Q&A: XANA RISES FROM THE ASHES WITH HER NEW DELUXE VERSION OF THE SEX WAS GOOD UNTIL IT WASN’T
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY JO GAFFNEY ☆
Photo By Jo Gaffney
XANA FEARLESSLY BARES HER HEART TO TELL HER STORY — in the extended deluxe version of her album The Sex Was Good Until It Wasn’t. Lyrically conveying the raw emotional hardship that comes from a brutal experience, and then rising up and out of the ashes to tell her story. How it feels to get the girl, then get over her, and all the other sh*tty cards you are dealt in your youth—something so personal yet universally felt.
This record showcases someone rising from the dark part of the night, crawling on their hands and knees to make something for themselves as a way to move forward. Xana sings confessional truths of queer loving that are painfully earnest, making you hot and breaking your heart.
The Luna Collective got a coffee with Xana and had the pleasure of hearing her break down the deluxe version of her album.
Photo By Jo Gaffney
LUNA: Hello! Thank you so much for meeting up with The Luna Collective to talk about your Deluxe Album The Sex Was Good Until It Wasn’t. Our readers are very interested in hearing all about the record and the additional tracks! What was the main inspiration for the album as a whole?
XANA: The album as a whole is about a wide time frame of my life. A lot of it is about my relationship with myself, other people, sex and intimacy. The centrefold of the album is a song called “fifteen,” which is about an assault that happened when I was fifteen. I think a lot of the rest of the album kind of circles that, like did these things happen because that happened…
LUNA: That sounds like a lot of processing, and getting into a really raw emotional state in your work. Sounds like working through the hardest feelings of sexuality and adolescence.
XANA: Totally doing a self-autopsy of a ten year period of my life, the things I feel like I couldn’t even explain or process or dive into at an earlier age. I remember when I was fifteen thinking I don’t have the tools to deal with this right now, we are just gonna put it on the back burner until I’m older and so writing this album was me being like okay I have the tools now, I can dive into it, and process it from a zoomed out perspective and observe the patterns of my life which was really healing and helpful for me. Some of it was sad and some of it was a reality check.
A moment for me to take accountability for my own decisions and patterns. Then you add f*cking into queerness to the mix, and everything gets a little stickier there.
It was such an important project for me, I think for a lot of people, and I am very very proud of it, how it’s turned out and how it’s been received.
So I was really excited to do the deluxe version and be able to touch deeper and push myself further in those topics and wrap it up with a bow.
LUNA: I feel like your work is within the idea that “the most personal is the most universal,” it feels like you’re really speaking to a broad group of people. What do you want people to take away from this record?
XANA: I knew a lot of this record would be hard for me to dive into and talk about, but I knew it would be so good for so many people. I’m a super firm believer that the art that I make and put out into the world has to be completely authentic and true to myself. There’s really no point doing it any other way because that is what connects with other people and that’s what forms community. If I say the hard things, then someone else might have the tools to do the same. Opening up the space for people.
LUNA: What made you want to expand on the original album and make a deluxe version?
XANA: I was just writing so much, and I had so much to say; these are situations and relationships that spanned like ten years, so there’s a lot. I just didn’t stop writing songs, and there are some songs like “confidental” that I felt like stood out too much to be on the original version, but still felt very much a part of that era and those stories. It’s a bit more indulgent, it’s a bit more out there, we tried things a bit differently with writing/recording. It just made sense that those would be an extra add-on. A little cherry on top, a treat for the kids who stuck around. It’s kind of like at the end of a movie after all the credits, they’ll have an extra little scene. It’s kind of like that, like “here’s a whole album, here’s the whole story, but here’s a little bit of info to give you a bit more perspective on it.”
LUNA: Like another lens to view the record on?
XANA: And those songs play with the original songs a lot; there are a lot of references and crossovers within the lyrics. In “crying after sex,” there’s a lyric: “42 teeth where’s your backbone baby,” and in “body” it’s “I’ve got 42 teeth and a bad attitude.” It’s like the two songs are talking to each other in that sense, a lot of them do that, where there are these little links—like an older sibling. I feel like I do that a lot in my songwriting, but especially with this deluxe version, there are little connections. I like to have fun.
LUNA: It feels like you’ve been able to really push yourself forward in your art, putting out this deluxe version and all of the shoots you’ve been putting out. How did you get started in music? What’s your origin story?
XANA: I think that being a rockstar was the first thing I knew about myself, since I was two years old. I’ve always been musical—I started doing music lessons when I was five years old, I did dance lessons the growing up, my parents put us in any art class, anything creative they were really supportive of me and my sister, and they wanted to support that side of us and push that part of us.
When I was six or seven, I discovered Avril Lavigne, and I knew that’s what I wanted to be when I grew up. I played violin, I sang, and eventually I started playing guitar and piano. Then, when I was in middle school and Taylor Swift became a thing, that was the first time I realized you could write your own songs. I was a kid and didn’t realize how this all worked, and then I started writing. Which was terrible. Iconic awful writing that should never see the light of day, but you gotta begin somewhere. I didn’t start working on this project until 2019, when I met my producers, and I had already spent a year or two writing a lot and preparing for this project. Then, in 2019, we started recording, and I put my first song out in the fall of 2020. And now it’s 2025 and it’s crazy.
