On the Rise
Portraits of Tracy

In its minimalist soundscape, you can project all of the multifaceted angles and edges that make up a person onto the simple way a note bends. These are the pieces of music that make music obsessives, the passages of sound that you grip onto for dear life when you don’t know who you are yet, when all the information you can wring out of a song becomes your reason for creating anew. 

Speaking to Tracy Geneviève Amare, who named her project Portraits of Tracy (first conceived in her childhood bedroom in Baton Rouge, Louisiana) after the Pastorius song, it is clear that she has banked and stored hundreds of these musical lifelines and fed it back not only into her work, but the way she moves about the world. You can’t imagine that someone freshly of drinking age in our shared home nation could contain such an encyclopedic knowledge of so many things presaging her sound, certainly not in the de-contextualized era of short-form video, where time collapses and history becomes a moot point.

But then, ten minutes into my conversation with Amare (who informs me she stayed up the whole night prior editing video content to accompany the release of her EP, cheekily titled Q: From Where Do Our Primal Instincts Originate A: MTV!), she has referenced Ennio Morriccone, Surf’s Up-era Beach Boys, Sly and the Family Stone member Rose Banks, The Avanlanches, and “Want Ads” by The Honeycombs. At one point, her eyes widen as she exclaims, “Oh, I forgot to talk about space-age lounge music,” which she goes on to characterize as her genre of choice at the moment. 

She also talks about Tyler, the Creator – the first artist she heard that inspired her to try making her own music. “I shouldn't have been listening to ‘Colossus’ that young,” she tells me, referencing 2013’s Wolf as a major point of inspiration, “but it kind of changed me, even just from a harmonic standpoint. It's weird to feel nostalgia as a kid, but that's what his songs made me feel, so I just took that and ran with it.”

This is the thing about Amare’s music, and specifically this new EP, which riffs liberally on an eclectic and colorful version of pop music history—from the hardcore thrash of “This Song May Or May Not Be About An Alt-Right Influencer” to the Queen-inspired operatics of “Royal Courts (Great Misfortune)” to the lush balladry of “My Life is Loving You.” Perhaps by emerging from that same short-form video-driven culture, having first gained attention in the online sphere by making beat re-creation videos, she feels no allegiance to constrain herself to any one sound or time period. Any moment in pop music can sound like Portraits of Tracy, spurring my own fascination with her work. I tell Amare as much on our call, having heard the EP’s lead single, the zany synth-pop banger “Caught in a Jam,” on a whim while clicking through press emails: my first thought was simply I want to talk to the person who made this, to capture even a fraction of what she has rattling around in her head.

To dig into Portraits of Tracy’s true genesis—prior to her connection to Tyler, the Creator, or even to the hypothetically democratic world of online music-making—is to dig up her first brush with pop culture obsession, which arrived through “what I had access to every day, and for me, growing up, that was video games and TV,” as she recalls now. “My cousins, they were all boys, so it was all boy games. They had the Tony Hawk [video games], all the classics. I played that shit nonstop and heard the music in those games. I released my debut album on May 16th just because of Lagwagon, ‘May 16,’ [from] Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. I am not kidding you, that’s one of my favorite songs of all time. I didn't care what my cousins felt about these songs. It was literally me sitting there and just being transported by them.”

That wide range of influences fed into Amare’s viral attempts to recreate the songs she loved, learning her own taste and voice through mimicry, eventually releasing her debut mixtape and album within a year during 2021, which she then followed up with a concept record, 2023’s Drive Home. A dense, narrative epic blending strains of rap, soul, and psychedelia into an hour-long radio drama, Amare’s last record served as a semi-fictional re-imagining of her own upbringing as a trans teenager coming to terms with her identity through a stand-in character named Junie. After a three-year hiatus, during which she was “signed to a major, and then everything went to hell,” in her words, Amare decided to scavenge through old demos or half-finished musical ideas she had “lying around” in order to refuel her creative juices ahead of her follow-up project. In other words, if Drive Home felt cathartic and personal in its musical thorniness, Q: From Where Do Our Primal Instincts Originate A: MTV! lets the light in by harkening back to the sounds that made her, mining the manic thrill of a fresh start following a long period of silence.

“It's the first time that I haven't given myself a reason to have fun and create my work, and I think it shows,” she says of the largely solitary process of writing and polishing the EP, made in her bedroom over a period of several weeks. “The sound of it is so…cheery. I feel like I'm in a place where if I want to have fun, I’ll just do it. I used to ask myself ‘why’ a lot, and would block myself off from fun things in life. Drive Home just took itself too seriously. We’re humans! We don’t cry all the time! We laugh sometimes! I just wanted to reflect how I live every day now.”

