That What You Wanted Will Never Unfold: My Two Years With Mari Kattman's Music

Or, All I Wanted Was The One Thing.

*Please note: I propose an activity at the bottom of this piece, if you’re interested. Also, there will be an audio version of this soon if folks want that.

In June of 2023, I went to an Assemblage 23 show with very limited knowledge of the opening act—Mari Kattman. When I stepped into Conduit—a music venue randomly dropped in a strip plaza in Winter Park—I’d just begun listening to her music and had limited knowledge of Swallow, but Alice in Wonderland thematics are a magnet for me.

I was treated like I was crazy because I was curious and gifted, but it was the way I was treated that made me crazy. I think this is the thread in Kattman’s work that makes me feel connected to her music. Identification is powerful.

I gauged the room, then stepped over to the march table with Blackwell, when she said, “ OH, I want to buy something some Mari Kattman because I love Swallow.” I thought it was great, too, but my weirdness is that I’m less invested in artists until I see them live. It’s a thing; it’s why Hyperactive Ghost is authentically about live music.

I dunno, I just already sensed that she was one to watch and that it wasn’t only my ability to notice talent—and she has it, for sure. Those vocals! But…I had a lot on my mind. I was overwhelmed.

My gift is perceiving and interpreting almost everything, minus your social cues. I might miss that you want me to stop talking, but I heard your distancing language, and I see that your shame is your reason for lying. I will meet you in that darkness with a torch that burns warm and bright in your darkest moments—if you ask me to.

But I Just Can’t Trust What I see

You won’t understand why I’m specifically attached to Kattman’s music without a proper lens—you can see that her work is great and rising in stature, but I’m in the business of personal interpretations and conversations about the way music is our soundtrack.

So.

For the uninitiated, I ask that you imagine some things for me because it might make my attraction to her music make more sense to you. So, imagine some things for me and identify where you can:

• Imagine that I’m 10 months out of a trip to two residential facilities, one to detox and one to work on my long history of traumas. I’m learning how to human.

• Imagine that I fcken hate it here.

• Imagine that I’m still detoxing from astronomical dosages of pernicious meds.

• Imagine I’m ashamed of the degree to which I ate and drank to kill the rest of my pain when…I could have walked out the door. But I couldn’t. It haunts me.

• Imagine a floating equation: panic disorder - GABA / the prodigal necromancer = chaos revisited

• Imagine that my career is in danger because of fascism, and, guess what, I chose early American literature and critical theory, but I am now working in rhetoric, so it’s like being in Sauron’s eye when nobody else sees that Sauron is even real.

• Imagine that I’ve just learned and am battling the excruciating pain of facing truths about the people I’ve loved the most—now my history is wrong, too.

• Imagine that I believe I’ve lost everything, and I can’t imagine anything.

It’s like I’m deep in Tulgey Wood, and I’ve just sat on the rock because who am I? What is real? Will I ever escape? Why are people who exist in crazy places—people who created the conditions for C-PTSD— telling me to keep my temper?

Just….what the fuck is real and who is wrong?

But….standing in Conduit, I was thinking about this connection to what I’d heard of Mari’s music—how could I not? I don’t have a way to share what it’s like in my head, so I try to just manage Wonderland’s nonsense, though it’s not only nonsense.

Ohh…. how I want this heartbreak to end…it’s all I want, now. Just stop the heartbreak. Thank GOD for the dopamine rollercaoster that is live music, god damn.

And that’s how I managed to drift closer to the stage without thinking about it. I tend to float like that when I’m deep in thought or when I drop my guard at a show.

I am the Hyperactive Ghost— intermittently seen, but rarely perceived. Here and then not here. A flicker people see when I’m excitable, but I’m just mouthing something nobody can hear before I disappear again.

What I loved about her performance that night was its simplicity—just an artist on stage—but also the intensity concentrated where she was performing. I was only a few people back from literally standing in front of her. I wanted to talk to her badly, but what would I even say? I’ve come to detest the kind of fandom that seeks access for its own sake.

