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Zachary Pace
February 18, 2024
One of my most apposite guests to date, writer Zachary Pace joins me in conversation about their new book, I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays about the Women Singers Who’ve Made Me Who I Am, out now from Two Dollar Radio. In it, Pace describes the evolution of their sensibility and identity from their isolated childhood in Upstate New York to today. Zachary is the perfect guest for a show about how music helps shape who we are and how we function creatively!
When Zachary was 8 years old, they recorded themselves singing a song from the Disney movie Pocahontas and the result sounded so different from the voice in Pace’s head, sounded so queer—so awful—that it changed their life forever. Already obsessed with specific icons of pop music and TV culture, Pace began to write poetry and to find their true voice. They also started going to therapy, just like Ally McBeal.
In addition to searching for their own language, Zachary began to search for music. They participated in bulletin boards services, blogs, and chat rooms where other like-minded people discussed the minutiae of female singers and traded bootlegs and rare releases. This was a kind of research that could provide information and media Pace could take away from the computer and into daily life. These songs, these artists, helped Pace to be a person, and to navigate questions of family, relationships, gender, identity, and pleasure. Why do certain female singers appear so much to queer people—particularly people with male bodies/gay boys?
You can find Zachary’s wonderful book here, and follow them @zacharypace on instagram.
Thank you to all my listeners and to Zachary Pace in particular for being patient with the background noise in this episode! It was an unusually busy day at International Waters. Apologies!
Complete playlist below; tracks in yellow were cut for time.
1 Here, in My Head - 2015 Remaster, Tori Amos
2 Willie, Cat Power
3 Funkier Than a Mosquito's Tweeter, Nina Simone
4 needy, Ariana Grande
5 fake smile, Ariana Grande
6 in my head, Ariana Grande
7 Searchin' My Soul, Vonda Shepard
8 Tracy, The Cuff Links
9 O-o-h Child, The Five Stairsteps
10 Tell Him, The Exciters
11 Work, Rihanna, Drake
12 Woman, Cat Power and Lana Del Rey
13 Multi-Love, Unknown Mortal Orchestra
14 I Found A Reason, Cat Power
15 Most of the Time, Bob Dylan
16 Cloud Blood, Ani DiFranco
17 Waiting In Vain, Annie Lennox
18 Don't Play That Song, Aretha Franklin