021: Now, more than ever

You can't save the world with a song.

Ok, let me get this out of the way first:

I’m having a benefit show to help me make my next album! It’s on February 15 in Northampton, MA and tickets are available now. I’m sharing a program of music that is incredibly important to me: classical repertoire centered around a set of Negro spirituals as arranged by Black composers in the late 1800’s. There will also be some fun experimental stuff, and some opera classics. I would be truly elated to see you there.

If you can’t make it, you can still contribute here, and learn more about my $28,000 goal here.

I am currently 42% funded thanks to the immense generosity of nearly 80 contributors – THANK YOU!

Life feels like a bad movie right now.

We’re one day out from the inauguration. Rumors say there will be 200+ new executive orders signed by the end of the week. Social media is getting more evil than ever! Didn’t know that was possible.

I am pulling joy from the small circles in my life – my friends, my home, my dog, the crystals of snow that astound me. My newfound strength – I’ve been going to the gym for 4 months and I shoveled my driveway alone and I felt so strong!

If I look up from my microscope at my state, my country, my industry, my continent, my world, my galaxy, I feel torn apart.

Eye back to the microscope: I can take my neighbor’s mail to her so she doesn’t have to walk on the ice. She’ll smile and feel cared for. I can dress my dog in her snowsuit and throw sticks for her to chase: she’s having the best day of her life. I can text my friends and tell them I love them, update them on my life. They’ll feel connected to me. I can lay in bed and video chat with my sisters and our three-girl universe will glimmer.

Being on social media as an artist is a very weird experience.

During times of trouble – long regimes or short, intense disasters – I see the same kind of post from my musician friends:

Hey y’all. It feels weird to be promoting a new song right now. But I think that with everything happening in the world, the arts are more important now than ever before. So I’m sharing my new song “Memory” in hopes that it can be a light in the horrible news of the day.

Ok.

I want to dig into this.

First of all, unless you’re a wildly famous artist with a ton of pull in the industry (and maybe not even then!), once a song is scheduled for release on streaming platforms, it’s coming out that day. It’s a slow process to get the computers to talk to each other, and rescheduling a song day-of because an oil spill or a wildfire happened isn’t really possible. I don’t know if the average listener knows this, though.

I also believe that arts and artistic expression are more important than ever. But I also know that a song won’t save us. Songs can and do save us as individuals, and even give us guidance and connection as groups, but someone’s single release on the day of a tragedy isn’t the bandaid we need.

A song doesn’t have to solve everything

The other day, SZA said this in an interview: “I just love feeling, I love processing emotion and I love expressing that process. It’s a gift to be able to feel. It’s a gift for all of us to experience life happening to us, and to allow it, and to cry and to scream and to say ‘I hate this place!’ but to also show up anyway the next day, and decide to smile and decide to participate…”

Sometimes a song doesn’t need to fix the world. Artists are not responsible for responding to every single pain the world has to offer. It is always enough to continue the heavy and essential work of feeling and expressing those feelings.

To loosely quote James Baldwin: “The role of the artist is the same as the role of the lover: if I love you, I have to make you aware of the things you don’t see.”

If you’re an expressive person and a feeler, you may not realize that not everyone is like you.

Many people struggle to identify and name their emotions. Many people struggle to understand how their thoughts and feelings interact. Many people don’t know how feelings can affect your body. And not everyone can or will express what they’re feeling.

An artist’s expression is a conduit – it’s a nearly-invisibly-trod path through tall grass – it’s a pencil sketch of a map that says do you feel this, too? It’s a curiously-reaching antenna that allows people to pick up on its frequency.

My new music won’t save us.

My new album isn’t going to fix the problems of the world. It’s going to give you an entry into my heart and mind, and I hope you find it to be a hall of mirrors. I hope that what you see reflected there surprises and delights you and reveals to you something new and essential about yourself.

People say “for the next 4 years, we really need to do etc etc etc.”

American politics have never worked for Black people, for queer people, for immigrants, and for women – there’s much fighting to be done.

And alongside the fighting, the simplicity of joy and expression as seen through a microscope. The songs I sing while I wash the dishes. The songs I labor through, heartful, for my new album. Singing with my niece. Dancing in the kitchen. Sewing with new friends, cooking with old friends. Teaching someone to read.

Now, more than ever – what? Now, what?

Now, more than ever, we fix and build and change and dream of the small things, knowing that all small things, like seeds, become enormous over time.