Your Story // Melody Pilotte
It is an honour, to share with you Melody aka Jean Valjean’s story with you here on AWH. It’s a real and RAW story, some of it isn’t easy to read, but easy isn’t the point of these stories. Without revealing too much, I’ll let Melody introduce herself!
Try to describe yourself without using your name attributes, skills, gifts, or talents by society, and really think; who am I?
All of my social media profiles say something to the effect of, “like Snow White, only more maudlin,” but the only proper response to “who am I?” is “I’m Jean Valjean.”
What do you want us to call you?
My real name is Melody. I’m just Melody. I make music as Le Bas-fond, but that’s just the name of my music project--much in the way no one calls Trent Reznor “Nine Inch Nails,” or That Guy Whose Project Name is Owl City “Owl City.” (Sorry, I can never remember his name and am too lazy to look it up--but, That Guy!)
It’s funny you mention it, because people have such a hard time with my name, and it’s a noun. A. NOUN. (You’d be surprised.)
What decade were you born in & what do you love most about that decade?
I was born in 1987, and I look great for 32 and a half, so no shame in revealing my age! Hahaha!
Being born in the late 80’s means a lot of things--everything from seeing the Berlin Wall come down on live television and not understanding the full weight of what it means, to experiencing warm analog crackles when they were new and fresh and vibrant. Rorie mentioned that in her interview, too: the world on the precipice of constantly being plugged in and hyper-connectivity, and we were the last ones who got to see it the way it was before. The calm before the information highway storm. Things we saw on Pokémon, like Ash video-calling Professor Oak, are now reality. We even now (sort of) have Pokémon!
The 80’s (and 90’s) had great music, great movies, great cartoons. Definitely the absolute best part of both decades.
Where / what do you call home?
Pacifica, California. If there are Harold and Maude fans out there, I live near where the final scene of that film was shot. I live my seaside witchy dreams in the forest by the oceanside, the redwoods, the mountains and the beach, depending on which direction you feel like walking.
What are the things you do now, that you're the most passionate about?
I’ve always kept my work as a recording artist and composer completely separate from the rest of my life. I just want to be a normal human being. I don’t really see myself as an ARTISTE, just a normal person who likes to do art.
I care about a great number of things: the environment, voting rights, holding media and the arts accountable for the role and responsibility they hold in society. You know, casual stuff!
Right now my absolute favorite thing in the world is watching Rachel Maksy on YouTube, second only to spending time with my pets and my niece and nephew.
What was the last quote that really spoke to you?
This is such a silly answer, but it was a Spongebob quote.
"Can I be excused for the rest of my life?" I don’t even know what the context of this was, because it was on in the background. I just remember thinking, “this speaks to me on a visceral level!”
What quality do you admire most in others?
The courage to stand up for something you believe in, even when it’s not popular. A constant and unwavering moral compass.
If you could be any age for a week, what age would you be and what would you do?
I would just be the age I am now. I’d like what’s in store for me aging-wise to be a surprise, and don’t want to relive any of my younger years.
Oh wait, if I could be 10 or 11 for like an hour or two? Can I do that? I hated being 10 and 11. But if I COULD, I would be 10 again, for like 4 hours, and go to CHUCK E CHEESE (or, more realistically, have someone else take me). I only got to go once when I was a kid, and now they don’t let you in unless you’re under 18 (for a good reason, but still). I could go and be just old enough to be able to be good at the games (who am I kidding, like I’D be any good…), but young enough to where I would still be having fun and appreciate it. I know Dave and Busters exists, but Chuck E Cheese has a creepy rat jamboree and shitty cardboard pizza. Cannot. be. beat.
What is freedom for you?
Not that scene or line from Braveheart. :)
What is a home for you?
My spooky little cottage by the oceanside.
If you could interview anyone dead or alive, WHO? And what would you want to learn from / ask them?
Susanne Sundfør. We would have coffee at my house, and play with my cats, listen to records. I would spend hours picking her brain and unlocking all of her secrets.
