One year ago, L.A.-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist released One for Jackie, a stunning concept album about grief and loss in the classic tradition of Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night, Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen, or Eels’ Electro-Shock Blues. The titular Jackie is Madison mother, who died by suicide in 2019 after a lifelong battle with addiction and mental illness. At that time, Madison almost immediately turned to songwriting to process her complex emotions, something she’d done from an early age while navigating a difficult and dysfunctional childhood. Simultaneously, Madison was falling in love with her partner, so all of her emotions were running high.
The backdrop to this chaos and creation was the COVID-19 pandemic, and interestingly, it was during that locked-down time, when Madison was unable to tour and was trying to stay busy, that she made a fascinating and heartbreaking discovery. This revelation not only informed the album (particular one “rage fantasy” track, “One for Jackie, One for Crystal”), but provided a missing “massive piece of the puzzle” in Jackie’s tragic story — when Madison dove into the legal process to obtain her mother’s rehab-facility medical records, and learned that Jackie had been survivor of child abuse.
Madison acknowledges that it may “sound really odd,” but about a year after Jackie died, she had “an intuition or a deep gut feeling that my mom was a survivor of child abuse. I kept imagining my mom — this sounds really weird — in a bar as a kid, and I got really fixated on this feeling that my mom had been abused, even though that’s not something we ever talked about when she was alive. I got so intensely fixated on it that I tried to do background checks on people I knew to see if it would lead me to any information. Obviously, it wasn’t stuff that was recorded in any legal sense, but nine months later, after going through all the court processes to get her rehab records, I’d found out that she’d confided that she had in fact been abused as a kid at a bar in her hometown. So, it was very wild. I am very spiritual, and I feel in one sense my mom was trying to somehow kind of cue me into something. I just couldn’t let it go, and then I realized, well, I probably couldn’t let it go for a reason.”
Madison admits that a child she “wrongfully blamed” herself for her mother’s mood swings and misery, but learning about Jackie’s past gave her “so much more perspective and took a burden off my own shoulders, in knowing that my mom’s pain and suffering began before I was even on Earth. … Me unearthing this information just totally shifted my healing journey. I was able to realize I was actually not the origin of my mom’s pain and struggle, and also I can have so much more love and compassion for her. It just shifted the way I viewed my mom as a person.”
Now, as One for Jackie receives a deluxe anniversary reissue treatment — as One More for Jackie, packaged with four additional songs — Madison sits down with Lyndsanity in the Q&A below and video above for an in-depth conversation about love, loss, healing, revenge, forgiveness, generational trauma, spirituality, the making of the album… and how Jackie herself would react to this deeply personal body of work.
LYNDSANITY: You just celebrated the first anniversary of One for Jackie. Obviously there’s a lot to unpack with this record, but before we dive into that, as you look back at the past year, what sticks out to you?
RETT MADISON: That’s a great question. I think what stands out the most post-having this record out is just connecting with people after shows and realizing that the grief that I went through to eventually record and write songs about loss and losing my mom ended up resonating with some people. It’s definitely made me feel less isolated, and that’s probably been the best part of having the album out, just finding community in that. … I feel like that’s the point of why I made the record. It’s honestly the most validating kind of feedback that I could possibly get from anyone. Not that I would wish other people go through similar situations. But it’s just knowing that the whole goal was to reach people who might be having a similar really tough experience, and knowing that [listening to the album] has been at least one way that they’ve processed the loss of somebody they love and that it has been cathartic for them to have those songs.
At what point after your mother’s death in 2019 did you start making this album? Did you dive right in as a way to deal with your grief, or did years pass before you tackled it?
