Jessica Boudreaux is a singer-songwriter and producer who led the Portland-based indie rock outfit Summer Cannibals for 10 years before it disbanded in March 2023. Having recorded and mixed records for some local Portland bands as well as the last Summer Cannibals LP, 2019’s Can’t Tell Me No, in the years prior, she built her own studio, Pet Club, where she kept busy writing and producing songs for other artists and working on music for film and television, including the Oscar-nominated animated feature Nimona and Apple TV’s City on Fire. In November 2020, Boudreaux was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was in remission by the summer of 2023, when she embarked on a whitewater rafting trip for young cancer survivors, an experience that renewed both her sense of self and her excitement for music. Following her 2022 EP I Think My Heart Loves to Break, she wrote, performed, and recorded her debut solo album, The Faster I Run, herself. It’s a cautiously yet cathartically optimistic record where each song – be it heart-on-sleeve honest or a little tongue-in-cheek – was conducive to her healing. “I know the faster I run/ The sooner I get to end,” she sings on the final track, so she tries her best to soak up every moment, vulnerable and complex as it may be.
We caught up with Jessica Boudreaux for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about focusing on her solo project, making The Faster I Run, going on a whitewater rafting trip with fellow young adult cancer survivors, and more.
You’ve spent a lot of the past few years co-writing and engineering songs for others while also focusing on your solo project. How do these creative practices intersect with each other? Is collaborating in the context of a band different from working with others outside of it?
With the band, I wrote a lot alone, and then I would demo everything out and bring that stuff to the band, and each member would change and transform their parts to be more theirs. So, the writing part didn’t change that much, except that I didn’t feel beholden to what people wanted or expected from Summer Cannibals. That was really freeing for me, I was like, “I can do this whatever I want.” I feel like it ended up not that far from what I would have done with the band, but it is a lot softer and more vulnerable. And I did actually end up writing a good amount of songs with different people – my partner, Cass, who was in the band, collaborated on a couple of songs. There was probably more collaboration and co-writing on this album than on any of the band’s albums just because I used to really hold on to control as much as I could with what I was making. I felt like I could write better alone and didn’t have to worry about throwing out bad ideas and them being rejected.
When I started co-writing, I’d probably write with like seven different people in a week, all of whom I had never met before. It totally changed the way I looked at collaborating and co-writing and the ideas that are born from just being in a room with someone and messing around. That process reignited my excitement for music. It was getting tiring to feel so alone in the process, and opening up the limits of what you can do by collaborating with different people and not placing genre or thematic restrictions on yourself made me so much more excited about music.
I read that you wrote around 80 songs in a few months for your I Think My Heart Loves To Break EP. I’m curious if you drew from an even larger pool for this album, or if there was any overlap between projects.
There’s not really much overlap. I still make pop stuff, but more so to pitch to other people or for TV and stuff. This album had a much smaller pool of songs because it was a very clear few months of writing. There are a few songs where the writing process started earlier, but for this record, I think there were about 20 songs, and then it was cut down to 12. At the same time, I was writing all different kinds of things in different genres for different purposes, which made writing for this more interesting to me. It just expands your horizons melodically.
When you were coming back from writing other things to focus on the album, was it grounding in some ways? What kind of boundaries did you set to make the balance work?
I feel like was holding space for both equally. Maybe there were a few weeks where I was kind of pedal to the metal to finish this album; I had a feeling that if I didn’t finish it in the next two months, I might never finish it and lose this drive to get it done. So, I made a plan with Joe Reinhart, who was mixing it, and set a deadline to turn it in. I was like, “Okay, now I gotta actually finish it.” I set hours for myself and dedicate certain days to this and certain days to other stuff. If work things came up, like deadlines around music stuff with more direct money involved, I would put this aside for a couple of days, turn that in, and then get right back to it. It was somehow not draining; it felt like the different things I was working on were fueling each other. Whenever I worked on other things that weren’t the album, I would get more inspired and more excited to put some time into the album.
You’re making a distinction between those two things, but it sounds like you’re applying a similar discipline to both.
Yeah, totally. Over the last 4 or 5 years, doing a lot of studio and production stuff, I’ve realized that if my life were 100% making ad music, that would not be fulfilling for me. But I also recognize that my life being 100% band, band, how do I make this band work was also not feeling great. Having a balance of creatively fulfilling personal time to write and make music in that way, and also making it in these other capacities, to be able to diversify what I can do within music, makes me love it more.
You’ve talked about how touring, or the prospect of touring, made you feel uneasy about working on your own music again. I wonder if it was also the fear of getting pulled into this obsessive cycle creatively.