I’ve seen fans behave strangely around artists, and I’m sensitive to how exposed performers can feel, especially on tour. At the time, I hadn’t known her music long enough to offer anything meaningful—but that would change.

I’ve always focused more on the art than the artist, unless something serious comes to light¹. I still don’t approach artists unless we’ve already met—and when I do, it’s only to say, plainly: you matter to me.

That night, I was thinking about my return to touring bands—and the way I love capturing moments through my phone’s lens. I’ve kept journals since I was 12, part exorcism, part archive. Confessional and memoir were in my blood long before anyone accused me of self-indulgence. I wrote poetry to keep from speaking out loud. I failed at that, of course—but every time I say the quiet part out loud, there’s always someone in the back yelling, “ME TOO, QUEEN!”

You can’t really approach an artist and say:

Soooo, your use of Alice in Wonderland to talk about how girls feel a little crazy hit me hard, because I’ve been obsessed with Carroll since I was a kid—like, I did a whole literary research project using The Annotated Alice as a springboard to unpack how the nonsense wasn’t actually nonsense, and ever since then people have said I’m basically the real-life Alice, which, sure, feels cute, but also—when you’re a hyperverbal girl who’s constantly being told to shut up, even into your 40s, it makes you feel absolutely insane to still be trying to be heard. And also? I’ve been fucking the patriarchy so well that I’m dry, and now I think I’ve been teaching it how to fuck me well and—god—maybe I’m just teaching men to fuck everyone else better and they’re playing me, and honestly maybe I should stop playing straight and finally lean into the bisexuality I keep pushing to the side because I’m tired. I’m just so tired. Can we be friends? NO? Ok….

You can’t do that, right? And if you can, you feel cringe later and, in the mirror, you say: the things you said you can’t undo.

So, when I was watching her perform. I just decided to try something interesting. I wish I’d moved around more and gotten more footage, but I realize that I sometimes see a show with my camera like it’s my own little game of what I can catch, but with a deep love of artists and a genuine interest in what their stage persona is about.

She wasn’t Flight of the Conchords in a library–she was opening for Assemblage 23.

When she was done, I spun around to find Blackwell and was like “DID YOU SEE THAT OMG I LOVE HER! UGH….I only got one good photo.” Blackwell was deep in her feelings because she posted a photo of Mari without her permission².

But, in June of 2023, I wasn’t even fully cued in to how I’d connect—that happened a couple of months later on yet another dark road.

EAT ME

We all arrive at our “fck you” moments for different reasons—but if you’re reading this, I bet music holds the gold. Mine is almost always in my car—the darker the road, the better.

I was driving home from my friends’–it matters that they were a big reason I’d survived the previous 15 years. My drive is an hour, and I was headed back to my father’s house, the house where some crap things happened and I was living in my old bedroom³. So, yeah, I was primed for my feels. At the red light where I was about to turn left, I said, “Siri, play Mari Kattman.”

I hit the gas and merged onto the 417.

The 417 in Orlando is a long road where there are no stops. It’s dark, especially as it moves you over Lake Jesup. It’s spooky at night. And the house I was headed to is in my hometown of Daytona Beach, a place I swore I’d never return.

I hustled in higher education through 3 degrees, thousands of students, and sociopolitical landmines. I fought so hard for so long that, by the time I realized I was at the bottom of that hole. I knew it. I knew my career was going to end, but not how?

Pressure in my chest. Pressure on the gas pedal.

I am a woman with a considerable amount of presence in a room when I want it or I can hide out in the back and observe. I have zero questions about whether or not I’m interesting or whether or not I have anything left to teach anymore. Watch me.

When I think of that nigjht on the 417, some of the things I was thinking was—I feel like everyone has me fucked up.

I have been called crazy by better people than some people have ever met, much less impressed.

Too much? Inappropriate? Awkward? Inconsistent? Ok, I’ll go with it.

Lazy? Unprincipled? Conventional? Boring? Uh-uh. Nope. A thousand times, nope.

Exhausted? Yeah.

