Book 9: DINNER PARTIES
This might’ve been the easiest song I’ve ever written. It felt like opening up a faucet, holding a glass underneath it and watching it continuously refill, faster than you can empty it. It was exhilarating and magical and intangible all at once. It was that cliché moment writers love to romanticize, when your emotional and intellectual minds serendipitously collide and you suddenly know exactly what you want to say.
It was mid-December of 2024 and I was scrolling through Pinterest when I stumbled upon this book cover.
The cover is so simple, yet equally complex in its details. Jackie Kennedy (already a loaded female figure in her own right), draped in a gown, lighting candles at an immaculately, over-the-top set dinner table. Wearing pearls and a beehive hairdo, her image reflects the societal standards (set by men in board seats of corporate America) of the 1950s and 60s. Effortlessly elegant on the outside, always striving to create an aura of ease and glamour that was everything but. Here is Jackie, a formidable intellectual and politician in her own right, dressed to the nines, fulfilling her traditional role to create a beautiful space for men to get the ‘real’ business done. The cover is, once again, the stereotypically ‘female’ dusty rose color - not too bright so as to not seem too promiscuous and not too dark so as to not seem too serious. The title, a sophisticated shiny gold, draws the eye away from perhaps the most telling part of the cover, its coyly small-font subtitle: reviving the art of the hostess book.
Being a hostess is a woman’s job and there’s an art to encapsulating it, following the impossible rules and traditions set forth by generations of men who were taught work in the kitchen is below them. Yeah, right.
Can you tell I had a visceral response to the cover?
My mind immediately started swirling with visuals and lyric ideas to describe them. For some reason, it all made me think of Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott and Emily Dickinson. It made me think of Sofia Coppola and her Marie Antoinette film. It made me think of female authors and creatives who got to write and portray the girlhood experience, a drop in the sea of stories told by men. I found myself fervently scrolling through Pinterest for inspiration:
dinner parties and a cotton candy dress
cream puff pastries and a game of chess
soft composure, calm like lilies on the pond
a hunt for closure and an iron bond
You can start to see how this all came together, right?
Pretty quickly after seeing all of these images, I wrote the first verse of what is now Dinner Parties:
The more I wrote, the more I realized this song was turning into something I had always wanted to write about but never quite felt properly equipped to do the topic justice. It’s pretty obvious that I have a super ‘girly’ aesthetic, complete with sparkles and bows on pretty much everything I own. I do it because I think it’s cute and brings a bit of whimsy and magic into my everyday life (we're all about romanticizing everyday experiences over here hehe). However, me looking a certain way has also led to people in the music industry (especially producers and managers) to assume certain things about me. I was often not taken seriously at first or treated with a particularly spicy flavor of misogynism where they’re surprised and unconvinced that I can handle things myself or produce my own music (yes, very much for real). At first, I was deeply infuriated with this happening over and over again and initially bent over backwards to try and look more ‘manly’ and ‘serious’ (ugh baby Anja!!) to be respected.
But as I grew older, I started to see the hidden power in this misperception - instead of being annoyed and try to adapt, I could use this to my advantage. If men will assume I’m soft and delicate and incapable based solely on how I dress, then the joke really is on them. I started wearing my bows as shields, presenting myself as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. In meetings or production sessions, men would talk to me like a child, completely unsuspecting of my true knowledge and abilities. They threw words around carelessly and confided in me because I was never seen as a threat. Then I would go and use this against them in later conversations and situations - unfortunately for them, they didn’t realize their own miscalculations until it was too late. Oops :)
As it turns out, my mom and her mom are exactly the same. They look and act delicate and hyper-feminine, only to carry immense strength, intellect, and capabilities underneath the satin facade. Suddenly, the song turned into an anthem of hidden power, an often underestimated, sophisticated skill that women pass on from generation to generation.