Well, songwriting has always been, ever since I was a tween, a tool for me to process really difficult chapters of my life — as I think it is for a lot of people who turn to music. And so, it was very natural for me not long after I lost my mom, maybe within the first few weeks to a month, to start picking up my instruments and processing in real time probably the hardest emotions I’d felt at that point in my life. A lot of people maybe turn to journaling or to a diary, and songwriting is just like my journal. It was almost immediately, very, very soon after I lost my mom, that I was writing, and then it was a few [more] years, because the only thing that was really coming up for me was still processing different aspects of the way my mom passed and uncovering different traumas that my mom had survived. And there were also a few songs on that album that have more to do with me falling in love with my partner. That also happened not long after I lost my mother, but I think after a few years, probably by 2021, I realized that most of the songs I had written in the span of 2019 through 2021 were largely to do with grief. And I felt to kind of bookend or close a part of that chapter of my journey, I needed to record it and to put it and compile them together. By the time I recorded the record, it was in 2022.
It’s interesting that you were falling in love while you were freshly grieving. A lot of people in your situation would not be in any position to get into a relationship.
I wasn’t expecting to fall in love with my partner, and I felt very closed off to that, honestly. But it just so happened that a friend in a very sweet and kind of middle-school way matched us together a few months after I’d lost my mom. I went into everything, even the couple dates we had, with a very casual mindset and was very candid: “I just lost my mom. I don’t know how available I think I really am going to be.” And my partner just created such a safe space for me. They very much were like, “You don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to talk about, but if you want to talk about any of that with me, I’m here to listen,” and was just so patient. We’d known each other. We were acquainted. We had been in the same a friend group. We had a lot of mutual friends, even though we weren’t super-close before we dated. And they just ended up revealing themselves to be just this wonderfully kind, grounded, and incredible person. Honestly, falling in love with them was such a crucial part of my healing journey as well, because while I was really reeling and going through the hardest thing I’d ever experienced in life — I’m going to get emotional talking about it — I was simultaneously experiencing the most love and kindness that I’d ever received from somebody romantically, ever. I just felt a lot of safety with them, pretty immediately, and very cared-for. And we’re still together. It’s been probably five and a half years we’ve been together. But it was a wild experience for me to lose my mom and then almost immediately fall in love in a real way for the first time.
And then the pandemic happened very shortly after the loss of your mother. That’s a lot to deal with at once: grief, an exciting new relationship, a world in chaos, isolation and lockdown, and then not touring or doing gigs, so your livelihood is taken away. Did making this record sustain you or help when all that stuff was going on as well?
Oh, yeah. I think in the way [the pandemic] informed the record, because so many of us were just at home and having a lot of time for self-reflection. I feel like I was able to really go inward in that period of time. Maybe that is part of why the record ended up coming out the way it did, because I just had way more time to sit in those heavy feelings and keep writing about different angles of what I had been through. Also, I feel like had it not been a time where I was living off of unemployment in California and just staying home and had more time than I’d ever had before on my hands… this is going to sound weird, but I was able to go through the legal process to get some medical records of my mom’s from some of her previous stays at rehab facilities in the early 2000s. And through those, I uncovered that my mom was a survivor of child abuse, which also ended up informing part of this record. There’s a song where I have a rage fantasy, “One for Jackie, One for Crystal,” about going back in time, essentially, and murdering a man who hurt my mom as a kid. That was huge, massive piece of the puzzle for me, and uncovering that and having more compassion and understanding about my mom’s struggles here on Earth wouldn’t have happened, I guess, had I not had a lot of time on my hands and could actually take the time to figure out how to go through a court where my mom died and get the right to retrieve her medical records as her only living child. Just kind of all that paperwork that I probably never would’ve gotten around to doing.
Wow, that’s really heavy. So, you did not know about the abuse at all before you obtained these documents?
Well, this is going to sound really odd, but probably about a year after I lost my mom, around the year anniversary of her passing, around January 2020, I had a really unshakeable… the only way I can describe it is just an intuition or a deep gut feeling that my mom was a survivor of child abuse. I kept imagining my mom — this sounds really weird — in a bar as a kid, and I got really fixated on this feeling that my mom had been abused, even though that’s not something we ever talked about when she was alive. I got so intensely fixated on it that I tried to do background checks on people I knew to see if it would lead me to any information. Obviously, it wasn’t stuff that was recorded in any legal sense, but nine months later, after going through all the court processes to get her rehab records, I’d found out that she’d confided that she had in fact been abused as a kid at a bar in her hometown. So, it was very wild. I am very spiritual, and I feel in one sense my mom was trying to somehow kind of cue me into something. I just couldn’t let it go, and then I realized, well, I probably couldn’t let it go for a reason.
