We Are Who We Are
by Michelle Dockrey & Tony Fabris

Do you remember the first time you learned
Monsters could be real?
Behind the teacher's back or behind closed doors
What their smiles could conceal

Sly little cruelties they denied
Betrayals of trust that ached inside
The ones that you turned to who replied
"Oh just ignore"
Did you find solace in stories
On the screen or on the page
Escape to another world, another age

Do you remember the first time you learned
Monsters could be slain?
The stories said the power could be yours
And that you could ease the pain

And sometimes the monster could be tamed
And sometimes you learned, when it was named
That sometimes the monster was the same
The same as you
The heroes and monsters together said,
"Come with us, you'll be safe and strong.
You are welcome as you are, where you belong."

(We Are) We are the lovers and the dreamers
And we will stand up, win or lose
(We Are) We are the children of the future
And we will make it what we choose
(We Are) We are creators of our own worlds
Every planet, every star
(We are) We don't need anyone to tell us
Who we are (we are who we are)

Did you imagine you'd ever find
A place where you could share
The stories and the songs and the many worlds
Before someone joined you there

Remember that all your loves are true
If anyone says it's not for you
Well just look around, you know what to do
You have a voice
We've all got a chair at the gaming table
And it's time for them to learn
We're here where we belong, and it's our turn

(We Are) We are the lovers and the dreamers
And we will stand up, win or lose
(We Are) We are the children of the future
And we will make it what we choose
(We Are) We are creators of our own worlds
Every planet, every star
(We are) We don't need anyone to tell us
Who we are (we are who we are)

It's gotta get better
We've changed the world, but we're far from done
We've gotta make it better
For everyone
It's gotta get better now
Hold your head up and be brave
You can't stop the signal now
So let's misbehave

Do you believe in a world
Where every person has a place
Where everyone can find their story
And see a reflection of their own face

Where nobody has to hide anymore
You know this is what our tales are for
To teach ourselves that there's so much more
That we can be
Until no one's voice is silenced
Until no one has to fear
We'll raise our voice, we'll draw the line right here

(We Are) We are the lovers and the dreamers
And we will stand up, win or lose
(We Are) We are the children of the future
And we will make it what we choose
(We Are) We are creators of our own worlds
Every planet, every star
(We are) We don't need anyone to tell us
Who we are (we are who we are)

About the Song

Vixy:
I like to joke that the original title of this was going to be My Geek Pride Will Be Intersectional or It Will Be Bullshit (reference to a seminal essay on intersectional feminism by Flavia Dzodan). That was never actually the original title, but it's a way of telling the audience and reminding myself what I was trying to do with this song.

It's about acceptance and belonging. It's about pride and connection and understanding. It's about healing and hope. It was about a month before I was able to perform it without crying.

About the Songwriting

Tony:
This song got written because of two things. First, was a comment from our friend Monica: I asked her what she'd like to hear on the second album, and she said that we needed something anthemic, like Mal's Song was on our first album. The second, was the night that President Obama was elected for his second term, which was also the same night that some states passed laws legalizing gay marriage. There was a feeling I had that I couldn't describe well in words. I felt like we were winning. By "we" I meant everyone who has been marginalized: Geeks. Women. Transpeople. Minorities. Liberals. The good guys. And by "winning", I meant that the people who have been trying to hurt us all our lives were visibly losing ground, whether it was the bullies who beat us up in school, or, after we grew up, those same bullies in politics trying to take away our civil rights and make it a crime to be ourselves. I jotted down a few terrible lyric ideas that very evening, as the election results were being tallied on our TV screen. Vixy didn't make use of most of the lyrics I wrote, but kept the basic idea and also kept the repeated "we are" motif. With regard to the song's subject matter, Vixy did not feel as optimistic as I did, because, as she rightly points out, we've got a long way to go; we haven't won yet. So her lyrics are tempered with the reminder that we need to continue to make it better. I think this is a good balance for this song.

There were some follow-on lines in the verses in the original lyrics that we removed at some point in the song's lifespan. For instance, there's a great video from FilkCONtinental, one of the most amazing performances of the song we ever did because of the wonderful audience participation, but that one still has the old version of the lyrics with the follow-on lines still included. Shortly after that, Vixy and I both independently decided we liked the song better without those follow-on lines. I was actually afraid to bring it up with her, thinking she's take offense if I asked her to remove lyrics. To my surprise, she agreed and said that she'd been thinking the same thing. Now, both on this recording and when we play it live, those spots just have some extra bars of really nice fiddle and cello.


Vixy:
It all started when Tony came to me and basically said he wanted to commission me to write a song.

This isn't normally something one hears from one's bandmates. He'd had this idea, this inspiration, but he hadn't been able to write the song himself. He gave me his vision of it (see above) and the lyrics he had so far (I think I used more of them than he thinks). He wanted it to be a geek anthem, but more. It had sprouted first from the feeling, shared by so many of us, of triumph over those childhood bullies who tormented us for just being who we are, but he wanted it to encompass the feeling of change and hope and social progress in the larger world as well.