What's the first thing you notice about people?
How tall they are, because I am smol. :)
If you could have personally witnessed anything, what would you want to have seen?
I feel truly fortunate to be living in a time where I have seen a lot of cool things happen. I saw the Berlin Wall coming down (which I mentioned earlier), and Nelson Mandela being released from prison on live TV. There have been a lot of scary things, too, but I am grateful for experiencing both, because they are seminal in different ways. Hmmm! I think if I had to pick something, it would be seeing the original casts of CAROUSEL or BRIGADOON on Broadway.
What is beauty in your eyes?
Being able to see the world through the eyes of babies and toddlers. Seeing the way babies view the world and understand what happens around them is truly beautiful. It’s the perfect, precious reminder that there will always be hope, for one, but we can appreciate small things. The joy in everyday and small things.
If you could try out any job for a day, what would you like to try? and why?
I would be a marine biologist. I studied to be a marine biologist for many years. It was either going to be that or a NAGPRA lawyer--those were my two non-artist choices, and I took both very seriously. I was thwarted by the math involved with oceanography, but I still love marine biology so much. My special area of study was (were?) Actiniaria. We took my niece and nephew to the tide pools a couple of weeks ago and they absolutely loved it, and it was fun to use that cache of knowledge stored up after all these years to share with my two favourite humans.
I used to work on a farm and teach little kids about pumpkins and sustainable farming. I’d love to do that job again for a day, too.
What are the things you're family / environment / culture you grew up in taught you, that you're very thankful for now?
I was raised by a single mother and her parents, who were Indigenous Mexican and Geordie (Northern English). I am 100% shaped and informed by my maternal grandparents, as my mother had been shaped by her parents. I spent most of my childhood and young adulthood with them. It’s not my mom’s fault, by any means, but I am so grateful for being able to have a safe space. I definitely hold all of my grandparents (outdated, I’m afraid) values--telling the truth, honesty, goodness, always doing the right thing.
My biological father is First Nations and German, and while my parents divorced because of domestic violence when I was 6 years old, he continued to break into our home and stalk us for decades afterwards. This is the source of my PTSD, which was later reclassified as C-PTSD, when I was 6. It took me a long time to deal with my internalized racism towards Native/ First Nations people.
Because of my sexual abuse and domestic violence my mother and I lived through, I was “destined” to be a “failure” in life; this was determined by school officials and the parents of my peers. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t had my grandparents as a safe space or a touchstone for goodness. My mom did everything to the best of her abilities, make no mistake, but her parents really swooped in and saved the day. You don’t really think about these things so much when you’re a kid; it’s not as painful that your biological father hasn’t picked you up from school (again) because he’s off somewhere drinking or doing drugs when your grandfather has just preemptively taken the initiative to pick you up from kindergarten instead. You just think, great! Grandpa came to get me and now we get to have grilled cheese and tomato soup at his house! You don’t realize these things are painful so much, or you don’t think about it that way, when you’re 4 or 5 and in the thick of it.
My grandparents were just so great about dealing with me. For many, many reasons (obviously), I was just a little weirdo, and it didn’t even seem to phase them. I used to sing fake kid opera (WHICH I AM SURE WAS SUPER ANNOYING), and instead of telling me to stop, Grandpa was like, “if you’re going to do this, at least listen to this and imitate this instead!”
How has your birth order/characteristics of siblings affected you?
Oldest sibling. Responsible and blamed for everything, by myself and everyone else.
What is the strangest thing you believed as a child?
This is an easy one! That the song ‘Chapel Of Love’ was about jackals. I was devastated when I found out the actual lyrics. Misheard lyrics are my specialty. My brain is a special place.
What are you most proud about with your younger self?
That no matter how hard they tried to break me, they couldn’t. No matter how confidently they predetermined my failure, they didn’t. That I defied every single last expectation that I would fail in life. I made it.