That is wild that you had such a specific idea of what had happened.
It is, but then sometimes I think about this stuff and I’m like, “Well, my mom did carry me in her womb…” I don’t know how that stuff works, but maybe there’s something scientific to that.
I don’t assume you know who it was at that bar, or if that person is still alive and might have actually heard “One for Jackie, One for Crystal.”
I have my own personal speculations that for obvious reasons I probably can’t go too in-depth about. But if that person is in fact alive, I’m sure they’ve heard something about this song or this record.
You said your mother never spoke with you about what happened, although you suspected it. Did confirming your suspicions bring you a certain clarity or forgiveness regarding you endured as a childhood?
Yeah, absolutely. I think the word “clarity” is definitely something that I felt. For a while, even before my mom passed, I had started to reflect on my upbringing and go through my own process of grieving my childhood in a way, trying to make peace with the way I grew up. … I think even before I knew that, I had still had so much love for my mom, because she really was a beautiful person and a wonderful person, even though her own struggles definitely deeply impacted me as a kid. But yeah, it gave me so much more perspective and took a burden off my own shoulders, in knowing that my mom’s pain and suffering began before I was even on Earth.
I don’t want to speak for everybody with this experience, but in my experience, being a child of somebody who struggled with alcoholism and mental illness, because I was often alone with my mom, there were a lot of moments that I would internalize or blame myself for however my mom was treating me that day. I just blamed myself a lot as a kid and as a tween, wrongfully blamed myself for my mom’s pain, trying to rationalize: “Why is my mom so upset? Maybe it’s [me].” I think some kids tend to do that, and me unearthing this information just totally shifted my healing journey. I was able to realize I was actually not the origin of my mom’s pain and struggle, and also I can have so much more love and compassion for her. It just shifted the way I viewed my mom as a person. I think I realized, one, what a miracle it was for her to make it as far as she did in life in terms of actual lifespan, and two, it made me angry on her behalf, that if people had knowledge about her being abused, there wasn’t anybody to interfere and protect her as a kid. Really, from an adult perspective, finding that out about my mom really upset me, but for the little-kid part of myself, it released me from a lot of blame.
What was your family dynamic growing up?
Because I was my mom’s only child, I feel like there was nobody really else, no other peer or person, to share that burden of being the kid in the household of somebody struggling severely with alcoholism and mental illness. I often felt just very codependent, just very much in that with my mom without anyone else to intervene
Was there a lot of parentification going on?
Absolutely. I would say all of my material needs were provided for by my parents, especially my dad, but I did feel very much the responsibility of a caretaker, in terms of both emotionally and sometimes just quite literally, without going into really detailed stuff. But there would be nights — and I think this is a common experience of kids of parents who are struggling with addiction — the role reversal of being like, “OK I have to make sure I get my mom to bed,” or “I might have to get my mom dressed today.” There was stuff to that degree of totally dysfunctional role reversal. I’m lucky that I’ve had a lot of therapy and a lot of time out of that environment to be in a space where I’m totally safe for many years now, to kind of be able to have perspective on that. Obviously, when I think of my younger selves, I don’t excuse the way I was treated in those situations. I don’t want to play that down. But I do have a lot of deep compassion for the struggles that my mom went through, and even though I can candidly speak to the truth of what those experiences were, I think it’s important to eradicate that shame. I don’t harbor any blame or anger anymore for those situations.
Were there suppressed memories or resentments that came up while making this record that you’d forgotten about, and did this artistic process help you make peace with that stuff?
