Hello Friends,

Since I've got July off in this little crooked house -- and thankfully it didn't burn down last week with the Walker Ranch Wildfire a few miles from here -- I have decided to go on an exercise program to keep my music muscles from melting while off the road.

I'm committing to cover a song every day. Each week will have a theme - kicking things of with Mr. Tom Waits. A Tom Waits song a day and then come next Monday I'll choose a new artist to pay tribute to. Ahhh...so many....Susan Werner, Eliza Gilkyson, Mark Knopfler, Emmylou, Patty Griffin, Patty Larkin, Beth Wood, Eli West, Miss Welch....

So let the list begin! I'll learn them day-by-day, kickin' it off with "I Hope That I Don't Fall in Love With You."

Happily yours,

Gabrielle Louise

Week July 16th to 22nd: Susan Werner

Week July 2nd to July 9th to 15th: Emmylou Harris

Week July 2nd to July 8th: Tom Waits

Did you know that before 1970 they didn't manufacture a key for the exclamation mark on typewriters? Yup. I guess people back then didn't get so excited as I do now when I have a new song day! (New song days are my favourite days.) You can sneak around this little hiccup by typing period, backspace and apostrophe. I still can't find the missing 1 key, though. All counting starts with 2 from here on out.

It's really cold in this house. There's a two by two foot space that my guitar and I can occupy - in between the typewriter and the stove. A grandpa sweater is mandatory.

I've been sitting here for a couple days now because on Friday is a big show that I've been practicing for. It's a preview event for the Colorado Environmental Film Festival, and I'll be entertaining in between live director's commentary and trailers, sort of like an awards show.

One of the six environmentally themed films that we'll be highlighting at this event is called "Arise," a movie by two local film-makers who are a mother-daughter team. (Some may remember that I used to perform in a mother-daughter duo when I was a teen.) At any rate, I find the title of the film to be inspiring.

Below are the lyrics that resulted today when I thought about what that word meant from my perspective.

I'll also share with you a little demo I made on a kind of virtual tape recorder. Since it's not mastered or mixed or anything of the sort, I highly recommend listening on speakers as opposed to phones or computers.

Fondly! (With all the exclamation a modern day computer can provide.)

Gabrielle

Arise

Old mother Piñon Tree bends her back resiliently,
a fraction of what I used to be, I stand beside her.
Her branches are bare and thin, her youth is weathered in the wind.
From the canyon that we're standing in, I can't see the horizon.

I take a seat and start to cry, we talk awhile, the Piñon tree and I.
I validate her fears and she does mine. Her pride  is uncompromising.

I leave the woe behind
by fantasizing flight.
I'm so heavy in my agony
piece by piece it buries me
til' I'm bound, bound, bound
like the Piñon tree.

I lay my heart down like a seed, cover it in crackling leaves.
Time turns Winter into Spring, but nothing rises.
Though I water it with daily tears, love will never grow from fear.
One day I'll just walk away from here! Feels like I'm dying...

I leave the woe behind
by fantasizing flight.
I'm so heavy in my agony
piece by piece it buries me
til' I'm bound, bound, bound
bound, bound, bound!
til' I'm bound, bound, bound
like the Piñon tree.

Somebody named Winfield Townley Scott said "I think people know, even when they know little about poetry or care less, that a poet serves Truth. Truth is an unpredictable, a dangerous thing; avoided by most people. A poet is a rebuke, a higher and more responsible consciousness in our midst. He is, while alive, more alive than most people."

Of the long list of things that I loved about my father, most of all I loved that he felt his emotions so deeply. Unlike so many sleepers navigating though life on some auto-pilot pathway, he had the tremendous courage to feel.

Paul and Pam Sadler on Christmas Day 1970-something, Painting by Sheila Dunn

I also loved that he had me convinced well into my late teens that Sting was Gordan Lightfoot's god given name, or that when he toured he would collect electronic hotel room keys to bring back for me, writing over them in sharpies to create a deck of cards. They were a little stiff when you tried to shuffle them, though.

He brought us the tiny shampoos and conditioners too, a precursor to my now strict environmentalist dont-let-anything-go-to-waste ways. He called them itty-bittys. I loved that he played Norwegian wood and Ragpicker's Dream every Christmas. In fact, I loved HIS love for the Beatles in general. When I was sorting through his computer last week I must have found a hundred photos of Paul McCartney in his photo library. As if they were good friends.

I am forever grateful that he bought me my first guitar, taught me my first chords, and then proceeded to beg me not to become a musician--exactly the fuel a teenage musician needs.

It's important to consider, however, that death doesn't suddenly transform an imperfect person into a perfect one. In fact, without considering my father's flaws, he isn't the man that we loved. But death does give us the pause we need to understand the complete person, flaws and all.