This is very true--because of my ethnic, socio-economic background and my coming from a broken home school authorities and other Powers That Be had predetermined I was going to be a “failure,” and destined for a life of crime, prostitution and drug abuse. Can you imagine being 6 years old and having an authority figure basically tell you you’re going to be a sex worker, and should give up on school now? This idea that this is the worst case scenario, and you’re telling a child in 1st grade that this is their fate and to just accept it--WTF!
They told me I was going to fail, and I said “f*ck you.”
Can you tell us about a “breaking through the concrete” moment in your life?
I LOVE this question. I have had a lot of those. I think my first major one was in 4th or 5th grade, and they made a big deal about having a student who marked off “Native American/ Alaska Native” on the ethnicity portion of the STAR tests (California standardized elementary school testing no longer used), and then I scored so highly on so many portions of the test. I know for a fact that one of my teachers thought I couldn’t read because I didn’t want to. :)
What do you do when you have setbacks?
I was retraumatized, as previously mentioned, a few years ago. I had a nervous breakdown a little over 3 years ago. I had worked so hard and so long to heal and be able to do certain things. I had spent the greater part of a decade doing some really arduous and necessary work, and have the selfishness of others undo all of that healing that I had done. All of that work was gone. I realized that I may never heal completely--that it happened too late, and that my healing could plateau, and sometimes that’s just what you get. Accepting limits is one of the biggest liberators for me. There’s something very freeing about just letting it go. Once you stop chasing the mirage of ‘healing completely’ horizon line, and just accept that at some point you will plateau, and that’s perfectly okay, you’re suddenly free. I am not saying to not try. I am not saying to wallow or root around in your bad traits like a hog in the mud.
I was a professional den mom for a few years, and was in Boy Scouts with my friends for years before that. One of the things I learned from Scouting is that you have to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. I think it's just a great way to look at and deal with life in general.
What do you do or where do you go to rest and heal?
My bed. :) This is a silly and simple answer, but it’s true. Coffee, the cats, fluffy sheets, the marshmallow mattress, my bunny (lamb?) snuggie-thing. It’s where it’s at!
Who or what inspires you and keeps you going?
My niece and nephew! My pets! Everything I do is to give them a better life and to hopefully be able to buy my niece a pony (don’t tell my brother-in-law).
What moment has been the biggest life-changer in your life?
Becoming a professional illustrator/ painter, and releasing music for the first time. These were the first times in my life where I had done something totally and completely just for me.
What advice would you give your younger self? / what are the things you know now, you wished you knew when you were younger?
Punch your bully classmates in their ******* faces.
Kids used to beat me up in school and I would go home with black eyes and fat lips and the teachers did nothing about it. School authorities did nothing about it. I wish I hadn’t taken the high road. The bullying went on for years and years and years. At some point it had stopped being physically violent, and switched to being horrendous verbal abuse.
Make no mistake, when I have kids, if my kids experience bullying, and if we’ve gone through the proper channels, and the school fails to act, my kid(s) will absolutely have my permission to knock the other kid’s (kids’) lights out. Case closed, end of story. “High road,” “low road” nonsense be damned. I am not advocating for violence as the immediate response, but I wish we taught our children, especially young girls, that it’s okay to defend yourself.
And vice versa, what are the things you miss about being a child, that your older or adult-self could need to learn or remember?
Younger Me would tell Adult Me to just ENJOY things that you enjoy whole hog. Just LET yourself enjoy things.
How do you think your younger self would look at what you've become?
8 year old me would never believe it. Period. Flat out. And would be pretty pissed there are no flying cars.
What or who helped you bloom into who you are?
My maternal grandparents. Hands down, the two most important people in my life.
Music of all kinds, as well as Disney movies, old movie musicals and old Universal monster movies. I am ten hundred percent defined by cartoons and animated movies I watched as a kid.
While now it’s been ruined for me, at one time the novel Les Misérables had a profound impact on my life. My great uncle who was a bishop gave me a copy when I was 8 years old. He was the first Native American bishop in the Catholic Church, and was a wonderful man. He also had a profound impact on me. He reminds me of the bishop from the novel a lot, too.