Yeah, totally. Because my relationship with my mom when she was alive was often complicated, and there were dynamics there that were nuanced, I feel like when she passed, it wasn’t just grief that was coming up for me — it was also a retrospective of all the stuff, maybe some of the stuff we had had unresolved when she was alive as well, kind of all coming to the surface at once. Which was definitely a lot to heal through and deal with at once. … There’s one song that’s on the album that, oddly and coincidentally, I wrote actually three weeks before my mom passed away, “Death Don’t Make a Bitch an Angel.” … And this is just a weird side note, but I didn’t know it at the time, but the first time I was playing it live at a very small writer’s workshop thing in L.A., that was around the same time on the same evening that my mom was actually passing away — while I was playing this song. That is also a weird, eerie coincidence. But clearly before my mom passed on, I was already starting to work through some complicated feelings of both of anger and resentment about whenever it was going to be her time to pass. I just didn’t know it was going to be so soon. It doesn’t automatically erase the pain that we’d experienced or that I felt had happened me as a kid. It doesn’t just immediately absolve it. And also, I was dealing with that realization for myself. I mean, it’s impossible to navigate life without hurting anybody or having some kind of conflict interpersonally. So, I was also having this realization while writing the song that whenever I go, death doesn’t immediately absolve me of the ways I’ve hurt other people. It doesn’t immediately wipe the slate clean for the people that have hurt me, and vice versa. I would say that, honestly, on a record that is so largely about death and loss and mental health and abuse and all that, that that is probably one of the darker songs on the record.
You mentioned at the beginning for this interview that One for Jackie has resonated with a lot of fans who are dealing with their own grief, and I imagine “Death Don’t Make a Bitch an Angel” is definitely one that stands out, especially in a live setting. It must have been pretty intense when you first started performing these songs in front of strangers.
Yeah, I think when I was first writing the songs and starting to workshop and perform them, there would definitely be times onstage where the emotion still felt very present in my timeline. There would be some nights where it would be difficult to finish a song. I would always sing it and get through it, but it would be almost like, “I can feel tears well, and if I don’t hold them back just enough, I’m not going to able to actually literally physically sing this song.” It would get really intense for me personally. And I think there was a learning curve as well. I was sharing them so soon after my mom had passed… and I was having a lot of people come up to me after shows or message me, and they would also be vulnerable and share sometimes in very detailed accounts of how they lost loved ones by suicide or other circumstances that were traumatic. I remember I would leave some shows and just cry in my hotel room, because I was still so close to my own loss. I was really walking away and taking home a lot of folks’ own stories of grief, and it was hitting me in a way where it was hard to just leave it at the venue. Now I’m a bit better at being able to be present with somebody if they’re sharing something with me that’s very personal, and I can be in that moment with them, but leave that in the moment without taking it back to my hotel room. It’s like, you’re hearing really intense [stories about] folks who have lost the people that they deeply love, and early on it was hard not to take some of that on. … There’s definitely been some self-care moments where I’m like, “I’m just not going to [do a meet-and-greet] tonight. I know I won’t be able to really be present.”
Are there certain songs off One for Jackie that seem to resonate most with your audience?
The songs that I’ve noticed people mostly mention are probably “One for Jackie, One for Crystal” and “Flea Market.” Unfortunately, there are a lot of people that are either survivors themselves of sexual abuse or love people that have been survivors. “Flea Market” is more stream-of-consciousness about grief, but also it’s a song that I wrote a lot about the guilt and shame that I’d felt as a kid, and I think there’s a lot of folks that have found themselves in similar situations that I grew up in, where maybe they’re on their own journey of hopefully releasing self-blame and shame and guilt for stuff that really was never in their control or power as kids.
We’ve touched on spirituality a bit. Your website has this whole cool tarot card section, and some of your other song titles are “Fortune Teller” and “Mediums, Therapists, and Sheriffs.” Where does your connection to spirituality or the supernatural come from?