Her everyday life, then, seems to still be mining the collection of sounds she’s encountered and internalized like they’re a core part of her makeup. Each track began with a germ of inspiration from whatever strikes a visceral reaction from the writer—no matter how obscure or unexpected the source material. Though “Royal Courts (Great Misfortune),” for instance, pairs its climbing vocal melody with a bracing guitar shuffle, all leading to its eventual build-up to walls of vocal harmonies that seem set on blasting through to the Earth’s core, meeting somewhere between the prog-rock troubadours of the mid-70s and her beloved Beach Boys’ more daring arrangements. Instead, inspiration struck with the track “A Smile and a Ribbon,” recorded by child vocal duo Patience and Prudence in 1956 and later used as the theme song to Welcome to Derry, a spinoff series based on Stephen King’s It. “It did something to my brain chemistry,” Amare says, attempting to articulate how the simple novelty song served as the pathway to creating her own complex suite. “I listened to that song on repeat for like a day straight. There was something about it that was so sweet, but in a way that made me scared.”

“I feel like there's two different types of nostalgia with music,” she continues, returning to her own internal desire to preserve a different time in her own life in amber to describe her process, fiddling with sound to strike the exact emotion laying dormant in her own memory. “There's comforting nostalgia, like The Avalanches, and then there's like horrible nostalgia—think, like, a crooner!” She laughs as she continues, attempting to set the scene in her song that bears no similarity to a Sinatra standard. “You're hearing loud saxophones, and it's the '40s or something: that type of bad nostalgia. I wanted to get closer to that.”

Other tracks’ points of inspiration are a little bit more direct, even if the writing process proved to be more grueling. Despite being the EP’s most immediate track, “Caught in a Jam” saw Amare initially doubting her own abilities as she struggled to spin her demos into something she felt was worth listening to post-hiatus. “I don't know how long I disappeared for, but I was, like, ‘I need to do something iconic, I just need to get delusional,’” she remembers, mapping out her train of thought. “‘I need to act like I’m fucking Queen after they put out A Day at the Races. In this song, it’s the 80s! Everyone’s on cocaine and having fun! I need to make a Duran Duran song!’ Honestly, it ended up being more like a Gary Numan song, but it's just me freaking out in my room. That’s the best way I can describe it. These songs came out of nowhere. I sat with my acoustic guitar for hours, sounding like a lunatic.”

Some other tracks draw a more direct line to their forefathers, like “This Song May Or May Not Be About An Alt-Right Influencer” and its clear debt to bands such as, for instance, Dead Kennedys – but the direct, blistering nature of the genre paired with the song’s back story is no mistake. For all the free-flowing, associative stories about writing and creating up to this point in our conversation, Amare can pinpoint this track’s origins much more plainly: “I wrote it late last year after I found out that a widely known white supremacist was listening to my stuff. I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ I posted about it on my Twitter and everything, and I got so many reactions telling me that I shouldn't have taken it that seriously, but I couldn't shake the…I don’t know.” She pauses: “It's just ironic to me, how you can outwardly advocate for the erasure of a group, and at the same time, enjoy what comes from that group and want to be us and dress like us and talk like us. On the surface, ‘Alt-Right Influencer’ is about just one person, but I think, for me personally, it’s transcended that. It’s how I feel about the whole movement.”

Perhaps the concept that ties the newest interaction of Portraits of Tracy together as a project is its collagic quality, pulling from all movements that Amare deems worthy of further iteration through her own lens, but also its ability to cut through all time and history to become vital to her own history. Every love song, even while pulling from a familiar sonic palette, still burns with the fever of a passion still active. Every grandiose climax directs your gaze upwards as you try to get your arms around the enormity of Amare’s vision, but every punk-inspired ripper stings right where she’s stuck you with her proverbial knife, no second guessing. Portraits of Tracy lives in the space age, imagining a world beyond our own, but doesn’t deny our very present reality. These artists she loves, no matter how disparate they sound when listed one after another, also reflected their own lived experience. Through Amare’s filter, these sounds still find themselves balancing on a knife’s edge at the end of the world.

“Every time I create, I strive to touch that little glimpse of perfection,” she agrees, hinting that a larger project planned as a follow-up to the EP is currently in the works, causing her once again to re-think and re-imagine how she can further expand the madcap, multi-faceted sound of her making. “It's just euphoria that we're all chasing, so that’s how I try to go about it. When I create, it’s about nostalgia, good feelings.” 

There’s a pause on the line as I allow her a second to expand on the thought, but she laughs with the same lightning strike of energy that hums through the technicolor dream of her work, driving her to cut through time to make each sound her own again. “Am I making sense? Am I sounding too crazy?”