And things were about to get even worse, but sometimes you know that and then orchestrate it because it’s so hard to stand at that precipice on your own.

Please please please….push me.

I wanted the heartbreak to end. Just make it stop. I just want love and loyalty and to belong. That’s all I want. I’ll accept less of everything if I can just have that.

At that time, I’d known my memoir was going to be called “Bitter.” I’d had some suggestions to call it “Bitter Pill,” but I felt it lost the power of potions, poison, venom, the “drink me, eat me” tropes.

Get this: I was not connecting “Swallow” and “Bitter” in an uncharacteristic lack of relation to the idea of Swallow being relevant to my actual memoir podcast. I don’t have an answer about that right now because….damn. I dunno. It was right there.

Also, I’m not suggesting that tapping into Alice in Wonderland is original or new, but it’s authentic. It was what I was reading as a kid. I was only 18 or 19 when I did this speech on Alice in Wonderland. I had this beautiful “Annotated Alice” book that gives you all of the references, and I used it as a springboard after that to learn more.

The non-sense is arguably not reducible to nonsense.

On a night drive like that, the way Swallow keeps dropping you feels like it’s going down your throat; it’s a forced gulp, followed by the acknowledgement of a game somebody made up. I stepped into feminist discourse in the late 90s after teenage years of being a shitty, uninformed moderate, but that was 25 years of knowledge ago.

And yet, it was clear to me that I was truly single for the first time in my entire life. Nobody on another burner. Nobody was hammering at me in my DMs⁴, either. And, oh boy, was I feeling ready to tell a bunch of people: eat me, bitches. I’m fcken done with your bullshit.

You Don’t Even Care What’s Real For Me

You know that opening on “You Can Show Yourself Out'‘? Yeah, that happened in a moment of barely any other stimuli, I was over water, I just can’t be sure which it was.

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOMITY BOOM WHAT ARE YOU SCARED OF?

Me: Oh…just my potential when I’m unfettered by multitudes of the dusty ones.

KICK GRIND

Me: yyayyy….BUT ALSO FUCK YOU OMG *starts crying*

Alone in my car, I can sing without worrying about judgment and think about difficult things when I have to remain tethered to my physical world because of death. But electronic music is like a stationary rollercoaster for me.

GRINDY GRINDY BWENEBWENBEWNE

EMBOLDENED…CAN’T CONTROL YOURSELF

Me: oooOOOOoooo…DAZ RIGHT, ENUNCIATE AND TELL THEM OFF

LIAAARRRR, FALSIFERRRR…

Me:….DAZ RIGHT, MAKE IT SOUND LIKE MULTIPLE PEOPLE

CREAK SLAM…. wait, that’s not in the song.

I do something akin to synesthesia where I have a strange audio impression of what I’m processing⁵, so I produce the sound effects for my thoughts. You’d be crazy, too. It was a door opening that might be rusted shut.

Something I love about Mari’s voice is that she manages to enunciate without making it musical theater, but it also sounds like more than one voice, so.

You think you know what’s best for me? You don’t even know what’s best for you.

In the car, I just felt so……angry. Angry as FUCK. And, no, just like patriarchy, it’s not only men holding it up.I started thinking something like:

Really, everyone? Really? You want me to keep swallowing my own pain because you’re tired of hearing about it while you refuse to read between the lines about what I’m sharing?

You want to blame me for you caring more about your access to me than about me?

You want everything that happened at any point in my life to be only my fault while you obscure your own manipulation, lies, and your presence in a cadre of abusers? This is just my insecurity, and not yours?

This was my first thoughts of just wanting to get the fuck up out of this town, this state, this career—but, at the time, I was just raging out and the idea of leaving wasn’t entirely formed just yet.

You don’t even care what’s real for me / if it blurs the lines of what’s real for you.

GYAT DAMN!

I thought a thousand NOPES at once, and I just felt like everyone could just show themselves out of my brain. Get out, leave.

MY SANITY BEGINS WHERE YOUR ACCESS ENDS.

