In stark contrast to the decorative extremes of a wide swath of contemporary notebook culture, there’s nothing fancy about the way Alexa Dirks, aka Begonia, gets her ideas down on paper.
“I really like these ones from shoppers that basically look like ‘80s and ‘90s school notebooks,” Dirks says over the phone from Winnipeg. “I’m really rough with my shit. I’ve tried to get nicer notebooks, people have bought me nicer notebooks, and I’m ripping them to shreds. I’m not delicate with these things. Because if something feels like, ‘Oh, this is a good idea,’ I rip that page out or I dog-ear it. If I’m in a Shoppers or a dollar store, and I see something that looks like it has enough pages for what I want to do, and it looks as nondescript as anything, I’ll buy it and just shred it.
“I’ve tried to be aesthetic, I’ve tried to be fucking Pinterest, man, it doesn’t work for me,” she adds. “Everything just ends up looking like a dog ate it and spit it out.”
It’s a kind-of-surprising reveal when one considers Begonia’s kaleidoscopic pop music, the universe of which Dirks fleshes out 360 degrees into an encapsulating ecosystem of glitter and glam that fits the tunes to a ‘T.’ But such is the case often when one gets a glimpse behind the curtain.
Fresh out of the studio after putting the finishing tracking touches on a new record, Dirks spoke at length about her journaling habits and history, and offered some advice to those looking to switch up their Notes app for an analog experience.
What are your earliest experiences of using a notebook like?
I used to keep a diary as a kid before I could write. So I looked back on those diaries and series of scribbles, and then when I could kind of write, entries were like, “I hate Scrot!,” like, just different boys in classes who I didn’t know how to spell their names. It would just be me venting about people who I thought were bullying me or whatever, but you could never read it back. It was in a different language. And then, because I was always kind of composing in my mind, I’d write songs and stuff, but didn’t really know that’s what I was doing. So I was always writing in journals or books, and I was a super Christian kid, so I’d have a prayer journal. And I would write all my thoughts and prayers. I had different journals for different things. There’d be, like, the journals that were more like a diary, for venting my shit, and then the prayer journal that was like, ‘dear Lord, bless me.’ And then there was a journal of, I guess you would call it poetry, but at the time, I wasn’t like, ‘I’m a poet!’ I was just writing random shit, but I always remember having something on the go as a child.
How has your relationship to journaling evolved over the years? Has it gone through phases?
I go through different phases of journaling, definitely. Like, journaling thoughts, but I’m always of the mind, especially more so now, that even if a thought is incomplete, it’s always useful to write it down. And if we’re thinking artistically, artistic practice-wise, I go back constantly when I’m starting a new album or a new project. I’ll take journals or books that I’ve written random thoughts in, or even my schedules from the last three years or something, and stack them up and go through and see what I can mine. Because you never know what little nugget you’re gonna find. Like, ‘Oh, this is something that’s on my mind. I’m just gonna write it down, but maybe it’ll go nowhere.’ And then I look back two years later and I think, ‘That’s something that inspires me to do something else.’
Could you walk me through your songwriting process for a specific song, focusing on the journaling part of things?
“Fear” is on my first album, and it’s basically a laundry list of things I’m afraid of, and then a series of screams. I had gathered a bunch of journals. Matt Schellenberg, Matt Peters, and Marcus Paquin and I were all in Marcus’ basement in Montreal. We were there for four days to just write music. And I had brought four journals along, some older ones. I had been very frustrated because there was one song that I thought was amazing that I showed Marcus, and it just did not thrill him in the slightest. And I was like, ‘I’m trash.’ I remember kind of pouting and going upstairs to the kitchen, making myself a coffee and crying, being like, ‘Why do I even do this? I’m garbage.’ And then going back downstairs, and they had started this bass riff that became the riff for “Fear.” It’s this really driving, very frenetic bass riff, and they had started this beat. I was just sitting there, so fucking pissed at everyone and myself, and I was flipping through journals. I’m like, ‘Something has to inspire me because I’m not going to be the one who’s going to say I’m done for the day,’ even though I felt very done for the day. And then I saw this list: fear of everyone, fear of harnessing power, fear of screaming too loud, fear of wasting an hour. I had just written a list one day when I was frustrated. And then I thought, ‘Oh, this is exactly what this song is, exactly how I feel right now. And mostly it’s my anger towards myself and towards everything else that is coming from a place of fear — of not being good enough or the imposter syndrome of it all. I ripped it out of the journal, and then just started riffing on a live mic, and it became that song.
Do you normally use your journal a lot in the studio?
I always have it, and it’s a safety thing. Sometimes it’s not applicable. It’s always a mechanism I use either first or if something’s not working. Then I’ll be like, ‘Okay, I’ll go back here and see if something, some lyrics, can spark something.’ And sometimes it doesn’t work, sometimes I try to fit certain ideas into a new musical idea, and they don’t fit together. But I always have them there, and I’m always ripping pages out. In Marcus’ studio, he would say, ‘I always knew when you were there, because there would be little paper pieces everywhere from when you rip out pages of a journal that are hole-punched or whatever, and you get those little tiny frayed pieces.’
It must come in really handy, all the note-taking around the creation of the record.
It’s actually so fun to look back on. I use the computer more now than I used to, for gathering all my thoughts in one place. People have been trying to get me to learn how to make spreadsheets for so long. Because I think for my team, having things in docs and spreadsheets is a lot easier to share than me taking pictures of a mangled piece of paper and being like, ‘Does this work for you?’ So I’ve tried to be more proficient in that way. It takes me away from the notebook a little bit. But that’s still always the beginning of everything, and it’s like, sometimes fun, sometimes arduous, but useful to have that notation, to have all that stuff written down. And so interesting too. When I started to think about this new album that I’m recording right now, I went to the notebook that was the beginning of the last album, just to see where I was at headspace-wise. What were my fears? What did I think I couldn’t accomplish? And then I can see what I did, and it’s helpful. It’s helpful to see what my past self thought.
What advice would you give people starting an analog notebook habit?
That there is no pressure. There doesn’t have to be a method. Because that was always a thing that would stop me. That stops me in many parts of my life, when it’s like, ‘Here’s this habit, and if you don’t do it in this specific way, then you’re doing it wrong,’ or, ‘here are the steps to do it the perfect way.’ There’s no perfect way. It’s just whatever way works for you. If that’s a teeny, tiny notebook in your pocket with a pen, and you saw a bird today and that’s all you wrote for one day, that’s great. If it’s a giant notebook that doesn’t even fit in a bag that you keep by your bed and you write in before you fall asleep, that’s great. It’s great if it’s cathartic and useful for you. And for me, it’s a series of dog-eaten notebooks all over the house.