Yeah. I have ADHD, too, so I hyper-fixate and hyper-focus. I’m learning that my brain likes when I can switch things up, and it makes it so one thing isn’t just taking from me. I can press pause on that and work on something else. Anytime I’m making something, I’m learning something. It makes so much sense to me now, and I’m like, “Why didn’t I do this earlier?” But you live and learn.
There’s a story in the press release about a week-long kayaking excursion you went on last year that led to a surge of inspiration. Could you share your memories of that time and the creative period that followed?
Leading up to that trip, I was diagnosed with PTSD from my experience with cancer. Amidst that, I was also diagnosed with OCD. I was dealing with constant fear – just picturing myself dying all the time. I had a hard time leaving the house and being alone. On a whim, I signed up for a week-long whitewater kayaking retreat for young adult cancer survivors. The day I was supposed to go, I was sobbing, I was like, “I cannot do this. I can barely get in the car and drive 10 minutes, let alone get in a kayak and go down a river with rapid speed.” But I went anyway.
I ended up having one of the most beautiful weeks of my life. A lot of people get cancer, it’s not an uncommon thing, but when you’re 30, you’re the one in your friends, usually. You can’t relate to anybody, and you feel like no one can relate to you. To be in a space with 20 or so of us, all staying in a house together, where every single person either currently had cancer or had cancer previously – you’re suddenly not special. [laughs] It quickly becomes the least interesting thing about you. In this camp called First Descents, they don’t use your name; when you show up, they’re like “What’s your nickname?” So for the rest of the week, you don’t hear your name.
It took me out of myself and out of my head in a way that I had never experienced before. There’s so much ego involved in being in any kind of entertainment, you’re constantly thinking about how to promote not just your music, but yourself. When things fail, you feel like you failed, and that there’s something wrong with you as a person that people aren’t caring about what you’re doing. There’s so much vanity involved. It’s just the name of the game; you have to consider those different things. But to be in a space where all of these factors that had gone into making me who I am were taken away, I felt like I was back to who I really was. I started to see my value as a person in a different context. And I just had a blast – I absolutely fell in love with whitewater kayaking and made some great friends.
Coming home, because I had that separation of ego, I felt like I was back to my core. I felt like I could make music without any concerns about what anyone was going to think of it. I was just making what felt good and right. I’m really grateful for that experience. I’m like, “Man, I wish I could do that once every summer, just to get a reminder of what it feels like.” [laughs] It really drove me to make it, and make it for me, but not from a vanity place, I guess more like a release.
You mentioned having cancer being the least interesting thing about you in that environment. I’m curious if there was a connection between that fact and not setting out to make a “cancer album.” Was it a factor in not wanting that experience to define the narrative of The Faster I Run?
I think it’s important context for the album because it’s the catalyst for the reflection, but I don’t feel like you would need to have had cancer to understand the album. Especially with what we all collectively went through with COVID, it created a different lens for many of us in our twenties and thirties – like looking back on the “before times.” My partner and I refer to it as “BC,” before cancer, because it was such a huge shift. I feel like everyone felt that shift during the pandemic. I don’t sit around all day feeling sad or bad for myself for having gotten cancer, so I didn’t want to make something that felt like, “Why did this happen to me?” Going on that trip took me out of feeling sorry for myself and helped me make something that isn’t just sad.
On ‘Somebody Else’, you sing, “Time used to feel certain, now it’s diseased.” When you wrote that line, was there a moment of second-guessing or wishing you could if time really did eel certain back then?
Right, because it never did, and that is an interesting point. There was a lot of looking at things through rose-colored glasses. When I was going through treatment, it was like, “Oh my god, I’d give anything to be back two years, everything was so great.” But being in therapy and really looking at my whole life instead of just these pieces was really mind-boggling. To realize how unhappy I was – before cancer, before COVID, before everything. ‘Be Somebody Else’ came from a desperate moment of thinking, I wish I could just forget everything that happened over the last few years and start over and be a different person. In those moments, it did feel like things used to be so much better, but I don’t think that was always true – at least it wasn’t for me. I wasn’t being totally honest with myself about how I was feeling at that time.
On ‘Back Then’, the first song, you sing about how you used to have big dreams. I thought it was interesting that the closer, ‘You’ll Say It Was Fun’, also has that phrase about being drunk on a dream. How are these songs connected in your mind, and what does “dream” mean to you in those different contexts?
‘Back Then” is specifically written about a time period between 18 and 20, where it just felt like the possibilities of what could happen in my life were endless, and I really did feel like I could go so far. Like we do when we’re young, I had an idea of how my life would go. The person who I wrote that song about/for passed away maybe 6 years ago now. I had always wanted to write a song for/about her, but never really knew how. When that song came about, it just felt like the right way to honor that friendship.
