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Finding Beauty in Death

I wrote this article in 2012.

Finding Beauty in Death

By Robin Hudson

When people meet Autry Carey on the street, they are generally surprised at how normal she is in real life. On her YouTube channel, AUTRY!, the 23-year-old posts videos of her original music as well as covers of songs by Adele and Tegan & Sara. But along with those videos are things like “Cinderella Lipstick,” in which Carey struts about in a yellow spandex bodysuit and wig, talking in a raspy voice about her new lipstick.

When she’s not making videos, she still lives a rather adventurous life. Apart from her life as a musician, she works as a driver for strippers. She drives them anywhere from the club to Taco Bell, even to the hospital. And she’s seen a lot.

“It’s really overwhelming,” she says, biting into a well-deserved taco after a long shift. “There’s constant drama, and drugs and alcohol. I drink sometimes, but I never felt the need to partake in drugs.”

She’s sitting in her bedroom, with walls covered in posters for bands like L7. She’s wearing a Freddy Krueger t-shirt and a leather jacket, and her bleach-blond hair is cut short and dyed black on the sides.

She’s quick to joke and has an incredibly positive outlook, so it’s shocking to find that the two moments in her life that truly inspired her to do music involved death.

When she was 17, she began a close friendship with a girl over the internet. Her name was Hailey, she was about 14 years old (“When you’re that age, it seems like such a difference,” she says.) and lived in Kansas.

Carey had always had this urge to drop everything and travel, not unlike Alexander Supertramp in Into the Wild, and the two girls had that in common. They began planning to travel, sometime after they graduated. They would go off together into the unknown and go on adventures.

But then Hailey died in a car accident, before the two could meet.

“I felt like that life path I had made died with her,” she says.

Hailey’s death cemented in Carey that the music she’d been casually dabbling in- since she began rapping at age nine- was what she really wanted to do with her life.

“I realized what it meant to live,” she explains. “I realized I want to do music, this is what I want to do. So I travelled and wrote music. I was expressing myself, living as I wanted to live.”

But the moment that truly changed her life and solidified her beliefs is also her best memory. Her grandfather created the “Death with Dignity” bill in Oregon, which eventually spread to Washington and Virginia (“I think it’s so weird that they don’t have it in more states,” she says). Like physician-assisted suicide, this practice involved helping a person pass on. When someone who is ill has reached a point in their life when they’re ready to die, they can purchase a rather expensive medicine that puts them to sleep, permanently.

In a rather fitting twist, when Carey’s grandfather became ill, he requested a Death with Dignity.

“If felt weird,” Carey says, “like my grandfather is going to commit suicide.”

His family surrounded him as he took the medicine, and when he drew his last breath, something happened to Carey.

“It was a crazy experience,” she says. “It wasn’t like God or anything, but I felt everything around me and I felt that everything was okay, like I understood everything. I had always suffered from anxiety and I was so afraid of death, but I felt okay. I felt like, I don’t have to be scared anymore. I know what I want to do with my life.”

That life includes making an audition video for The Glee Project, a reality show by Glee creator Ryan Murphy to find the next actor to join the Glee cast. At the time she had never watched Glee, but she saw numerous audition videos on YouTube, and her friends encouraged her to try. So she started watching Glee.

“It’s a ridiculous show,” she begins. “But it’s a really positive show and I really like what it does for kids, I recognize how it affects them.”

She didn’t start writing music until she found her sister’s guitar in the attic. She taught herself how to play and began writing (“It was terrible,” she says).

And because of her anxiety, she had terrible stage fright. But after playing in front of audiences for so long, she can sing in front of hundreds of people and feel okay.

She gets her ideas from her life and emotions. A self-proclaimed “sensitive person,” she has long suffered from an anxiety disorder. Many of her songs on inspired by her struggles. “But not all of them.” She even reworked her grandfather’s favorite song “Bye, Bye Blackbird” and played it for him in the hospital and eventually at his funeral.

