CONTROL

“This song is about the control we feel from outside sources when it comes to love and sexuality. I grew up in the church with lots of influence from purity culture. As I grew up, I realized how much that ideology was harmful. How much shame and trauma it caused. How much it disempowered me. I wrote this song many years ago as I was coming out of my first heartbreak and was entering the dating pool as a non-christian for the first time in my life. As I was going on dates and downloading dating apps for the first time, I was having to unlearn so much of the shame that purity culture had given me. As that was happening, I was being confronted with the sexism and objectification that came from hook-up culture on the opposite end of the spectrum. I met some horrible fuck boys and realized that the other side could be just as disempowering and traumatizing as purity culture could be.

The song itself feels a little bit overly simplistic and juvenile at times, and that, honestly, is on purpose. When we are young, we are confronting these archetypes for the first time in a very basic way. In the music video, the black and white is meant to represent the contrast of these two ideologies coming up against each other. It's wild how there are so many outside influences that are attempting to control how we understand and express our sexuality. If I am not sexual enough, I am a prude. If I am too sexual, I am a slut. There is a sadness I feel for that younger version of me that wrestled with these concepts with so much seriousness, anxiety, and shame.

Those layers only got deeper as I began to confront my own queerness and the ways that heteronormativity has influenced my life. Any woman or queer person that has chosen to leave the church can likely understand how deep the rabbit hole goes. I wrote this song on the precipice of so much self discovery, and it's fun to be releasing it now on the other side of that journey. I wish I could go back and hug that younger version of me and let her know that it's going to be okay.” -Valentine Ephemeris