Family

One song frame I played with when I was in therapy grad school, was to write songs about my family members and their stories, in part as a way of therapeutically working through family myths.

It’s such a wonderful music therapy project! A bit like memoir in music.

My invitation to you: is there a family member, distant or close to you, whom you might like to mythologize and honor through an art piece?

Here is my example. I wrote this song about a family member I love very much, and this recording was made outside in Big Sur on an 8 track analog recorder with the Interludes, a genuine, tender and funny group of musicians I got to play with in SF for 1 special year back in 2007.

Lyrics:

You were relieved when you could deliver that man into her hands. She came a long way to eat your liver, but she could mend his clothes. And she could pare his apples, and boil water, and carry his sadness between her legs.

You had a horse and a silver pail. You birthed the babies and walked to school. You broke your arm when a boy pushed you, how embarrassed he must have been, when the ambulance came to take you away, he must have felt it burn up his face.

You had your jaw set in iron intentions to leave one day. For those wooden fences, and the smell of horses, and Kentucky bluegrass, and the Triple Crown.

~~

Thumbnail image lovingly appropriated from Wild Swans, by Hans Christian Andersen, translated by Naomi Lewis, and illustrated by Anne Yvonne Gilbert