In my car, I can visualize conversations in my head while I just keep driving through the haze of the night. I settled into a feeling like being single might be exactly what I need. If nobody is wiping their feet when they come in here, then maybe I just stop answering the door. If nobody is gaslighting me or keeping me awake, maybe I’m not losing.

I admit, I punched the gas, but nobody was there to witness my super great defeat of …literally my own anxiety. And it started to become something a little more, even if it wasn’t always in my car. I kept listening to Swallow for months, and seeing Mari perform at Absolution Fest kind of kept me playing it over and over in my car.

Every road can be the 417 when you decide your nervous system wants a rollercoaster more than it wants money in the bank. Eggs or a rollercoaster?

Helix at Absolution Fest 2023 and Some Nonsense

See, the context shifts massively between seeing Mari in June, to that night in August, to the night I was standing right at the edge of the stage at Crowbar for Absolution Fest. I felt like I was a completely different person, and it had only been a few months.

In June, I’d have said, “WOW, she is so cool with those Alice references” while I ran around with my new show legs, figuring stuff out.

In August, it was the night on the 417 when I was kicking people out of my head.

And in October, it was looking about empowering myself to test the success of my taste in fashion and a bold move to show myself out of my home state.

I felt unrecognizable by that time because investing deeper into my friendships with Backwell and Best did bring about a connection to some things I didn’t have in my life. Best makes me playlists and listens like a 300-year-old vampire regardless of what vibe I’m bringing to the function.

I can’t be 100% sure of what it is about the way my people care for me, even if I DO know that my kind of love is hard to find. But….I think it’s…..it’s right on the edge of my tongue….AH! Yes. Parental guidance.

When Helix played⁶, I was right at Mari’s feet, and I think I spoke into a mic that made a loud feedback sound. Like…that feedback is not great, is it?

The interesting part about seeing Helix at Absolution Fest was that I was, more excited about it and yet more self-assured, despite how it looked. When Mari sent me a lil peck of a kiss, I was thrilled to have that image for everybody.

At some point after, I started clocking who was touring and where and where bands were living and shit like that–shit I refused to do when I was with my ex. I think what was different was that I didn’t know any of the bands, but they also weren’t unreachable. I can take a video of Brian Belknap right in front, but I also don’t know so much about him that I don’t have things to learn about BlakLight.

In the months following, I went to Nashville and had another life I couldn’t have expected, but I kept expecting a headlining tour. I knew she meant what she said about the industry, but I think I still had more faith in the industry than she did. I even messaged her at some point over that year or maybe into my return to Florida.

You have to know what I’m like when I’m excitable. You can tell me to dial it back, but, you know, nobody ever asks me….to my face anyway⁷.

My life in 2025 has been an epic struggle after Florida’s administration and universities who are just fine with some things when they wanna turn a buck. It’s gross. I banged the pots and pans too hard, though, y’all. My bad. *chuckles*

Today: More Nonsense

Hello hey hi, I’m so glad this album dropped, but holy shit was in right in the thick of my little personal pity party. Like, let me pity myself here in the same bedroom I’d escaped twice, now. I wanted to write a piece about her when I learned there was an album dropping, but I think this is proof that I can’t always be timely when my life is in flux.

I had no idea that Mari was working on a full-length album–or, if I did, it got buried under my considerable existential dread. I wanted to write something about her work since the beginning of this thing, but I suppose I was saving it until the relaunch I knew would happen at some point, but was just too focused on other aspects of my life until month ago when I dropped this new vibe in everyone’s laps.

If I say that my recent activity is putting space between the past 3 years and the search for a more present me, it’s intentional. I need to stop the flow of meaning from eroding the shore. Or I need to stop letting past experiences swoop down and take my snacks. Or I need to stop letting the past dig into my yard and make it too squishy to walk on. Something like that.

And the album is so great and I’m glad she’s getting well-deserved attention, but my timeliness will be when a tour hits because I write about live experiences and the ways music is my internal processing engine.

