KC indie-rockers Ramona Clay tackle mental health stigma on The Things We Don’t Talk About

Ramona Clay. // photo by Allen Marshall

When I hop on the phone with Katerina Jae, singer for KC-based indie rock band Ramona Clay, we are both on speaker—me because I am recording our conversation, and Jae because she is bedazzling a guitar to give away at the band’s show this Saturday, May 31, at Harrah’s VooDoo Lounge.

“I don’t even know if I’m doing it right ’cause I’ve never bedazzled anything in my entire life,” jokes Jae of what she’s doing to the Guitar Center-donated acoustic. As to why the band has been donated an acoustic guitar and why Katerina Jae is bedazzling it, Ramona Clay’s upcoming gig is more than just the release for their new album, The Things We Don’t Talk About.

It’s also a mental health campaign kickoff, of which the music is only one part.

“It’s really complicated because my stage name’s Katerina Jae,” explains the singer. “I’m actually a professor at the University of Central Missouri in psychology and a lot of what we’re doing is tied into my research lab.”

This health campaign “fuses music, photographic and video portraiture, storytelling, cutting-edge technology, peer-reviewed research, and mental health resources to increase access to mental health care and destigmatize mental illness,” and is a collaboration between Ramona Clay, the UCM Alumni Foundation, the Advancement of Mental Health Lab, 90.9 The Bridge, Stratgazer Entertainment, and Harrah’s VooDoo Lounge.

The band has created The Things We Don’t Talk About, a ten-track album “that covers a variety of mental health experiences — from PTSD to stalking and sexual assault to suicidal thoughts.” Inspired by the album, there’s a touring portraiture exhibition featuring “photographic and video portraiture of 10 diverse participants, each sharing lived experiences connected to the theme of a different song on the album,” in which the Advancement of Mental Health Lab partnered with Ramona Clay thanks to an Opportunity Grant from the University of Central Missouri (UCM) Alumni Foundation. The Advancement of Mental Health Lab and the band also partnered with 90.9 The Bridge to release a yearlong monthly article series, with pieces which “blend the mental health campaign participants’ narratives with peer-reviewed research and mental health resources.”

TL;DR: The Things We Don’t Talk About is more than a collection of songs, but instead the kickoff to a yearlong movement to “use music as a vehicle to destigmatize mental illness and increase access to mental health care.”

“We started this project two and a half years ago,” reflects Jae, who started writing this in the corner of her bedroom using Logic Pro and DSTs. “But we decided to go ahead and go for it because we wanna be able to tell more stories and [offer] more diversity.”

When this project first started, says Jae, she recognized that they had a lot of representation from people who might lean to more liberal, but everyone involved wanted to represent a wider swathe of individuals.

“I think sometimes a part of conservative culture is not being as forthcoming about mental health type stuff,” Jae explains. “ We wanted that representation within the series because we don’t want just one type of people. We wanna help all people.”

The Things We Don’t Talk About campaign springs from a trip Jae and one of her collaborators in research took to the American Association of Psychology a couple years ago, where she met a representative from Harvard University, whose McLean Hospital has a project called “Deconstructing Stigma: Changing Attitudes About Mental Health.”

“We were gonna partner with them at first but we realized we wanted more of an artistic type thing,” offers Jae, saying that while the Harvard project is great, with installations at places like Boston’s Logan Airport, she wanted to use this project to allow “a whole bunch of people to get involved and be able to recognize–no matter, whatever your skill is–you can apply it and do good.”

From there, she got the grant to create the portraits which tie into the songs, and while copies will tour as part of the campaign, the original art will hang at UCM in the Warren C. Lovinger Education Building.

“After we had the songs, after we had all those things, I was like, “Now, why don’t we go find people who have a story that’s similar to the topic,’” continues Jae, and that’s where the narratives come in. “The participants actually haven’t even heard the songs at all.”

Included in the narratives are Kansas City musician Emma Jo and the hardest-working man in KC, Hartzell Gray, among others, all recorded in the studios of PBS affiliate KMOS. Each video will run three to six minutes and be viewable alongside the portraiture exhibition.

After having worked on this for two and a half years, Katarina Jae is really excited to share it with everyone but also, a little nervous.

“There’s so many things that I wanna do,” the singer expresses as we wrap up. “I’m a dreamer but I’m also someone who gets to actually try to do them no matter how ridiculous they sound or outlandish. I often have people laugh at me saying like, ‘Bless her soul. She thinks she’s gonna do that,’ and then when I do it, they’re like, ‘Oh shit. She actually did it.’”

Going back to that bedazzled guitar, should you care to take it home yourself, there’s no cost to entry but listening, says Jae. Tabling at the The Things We Don’t Talk About campaign kickoff and album release will be organizations such as National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), First Call, Beacon Mental Health, Midwest Music Foundation, and MOCSA.

“The way that they get the raffle tickets is by engaging with the nonprofits that are gonna be there,” Jae says. “’Cause the whole mission of the thing is to increase access to mental health care and destigmatize mental illness and one of the things that we find from research is that a lot of people don’t know where to go for help.”

Ramona Clay performs with Cloud 9 Aerial Arts, along with 93 & Alive, Barrage, Park Sessions, [SPACE] Jockey, and Sylarin this Saturday at Harrah’s VooDoo Lounge. Details on that show here.