About the candidate · Filed by hand
I’m the last person who thought she’d run for Congress.
So before we get into it, a fair warning. I’m not a politician. I’ve never run for anything in my life. I don’t have a law degree, a think-tank job, or a family name people in Nashville recognize. What I have is forty-something years of paying attention - to Memphis, to the music industry, to New York after 9/11, to a country that keeps electing people who look you in the eye and lie about what they’re going to do for you.
If you’re here trying to figure out who the hell I am, this page is the long version. Pour yourself something. It’s a lot.
Chapter one · Memphis
I grew up in the birthplace of rock and roll.
I was born in Memphis in 1974. The Memphis I grew up in was the one most people don’t see on TV - not the tourist version, not the Graceland version, just an urban, southern city that has its issues but is a damn good time.
I was in CLUE and APEX - the programs for gifted students - and in 1991 I was the first school reporter for Channel One when it came to Germantown High School. I also hosted a cable news show in high school, the name of which I have completely forgotten. I had no interest in going straight to college after high school. I needed a minute to figure out what I actually wanted, which adults at the time treated like a personal insult.
I worked. I figured stuff out. I waited.
Chapter two · New York
In 1998, I worked as a PA on the MTV X Games in Memphis. I was 24. I wanted in.
So I moved to New York in 1999 to do an internship at MTV. I was 25, which made me roughly a century older than everyone else interning. They offered me a job after, and I took it. The plan to maybe finish college got tabled. I figured I’d come back to it. I did, eventually - but not for another 13 years.
I worked on ESPN’s 2 Minute Drill, I sat in Mark Burnett’s office, I was a production coordinator at MTV Commercials. I lived in a 600-square-foot Art Deco bank building in the Financial District at 88 Greenwich Street, twelfth floor, with a view of the Statue of Liberty out the one window. My boyfriend worked at Goldman Sachs a few blocks away. The rent was somehow manageable. I was 27 and living a life I had literally dreamed into existence.
The dreaming part lasted about two years.
Chapter three · September 11
I lived two blocks from the towers.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was trying to go back to sleep. My boyfriend had left for work. I heard my neighbor Chris in the hallway screaming at his girlfriend - “DO YOU WANT TO DIE?” - and she screamed back “I HAVE TO GET MY ROLLERBLADES,” and at the time I genuinely thought it was a domestic dispute and it wasn’t my business.
Twenty minutes later the whole building shook hard enough that I fell out of bed and landed on the floor.
My first thought was that the building was collapsing - the upstairs neighbor had had a water leak the week before and the maintenance crew had just finished repairing the ceiling. I figured the renovation was shoddy. I went to the window to see which side of the building was falling down. What I saw instead was the back end of an airplane sticking out of the side of the World Trade Center, and a few floors below it, a person banging on the glass until it broke, then grabbing somebody’s hand and jumping.
That scene runs on a loop in my head. It has for twenty-five years.
But I’ve held on to more than just the attack all those years ago. I’ve also held on to what happened in the weeks after - how the entire city, and basically the entire country, suddenly remembered we were neighbors. Strangers held doors open for each other and meant it. Everyone made eye contact. For a few months, we were the version of America that we’re supposed to be.
Then we mostly forgot. Which is its own kind of grief.
Chapter four · The blog
In 2003 I started a blog called Rachelandthecity, which was supposed to be Sex and the City but with worse outfits and more music.
I moved back to Memphis in 2004 and the blog took off there. It won the Memphis Flyer’s Readers’ Choice Award for Best Blog three years in a row - 2005, 2006, 2007. This was before anyone knew what “blogger” meant as a job, and somehow I was getting paid to do it.
The Commercial Appeal hired me to write a weekly music column called On the Record. Then John Fry at Ardent Studios recruited me to come help them figure out this whole “internet” thing. The phrase “social media manager” did not exist yet. My title was “new media consultant,” which is a fancy way of saying nobody knew what to call me.
