Demo-land

I'm one more week closer to finishing my set of eight click track demo! Though I know abstractly this is a learning process to prepare for The Real Deal, I'm always surprised at how much I'm learning: how though I'm recording the seperate pieces, I need to plan on what they will sound like together, rather than having an instrumental solo under my own singing. How essential it is for me to have other ears listening too, to say 'that's absolutely good enough, You can move on'. How freakin sensitive mics are, and how amazing it is I have roommates who will freeze from their tamale-making-day-off-cleaning-dog-galloping so I can take four minutes to try it again.

Four down, four to go.

Dear darkening ground, divestment in Norway

This week I was reacquainted with Rilke's Book of Hours, the collection of poems that enchanted me as a young girl, translated by my now teacher and friend Joanna Macy alongside Anita Barrows.

And reading about the epic fossil fuel divestment campaign in Norway, the certainty and uncertainty of the world unraveling under climate change, I went back and re-read a beloved poem, Rilke consoling God.

Dear darkening ground,
you've endured so patiently the walls we've built,
perhaps you'll give the cities one more hour

and grant the churches and cloisters two.
And those that labor—let their work
grip them another five hours, or seven,

before you become forest again, and water, and widening wilderness
in that hour of inconceivable terror
when you take back your name
from all things.

Just give me a little more time!

I want to love the things
as no one has thought to love them,
until they're worthy of you and real.

Book of Hours, I 61

You can hear more of Joanna reading the poems, here.

And that was yesterday.

Sometimes I call a jam and all my favorite musicians show up, show up on time. And we sing/musically zone out on the best of the New Moon canon: Lay Lady Lay, Rivers and Roads, I Can't Make You Love Me, some originals.  Sometimes I call a song that was my favorite in 12th grade, Yellow, and we jump on it, in full harmony, even hitting some weird add13 chord at the end. All while one roommate makes tamales, another lays secretly in the living room, listening, and the dog swoons on the floor.

And that was yesterday.