Erica Mac aka Piano Punk

I think the most suitable answer would be that I identify as autistic. I also suppose that the descriptor of “late-diagnosed” would be appropriate. I am also the walking definition of alexithymia (I really struggle to identify and describe emotions, something that music helps me with) and I tick quite a few of the boxes for dyspraxia too, even though I am not formally diagnosed with either alexithymia or dyspraxia. I can somehow manage to play piano and other musical instruments despite being deeply uncoordinated and fairly lacking in spatial awareness.

I identify as lesbian and queer. My partner is non-binary and uses they/them and she/her pronouns. We’ve been together for six years. In terms of gender, I mostly feel like a brain driving around a meat sack rather than a man or a woman, even if I’m often performing “woman” and “neurotypical” at work or in my day-to-day life outside of performing. I really love the word autigender, even if it’s too esoteric and uncommon for most people to know and understand. I think that [autigender] really encapsulates the way that the performance of gender is inseparable from masking. Queerness and autism are linked in this way: both deviations from the “norm”, both pathologized in the recent past, both something that is hidden in the proverbial closet or masked as a form of self-preservation when encountering bullying, and both something that can be disclosed to people who are hopefully non-judgmental.

I love being queer and one of my favourite parts of living in Vancouver has been singing in my queer choir, arranging music for them, and participating in a queer choral theatre show that happened at Fringe. All of that has been paused during the pandemic.

How does your identity impact you as an artist?  

My identity has shaped every part of my musical practice. I used to write original music, and I still do sometimes, but I found that non-autistic people often didn’t listen to the words, didn’t resonate with my ideas, and didn’t understand the feelings that I was trying to evoke. People kept telling me to write songs about love or they would compare me to Joni Mitchell (which is nice but bizarre since the only thing Joni and I have in common is that we aren’t male). People really wanted to pigeonhole me as a singer-songwriter since I play piano and am ostensibly a woman, even if the subject matter of my songs was much more focused on the feeling of being an outsider, masking, grappling with what it means to be authentic, struggles around identity, and attempting to evoke a feeling of isolation in the listener, all of which are more common themes in rock and alt-rock than the genre of singer-songwriter.

I faced a lot of the grueling sexism that many women and non-binary AFAB (assigned female at birth) people in the industry do when I would do gigs. Bartenders would compare me to other women performers on the bill and tell me that I was worse than them. Venue managers would treat me like a mother figure to all the male musicians and tell me to rein them in if they were being too wild. Men would ask me if “[that was my] boyfriend on stage?” after I’d finished my set and was watching another musicians’ set because they didn’t realize that I could possibly be a musician myself. I would get hit on or have the small of my back touched by strange men after I’d just come off stage, and in my last time ever wearing a dress on stage, one particularly gross man told his friend loudly that he would like to “take me home” but that he was too old and would let his friend “have” me. That’s assuming I could even manage to get a gig, which requires quite a bit of cold calling and cold emailing or networking which is very, very hard for me.

The truth is that my current act, Piano Punk, in which I play piano covers of hardcore, metal, grunge, and punk songs, has allowed me to create a niche that doesn’t subject me to the abhorrent misogyny that a lot of women who write original music experience. I perform songs from heavier genres that are seen as “masculine.” I find that I get more respect due to the supposedly “masculine” nature of the music, as well as my classical music background and credentials. I wear a punk vest on stage and I get to info-dump to the audience about the historical aspects of each song whilst doing covers. Piano Punk allows me to escape from the expectations that I will be likeable, relatable, marketable, or attractive. I don’t want to be any of those things. I love that a punk aesthetic tells other people that you don’t care about their perceptions. You can be as rude, political, difficult, sarcastic, despicable, or villainous as you want. I have basically created a persona for my stage act that allows me to be free from masking in a way that I could never be in my day-to-day life.

I don’t aspire to tour as an artist because I know now how hard it would be on me. Prior to the pandemic, I made the choice to gig less frequently and to keep returning to the same venues because I wanted consistency. I don’t engage with the granting system which prioritizes marketability, universality, and sees disabled and queer artists as “non-commercial”, not worthy of international export, and not worthy of investing in. I have had to create a vision of what success means to me because the versions of “success” that I saw being held up as the standard in the music industry are really something that I don’t think is accessible to me as someone who is highly unique and deeply unrelatable as a result of that uniqueness.

Are there any challenges that come with being a member of the LGBTQ+ community?

Although there are so many autistic queer people, queer spaces aren’t really made for us. A lot of it is centered around bar culture, or at least it was pre-pandemic. I personally can go to bars as long as my partner comes with me, but I find my tolerance for the sensory aspects is so variable and I have to be willing to trade off my comfort for the experience. I love seeing Drag King shows and personally I find that Drag Kings are a huge influence on how I think about and create my stage persona (even if I’m not doing drag myself).

One of the weird things about being autistic and queer is that I didn’t innately “get” queer culture, probably due to being autistic and taking things literally. I thought to myself, “I can’t be gay! I don’t have a gay haircut, I don’t wear Birkenstocks, I don’t love Tegan and Sara’s music, I really don’t want to have to ‘U-Haul‘ with someone because I like having my own space” and didn’t understand that those are stereotypes and not requirements. I didn’t understand the strange sarcasm of “camp humour” and I took a lot of the self-effacing humour of the community literally. “The L Word”, “Rocky Horror Picture Show”, “But I’m a Cheerleader”: all of these shows were so perplexing to me and I didn’t understand what people liked about them or why they were funny. I had to meet other queer women and non-binary people and see how diverse they are to really understand it. I still feel like even though I get queer “culture” now and understand camp humour and enjoy queer representations in TV and film that it still sometimes feels like I have to pretend to like things other queer people like. I’ve learned saying you don’t care about a famous lesbian musician or don’t like their music can really offend or bewilder people. Especially if it’s pop music. People who like pop music expect you to also like pop music because they see it as universal, in a way that metal heads or punk aficionados do not. The queer community has it’s own taboos that you have to learn (for example: astrology is very controversial for reasons I don’t understand or care to understand) in addition to all the non-queer neurotypical taboos, so that definitely is a tough hurdle when you first come out.

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