By Janeen McCrae — 10 Oct 2025

I am not a brand. I am a body of work.

I don’t want to be a brand.
I want to be a body of work.

I want my work to be soft like a body. Broken like a body. Marbled and scarred and freckled and hurt and healed and curious like a body.

A body of work.

I want my body—this body of work—to pull on its heavy boots and kick at rocks and stride toward thunder-headed horizons and roll in fields choked in daffodil-lic joy. I want it to get splinters in its paw pads and ticks upon its skin. Be bruised and shivering, thick with rashes and beset by aches and cramps. To be familiar with phantom pains that come and go.

With a jolt of the hot syrup of adrenalin, I want it to surge as a ball of pure throng energy, as a mass of humanity toward the stand-clear-of-the-open-doors of a 6 train at 7.30 AM on a Monday in New York City.

I want my body of work to cast a long shadow that will shade me against the feeling that it has all been sadly, unfortunately, and tragically for nothing.

I want to be a body of work.
I don’t want to be a brand.

I don’t want to be watered down to a punchy one pager or adhere to some print-friendly parameters of a logo that can be clocked from a mile away by people with astigmatism. I don’t want to be scalable and fit as neatly on a coffee cup as I do on a billboard.

I don’t want to appeal to an algorithm or click-bait a subset of people listed in a prospectus as consumers who slot into an age bracket and earn this much money and have this many kids or no kids and a dog or a cat and live here but not there.

I don’t want to follow a style guide.

I don’t want to be a value meal you can upsize. I don't want to be the fries that go with that.

I don’t want shareholders.

I just want to sail. On a boat. A boat of a body—my body of work. My terrific schooner.

I don’t want to be a brand.
I want to be a body of work.

I want my body of work to be lithe and agile, to downward dog and pigeon pose. I want it to groan and squeal and yell and erupt with life. Shiver and sweat and exude and leak. All the fluids. All the juices.

I want it to flex its iron forearms and forge with hammer and tong the weapons and implements that will create a whole new age—the age of my body of work.

I want it to touch and be touched and grow like a weed, like a tree, like love in a playground.

My body of work does not need to be a brand to lay a finger on the pulse of its own wrist. The beat of it can score my song. It will keep time with time.

I want to be a body of work.
I don’t want to be a brand.

I don’t want to appease or appeal or distill or compromise. I don’t want to be as a silty lyric, smooth on the palate with a sticky mouth feel.

I don’t want my name represented in the same font for all time, kerned to perfection. The letter of my letter, typeset and aligned.

I don’t want hours of operation listed on my door.

I don’t want to be always on brand or answer a brief or be focused-grouped out the wazoo and straight into a nothingness burger.

I want to be the accident that slices off the finger of fear and bleeds my heart out onto the floor.

There is no single-minded message. Only my mind in this single, one-of-one body.

Of work.

I don’t want to be a brand.
I want to be a body of work.

Alive body. Unpredictable body. A body with mistakes. A body with imperfections.

I want to treat my body of work with kindness and tenderness and love and admire and respect it in the mirror of its powder room. I want to look at it with reverence—amazed by its skill and fortitude. I want to see it exercised daily and turn the limbs of it to create a motion that stretches toward old age with constant honor and with moral compass.

Long and lanky, with its own voice hitting notes and cracking the spine of emotion over its own knee.

Notes will change, the skin will wrinkle. The weight of this body will fluctuate. Its vision will dim and brighten and narrow and squall.

The hands of it will hold tight and spread wide and at times it will drop everything to signal to the invisible. The specter of its conscience—its consciousness.

There will be action. There will be fury and flurry and feisty fervor. Organs to be donated. Wounds to be dressed. A skeleton to be scaffolded.

My body of work will burn baby, burn and watch as it dances itself into the fire of its own doubt. Still raging, still producing, loud and with the crackling skin of its voluntary immolation in the courtyard of the world.

My life, my flesh, my towering tome.

My flaming sword.

I want to be a body of work.
I don’t want to be a brand.

In saying this, I am aware that if all goes to plan and I make the full journey with this body of work—all the way to the mortuary of my mission—it will become, through no action of its own, through consistency and persistence and sticking to the stick of it, this body of work will become known as and looked upon as *sigh* my brand.

Accidentally.

But building that brand? Consciously? That is not a house I'm looking to frame.

Because I want to reach the end knowing that I have lived by my heart; true to its placement within the chest of my body of work. That I have not sought out nor worn the easy clothes of others. To know that my soul remains uneaten by vultures.

I want my body of work to be its own universe. I want it to be a reflection and manifestation of everything I find in my atmosphere. Everything I have breathed in. Everything I have mapped. There will be no logo, only presence.

My gas giant. My nebula. My celestial body of work.

I don’t want to be a brand.
I want to be a body of work.

I want to heed the words of William Burroughs and the advice he once gave to Patti Smith* when she found herself in the awkward position of being offered a lot of money to do something she didn’t want to do.

“You’ve gotta keep your name clean,” he told her. “You gotta… never do anything that you know isn’t right for you.”

I want to keep my body’s name clean.

This body—my body of work—must not give an inch or a letter or a slurred vowel toward the tailoring of its jacket or pants or the darning of the socks of it.

This body may be bought and paid for, but only if it feels right in the conscience and ethical genetics of its flesh and bone and core.

Because I want my body of work to be able to get up every day and look itself in the eye with no shame.

I want it to be comfortable in its own skin.

In my own skin.

So, say it with me:

I am not a brand.
I am a body of work.

Put that on a t-shirt. Wear it all the way to the bank.

Email me your thawts

*Patti Smith tells the 'keep your name clean' story during an episode of WTF with Marc Maron. It's around the 1 hr 9 minute mark

This week’s amends…

"This is the only poem I can read. I am the only one who can write it. I didn’t kill myself when things went wrong. I didn’t turn to drugs or teaching. I tried to sleep. But when I couldn’t sleep, I learned to write. I learned to write what might be read on nights like this by one like me."

- Leonard Cohen

On Rotation: “I met the Buddha at a Downtown Party” by David Byrne.

I'm well on the way to building a nice assortment of records to choose from for "The Vinyl Countdown 2025" (favorite records released in a calendar year.) This came out recently. Love the design and art for "Who is the Sky?"

A reminder that all songs featured in this newsletter over the years are added to the giant mega super playlist of magnificence which you can access with an effortless depress of this button. 👇

The Stream On Rotation Playlist