk” is for it to encourage listeners in need of a little therapy speak. Whoever you are, wherever you are, you’re doing really well! And you’ve come all sorts of far.