My name Claire Siegely. I'm 32, trans, about as lesbian as you can get while being asexual, and that up there's a picture of me from 2016, when I was younger and on HRT and had more hair.
(and I actually never really looked like that. Even at the time I said "this doesn't look like me". I just wanted to have a picture on my About Me page and to date there still hasn't been a better one.
I'm a cooler person now though, so. Acceptable trade.)

Over the past 15 years or so I've tried and tried to write cool and exciting music. I pretty much never managed to finish any album, and got almost no attention for what I did finish.
So maybe professional music's not for me. Finally in September of 2023 I was just about becoming ready to hang up my hat for good when, one morning, I woke up with an old song by a favourite obscure, 2000s era internet musician in my head. I went to check what she was up to these days and the answer was: almost nothing. Also she's an anti-vaxxer now, or adjacent.

What about my other favourites from back then? They're: not technically inactive but nowhere near as active as they used to be,
and one of them has changed styles a few times over and isn't as good now.

I wrote quite a few pages in my diary about this. No one from the old days was still making the kind of beautiful, faerie-like (sometimes cyber-faerie-like) music I grew up on. I was a teenager for the majority of the 2000s, and I was never into chart music (for the most part), so my formative listening is video game soundtracks and stuff downloaded from the internet, often very midi sounding but still often vocal. Who's keeping that dream alive? Not my old favourites, that's for sure.

"Then I will", I thought. And I realised: most of them didn't make albums either, they released music one track at a time, for free, on websites they built themselves. And most of what I've made over the years has been short little EPs with only three tracks, and compilations of unrelated things. I've got quite a few finished or mostly-finished tracks that still haven't seen the light of day because they were written for albums I couldn't finish. Maybe the one-track-at-a-time model is what I'm suited to.

And uh, I think what happened next is: after a full day or two of 2000s nostalgia, this idea combined with another last ditch effort music idea of mine, where I get a phone call from a version of myself from an alternate 1976, and somehow through her rotary phone she sends me the .wav files of a big, grandiose, Yes soundalike album by her band.
I still haven't finished that album yet and will delete this last sentence when/if I do.

So, here's What This Is: this is a semi-improvisational music-and-general-2000s-nostalgia project where I play both myself as Webmaster and an alternate reality version of myself from 21 years ago, who's 4 years older than I was at the time. I've given her the name Emily Heart: I can't remember where "Emily" came from but it's just a nice girl name, and, "Heart" comes from deciding to identify myself a few years ago as "Kokoro" (Japanese for heart), as a sort of reference to a thing I don't feel I have the right to explain*.

It's to be understood that when I'm speaking, the text is this lovely purple, and when Emily's speaking it's this lovelier pink.

*It relates in some way to my aforementioned old favourite artists from 2000s era internet, and, I will never name them (unless unpredictable events transpire whereby I get permission).
They've sort of moved on, at least partially, and, look, I have to think about this kind of thing: what if, by some freak miracle, my music gains some amount of popularity?
And then those fans check out the artists I'm kind of homaging?

Imagine this: you're in your late 30s, maybe your 40s. You've carved out something of a consistent, comfortable life. Suddenly, you get a lot of attention from the fanbase of someone you've never heard of, because of stuff you made for fun when you were a teenager. I think some people would respond like "oh cool", but, y'know. I think some people wouldn't. I don't wanna take that risk, and, hey if you've been on the internet for as long as I have, you know that sometimes, well, fans are cool, but fanbases are so often rotten. Or at least obsessive, and that can be its own kind of rotten.