It sounded good to me. My husband Fish and I had been lucky enough to be able to attend President Obama's first inaguration four years before (where "attend" means "stand out in the cold on the National Mall behind the Reflecting Pool, but still, WE WERE THERE OMG) and I had felt that same sense of wonder and awe and world-changing hope. I should be able to write this song, right?

Only I couldn't.

Stories of sexual harassment at SF/Fantasy cons were coming out right and left. Bigots were shouting vitriolic backlash against the trends of representation in fiction. Gamergate was in full, hateful swing. I didn't feel very hopeful about fandom.

I tried and tried and finally confessed to Tony in tears that I just couldn't do it. I couldn't write a song that said "we won" when so many of us were so very far from winning. I felt like I'd failed him.

He replied, "Just write it the way you see it."

With the freedom to write a song that didn't have to be all everything's-hunky-dory, I started over. I wanted to keep Tony's feeling of triumph and ground gained, but I also wanted to convey that making fandom a place for everyone, making the world a place for everyone, is an ongoing process. And that art, in all its forms, is and has always been a way to examine, discuss, learn about, and imagine improvements to our world and ourselves. Instead of a victory song, I wrote a battle cry.

I wanted this to have a personal feeling, to start with a personal story, but at first I went too far in that direction; I tried to start by telling a specific childhood anecdote that Tony had repeated to me once, thinking that each verse would be a different person's story. But it was too specific; I was ignoring the forest for the trees, and ended up missing the point I was trying to make.

Two works of art inspired me most and gave me the angle I needed. The first was the graphic novel Something Terrible, by Dean Trippe (trigger warning: reference to child sexual abuse). It's a deeply moving story of how science fiction/fantasy helped them recover and heal from childhood trauma. In particular, the page called "You'll Be Safe Here" brought me to tears. So many of us came to our various fandoms seeking a safe place to be ourselves.

The second and greater inspiration was an essay by my best friend, Seanan McGuire. She had participated in the horror anthology Midian Unmade: Tales of Clive Barker's Nightbreed, and she later wrote an essay about what horror movies, and Nightbreed in particular, had meant to her. That essay was never published, but when I read it as a beta-reader I was incredibly moved, and with Seanan's permission I've put it up here: Then, Midian: The Power of Going Where the Monsters Are (trigger warning for discussion of child sexual abuse and bullying).

It's about how monster movies taught her that the monsters could be defeated, even the ones in our daily lives that we don't recognize at first. It's also about how the terrible things we experience, even if they break us, don't have to turn us bad. Even if they turn us into monsters, we can choose what kind of monsters we want to be. We can have a place to belong.

"That no matter what you had done, you deserved to be loved too."

I had my way in at last. This song owes its beginning to Tony, but it owes its life to Seanan.

(PS: And yes, the "lovers and the dreamers" line refers intentionally to Jim Henson. We miss you, Jim.)

About the Recording

Tony:
The choir was of course the natural progression of the idea of the song; Mal's Song also had a choir at the end, but in this one it's more personal. We wanted a geek anthem, and so we wanted all our geek and filk friends to be a part of it, every one of us declaring who we are, and making the statement that we will continue to join together, and raise our voices to make this world a better place for us. We got as many people on the recording as we could get, every voice is mixed in there. Many of the voices came from quick-and-dirty recordings on laptops and earbud microphones, but it didn't matter, every voice is important.

The multitracked "oooh ahhhh" just before the last chorus is our good friend Molly Lewis, who is amazing, and if you haven't already checked out her stuff, go do so, she's wonderful.

I tried an experiment with recording the strings on this song, and it didn't work out too well, so I don't think I'll ever do it again. Some of the string tracks were recorded with Betsy and Sunnie playing simultaneously, but plugged direct-in so that the tracks were fully isolated and could still be independently edited. The idea was that the two of them mind-meld so well together when playing live, I wanted to capture that magic in the studio. But it turned out to be way more hassle than recording them the usual way (the usual way being independently, taking turns, with microphones). In the end, the sound quality wasn't very good on the plugged-in tracks, they required a lot more EQ and processing to sound right in the mix, and I even had to throw away some of the takes due to ground loop hum that cropped up at one point. The final good edits from those plugged-in takes are still in the song, but it took a lot more work to make them sound good than I had bargained for. Lesson learned.

When I recorded the bass line for this song, I wrote a particular melodic riff on the bass for the song's intro and outro, which I'd worked very hard on the details of, intending it to be the primary focus of the intro and outro. But Betsy independently had also worked out an intricate cello riff for those same spots. I was worried that I'd have to choose one over the other, but it turns out that they dovetail perfectly and make a great little moment at the beginning and end of the song. I'm very happy with how those turned out.