What have you been through and learned from that you wanna help and give to others to help them bloom?
I have been through a lot. That’s a bit of an understatement, to be honest. What I would give to someone else is to just tell them that, if nothing else, exist because of spite, and to prove other people wrong. You deserve to be here and to take up space, and you’re here for a reason, and reason is to kick ass and help save the world. You got this!!!!!!!!
If you don't think about boxes, society, peoples opinions, education, money or jobs, what are you dreaming of doing?
I am not really a dreamer, I am more of a doer. I plan everything out very carefully, and make the correct decisions and arrangements for them to work. This ties into my having been a professional den mom--my friends make fun of me for being such a super-planner! We do this thing every year called “T-rexmas” where we inflate this T-rex and shove it in the back of my friend’s car, deck the car with lights, blast cheesy disco versions of Christmas songs and drive around spreading ‘holiday cheer.’ I have everything planned, right down to the stop lights. Mock me all you want people, but my sh*t is EFFICIENT!
As for ‘doing,’ I do many things, but one of them is being a recording artist, and that was never really a dream. I knew I could sing, and it was just something that seemed like a very natural use for my voice. I did research on how to do it, learned very basic commands in DAWs programmes, and just went from there. I don’t know if I want to do music forever. I just want to make music right now. I am so glad and lucky that I can and do other things. I waited to release music. I wanted until I had something to say and I waited until my skills were sharp enough to release something and stand behind it. I didn’t daydream about becoming a recording artist, I decided I was going to it and did it.
I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’ve been isolated in my life for so long, and because people were so horrible to me growing up, but I don’t care what other people think. I don’t ask them for their input. That’s not to say I don’t value the opinions of others. This isn’t to say that I am a Type-A, stereotypical Leo megalomaniac! I absolutely seek wisdom when I need it and don’t know everything, I am just not motivated by what other people think in that way.
I didn’t start out being a starry-eyed dreamer, so I am not going to sit around and cry if it doesn’t come true.
What dreams are you chasing? How did it start?
I guess if I had to say I was ‘chasing a dream,’ it would be to own my own house: a house that I had designed or liked the design of that was custom built just for me. But that’s just me, isn’t it? Instead of sighing wistfully and dreaming about a ‘dream house,’ I went on The House Plan Shop.com and found some designs I liked and made notes on them. I talked to my friend the CAD designer who said he would help. I will probably be rolling up my sleeves and doing a lot of the work alongside the construction team. Made notes about what I wanted, and what my needs are. I want something 2-stories, a storybook sort of idea (to meet my spooky/ ‘The Company of Wolves’ aesthetic). Somewhere that I could set up my recording studio the way that I have it now. Room for future children.
Although I am taking the necessary steps to do so, I suppose I would include having children as part of that dream. I’ve chosen to have children on my own. I guess I can count that as a dream, because, even with taking the initiative and going through a fertility centre and all that, there’s still no guarantee. I know that, obviously, adoption is always an option, but I wanted to have my own biological children because my biological father’s tribe was almost completely eradicated because of forced sterilization and eugenics. My having children is an act of defiance, the reversal of genocide, one little pudgebunny snugglebaby at a time.
This started because I had spent so much of my life caring for and catering to other people. I missed important moments of my life supporting others. The year I turned 30 was probably one of the worst years of my life. I had given my entire life away up until that point. It wasn’t just ONE thing, it was EVERYthing.
I wanted to live the rest of my life by myself, and not give anything away to anyone. A witch in the woods with her babies, answering to no one, and removing the variables. No one would ever waste my time, or me, again.
(There’s a scene in ‘The Company of Wolves’ where a witch has been wronged, and the nobleman who left her because she was a peasant for a noblewoman is marrying said noblewoman. Well, the witch shows up to the wedding, very visibly pregnant, and as revenge turns everyone into a wolf. She then lives in the forest in a tree house (if I remember correctly) with her baby, and commands the wolves to “sing” to her every night. #itme )
In what ways do you dream of changing the world?
