EVANN MCINTOSH

DIGGING DEEPER EVANN MCINTOSH

UPCOMING PROJECT CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

I am 17 years old and I am a musical artist. I live in Kansas and my producer and friend, Jesty Beats, lives out in Ohio and we have been remotely making music for about 5 years now. I use music as an outlet, it’s very therapeutic. It’s much easier to convey emotion that way and it’s always been something that has allowed me to be able to genuinely be myself.

I started writing and co-producing my second musical project, Character Development, about a year and a half ago. It’s coming out in late August. I've been very impatient about it because I’m always very eager to release things before I can’t relate to them anymore. I cannot write the way I did then because I’ll never be in that mindset again, and I will never be who I was in that period of time ever again. What’s really beautiful, and why I like to make projects as opposed to singles (which I have nothing against at all), is that there’s more space to completely encapsulate that time of my life and what it felt like and what I was thinking in a series of songs. It’s also been beneficial to me now because I’ve sat on this project for so long and I’ve had so much time to listen to it again every few months with a new perspective and I can understand who I am better and really hear what I didn’t know I was trying to say.

I wrote this project at the beginning of my sophomore year of high school, which was my last year in high school because I dropped out and got my GED two weeks into my junior year. I don’t think I realized how unhappy with myself and with my surroundings I really was at the time compared to reflecting on it now. I wanna say it had a lot to do with being a queer creative in a small town in Kansas. I had several identity crises and numerous false guidances and I couldn’t even begin to understand or digest anything about it until months after I’d left high school. During all of that confusion, I wrote this project and it felt like a series of questions then, when I wrote it, and now it feels like answers for somebody else. I think that’s cool, in a way I was capable of giving those answers to myself.

I think it’s still a process though, I keep writing albums about the quest for love. Not exactly romantic love or platonic, just something, I don’t know what yet. Whether it’s to be satisfied with myself or my work, or comfort, or to be understood, I don’t know. I was looking for acceptance and validation in high school, I was looking for something to live for. That’s the kind of love I was looking for when I was writing Character Development. But it keeps me writing and making stuff. I get closer and closer with every Barbra Streisand romcom, I can feel it. I watched The Mirror has Two Faces a couple of nights ago and I have no shame, it was very very nice. I will be a professor at Columbia and find love with a college lecturer who specializes in romantic literature. That college lecturer will be Barbra Streisand. Then I will retire from music. Because there will be no point anymore. Barbra Streisand and I will be in love..

The upcoming project 'Character Development' is out on the 27th August.