Pictured, homemaker starter kit, circa 1960something. The pills apparently “calm anxiety and apprehension, relieve pain, ease muscle spasm and elevate patient morale.”

Today, some back-story on my new song, "Cul-de-Sac." When I was 12 years old, I found an ancient 1960s kenmore vacuum cleaner instruction manual and an old envelope marked “coupons.” Inside that yellowing envelope was a disintegrating pack of pills for “tension headaches and anxiety.” The ingredients list revealed that the pills were laced with “Butabarbital,” warranting the tiny warning: “may be habit forming.” These pills were once known as “mommy’s little helpers,” prescribed to women who felt restless within their so-called domestic bliss. They claimed to “calm anxiety and apprehension, relieve pain, ease muscle spasm and elevate patient morale.”

I found all this behind the drawer of an antique desk I used to do my homework. The stuff had fallen between the drawer and the back of the desk and was forgotten until that random day. I know this is weird, but I remember writing about it in my diary, and of course, I saved this ephemera that you're looking at now (I save a lot of weird things, especially found objects). At that tender age, I already knew what the generations of women before me had endured (thanks to my ultra feminist mother and an old copy of the “Feminine Mystique” I'd “borrowed” from my older sister's room, which I only understood vaguely). Ok, I barely understood any of it, but I felt like I sort of got the gist.

This real life time capsule was like a window into a real bored housewife's reality, too physical to ignore. It conjured up all kinds of creepy ideas about what my life would be like if I had been born in a different time. Butabarbital is a barbiturate drug used as a sedative and hypnotic, and it was common for doctors to prescribe medication like this to women who were too smart, passionate, witchy or powerful. The pills usually contained a strong sedative as well as an upper (this one contained caffeine) to keep the woman in a perfectly zombie-like state, just “up” enough to make a pot roast but subdued enough to remain docile. By the late 90s, when I was coming of age, the very idea of housewives and forced female domesticity had been relinquished to bad jokes or retro sit-coms. But there was still a feeling that I couldn't shake, that a woman would always be trapped, always be made smaller, in some way or another.

Funny to think, but I feared that this was what domestic life would be like: a hard pill to swallow, a feeling of helplessness that you kept secret, stuffed in the back of a deep, dark drawer. Luckily, I found punk rock the very next summer, and my world exploded with possibilities (the more Ramones songs I learned on the guitar, the stronger and more unstoppable I felt). Oh, I never looked back!

So, when I read “The Stepford Wives” a few years ago—Ira Levin’s book about opinionated housewives being turned into subservient robots by the grinning “well-meaning” men in their lives—all those irrational fears from my childhood came flooding back. I knew I wanted to write a song about this feeling. That's where the imagery and lyrics for“Cul-de-Sac” came from: a young girl's fear of one day being trapped in a too-sunny, too-comfortable place, surrounded by powers that control even the inner workings of her mind.

It was only coincidence that the recording of the song took place during a world-wide pandemic, where all of us were forced to live our lives as domestic prisoners. It was an eerie double coincidence that I spent my quarantine in a sunny, comfortable Cul-de-Sac (where everyone waves hello, but no one can hear you scream).

stream cul-de-sac