When Year of the Katt dropped, I was thrilled and also a little sad because I’m in the business right now of saying goodbye to the last 3 years, there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to say goodbye to all of it, but here I am, back in Daytona Beach, back in my old bedroom once again, Nashville appears to have been a detour⁸, and, much like Alice, it feels like it was a dream of crazy choices I made.

Kattman’s work was a good friend during those 2-hour drives to and from Nashville from Camp Wonder Wander, but more when I needed “night on the 417” vibes. The drive in Tennessee stopped being scary, but it provided its own rollercoaster.

But you know, I can’t help but think that if I made crazy choices in this journey and had some incredible experiences and met some incredible people whom I DO love, then… maybe I can see the value in my crazy choices as a whole….and make some more crazy choices. I can still love the people I met, even if I fade from their memories.

Self-reliance is so often hard won because we don’t trust ourselves, but….I can see what changes for me by salvaging the best parts of a disaster.

I’m taking “Year of the Katt” and digging a little deeper in the coming months. It’s a new chapter, even if the sadness I feel is the knowledge of what I didn’t get.

But if I can manufacture a moment where I need the symbolism to shove myself into ending that painful drama, I can do it for future me, starting now. If I can face the way things are, then wake up and drop a Substack rebrand—if it can be chosen, yet arbitrary, I can fill the moment with meaning and define that sign.

In that sense, it can also be a tour from an artist whose work I love and whose work was part of my evolution.

In 2023, when I first saw Mari perform, I had no idea anything was going to happen beyond trying to recover from what had just happened. And if I rewind the tape from today, July 7th, 2025, the effect for me would be to cry, and then laugh, die inside a little, but lock the rusty door with gratitude.

Imagine: I would have to tell you that none of the events in my life over the last 2 years were predictable. If I just rewind and don’t erase, I can see what I’d have to give up if I were to trade in my experience to cut down the pain. I’d have to erase and say:

There’s no Year of the Katt.

No new job.

No learning to build a different, more lucrative career.

No Hyperactive Ghost, just a stale Substack with a few pieces.

No peace in choosing my home state, even if I chose this for reasons out of my control.

No end-of-2924 glow-up.

No opportunity to see Technicolor happy.

No bonding with Hedge.

No questioning what I knew about Nashville and revising that vision.

No episode 2 of Bitter.

No Tennessee at all–just none of that experience.

No pride in my bold decisions.

No doing everything alone until I trust myself to survive.

No cold weather to learn to love.

No experiences made me question my disbelief in anything beyond the rational.

No Hedge or Technicolor or Barbara Ann or Industrial or just….none of it. No pink shortsuit.

None of it.

And look, I know what the song means and yet, my weird brain takes flight with it, anyway. And I have to say that I couldn’t have wanted what I didn’t know existed, so there has to be comfort in the fact that….the heartbreak in my life will never ease up.

That’s all I wanted—just the one impossible thing….that’s all.

I hope we get that tour, Mari. I just hope you hire Assemblage 23 to open for you.

*NOTE: HEY HEY, DO YOU HAVE MORE MARI KATTMAN PHOTOS AND LIVE VIDEOS? Post them on your socials and tag me to celebrate Year of the Katt with your retrospective media.

1

I don’t care if Morrissey actually grew up in an ugly new house or if it’s just invented lore.

2. I was confused because social media is a world of platforms everyone needs to Donkey Kong if they want to work full-time and eat—but also, she’s not entirely wrong about it, is she?

3. I am again, but it’s so much better that my gratitude runs deep right now.

4. YET

5. I thought everyone did. For example, when folks say “and something clicked,” I learned this is not an actual sound everybody hears.

6. This is really in the context of my Absolution Fest 2023 series, but if you’re just learning that it exists, it’s a tab on the blog. I just haven’t gotten to Helix’s performance at the fest, yet.

7. *whispers* hey I love y’all, even when you’re being bitch-asses. LOL

8. If I get the opportunity to go back on my own terms, I hope I can. I really do. But right now, it’s my family amnfd Tampa, Disney World, and the beaches