it’s delicate when it needs to be
it’s a relic of her history
it’s a butter knife with a dagger’s blade
a sophisticated masquerade
it’s long nights with bow ties
it’s scheming behind doe eyes
it’s a ribbon-wrapped Trojan horse
it’s all girlhood
I made it my mission to try and carry the idea of strategically hiding strength behind softness throughout the song; from the lyricism to the production and visuals. The verses talk about pale pink chiffon cakes and cream puff pastries, then in the same breath bring up iron bonds and armories and bows & arrows (a double entendre if I’ve ever encountered one). I was on a true, bona fide writer’s roll and completed the song by the end of the next day:
I have a particular affinity for the line about ‘beautiful little fools’. I kept thinking of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy Buchanan and her tragic fate - she was always misunderstood, treated as a fragile and frail little creature, draped and suffocated by Gatsby’s prominent shadow. Yet there she was, navigating a male-dominated world and trying to find her place in a society where she was always meant to be eye candy. Her line is poignant and heartbreaking because in that world, the best a woman can hope for is to exist as a beautiful image, unaware of the profound tragedy of her situation. I thought there was something empowering about taking that line and sentiment and turning it into a war cry.
there’s nothing
more lethal than a
beautiful little fool
With the song now being completed, it was time for me to tackle its production. I was listening to The 1975’s Being Funny In A Foreign Language on repeat over the holidays and the intro song to that album kept replaying in my mind. I wanted to channel the chaos of it into this song, making it seem like something bubbling underneath the surface, a hint that everything is not quite as it seems.
I played around on the piano and started off with some half step loops that I layered in a few octaves:
Then I tried playing a few messy sounding melodies and layered them on top of each other to carry the verses and pre-choruses:
I wanted it to sound a bit dissonant and chaotic since the lead vocal melody is so bubbly and sweet. The disarray of these piano fills add layers and parallels the meaning of the lyrics. I kept adding in extra elements that come in throughout the verse and pre-chorus, from synths to live acoustic guitars recorded by my good friend Victor Balconi:
I now found myself in the chorus and had a decision to make. Up until now, the production just builds and builds, becoming more and more tense and INtense. I could either continue this or release the tension by revealing an entirely new melodic structure. But at the end of the day, I am drama and drama is me so naturally I opted for the latter: I decided to do away with most layers and instead replace them with contrasting, classical music-inspired piano arpeggios that are a complete opposite of the jazzy, atonal messiness of the verses.
The arpeggios trace the underlying chord progression and as I was playing around with the sound design of this piano, I started thinking of the theme from the HBO TV show Westworld. I will forever be obsessed with that theme and how eerily well it weaves into the narrative of its corresponding show. My personal bias aside, the theme also features quick piano arpeggios spanning multiple octaves, not dissimilar to what I was attempting in Dinner Parties. I couldn’t shake the Westworld parallels, so I decided to make my piano a bit ‘janky’ sounding as well (in the show, it’s mirroring the sound of 1800s Wild West saloon pianos - you can listen to it here if you’re interested). I layered that with a couple of synths that make a cool ‘swirling’ effect on the high notes to add a bit more interest and texture to the otherwise open and empty chorus production.
I loved how different the chorus felt from the verse and pre-chorus, but kept being annoyed with the few uneventful beats at the end of each ‘girlhood’ sung in the lead vocal. When I was brainstorming on what I could fill this silence with, I somehow remembered driving with my mom, listening to ABBA’s Dancing Queen. I think it’s one of the best songs ever created (that production! those chords!!!) and ABBA in general is a huge inspiration for how I try to build my productions. Listening to this in the car with my mom felt like quintessential girlhood, sharing a simple yet deeply precious moment through a song that my mom grew up with and that will now be an integral part of my life as well. Since I was already using so much piano in the chorus, I thought I’d do a little ABBA-esque descending chord inversions action and that did the trick:
Before any live instruments were recorded and dropped in, this is what Dinner Parties sounded like:
While I was in the process of finishing up the production and sprinkling in some final finishing touches, I would often ‘play’ the song in my head while out on a walk or taking a shower. I had spent so much time with it that I knew every little production detail by heart so I would mess around with different ideas and changes in my head before actually implementing them in real life. On one such occasion when I was trying to work out the ending for the song, I was suddenly hit with the idea to use Tchaikovsky’s theme from Swan Lake in the outro of the song. I mean, what better way to underline the idea of strategically hiding strength behind softness than to take a song that sounds bubbly and sweet and end it in its relative minor key? Tchaikovsky already plays around with the concept of duality in Swan Lake (Odette and Odile, white swan and black swan) so using an interpolation of that melody in Dinner Parties felt like a cosmic wink. Plus, I was always a bit bothered by the fact that I hadn’t found a way to incorporate Swan Lake into one of the calendar songs. :) Now, the production ends in a minor tremolo strings chord that turns the sweetness of the song into a veiled threat:
Layered throughout the song are also live recorded drums (played by the one and only Chris Hillekamps), with a tinge of folk and country inspiration:
And lush strings (played by Yoed Nir):
That are supported by some MIDI (synth) strings for a tighter, more Pop sound:
As the song was being mixed and mastered by my best friend and confidant Noah Taylor, I redirected my attention to the cover and music video for the song. The cover was created by Vida Igličar, Slovenian illustrator, graphic designer and author - she is the fairy godmother behind all of my covers since the calendar songs.