I believe in changing the world every day in little ways by trying to act in kindness, and making the world a better place by making choices that think globally and are acting locally.
Wow, I just sounded like I am running for Miss America or something.
April 25th?
Tell us about your passions, what drives you, what does it look like in your life?
I am really passionate about being accountable, both personally and professionally. One of the things that I feel the most passionate about is climate justice. This means acting in ways that support the planet--things like eating less meat and taking public transit, zero waste as much as possible. This also means being accountable for what I do and how I talk to people, my actions and the ways what I do affects other people. This ties into how I want to change/ save the world. I want the little things that I do add up into big things.
I also want to be as morally consistent as possible. Last year, I removed all of my music from Amazon and cancelled my Amazon Prime account. None of my future releases will be coming out on Amazon. None. Not only does Amazon make their employees work under sweatshop conditions and don’t pay taxes, they fund the concentration camps at the US/ México (imaginary, illegal) border. I don’t want anything to do with that. I don’t want my music to have anything to do with that. Americans are pretending like they are helpless lambs with their hands tied, but there are things that you can do--they’re just not comfortable changes. I know that Amazon owns basically everything, but removing investments from things like Amazon Prime is just one of the ways you can reduce helping their evil empire. When our children and grandchild ask us to look back and ask us what we did during the time of the concentration camps at the border, and they ask us what we did, I don’t want to tell mine that I sat by and let it happen. My music wasn’t making money on Amazon, but the little money it would have made, they don’t get to have. I, as a small artist, made a choice and took a stand, while bigger artists with bigger voices did not.
If you could learn one random skill overnight, what would you learn?
On brand with living full #cottagewitcy, I would absolutely love to be able to take on sewing projects. I can do some VERY basic sewing, like fixing clothes until they are beyond repair, but that’s about it. I’d love to be able to make things I could wear. Full cottage witchy aesthetic.
I would also love to be a plant parent. I am terrible with plants! It’s so embarrassing! I see people with these great gardens and plants all over their house and I am like HOW. There are a lot of plants in the house I live in now and we have a lovely garden, but they thrive because this black thumb isn’t allowed to touch them! hahaha!
What do you like most about getting "older" / what do you look forward to experiencing?
I am turning 33 this year. I look amazing for being in my early thirties. I feel beautiful and sexy, for probably the first time. For the first time in my life I am finally in my peak witchy aesthetic, finally able to afford things I've always wanted. My voice and writing abilities have never been better. My skin looks fantastic. I am super content in my accomplishments. They said I wasn’t supposed to live to be 18, let alone 25. 8 years later, I am quite literally living my best life. I am definitely feeling like a fine wine.
Of course I do worry about “running out of time.” I think everyone, especially women, hold this fear. I look forward to making my mom the crazy Grandma. :)
What do you think about more than anything else?
To be perfectly honest, wanting to be back in my bed from the minute I wake up, hahahahaha!
Other than that, I think climate change is something that is constantly looming in the back of my mind.
Hmm, or mistakes I made 5 to 10 years ago. Did I turn off the bathroom light this morning? Will I be a good enough mother? Have I done enough with my life? Stuff like that.
But, really, truly, mostly I think about is when I get to go back to bed, OOOPS.
What’s something or someone that amazes and inspires you? & why?
Hmmm! I don’t know why this inspires me so much, but I recently read a series of articles about the “cocaine hippos” in Colombia. It’s my favourite thing right now, and it brings me so much joy!!!!!! It’s so absurd, and yet it’s 100% true, and I think that’s the best part. The best part is is that they’re helping the Colombian ecosystem. The heroes we need in 2020! (Google it, peeps, you will not be disappointed!!!!)
Who or what inspires you and keeps you going?
Dandelions that grow through the cracks in sidewalks. Those are the real MVPs.
And people who break glass ceilings and boundaries, but take other people with them and don’t kick the ladder out from under them or leave other people behind. That’s the kinda person I want to be.