LUNA: So it’s been a wild five years of putting out projects, including Tantrums, which was your album that came out in 2022. How do you feel you’ve grown since then?
XANA: I feel so much more confident after making Tantrums. I think I felt like I may only have one shot to make an album; maybe it’ll only ever happen once. Maybe nobody will listen, who knows? I treated that album like it was the only album I was ever going to make, like it needed to scratch every itch I have. And so, I was not a full-time musician or anything, I didn’t even live here [in Vancouver]. I lived on the island, so I would come and bang out a song or two in a week and then take the ferry back. That was the first year. It felt like I was making that album in parts and pieces. I loved it; I was making music that I loved to listen to and that made me really excited and made me feel really really proud. Then the album came out, and people really liked it, thank god. Then, I was able to go full-time. Then, I moved to Vancouver. With this album, we were able to make it all at once.
LUNA: What was it like to make this record? What was the actual process like?
XANA: So much fun. It was therapy. Honestly, I think I definitely blacked out some of the harder parts. I was just talking with my producers saying like ‘Yeah, it wasn’t so bad to record ‘fifteen,’ I was fine.” and they were like “Girl, you were not okay, you were going through something that day” and I was like “Really?”
The tougher parts I think have been painted over by how much joy this album and era and the process in general have brought me. So that’s really cool.
LUNA: That’s so cool. Did you feel you faced any major challenges with the album?
XANA: There were definitely heavier moments, and although some of what I’d written about happened a long time ago, there were also things happening in real time, which were some different raw wounds to be nursing. I think sometimes there are also challenges trying to get a song the way I want it to be. I struggled with “save the bullets baby,” like I didn’t wanna finish that song, but the guys were very passionate about it and pushed me to finish it. I think we are all very good at pushing each other to trust the process and see the vision. So I’ll do that with them, and they’ll do it with me. It’s nice to be able to have a team where you can push each other and trust each other. Because we will always get there in the end. I felt really confident in this project in general, and it’s an album I wanted to write for a long time, even before Tantrums, I just wasn’t quite ready to at that point. And so once I felt ready, I already had the album art in mind for years and years.
LUNA: What inspired the visual art of the album?
XANA: If I am being so honest, I think I am just very dramatic and a chronic daydreamer. It’s something I would get in trouble for my whole childhood; I was always making up stories in my head, and I was the kid always making up a music video in my head to go with the song I was listening to. With this album, I love the glamour and otherworldly elements. It’s very fairies and witches vibes. When I was making the cover art the way I described it was “dark fantasy queer Garden of Eden.”
When talking about so much heaviness, very real, raw, graphic topics, I think having a magical beautiful landscape to soften the blow of that a little bit is important. I think a lot of people totally retreat to their own little made-up world. It’s very satisfying to make something very beautiful and very indulgent and grandiose out of some really sh*t cards I was dealt.
LUNA: Do you have a favourite song from the deluxe version? Why is it your favourite?
XANA: They’re all so different, it’s hard to pick a favorite. I really love “crying after sex.” I don’t do it very often, but a kind of diary entry or stream of consciousness-style song is so much fun to write, I wasn’t sure how it was going to be received, but everyone seemed to really like it! I just love that song, it feels so hypnotic you don’t even realize as it goes by. So I literally word vomited into my notes app and then I turned it into a song. I didn’t really think or try too hard at it, it just kind of came to be. Some of the lyrics are so disgusting and visceral and insane, but feel so pretty. I feel like it captures that struggle with intimacy so well, and I’m really proud of it.
LUNA: How are you feeling moving forward? Is there anything you’d like to share with Luna that you’re looking forward to?
XANA: I have so much coming up that I’m looking forward to, I have a music video coming up for “confidential,” that I’m super excited about; it comes out February 17. For “confidential” I’ve always wanted to write the James Bond theme song, a super dramatic huge song. I was pissed as hell when they killed James Bond, and I was like, “Fine ill just do it myself.” So when I was writing “confidential,” which is about this love affair and betrayal, I knew that it was the James Bond one. [It’d be a] jazzy, speakeasy, smokey, raunchy song. We had so much fun with that song and the sax solo!
If you had a gun to my head and said I could only keep one thing from this album, it would be this sax solo. So yeah, we made a music video for it and it’s all those things. It’s smokey and seductive, and angry and dramatic, and I’m really excited. I know I just put the deluxe out.
There are still some little treats for this era coming, and I am working on some treats for the next era. So I’m really excited about that, and shifting sonically a bit for that project in a fun way. I hope that everyone’s ready to have fun. Now that we’ve had a sad time together, we are gonna have a fun time together.
Photo By Jo Gaffney
