![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/earleine-12-1-e1593782451285.jpg\")
Ashley Wright was playing a festival when she heard about Rita for the first time. Rita wasn’t another performer on the bill or a mutual friend, but an alter-ego that had been emerging from Wright’s blackout drunkenness for years without her ever knowing. Someone who had met Rita the night before raved the next morning about how funny the persona was – “this buffet waitress who smokes two packs a day” – and when Wright asked friends about it they confirmed that Rita was no stranger to them, either. Rita lived in Ashley Wright’s body, but Wright was the only one not in on the joke.<\/p>\n
“I was totally mortified. It\u2019s a very surreal thing,” Wright says. “If I can have a whole other character that I have no memory of, what else am I capable of doing when I’m intoxicated? That\u2019s the scary part for me.” Wright did what any good songwriter would do – she dissected those feelings of shame and embarrassment lyrically, and set them to music. Though it didn’t happen right away, once she sat down to examine her risky behaviors around alcohol consumption – to have a chat directly with “Rita,” as it were – the song just tumbled out of her.<\/p>\n
Wright says her songs, which she performs under the moniker Earleine – a nod to the acquaintances she made while working anonymously as a civilian in a military training program – tend to either be extremely personal or more of an exercise in hyperbole, but never a combination of both. “Rita” was an exorcism, and ultimately an example of stark contrast between the using songwriting as a positive tool for unpacking complex emotions, versus the crutch of substance abuse, which Wright admits “always made things worse.”<\/p>\n