In Secret by Wildish

My first full-length album, recorded in just one day of autumn 2018. After over 5 years of writing songs and never professionally recording anything, I recorded 9 songs in 5 hours with my dear friend Tommy Babbitt while visiting my old stomping grounds in San Francisco -- the city where half of these songs were written -- after several years of being away, living in Paris and New York (where the other half of these songs were written). It was the day before I flew back to New York, and I said fuck it, let's see how many songs we can do in a few hours.

Tommy was the only producer I knew who still had the ability to record analog, on tape, and that was what I wanted for this album. We only did one take for most of these songs, and for the couple tracks that had more than one take, I still ended up choosing the first anyway. No matter what imperfections I wanted to fix by recording a song again, the first take was always the most passionate, the most heartfelt, the one with the most of me in it. And I decided that was the priority with this album, and what I was saying with all these songs, above anything else.

Here is my soul: imperfect, messy, raw, slightly hard to hear, not the crispest quality you're used to. But powerful, beautiful, and one of the realest things you're ever going to see.


Now, in April 2024, six and a half years after the day we recorded in Secret Studios -- due to a typical mix of doubts, anxiety, musician's block, depression, technical mishaps (like losing some of the stems before they were finished being mixed/mastered), and, of course, having perfectionist syndrome around it despite the aforementioned point of this album -- I am finally releasing this over-a-decade-long project, while I'm still (barely) not sick of these songs, written by a completely different version of me from long ago -- but a person just as valid as the one I am today.


This is my one-take, no bullshit-taken album, recorded analog and raw in Tommy's quaint music studio, which was appropriately named "Secret Studios."

After a lifetime of overthinking and perfectionism, the beauty of getting this album fully recorded in one go freely, quickly, simply, without overanalyzing, without fixing mistakes, without hesitating or thinking twice... As the raw, unedited, unhindered, un-performative, unfiltered version of myself... In Secret... was not lost on me.

I hope it is not lost on you, too.

angry feminist soul-punk-blues, a.k.a.
the sounds that occur when the world attempts to cage a wild woman.

** next show:
5/31/2025: 8-11pm
Eunice's, Hilo, HI