I found myself on a greyhound a couple of weeks ago. There was a lot of traffic so it was slow going, but we were moving forward, red tail lights glowing in the night. Rap music bled out of headphones somewhere, and I was chomping on a half a pound of carrots, thinking about Christmas two years ago -- the last time I saw Dad. Chris and I had been living at my parent's cabin all of November, hand-making gifts: Journals, hats, a little book that when you flipped the pages, showed a video of my 2 year old nephew high-fiving my brother. Meanwhile, dad had been working out in his wood shop in New Hampshire, carving wooden kitchen utensils for everyone. The days moved forward. I crocheted faster, trying to finish up the last stitches on a hat I was making for cold New England winters. I imagine Dad must have rushed the last few finishing touches on one of the pizza peels before packing up his suitcase, putting on his tweed coat, and heading for the crowded, wreath bearing Logan International Airport. He flew west while we cut down the pine tree and circled it with little white lights. We put the star on top while Dad's plane moved forward in the sky.

We're always moving forward. We make a choice and it propels us into the future. We can't see what we've affected because it's like a comet tail behind us. And there are billions of us making choices every minute--so the world is chalk full of comet tails, and shooting stars, and airplane trails. And they're chaotically shooting in different directions, ruthlessly interacting with each other. Every minute we produce more choices based on those intersections, so the comet tails sprout branches. This is how we fill the time, the days, the years...compound this with the basic principal that what people do--the choice they make that sparks the comet into motion--is hardly ever a true reflection of what they feel, or what they want. 

Christmas eve arrived and the presents were wrapped, the food prepared, and when the door opened there dad was, and he was drunk. The situation unfolded like an explosion of comets, or the black hole that ate Christmas.

Sometimes a person is so difficult, we come to an impasse with them. The choices they're making are intersecting lives left and right, and you can't make an inch of progress arguing with them either. What you don't know is it isn't just you and them in this room. You're in a traffic jam.

You can only see the bumper in front of you, this difficult person blocking your way. And maybe you can see a little sliver of the bumper in front of them, a grandparent perhaps, but not much else. In reality, there are invisible factors that file on for miles and miles of glowing red tail lights...Eventually the universe will allow you to lay eyes on the accident that caused  such an injury, and you're taught empathy. Your eyes point: That's somebody's brother, somebody's husband, somebody's son! Inch by inch, you pass the pain and gawk. Now you understand.

That Christmas my father had recently lost his father. He was mourning. I could have received him with love as opposed to disgust. But my pride and me had it all sorted out, and we stopped talking to him all together instead.

The next time that I saw him was in the intensive care unit at Exeter hospital, after my mother called the police and asked them to stop by his house. She hadn't heard from him in a few days and was concerned. In fact, the same police officer that found my grandfather's body three years ago, in the very same house, found my father unconscious on the floor.

Once we arrived, he did regain consciousness. We spent several days together that way.

He had been breathing well despite the infection in his lungs--they were measuring what percentage of breaths he was taking without assistance. The day shift nurse, a sweet baby-faced girl not too much older than I am, told me if he continued to breath so well they could take him off the ventilator. He couldn't speak with it in but he was nodding yes and no to any question posed. The whole family thought he was certain to live, and two of my siblings returned to Colorado to start school.

I had been recommended, the week before, a poet by the name of Dylan Thomas. I sat by my father's bedside reading Thomas' words about the cycles of life and death, the great unity of the universe.

I didn't want Dad to be alone ever. When he lifted his heavy lids I did not want him to see the face of a stranger, baby faced or not. I'd rub his belly, his knees, his feet, caress his face, behind his ears. He was so brave. The nurses asked him if he wanted pain medication every hour, and knowing it compromised his consciousness, he shook his head no despite certain discomfort. The ventilator tube made his mouth very dry and the nurse taught me how to moisten it, carefully around the breathing tube, with a little sponge on a stick. It was an effective drink of water. I continued to sing to him, read him poetry, told him about my little farm in Colorado--which he'd never seen. I read him a Dylan Thomas poem, "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night/ Rage, rage against the dying of the light..." to which he responded by lifting his torso and both arms in the air, as if with a great herculean roar and intent to lift the world off it's axis.

When I was a child my parents had a California king sized bed fashioned out of lodge pole pines. It was big enough to sleep a family, and it did. Every time a child was born (in that bed) they were also welcomed in that bed. And when we got too old for such things, well, we just waited until the middle of the night and then, one at a time, crawled in. Dawn would arrive and six heads of messy hair would be poking out of the down comforter, the largest and greyest of the heads snoring exactly like a papa bear should. That was the odd thing about the nights we spent together at the hospital. With the ventilator in, he couldn't snore. Strange that you can miss a thing as simple as a snore.

Hurricane Irene hit New Hampshire in the form of a heavy rain, the power surged and the life support mechanisms were momentarily interrupted. He lost a lot of blood frozen inside the dialysis machine. The nurses panicked. They had a backup generator at the hospital that failed to prevent the hiccup. What could anyone have done? It was the way of the world.

And a turning point for him.

He skin grew more yellow and bruises bloomed on his limbs. Repeatedly he would lift one tired hand and tug at that breathing tube, asking with his eyes for it's removal. The nurse told me that they would have to restrain his hands. I held them instead. I pulled the chair next to his bed and slept beside him. I'd wake up and see his eyes open at the same time as mine. "Maybe we're sharing the same dream," I said. I'd place my head on his chest and we'd breath together. Breath together with the medical ventilator. He breathed to live. I breathed to calm my weeping. His hands, as I held them, took the texture of bubble gum that has been chewed too long and disintegrates. I could, and can still, picture exactly what his fingers look like forming a D chord on the guitar. or a C chord, or a G chord, or any chord for that matter.

