Local nonbinary musicians Miss Christine and Alma Drake were feeling the urgency of the moment — urgency brought on by anti-LGBTQ legislation and rhetoric on both local and national fronts. So when the two got together to collaborate, the fruits of their labor manifested with “Indoctrination,” a slow-burning, blues-tinged tune they hope will become the Pride anthem of the summer.
Of the song they say, “The track centers trans and nonbinary people and the myriad challenges they face just living their lives and existing authentically in the modern political climate.”
A portion of the sales from this track on Bandcamp will be donated to the Iowa Trans Mutual Aid Fund, a resource which financially supports trans, nonbinary and gender diverse Iowans as they access gender-affirming care.
The accompanying music video also features dozens of selfies sent in by queer people and allies around the country against a backdrop of trans, nonbinary, gender and sexual spectrum identity flags.
Little Village corresponded over email with both Christine Moad and Alma Drake about the track, their collaborative process and what they hope others will get from the message behind the song.
The music video for “Indoctrination” has a big community component, with folks from all over the country sending in selfies. How did you coordinate this? How did you find the individuals that contributed?
Moad: With so much anti-LGBTQ legislation happening across the country, we wanted to open up submissions to queer folks and allies everywhere. It’s so important to see that we are not alone and we’re all in this together. We started planning for the music video in January of this year and began posting on social media platforms and our email lists asking for submissions in February. Toward the end of February, I spontaneously posted a video on TikTok and got lots more submissions from people across the country who were so excited to be part of the video.
Drake: I can’t remember who had the idea to ask for selfies, but it immediately felt right. And we debated about whether to add a list of names to the credits, but some people were nervous about being that exposed, which makes sense. In the end, we chose not to include the names of participants — and it feels odd not to give that credit, but it also feels safer, which is frankly extremely sad, but also why songs like this are so needed.
It felt like this song had been tucked away, waiting for the perfect moment to be released. That time is now.
Miss Christine
Christine, I love the story behind Miss Christine. Can you describe how you came to find this name for yourself?
This is a great question! The name Miss Christine has evolved alongside my queer journey. In high school my Dad randomly called me Miss Christine on a showbill. The name stuck and I’ve kept it, even though I am genderqueer and use they/them pronouns. As I am more femme presenting and unfortunately, often misgendered, people seem to miss Christine. The name has evolved into a play on words. The “miss” in Christine means longing to break free from societal expectations. Or, as the dictionary says, miss means “to fail to perceive, experience, or understand.”
Alma, you are a full-time sound therapy practitioner. For those that don’t know, can you describe what this entails? How does this practice inform your personal music endeavors?
Sound healing is ancient, I call it the ancient medicine of the future. There are hieroglyphics, possibly even cave art with shamans and drumming represented, Biblical references, references in Celtic mythology — I mean Bardic Arts, hello — and interestingly, the Chinese character for Medicine and the character for Music are almost identical. Very telling. Music and sound therapies complement each other beautifully, but one doesn’t need to be a musician to heal with sound. My musicality informs my sessions. I do a lot of interval chanting against a singing bowl, I play arpeggios on the harp of specific healing intervals, so on.
Drumming is a very important part of my sessions, because I love to use brainwave entrainment to drop people down into Theta so they are utterly noodled. Profoundly relaxed. Four beats per second is the frequency used, and it takes a lot of practice to keep that up, especially when it’s important to also vary the tone, the volume, accent different beats, so the person’s brain has something to distract it while their body settles down for a nap.
How did this collaboration come to fruition? Did you have a working relationship before this?
Moad: Alma and I met at The Mill playing in a Wild Women show. At the time, we both weren’t public with our genderqueerness. We stayed in touch through the years and I received sound healing sessions from Alma. During the pandemic, Alma gave me a tarot card reading over Zoom. I opened up to them about how lonely I felt and how I was starving for creative connection. Alma invited me to join a songwriter group that they co-founded with some local songwriters in the area. Through that group we got to know each other more and become familiar with each other’s songwriting styles. I was honored when Alma asked me to play bass and sing background vocals on their album in 2021.
Drake: We played together in the host band for the Wild Women Concert Series at least once, maybe twice, and Christine played bass on my record back in 2021, The Light You Can’t See In the Day. Several years ago I invited them to join a songwriters’ group my friend Chris Eck and I started way back in about 2012. That group has been such a fantastic thing for me, helping me grow and get unstuck from old habits and old ways of writing. Christine wrote some fantastic stuff that we got to hear in the earliest stages, which made hearing it on record even more fun.
What was the song crafting process like?
Moad: After one of our songwriter meetings, we tossed around the idea of writing a nonbinary anthem. Alma came to my farm on a cold fall day in October 2021 with a chorus. We wrote the rest of the song in a couple hours. It was so cathartic. Alma is a musician and songwriter I look up to and admire so much. To co-write this song together was a dream come true. We forgot about the song until last year, when I rediscovered the lyrics during a rage at all the anti-LGBTQ and anti-trans legislation in Iowa. It felt like this song had been tucked away, waiting for the perfect moment to be released. That time is now.
Drake: I had the chorus, and nothing much else, not even much of a melody or any kind of structure, but I knew it wanted to be something. Christine had just written Truth In Song, and I thought, ah, yes, a collaboration would be just the thing! We met and brainstormed around this idea of how people are being indoctrinated into hate, and decided what we really wanted to write about was affirming the gender we each feel is our truth, whether the paperwork agrees or not. We were both starting to really step into our own truth and power as genderqueer people, so it felt urgent and right.
There are some powerful lines in there, hard truths, painful truths, but I think Christine and I both have a very gentle orientation, and those lines are delivered with compassionate power instead of something like rage, and it feels very effective.
What do you hope comes out of the release of “Indoctrination”? Any future plans with the song/your work together?
Moad: I hope that it makes nonbinary, genderqueer, trans, queer folks feel seen. We are beautiful and valid and enough just as we are. There are so many of us and we have so much power when we all come together. On Sept. 13, Miss Christine will play the Friday Night Concert series in Iowa City. Alma will sit in as a special guest and we’ll play “Indoctrination” live together for the first time with a full band. I’m so excited!
Drake: I hope that a lot of people hear it and recognize their own family in the most beautiful way, and that it moves them to start standing up for real Fred Rogers-style love and affirmation — I like you just for being you, I like you just the way you are. Hey Governor, stop hurting my family!
We have no actual plan to work together again, other than I’m going to sit it with Miss Christine on Sept. 13 at the Friday Night Concert Series downtown and we’re going to do this song together. But we have such love and respect for each other that we’re bound to collaborate again. And COVID left us with the gift of knowing how to collaborate well over long distances, so it’s absolutely doable and highly likely.
