Destroying Everything Is a Bad Way to Start With a Clean Slate
You can move to another continent, end a relationship, change jobs, and ceremoniously announce the beginning of your new life.
There’s just one small problem: you usually have to take yourself with you.
On Destroy Everything, Emilee Petersmark deals with adoption, Korean identity, trauma, and past versions of herself.
We really love the idea of a clean slate. New city, new job, new relationship, New Year — preferably with new hair, half your contacts deleted, and the firm belief that this time everything will definitely be different. The less convenient part usually shows up a little later: the scenery has changed, but somehow the person standing in it hasn’t.
Emilee puts it more simply: “Starting over doesn’t necessarily mean a clean slate.” And Destroy Everything turns out to be less an album about getting rid of the past than a fairly long conversation with it. She wrote some of these songs back in 2012–2015, only to find meanings in them a decade later that she hadn’t noticed at the time. Imagine spending years in therapy only to discover that your 2012 self had already left the answer somewhere in an old song. Thanks a lot.
One of the more annoying things about the past is that it doesn’t actually have to stay the way we remember it. We can carry around a convenient version of some story, some decision, or even ourselves for years, then learn something new and have to go back and rearrange the whole thing. Destroy Everything is full of these returns: to adoption, separation from her biological mother, therapy, Korean identity, and questions Emilee once thought she more or less had answers to.
In the new episode of OTO Originals, we talked to Emilee about Destroy Everything, her first trip to Korea, her Korean name, therapy, old songs, and what’s actually left of the idea of “starting over” once it becomes clear that the past has no intention of going anywhere.
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The problem is, those are the exact versions of us that made decisions, got into relationships, lived through trauma, wrote songs, and somehow dragged us all the way to the point where we finally got to look down on them.
DESTROY EVERYTHING is out October 2 under Petersmark’s solo moniker, Lee Emi.
Pre-save the album
Watch “Clean Slate”
Lee Emi will celebrate the album with a hometown release show in Grand Rapids on October 3!
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Then she went to Korea for the first time — and the experience she had been worried about turned out very differently. It would be tempting to turn one trip into a tidy story about someone finally finding her identity, except identity is rarely that cooperative. What’s more interesting is that you can spend years thinking some part of yourself is foreign to you, unearned, or not quite real, and then discover that maybe the question was never whether you had the right to claim it.
Something similar happens with the music on Destroy Everything. Emilee launches a solo project while continuing to play with The Crane Wives, records all the guitar parts herself, and moves away from the band’s familiar folk and folk-rock territory toward something heavier. Not because her previous musical life was somehow wrong and needed to be canceled. It’s still there. Emilee just has room now for things that didn’t have anywhere to go before.
We tend to imagine change as replacement: the old self leaves, the new one arrives, preferably noticeably improved and with all its issues already worked through. In practice, it’s a lot messier. Old songs mean something different ten years later. A name that once felt foreign comes back with a different meaning. Something you once considered a mistake stops looking like one — or remains a mistake, but at least you finally understand why you made it.
So in a way, Destroy Everything slightly overestimates what any of us are capable of.
Destroy everything. Fine. But you’re still going to be there when the dust settles.