And it took her quite a while to get her job. She was making music using the money out of her own pocket, but she never had a job and never really wanted one.

“I don’t like authority,” she laughs. “I know that sounds cliché, but I don’t like getting told what to do. I can take direction well, but I don’t like it when they tell me how to live my life.”

She found the job while she was dating a stripper. She found that a man would drive them around in a van, walk them to their door, and take them where they need to go. Her girlfriend at the time told her that it was convenient and cheaper than a cab.

So Carey put together a flier and had some of her other stripper friends put them up in the dressing rooms at the local strip clubs. And she started getting calls.

It’s intense, but she has always liked it when hard ways of living surround her. “It’s more real.”

As the interview draws to a close, she’s apologetic.

“I’m not good at interviews,” she says, “I just get so nervous. It’s not that I have bad vocabulary, I’m just not that eloquent.”

I’m sure her fans disagree.

Autry Carey

Email: autrysmusic@gmail.com

Number: 503-956-0667

Belief and Technique for Modern Prose by Jack Kerouac

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house

4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Law, Like Love by WH Auden

Law, say the gardeners, is the sun,
Law is the one
All gardeners obey
To-morrow, yesterday, to-day.

Law is the wisdom of the old,
The impotent grandfathers feebly scold;
The grandchildren put out a treble tongue,
Law is the senses of the young.

Law, says the priest with a priestly look,
Expounding to an unpriestly people,
Law is the words in my priestly book,
Law is my pulpit and my steeple.

Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,
Speaking clearly and most severely,
Law is as I've told you before,
Law is as you know I suppose,
Law is but let me explain it once more,
Law is The Law.

Yet law-abiding scholars write:
Law is neither wrong nor right,
Law is only crimes
Punished by places and by times,
Law is the clothes men wear
Anytime, anywhere,
Law is Good morning and Good night.

Others say, Law is our Fate;
Others say, Law is our State;
Others say, others say
Law is no more,
Law has gone away.

And always the loud angry crowd,
Very angry and very loud,
Law is We,
And always the soft idiot softly Me.

If we, dear, know we know no more
Than they about the Law,
If I no more than you
Know what we should and should not do
Except that all agree
Gladly or miserably
That the Law is
And that all know this
If therefore thinking it absurd
To identify Law with some other word,
Unlike so many men
I cannot say Law is again,

No more than they can we suppress
The universal wish to guess
Or slip out of our own position
Into an unconcerned condition.
Although I can at least confine
Your vanity and mine
To stating timidly
A timid similarity,
We shall boast anyvay:
Like love I say.

Like love we don't know where or why,
Like love we can't compel or fly,
Like love we often weep,
Like love we seldom keep.

For the Dead by Adrienne Rich

I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer

The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself

I have always wondered about the left-over
energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped

or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting long after midnight

Part of Eve's Discussion by Marie Howe

It was like a moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand,
and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still
and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when
a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop, 
very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you
your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like 
the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say, 
it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only 
all the time.

Locked In By Ingemar Gustafson

All my life I lived in a coconut. 
It was cramped and dark. 
Especially in the morning when I had to shave.
But what pained me most was that I had no way 
to get into touch with the outside world.
If no one out there happened to find the coconut, 
If no one cracked it, then I was doomed 
to live all my life in the nut, and maybe even die there. 
I died in the coconut.
A couple of years later they found the coconut, 
cracked it, and found me shrunk and crumpled inside. 
“What an accident!” 
“If only we had found it earlier...”
“Then maybe we could have saved him.”
“Maybe there are more of them locked in like that.”
“Whom we might be able to save,”
they said, and started knocking to pieces every coconut 
within reach. 
No use! Meaningless! A waste of time! 
A person who chooses to live in a coconut! 
Such a nut is one in a million! 
But I have a brother-in-law who 
lives in an 
acorn.