Donna Missal is Reclaiming the Female Image, on Her Own Terms
Written by Rachel Cabitt
Photographed by Donna Missal
Self-portrait of Donna.
I spent the first thirty days of quarantine devouring Lizzy Goodman’s tell-all about New York City’s music scene in the early 2000’s, Meet Me in the Bathroom. I picked it up the week before the city shut down after a year of meaning to read it. From James Murphy’s self-centered comments to Ryan Adam’s now disturbing remarks, Karen O, one of the few female leads of 2000s alternative rock and one of the few female voices in the book, stood out like a diamond in the rough. At about a hundred pages from finishing the group memoir she wisely reflected, “I always felt like because I was a woman I just had a completely different perspective. I felt like my brain literally worked differently than everyone around me, which was all men. And so therefore I was not beholden to the rules of the game, which is a big thing in the rock world. It’s very dutiful. There’s a legacy that is laid out. There’s a cannon of rock, and a lot of men worship that and kneel at the altar of that. I didn’t have to play by those rules.”
Enter Donna Missal, a Los Angeles based musician who introduced herself to the world with power driven vocals on her debut album This Time in 2018. Songs like “Keep Lying” and “Jupiter”, co-written alongside Sharon Van Etten, cement Missal’s place in a class of strong singer-songwriters. Her style and confidence echo that of Sheryl Crow and Shania Twain, who she cites as influences, as well as Stevie Nicks, where in a photoshopped Instagram post of the witchy feminist icon, she announced the release of her upcoming LP, Lighter, to be released July 10th.
I first came across Donna how many of us discover artists these days, through the endless scroll of Instagram. It was through one behind the scenes photo of the singer, and then another posted a month or so later that made me pay attention, coincidentally both through the male gaze. But when I began to listen, what made me stay was the perspective Donna had created all on her own.
On a Friday afternoon Donna and I speak over a Zoom call. Our conversation starts with talks of protests, social change and COVID-19 tests, self-promotion being the last priority of them all. Her tone is concerned, yet adamant, as she thinks about the release of her forthcoming LP. “Social justice is difficult. I won’t try to pretend like it’s not really confusing and really difficult to wrap your head around… I feel really fucking strange about the concept of promoting this thing in the midst of everything that’s going on right now that is vastly more important than anything that has to do with my own agenda.” It’s comforting to hear her struggle with her own thoughts, something we all can empathize with during this time.
Donna goes on to describe that despite these contradicting feelings, she hopes that at the very least Lighter can bring people some calm through the storm. “I will say that my experience with music is that no matter what’s going on around me, there’s something deeply transformative and therapeutic about turning on a record, and not necessarily to shut out the world around you, but to feel more human and more connected to the things that you’re feeling on a daily basis.” Although Lighter chronicles Missal’s journey through a breakup, the album will now also be forever tied to the timing of its release.
“I feel really fucking strange about the concept of promoting this thing in the midst of everything that’s going on right now that is vastly more important than anything that has to do with my own agenda.”
The record starts off with “How Does It Feel”, a breathless Donna posing the title question to her listeners, and what a large question to ask oneself right now. Donna revealed that the song arrangement on the album is in reverse order, opposite of the rollercoaster of emotions she went through with her breakup, making track one the light at the end of the tunnel. But listening to the lines, “Holding onto nothing/ Through the fire and ice”, the current political climate surges to the front of my mind. Donna comments, “Music is this language of joy and pain and of personal, human encounters with one another, with the world around us, it’s sort of this other facet of history.” Rodriguez’s Cold Facts soundtracked the Apartheid for South Africans, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young channeled the country’s fear into “Ohio” after the Kent State shooting, and Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage” became the Tik Tok anthem to busy Gen Z while stuck inside during an international pandemic. The effect that Lighter will now have is beyond Donna’s control, an anomaly amidst the jurisdiction she had while making the album.
Self-portrait of Donna (center) with her sisters and co-writers, Kelley (left) and Cat (right).
Donna is among many musicians who are endlessly met with the question of how their gender influences their art. The underlying issue is how the industry has forced feminine expectations on artists. “I think that for so long our presentation as artists was decided upon by other people. And something social media has done is given the power back to the artist.” She pauses, carefully thinking. “All of these decisions are in the hand of the artist now and I think it’s really fascinating… it’s just given the power of the image back. It no longer feels like this thing that we have to be afraid of, or worried about someone else taking over the narrative. The narrative belongs to you.”
Among Missal’s influences, Shania was molded into the idyllic country woman in her music video for “Any Man of Mine”, with tussled brown hair, singing in a patch of overgrown grass in tight, high waisted skinny jeans, a cropped white tank and matching denim vest. Sheryl, at the height of her career, was transformed into the classic American beauty, blonde hair and blue jeans from her “dirtier” brunette 90s origins. In a music video set on the Las Vegas Strip, Donna utters the line, “I’m way too far away to be hurt by you” as she sits up in an unkempt hotel bed. The strap of her short ruched dress sliding off her shoulder reveals a lacy pink bra. She gazes intensely into the camera through liner smudged eyes, her tattoo-sleeved arms supporting her the whole way. While the description may fit that of a “damsel in distress”, Donna is flipping the script, choosing to show that this vulnerability she is demonstrating is in fact powerful.
The past few years have shown artists like Donna, Solange, Maggie Rogers, and Tierra Whack, creating their own unique feminine spaces. While all on major labels, their refusal to let those on top control their image is radical, with artists like Taylor Swift and Kacey Musgraves only recently taking hold of this power. Donna comments, “My experience has been that, in my career so far, I’ve always had the power to decide how I would present… And that’s really empowering for me because the music I grew up listening to, I wasn’t aware at the time, we weren’t made aware at the time, but it was very male gaze driven. And the images that you saw that would belong to the music or the artist, it was really someone else’s idea of how something should look and feel to the viewer… I think it’s a really powerful, interesting power dynamic shift.”
“It no longer feels like this thing that we have to be afraid of, or worried about someone else taking over the narrative. The narrative belongs to you.”
Donna has taken full advantage of this power shift in creating a gaze that is all her own. Her co-writers for Lighter include her sisters, who she currently lives with in Los Angeles, and grew up home-schooled with in New Jersey. While Donna has worked with a number of acclaimed collaborators, working with her sisters aided “to the benefit of the vulnerability and the closeness” of Lighter. Identifying as bisexual, Missal tapped Erica Hernandez, a “queer visionary”, to shoot all of the album imagery. This past March while on tour supporting Lewis Capaldi, Donna flaunted an all-female band in front of stadiums of thousands of fans, having photographer Hannah Edelman document it all. Her vigilance is refreshing. She has created a community of her own in which her perspective is anything but “completely different” than those around her, as Karen O once lamented. Donna relates to her bandmates and peers because she holds the power to surround herself with people who will reinforce her ideas, not mold her into an idea of what she should be.
While Lighter may be about a break up, its fiery title paired with Missal’s honest rhetoric is a push for leaving behind what no longer serves you. A dissolving relationship. A self-serving industry. A broken country. Donna reflects, “I wanted this record to really feel like it was embodying the artists of the past who have left such a huge mark on me.” A collective feminine effort so to speak. As Stevie Nicks retold a long ago conversation with Christine McVie to Rolling Stone, “We just made [a] promise to each other that we would do everything we could do for women, that we would fight for everything that we wanted and get it. That our songs and our music would be equally as good as all the men surrounding us. And it was.” From Stevie, to Christine, Shania, Sheryl, Karen O, and now Donna, the road is continuously being paved with new power never held before.
Keep up with Donna.