Addison Rae got me back into running

I went on my first run in years this past spring because I wanted to listen to “High Fashion” and “Aquamarine” by Addison Rae on a run. Not much else, really. Motivated by an experiential goal; reaching for something I wasn’t, but could be. A runner? More like: a person who runs. The same logic must have put me in the forest path of Cowen Park in Seattle, irregularly between the years of 2016 and 2018. I didn’t necessarily, like now, want to run. But I wanted to be running through a forest. Okay fine, and I was a little orthorexic… womp womp. Still, I remember Taylor Swift’s comeback album, Reputation, feeling really good to run to then. I was a college student whose first voting-eligible presidential election garnered Donald Trump. I ditched almost-dates to drink wine with my almost-celibate best friends. Much like Bella Swan during her first hour of being a vampire, I ran through that forest with exhilarated defiance.

Kind of crazy that the next time I’m called to be running again, the political circumstances are eerily similar (albeit worse). The stained glass abstraction of liberal democracy cracks once more, delivering us right into another four years of heightened disarray. It’s not something that surprises me, so I’m looking at the renewed running desire as more correlation rather than causation. I’m never really at ease in this country. My civic disappointment has been on a monthly subscription service model (And what? I’ve been paying with my life?) for at least a decade now—constant. Palestine’s violent abandon has been grossly accelerated for over two years now. These days I wish I could unscrew my head from my body like the wand in a tube of bubbles and blow everything out, watch it all float away. Under these circumstances, I haven’t been inspired to start much of anything. So it took me by surprise when something other than an eating disorder got me up and outside, even before buying a proper pair of running shoes. Especially without a literal forest at my disposal, what else could get me beating down the concrete sidewalks of Los Angeles?

Evidently, my recent impulse to move fast and feel free was viscerally reactive, in part, to Addison Rae’s buoyant debut album; and inspired by her conviction to actualize. Can’t a girl have fun? Can’t a girl have fun? Can’t a girl have fun, fun, fun? She twists Cyndi Lauper’s 1983 assertion into a cheeky rhetorical question on “Money Is Everything”, a standout on Addison. She is ostensibly talking about the typical young and successful shit: shopping, partying, wearing out the heels of her many Louboutin pumps. But I also think that for her, “fun” is careful transformation. Being that she is a dancer, I imagine Addison understands the intersection of expression and structure – dancing as human behavior first, then as choreography. Evident in her music and her interviews, Addison’s greatest inspiration and motivation is found in that part right in between. Halfway from instinct to routine. I can’t help but think of the corniest American idiom… it’s about the journey, not the destination? Or even better, how Miley Cyrus says it, “It’s the climb.”

On the album’s opening track, “New York”, Addison pulsates with love for a place so different from her two homes, Louisiana and Los Angeles: Oh, God, I love New York. The music and her intonation are so charged that they culminate in the exact feeling she names on the latter end of the hook: Feel so free. A freedom she so values, she confesses, It’s my religion. Addison and her co-writers/producers, Luka Kloser and Elvira Anderfjärd, transfigure a feeling into music so effectively she could be singing about Cleveland and the impact would be the same. Addison values feeling free so much that she is actively devoted to it. This past September, I checked out Addison’s Instagram. The bio read: “Effort is ritual.” I smiled to myself like I knew the girl. Effort (is freedom) is ritual. If her lead singles got me to start running, this one is going to keep me running. I picture myself finally beating my 10-minute mile as the very nostalgic-sounding “Na-na-na”s come in. You’ll likely never see me double fisting protein bars across twenty-six miles of my city (because for me, the running is never about sport), but you can count on at least half a mile. Because running has become a portal to that sense of freedom. God! I have to be careful… if I fall in with the wrong crowd, I might start saying Running is my religion.

For Billboard News, over dinner at the Valley-classic Casa Vega, Addison, Luka, and Elvira discuss the making of Addison. Luka explains that their song “High Fashion” came about while trying to make another hit like “Diet Pepsi”. She laughs about how “experimental” it turned out to be instead. Addison concedes in slant: “Yes, it’s so experimental… but when we were making it, I didn’t even feel that way! Truly, I didn’t feel that at all.” She gushes, “That’s like my passion song.” I find Addison’s earnestness here, and all over the album, so compelling. Her work functions intentionally on impulse and desire, and she makes those incentives so accessible they become infectious. On this particular passion song she promises, I don’t need your drugs, I’d rather get high fashion. For Addison, artificial ecstasy is unnecessary. She accesses joy and fulfillment in the culmination of her success–not necessarily in fashion, per se, but that doesn’t matter. On Addison, she prioritizes the essence of a song over the story being told. Words don’t need to be taken literally. Here, “high fashion” means the height of glamor, of accomplishment, of attention. You can track this tension between diligence and dalliance throughout the record: on “Diet Pepsi”, the drink is symbolic of an Americana daydream, on “Headphones On”, a cigarette is an irrelevant vice because the true salve is music, on “Money Is Everything”, it’s not the money, but the lifestyle that—well, maybe it is the money. But she’s built this narrative so motivated by conviction that her cheery praise of capital reads as charming, even true.

In July, my long distance best friend Dan tells me she’s picked up running, too. “How long do you usually run for?” She asks. I’m giggling because I’m a terrible runner, and because I figure it’ll make her feel better to hear. “Like, a mile or two max. Maybe twenty-five minutes,” I tell her. Well, Dan tells me this week she ran hard and fast until she threw up, hitting at least four miles. Clearly, we are on either end of two extremes. Since starting and still now, I only run as long as it feels good. “Good” can be a quick five minutes or a slow forty. In an interview with the hosts over at Popcast, Addison explains, “I like to go somewhere until I hate it, or eat something until I hate it.” I know what she means, as evidenced by my reluctance to eat oatmeal for breakfast after a two-year stint in my early twenties, or by how I seem to have a new favorite coffee shop every year. My new feel-good approach to running is meant to curb this fate—to build consistency. The way I experience running now is sort of like… dancing in a packed room. You’re moving fast, the BPM of your heart is meeting the BPM of the song, you’re acutely electromagnetic. Especially as a person who continues to take Covid precautions, it’s given me back parts of an experience I’ve long lost. My girlfriend, Char, always references the song “Marea (we’ve lost dancing)” by Fred Again & The Blessed Madonna when we talk about it. I think, maybe, just a little, Addison found dancing for me again. On “Aquamarine”, Addison sings, I’m transforming and realigning. When I sing along, it feels like I actually might.