But with the last song on the record, that’s the only song on the record that has any part of it written before I was diagnosed. I look at that song as years within one song, because I wrote it before cancer and I finished it after. I think that “being drunk on a dream” for me was the dream of being successful in music and having a successful band. Also, my partner was in the band, and we were having problems. There was a lot going on and a lot entangled in the band. The whole “this used to be fun” is on the surface about a relationship, but I feel like it’s also my relationship to that project and just to my life at that time. I still have dreams and hopes for the future, but I feel like they align a lot more with my core values now than they did before, so it was interesting to reflect on that and the things I let consume me.
How self-conscious were you about weaving those different relationships into the album, without necessarily making it about them?
Any negative feelings that I have about that time, it’s not really about any person in particular, and it’s not even about the project, because I loved that project. I loved getting to tour all over and I would not trade any of it for anything – the bands that we got to share stages with and tour with, it was such an incredible experience. But, when something doesn’t serve you anymore, you have to know when to let it go. And it had been a while that I was feeling that dissatisfaction and that fatigue. I think that some people are cut out to exist in that public-facing artist role, and maybe some of us aren’t. And maybe I’m not, or maybe just in a capacity that I can handle and that I can kind of decide how much I want to do. Having people rely on me to keep going, keep touring, keep saying yes, was draining so much of who I wanted to be. I was missing my nephew’s birthdays all the time, I was not seeing my family, and my dog was always with a dog sitter. Getting cancer and dealing with all of that is a shortcut to getting a really clear picture of what actually matters to you.
Music is very close to the top of the list for me, but knowing how to do that in a way that also made sure that my family and my health could still be right up there. Instead, it was pushing my other top priorities down by having to tour and do all this stuff. It was sucking the life out of me to deal with these record labels. I just knew I couldn’t do it and also maintain what was important to me. It made sense to explore that in some capacity on the album, because the album is about before and after cancer and reexamining things with a different lens. Again, I wouldn’t trade any of it for anything, but you gotta know when to pack it up.
On ‘Be Somebody Else’, you also sing about trying to extend the kindness you afford others to yourself. But there are also songs like ‘Exactly Where You Want to Be’ where you’re able to find that grace in what seem like uncertain situations.
I have had a history of letting the wrong types of people in and giving too much to the wrong types of people. Some may argue, some pretty bad people. My partner would always say and still says, “You are the meanest to yourself.” And we all do that, right? The way we talk to ourselves is so different than any way that we would ever talk to a friend or a loved one. I would never say some of the things that I’ve said to myself to my partner, and if I ever did, they should break up with me. Realizing the ways that I went about my personal relationships before all of this, and learning to better prioritize myself, but also, with ‘Exactly Where You Want to Be’, really letting it sink in that I am only responsible for my actions and for myself in the way that I move through the world. If someone does something, or if someone leaves or hurts, that’s not my responsibility, and it’s not my responsibility to shoulder that. I think I spent a lot of years kind of trying to mold myself in ways that would better satisfy the people around me. It was very freeing to be like, “No, I don’t do that anymore,” and be able to write about it.
There’s this balance that I feel like you strike between songs that are, not necessarily nostalgic, but reflective in a light-hearted way, and others are reflective in a more wistful and complex way. It’s almost literally the two sides of the record.
I was really just writing what felt right to me. I think that, on a personal level, I was going back and forth between dealing with what I’m dealing with right now and what’s right in front of me, but also knowing that in order to do that, I needed to do a lot of reflection. I didn’t want it to be like the before and then now on the album; I wanted it to sort of oscillate between the two because I felt like I couldn’t do one without the other, just mentally. I think it ended up sort of happening pretty naturally, that it was a pretty even distribution of the two sides.
I want to circle back to that line where you describe time as a certain feeling. How would you say time feels for you now?
I think there was a feeling of just kind of endless time before cancer to me. Even though I was very scared of dying and very scared of all these different things, everything felt so far away. And then to go through this thing where you’re faced with the possibility of dying, and that your life may be shorter than average, it really changed how I saw the future, in that I stopped seeing the future. Which I think in some ways was terrifying and empowering at the same time because I’ve never been someone who did a very good job of living in the moment It was like, “I kind of have to, otherwise, I’m just not going to get through this very well.”
I would say that time still does feel pretty uncertain, but not in a way that feels as scary to me. I think I have really soaked in that feeling of: the past isn’t real and the future’s not real because it’s never the future, it’s just today. I’ve heard that and been told things like in mindfulness and I was like, “Ugh, whatever.” But I feel like I feel that now. I feel that now more than I ever have in my life, which is, I think, a nice feeling.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Jessica Boudreaux’s The Faster I Run is out now via Pet Club.
