Provided by Holly Cinnamon.
Holly Cinnamon "Small Town Queer"
Holly Cinnamon is a queer femme-inist lez actor, singer-songwriter and embodiment educator from Edmonton, Canada, currently based in New York and Toronto. As an actor, she is best known as Julie Barnes in Daredevil (2018) and for Hocus Pocus 2 (2022). They identify as a queer gender-fluid femme and use she/ they pronouns.
Holly has been singing and writing songs since they can remember, but only during the pandemic, when their acting career was on hold, did they transition their creative energy to songwriting. They self-produced and released five singles in 2022 through their record label, The Female Gayze, and they are currently working on their first full-length album with Plaid Dog Studios in Boston. They collaborate with arranger and musician Matthew Lowy.
Provided by Holly Cinnamon.
Holly is inspired by her experiences as a queer woman & trauma survivor, her relationship to her body, and cool women throughout history. Their lyrics are definitively queer and their sound is inspired by embodied experiences and environmental sounds. Her song "Ride Sally Ride" explores America's first female astronaut's journey to space in 1983 and her coming out in her personal life upon return to Earth.
Watch Ride Sally Ride, here or below
Their latest release "Small Town Queer" is about their experience growing up queer in rural Alberta, Canada.
We interviewed Holly exclusively about her music and being queer.
Tell us about your latest single?
My latest single is called “Small Town Queer” and it’s about my experience growing
up as a queer teen in the early 2000s on the prairies in rural Alberta, Canada. I hope it
captures that feeling of being in between places and identities - feeling like the place
you are from is home to some extent, but it also isn’t. That people know you, but also
they don’t. The paradox of living in a place where you might not belong, though you
are from there and it’s always been home. We are so politically divided right now by
this concept of a binary system where there are rural/right-wing/midwest areas versus
urban/left-wing/coastal areas and that’s just too simple a concept to be realistic. I
think the path towards our healing is to bridge that gap, and the visibility of rural
queer people is one little step towards that.
The music video is now out on YouTube
and on all streaming services.
How do you feel your queer identity ties into your performance style or music?
It’s completely central to my mission as a performer & songwriter. My songs are all
about my experiences as a queer person, about bodily empowerment for female-
identifying people, about boundaries and anatomy and healthy, empowered sexual
relationships. A lot of my songs are about challenging stereotypes, for example
stereotypes that people might have about a more femme-presenting lesbian or about
being a redhead... I like to challenge and confront the ideas that I have felt have been
put upon me throughout my life and it’s a journey and an exploration as my identity
evolves. I have a song I wrote when I identified as pansexual that I’m producing now,
and I now identify as a genderfluid queer femme lesbian... but that’s also in flux. I love
how my songwriting is a vessel for me to explore the limitations of my thinking both
within myself and then within our culture right now. It’s necessary to do that and to be
visible, in the dangerous political landscape we are now in.
How do you feel your coming out journey plays into your music?
My identity is constantly evolving, and it’s very healing to look back on people who I
have been and parts of myself that I maybe identified more strongly with 5 or 10
years ago, and honor those parts of my journey and how they got me to who I am
today. In “Small Town Queer”, I’m going back to a more closeted teenage version of
myself who is not empowered in the same way I am today, who doesn’t have the
power and privilege I now have to choose where to live or who to interact with daily.
That’s very healing to recognize and honor that version of me. I believe that a big part
of queer power has always been rooted in play and playfulness - in recognizing that
we are all wearing masks, playing gender roles and performing our identities,
whether we call it drag or not. As an actor, my work is chameleon-like, but also as a
genderfluid queer person, letting my presentation and identity be something I am
constantly allowing myself to play with is very key to my performance work, my sense
of empowerment and my happiness. I wish we could all embrace that and learn from
the amazing trans and non-binary and drag communities that we can be a little more
playful with our identities and not be so rigid with our expectations of ourselves.
That’s the freedom I am exploring with my upcoming album, Transcend.
Do you start off with the music or lyrics first? Why?