I was raised very religious in the community that I grew up, in West Virginia. I was raised very Catholic. And as a young kid, my other “mom” who I’d take piano lessons from, who I stayed with a lot the first time my mom went to rehab, was also very spiritual and religious — not Catholic, but Christian. She had a ton of faith, but in a way that was less about the rules of any particular religion. It just felt like she was very connected to God, her belief and her version of what God was to her. And I feel like that probably influenced me as a kid to be open to spirituality. I was so surrounded by and immersed in religion as a kid, and then when I got a bit older, I had my own doubt about religion and didn’t maybe feel as welcomed anymore within the institution of the Catholic Church, just because obviously I’m a queer person and I grew up in a community where the Sunday school teachers were very much like, “If you’re gay, you’re going to hell. If you’re divorced, you’re going to hell.” There’s a lot of that rhetoric, and as I got older, that didn’t really feel right anymore and didn’t align with who I am as an individual. Not that I judge anybody for their vehicle in which they connect to spirituality, but I was realizing that for me personally, Catholicism was no longer my pathway.
As I got older, and I would say during the first few months after I lost my mom, I totally was like, “Nothing matters. None of this has a purpose. It’s just nothing when we go.” I went very, very dark, understandably. I’d just experienced a really traumatic way to lose a parent, so I had totally lost belief or hope in anything for months. And then I got to a point where I was like, “You know what? This really cynical. This mentality that I’ve been carrying with me doesn’t change the way my mom left Earth, but I could maybe be more open to a little magic and a little spirituality or go talk to a medium. … I could just change my perspective on this.” Again, it doesn’t change the facts of how my mom left, but it does make it easier for me and puts a little magic and hope back in the world for me. So, I got really into talking with mediums and I got really into signs [from the universe]. I was becoming open again, having these experiences… like having this intuition or deep knowing of something having happened to my mom and then months later, it being a very specific detail that was in her own life. There was definitely just intuition stuff that was coming up for me. It’s not like any religious framework, but I just became open to spirituality again. I want to be spiritual because I want to be connected to the spirit of somebody I loved that’s not here. Now spirituality for me is about continuing some kind of connection or relationship with those that I love that have passed on. It’s less for me about any certain kind of religious practice.
What are your beliefs about the afterlife?
Honestly, the older I’m getting, the more I can’t even begin to know what happens. If it really is nothingness [after we die], I’m not going to know regardless, so I guess I’m not going to worry about that option. I won’t know the difference. If that is the case, it kind of brings me a weird comfort being alive. The only thing I do know is I feel some kind of connection to my mom’s energy and to other people that I’ve lost. I can’t even scratch the surface on how that works or what that is, but all I can hope for is that maybe I’ll get to run into them again in some capacity. I don’t know what that means, if there’s just some kind of different consciousness that I’ll inhabit one moment, and I don’t know what that looks like. But I think my idea of the afterlife is me just hoping I’ll run into some people again in some way, shape, or form.
If and when you reunite your mother in the next realm, whatever that may look like, what do you think she would have to say about One for Jackie? Sorry if that’s a weird question.
No, that’s a great question. I think part of her would be really proud of me. A lot of struggle for her in her life was repressing and not feeling safe enough to share what she’d actually survived in her lifetime, so I think on one hand, she would be really proud — because I’ve totally gone the opposite direction than most folks in my family, where I’m just very like, “This is what happened to the person I love. This is what happened to me. I’m not going to be ashamed anymore and hide and keep this dysfunction ongoing by repressing or hiding it.” And now for a living, I literally yell about all that stuff onstage! So, I think she’d be proud of the bravery and courage it takes to be as vulnerable as I’ve been. But then I could see her simultaneously probably being like, “Hey, you’ve gotta write some songs that are not about me! Let’s move on!” I think she would kind of tease me a bit about it.
This Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity. Watch Rett Madison’s full, extended video interview in the YouTube player at the top of this article.
If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts, call 911, or call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or 1-800-273-8255 or text HOME to the Crisis Text Line at 741741.