Evie Sands, “A Woman’s Work Is Never Done”

by Alexandra Molotkow

I bought Evie Sands’s Estate of Mind in my early 20s. I was starting my first real job, and I was excited about the future. I never worried about getting older — not just because 30 seemed ages away, but because it didn’t seem so bad. My friends in their 30s paid their rents, played in bands their friends came to see, and had access to cottages on the weekend. The women seemed to know what they had to offer, which gave me something to look forward to.

The cover of Sands’s first album, Any Way that You Want Me, shows her in a tunic and bell bottoms, riding a bicycle. The music is hopeful and bright, more wistful than sad. She was still at the age when vulnerability is considered appealing. The tone is much different on Estate of Mind. Partly, the era had turned — it’s very much a ’70s album. The cover is all porno chic, bold stare, gamey lighting.

The difference is of just a few years, but it’s the difference between 24 and 28. Estate of Mind is a woman’s album. A new woman — newly mature, newly liberated, living during the sexual revolution and straddling value sets. It has a theme of self-sufficiency and a theme of being without.

Estate of Mind is full of pride and self-assertion; also self-reckoning, and oodles of vulnerability, which made me pretty uncomfortable when I first heard it. (“If Hollywood don’t want me/Maybe it’s for my own good/Oh, I’d like to pay the bill and go home/If only I could.”) I recoiled at the notion that gaining age was anything to feel messed up about. I still do, but now I understand that being in your late 20s, especially for women, involves see-sawing between opposite theories of life. By one standard, you might be doing great; by another, you’re a goner.

The second standard (as Lily Allen explained it in her awful “22”) is nonsense. But such nonsense is hard to rinse out completely, because again, for women, the idea of having a personal life for as long as you live is still so new. For Evie Sands in 1974, it must have seemed very new. I think of this album as a dispatch from its time, and of Sands as one among many women re-imagining their trajectories, feeling proud of themselves while feeling very lonely. Estate of Mind evokes the sense of leaving home — home as a concept, as the seat of your values and the source of your comforts.

Your late 20s are a weird, paradoxical time. You’re irrefutably an adult, but still young relative to the age at which you’re supposed to die — sort of like how the second toe feels like the middle toe. The thing I fear most isn’t aging, but the end of possibilities, which is exactly why I don’t want to settle down. But then, pushing 30 is much easier when you have women over 30 to look up to.

Any Way that You Want Me is about newness around you — the novelty of romance and sex and adventure. It’s about the pleasures of not having your shit together. Estate of Mind is about getting older, but also newness within: the novelty of self-sufficiency, of hard-won sexual confidence, of competence. Which is worth looking forward to.