I worked at Ardent for years. I launched a record label. I took over publicity for Big Star during their relaunch - that is, until Alex Chilton died the week before our big SXSW show. I started two podcasts (The Ardent Sessions, The Warm Up) that were listened to by hundreds of thousands of music fans. I wrote for magazines. I covered Lollapalooza and Gonerfest and Beale Street Music Festival as an official blogger. I spoke on panels at SXSW and CMJ and AmericanaFest.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, I finally went back and finished college. I’d started as a philosophy major, and graduated with a BA in communications and graphic design with a minor in photography. It only took seven years. At least you know I’m stubborn and I don’t give up.
I’ll write the book version someday.
Chapter five · The city itself
In 2013, I built a website called Make Memphis.
The idea was simple. Anyone in the city - residents, business owners, elected officials, the guy at the corner store - could submit ideas for making Memphis better. I built a Facebook group of 13,000 people around it. People showed up. Real ideas turned into real meetings. It was the first time I understood that you don’t need permission to organize the people who live next to you. You just need a working website and the patience to keep showing up.
A few years later I worked as a digital consultant on a mayoral campaign in Memphis. The candidate had served as president of the Memphis Police Association (MPA). The reason was specific - the city had broken its contract with retired city workers, which meant my father lost his insurance in the middle of fighting pancreatic cancer. The whole reason that campaign existed was to replace the mayor who broke that contract. It was a long story and not a clean one. But I learned a lot about what campaigns actually do versus what they say they do.
That’s where the politics seed got planted. I just didn’t know it yet.
Chapter six · Thirty years in music
I’ve worked in the music industry for thirty years - in production for Hustle & Flow, MTV, Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, MTV X Games, blogs, columns, panels, festivals, podcasts, the whole circus.
In 2019 I started my own music PR agency called Sweetheart PR. Independent folk and Americana artists, mostly. I never did any client outreach in six years of running it - everything came in through referral. I’m not telling you that to brag, I’m telling you that to explain that I’m not someone who has trouble doing the work or finding the people. I just got tired of doing it for a music industry that’s collapsing under its own weight.
In June 2025, I finished my last music PR campaign. I’m done. Sweetheart is paused. Thirty years was enough.
Chapter seven · The trailer
Also, since 2021, I’ve lived in a travel trailer.
I should explain that. When my clients started playing shows again in fall 2021, COVID was still very much a thing and I did not want to fly. I had spent the previous eighteen months walking between my bedroom and my office and I was losing it. So I sold everything I owned, traded in my Toyota Prius for a Toyota Tundra, and bought a bumper-pull RV.
I’m as surprised as anyone that I now drive a pickup truck. I have pulled into gas stations in country towns where men watch me roll up and I genuinely cannot tell if they’re looking at me or the truck. In my head I just say “these are not the droids you are looking for” and pump the gas.
Chapter eight · Why I’m running
Because the people in charge have lost their damn minds, and the people who are supposed to stop them are running plays from 1992.
I started writing about politics seriously after January 6th, and that’s been over five years now, and nothing’s really gotten better. The government no longer works for the citizens but we still pay all the bills, and the people who tell you they’re going to fix it keep promising the same things they’ve been promising for thirty years and never delivering. Healthcare. Affordable housing. Wages. None of it moves because the people in office benefit from it not moving.
So in May 2026, I filed to run for U.S. Congress in Tennessee’s newly-redrawn 5th District. I am running as a Democrat. I’m running as a disruptor. I’m running on six specific things that have to get fixed first - term limits, stock trading, lobbying, gerrymandering, money in politics, and building the bench underneath every Democratic seat in this country. All six are on the homepage.
I’m the first person who’s ever signed this pledge. I’m asking every federal candidate in the country to sign it too. And I’m asking every voter to commit not to vote for any candidate who refuses.
If you’ve read this far, you already know more about me than most candidates will ever tell you about themselves. Welcome to my psyop. All psyops aren’t bad - they’re just a means to an end.
Now you know.
The whole thing’s on the table. The six fights are on the homepage. The writing is on Substack. The money will be on the finance page, in real time. Pick where to start.