Lyrics, 100%. But also the melody happens simultaneously. I have only ever written
one song that started instrumentally. But most of my songs - like 99.999% of them I
have written while biking or on the subway or in the swimming pool, or in the elevator
going up to the gym, or walking around NYC at night or in Central Park in the day. I
am always writing songs in motion. And sometimes, if I don’t have my phone or a pen
or paper on me, I have to go back to the place I wrote the song and re-walk the paces
to remember what I wrote. I have hidden in the bathroom stall at my gym quietly
singing a new song into my phone more times than I could tell you. Also, the shower
is a great place to write! For me.... I just know when a song is good when there is an
idea that strikes me and it feels like fire and then I keep circling around it and as I
articulate it and find the words around the central concept, I just know when they are
right and when I am articulating something that feels new or unique or dangerous or
interesting or something I haven’t quite figured out yet. It’s the energy of being on
that edge, where there is a meaning to a song that I haven’t quite figured out yet -
that’s what I love. So I’m 100% a lyricist first.
How does where you’re from influence your sound?
I’m constantly inspired by and capturing environmental sounds. I have a song about
cat calling in which the percussion is just going to be a woman’s footsteps on
pavement... In “Small Town Queer”, it was really important for me to capture the
feeling of being in a rural place, especially growing up in Alberta where the winters
are long and dry and cold and desolate. There’s this idea on the prairies that if your
dog ran away you could see him running for the whole next day cause it’s so flat,
which is true! But then in the North, it’s that but covered in snow for as far as you can
see... so incorporating sounds I grew up with, like cows and roosters and wind
chimes and the distant train whistle bring that world into the song as well as the music
video does visually. I have only written a few country songs, but this is one of them,
and that was important to me to have it be in that genre that represents the culture I
grew up in... like I went to a country bar for my 18th birthday (which is the legal
drinking age in Canada) and we did the Cadillac Ranch line dance there all night!
Queer people have been so underrepresented in country music, so that was
important to me to show that side of myself and my cultural history. Every song has its
own world and so the world of the song really dictates the music choices and sound
element choices I incorporate.
What message do you want your music to communicate?
Playfulness. Hope. Empowerment. Visibility. I hope that there are some people out
there who will see themselves represented in my music and my videos the way I have
craved that representation for myself. I hope that people can feel empowered by my
songs in their bodies and their ownership of their gender presentation, embodiment
of who they are and their sexualities. A big part of my exploration for my new album is
about what feels good in my body now. What my body wants. What my body is
healing from. What feels playful and fun and empowering to me - whether that’s in my
clothing or gender presentation or sexual expression. Queer people have always
fought hatred and bigotry and patriarchy with light and rainbows and hope and joy
and creativity and self-expression and above all, love. Giving myself the space in my
both my life and my music to process and identify and acknowledge trauma and how
I’m still working through healing and the impact that has had, while simultaneously
exploring what freedom and joy and body sovereignty and empowerment feel like to
me now is the balance I hope to strike with my music and share with people as a path
towards a more embodied, honest, free future for us all.
I think recently our culture has gotten a lot of clarity around what we don’t want, what
we don’t like, what doesn’t feel safe, what we are up against and what we are healing
from, but the questions I keep coming back to are what’s the alternative? What does
the alternative world look like? What does the free, empowered, embodied world
look like? That’s what I’m curious about exploring for myself right now, and hopefully
creating music that makes other people feel like exploring that in themselves too.
As an actor, she has appeared Off-Broadway and in TV and film, most recently working as a stand-in for Shiv Roy on Seasons 3 and 4 of Succession, before booking a principal role in Season 4.
Find out more about Holly Cinnamon:
she / they
Singer-Songwriter | Actor | Embodiment Educator
Holly Cinnamon - Spotify Artist Channel
Holly Cinnamon - YouTube Artist ChannelMusic website: www.thefemalegayze.com
Actor website: www.hollycinnamon.com
www.instagram.com/holly.cinnamon
https://www.facebook.com/thefemalegayze
IMDB: https://www.imdb.me/hollycinnamon
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