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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