singing over
the bones

One of the stories in Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés introduces us to a figure called La Loba — the Wolf Woman. She wanders the earth, collecting the bones of forgotten creatures: wolves, ravens, whoever has lost the life force, or inner light, within. When she has gathered enough bones, she sits by the fire and sings over them. And the bones, one by one, reassemble. Flesh forms and covers the joints. Breath fills the ribcage. A spirit returns to the body, then the body becomes a creature, and the creature runs free.

That is what this record has been for me. A renewal. Coming back to life. Real folk girl shit.

At some point in our lives, each one of us must collect the bones we’ve left behind — pieces of ourselves that we set aside while we try to be easier to love. More convenient, less human. I’ve been collecting the bones of my creative self and the skeletons of memories I could name but could no longer feel. There is always a more honest version of yourself waiting around the corner.

I wrote these songs during a period of reckoning. My late twenties have asked me to look at the stories I’ve been telling myself about love, worthiness, and what I owe the people around me. It’s time to separate the facts from the fairytales and decide which stories I want to believe. And most of them, I don’t. I don’t believe that I can be truly happy if I sideline my dreams out of fear, or if I act like I’m not as passionate as I actually am. I don’t want to get to the end of my life and realize I lived the whole thing for everyone else. This is my one shot, and I have to live it for me. These are folk songs in the oldest sense: stories from a life well lived, woven together by sound.

I could not have made this record five years ago, or even two. I had to stop hiding long enough to write a story worth telling, something honest. When the project was finished and I finally sat down to listen to it — not as a writer or a singer checking vocal takes, but as a listener hearing the songs in order for the first time — it gutted me. I wasn’t expecting that. I remember thinking: oh, there it is. The tool doing its job. The creative self returns to make it all make sense when the bones have been gathered. And music lives in my bones.