I wanted us to take inspiration from the original Jackie Kennedy book cover I saw when writing the song, making everything look super dainty and coquette and hyper-feminine. My plan was to pull the ultimate ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’. :)
this is the cover brief I sent to Vida:
Along with some style and book cover references:
And THIS is what Vida came back with. Mind = blown!
At the same time, I was putting together ideas and visual inspiration for the song’s video. The initial images of Emma and Marie Antoinette that I was seeing on Pinterest when first writing the song were still so visceral in my mind and truly felt integral to the song, so I decided to fully embrace that aesthetic.
I decided the video would have two clear parts: a pink-drenched tea / dinner party that would represent the softness on the surface. The second part of the video would be filmed outdoors, a single walking shot where one-by-one, components of the delicate look would be taken away.
I rummaged my closet and found a dress that I had used in a couple of previous videos - but luckily for me, the context and accessories this time around would be so different that it would (hopefully!) warrant a double take to notice. :)
here it is in the Alone Together music video
and here (with the same lace shirt combo oops) in the teaser for the Hopeless Romantic album
I managed to find some lace gloves and matching handheld fan online, along with a straw (lace-trimmed, of course) hat, and combined them with some ASOS shoes I bought on sale back in high school, but never quite took out for a proper spin. It all coincidentally came together surprisingly seamlessly:
*side note: I accidentally ordered the gloves and the umbrella (parasol) in a child’s size so yes that umbrella is tiny, but I also cross-checked my references and that was also luckily a thing in the Victorian Era. HA! :)
I filmed the dinner /tea party portion of the video with my mom and dad in our backyard on a day so windy we nearly thought we’d have to call it off and get back to it the next day. We used paper clips and needle clips and attached and weighed down the background in every open spot. It might not seem like it from the images, but this background was 10x10 feet (3x3 meters) so when the wind blew against it, it acted like a massive sail (big yikes). The table and chair were both reused from the Midnight in Paris music video (you can watch it right here if you’re curious).
At first, I considered getting real desserts form a local bakery or Trader Joe’s, but then I found some artificial ones online that are specifically made to be used for filming. They look delectable and gorgeous, but they reeked of plastic and looked WAY better on camera than they did in real life (movie magic much, huh?).
The last (and I think my favorite) touch was a final shot that included me pretend shooting a bow and arrow - with the bow having an actual BOW on it to signal the double meaning of the lyric. He he he he :)
A few days later, it was time for us to film the second part of the video, in a wilderness reserve near our house where we also filmed the music video for To Tell You The Truth (you can see it here). The reserve is located in a shallow valley so the hike isn’t a loop but rather a straight walk there and back. Me, my mom and my dad put on our hiking outfits and walked about halfway through the valley until we found our spot. We needed a path that was long enough for us to film an entire single take of me lip syncing the song in real time, while also secluded enough that we wouldn’t have random strangers walking around in the background. Once we agreed on a location, I changed into my fancy Victorian get-up and began filming. My mom was walking backwards and holding the camera while my dad was holding a little makeshift trash bag basket where I could throw accessories as I was gradually taking off throughout the shot. We did multiple takes and messed up multiple times until the sun hit a gorgeous late afternoon light and the universe rewarded us with the perfect filming attempt that landed in the final version of the music video.
Dinner Parties began in outrage and annoyance, then blossomed into a piece of music that honored my mom and grandma, their strength and intelligence - a cunning and skill I’d consider a success to possess even a drop of.
It grew into a song about turning society’s preconceived notions and sexist standards into an armor, carving your rightful place in a world that is often institutionally working against you. It’s about writing your own rulebook on what it means to be a woman, honoring those who came before you, and passing on the lessons you learned along the way.