Graphic created by Hard Pass Creative

When Featurette was gearing up to release their first album a decade ago, the identity of Featurette Girl was formed. With 10 years to ruminate on the logic behind creating a character, Lexie Jay finds herself looking back at someone who experienced too much trauma to understand her own identity.

With the release of CRAVE, it was not yet clear that Jay had trouble being herself. Creating an alter ego of sorts let her dissociate away from herself enough so that she didn’t have to be anyone other than Featurette Girl.

“It’s quite obvious to me now I had a lot of trouble with gender in general,” she said. “I had trouble taking compliments. I had trouble being in my own skin.”

A year after their debut album, they released “Bang” and “Upside Down”. While neither song was her favorite piece of art, it was the continuation of the story of Featurette Girl. Jay and Jon Fedorsen introduced that era to an online publication that not only wanted to share their story, but would continue to do so.

Hi, it’s me.

The more that Jay created music, the more she found a way back to herself. The more she poured her personal tales into lyrics, the more Featurette Girl started to fade away.

Although Marc Koecher was always a part of Featurette’s creative process, once he officially became a member of the band was when the character disappeared. Turning the duo into a trio was a relief for Jay as it was no longer just her ideas and her vision. It was all of them having a voice.

In the song “EXIT” from their latest release, MULTISTATE, as Koecher and Fedorsen play “the angriest shit they’ve ever played” and Jay is about to scream the final bridge, the idea of Featurette girl is gone completely. Despite the heavy personal ties Jay has to the lyrics, she knows it is not just her song. It is her voice on the behalf of something bigger than her.

“It’s not me, it’s us,” she said. “We’re this three-headed monster and it’s not even about me.”

She understands that she is the face of the band. Although that is a completely separate tangent about a need for a new Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, she is just beginning to understand where and how the story began. She is more comfortable with her femininity than she has ever been, and has realized that even the music that wasn’t her favorite was her way of taking a left turn to know she was right.

“The problem I had with ‘girl’ is that I was just trying to get away from that idea,” she said. “Now I’m actively transcending that in a way where I don’t even need her anymore. I’m doing ‘us’ and ‘us’ is other people who are on my wavelength. I can reclaim myself because I wasn’t safe, but now I’m not only safe because I have ammo but also I’m powerful and I did that.”

Five interviews and two guest blogs later, the partnership between Featurette and Black is the New AP Style is much more than an impersonal email interview from 2017. We can agree that the thing about people like us is we can’t be stopped. Not in a way where we want to be stopped, but we don’t know how to stop, so we continue writing songs and articles and spending more than an hour on the phone because we are far beyond Featurette Girl.

Jay is no longer the freshly-graduated-from-opera-school young adult that had no idea how to sing into a microphone. She is no longer confused about what a band can or cannot look like. Between her and Fedorsen and Koecher, they feel unstoppable. Triangles are the strongest shape, after all.