I have been taught empathy. Empathy is the one thing you can never have enough of. Empathy is the parent of love. And when you learn the value of love, it turns out that everything else in the world can not add up to equate it. Love is more expensive and fragile than anger, than greed, grief, or especially, pride.

The tragedy of my father's death was not in the complete unexpected nature of it, or in his mere 61 years, though those things make for a terrible sorrow as well. And the tragedy isn't in the finality of it, it's in the uncertainty, the ambiguity of it.  When you shoot an old dog to put it out of it's misery--still a common practice on ranches here in the southwest--it's true the dog was going to die anyway. But it is also true that you killed the dog. That's unsettling for me. Recognizing that his organs would not recover, and asking him to be removed from life support was the most difficult pass I have ever traversed.

My oldest sister couldn't come cross country to be by our father's bedside. She doesn't own a cell phone, or drive a working car, much less be able to afford the plane ticket. But she looked out her kitchen window and watched a dying mule struggling in the field the day my father passed, and she prayed for its relief. She didn't need a phone call or a text message or a telegram to make that prayer.

In fact, the universe prepares us all in strange ways. Serendipity delivered me Dylan Thomas, God gave Suzi the dying mule, and some prophetic powers moved my mother to put in a random call to the police station. I'll never totally understand any of it, though I have the tools I need to move through it. "Dark is a way, and light is a place," Dylan Thomas writes. "But dark is a long way."

And the tragedy of my father's life was not in the traffic jam of broken hearts I told you about, it was not in a series of unfortunate circumstances that the world rained upon him, but in the inner conflict between his desperate desire to find happiness and his own inability to make choices that would lead to that happiness. It isn't just the plight of my father, but of humanity.

Tragedy lives too often exclusively inside the man, while the world is buoyantly, boisterously, relentlessly continuing it's routines.

Rumi said: "The day is outside, living and dying." And like so many things that live and die--the dawn, the dusk, the seasons, my father has gone on to join that cyclical rhythm that dominates all of existence.

He was a loving parent, an outstanding musician, and--in the sense of how deeply he felt his emotions, however low the depth of his sorrows and high the crest of his joys, and how courageously he served truth, however dangerous and unpredictable that it is--he was a poet.

And I believe that while he was alive,
he was much more alive
than most people.

Listen to the Ragpicker's Dream by Mark Knopfler with the link below, it is a beautiful song my father used to play about two castaways on Christmas.

"The main point is clear - with corporate control over the political process there can be no democracy."

-Quoted from Smith University Student Vanessa Raditz

Three ideas that don't involve pitching a tent:

• #1 Stop shopping, start trading.
  Host a barter party! It is astonishing how much of what we buy (90%) ends up in the garbage within six months. Most of that stuff is perfectly good! Let’s be honest, the biggest difference is whether or not it's wrapped in plastic. Did you know that the biggest reason our goods are wrapped in plastic is simply to prevent shoplifting? It isn't because it makes the product better, I assure you that. 
  When Chris and I moved into our fixer-upper farm house last year, we put out the word that we didn't have much of anything to furnish it with. To our great surprise it turned out that most of our friends had offerings that had just been sitting around in the garage, unused. You might think the things we inherited were second rate. On the contrary! Our home is now furnished with extremely classy pieces ranging from antiques to nearly new. And you might be surprised to learn that those donors were actually relieved to get rid of this stuff! Right down to the tiniest details --boxes of toothpicks, stacks of post-its for the desk, light bulbs, or a lifetime supply of paper towels, for example--there was enough extra stuff in our community to fill our house AND our garage!
• #2 Meet your basic needs by sewing, growing, and biking.
  As Americans we're so indoctrinated in the idea that when we need something, we have to go out and spend money to buy it. But a myriad of ways exist to procure products. The most obvious, of course, is to create it (or fix it) yourself! It wasn't so long ago that our grandparents did things like sew their own clothes, darn socks, or collect and filter rain-water in a rain barrel for household use. The satisfaction of being connected to the complete process of creation (beginning with an idea and ending with a physical product) is profound. In fact, some very famous philosophers have argued it to be the origin of happiness!
  Last Spring I came home very tired from an intense national tour that had left me feeling depressed and depleted. The only thing I could muster to do was dig up a plot of earth and plant a seed. By the time harvest rolled around, I was a joy machine! (Maybe it was simply all the vitamins and minerals I'd started to ingest by eating truly organic food grown from nutrient rich soil.) But philosophical or scientific explanation, the end result was the same: I was beaming with satisfaction.
• #3 Participate politically.
  Look, I think it's a drag, too. I do. The last thing I want to spend my free time doing is bombarding my left brain with more dull facts and details about things like campaign finance and "economic growth." I'd rather be dreaming up songs on a hiking trail somewhere. But if we don't use it, we lose it!
  Either we get involved now and put a stop to the corruption and corporate control, or we get to see urban sprawl and big box stores at every intersection, watch our water-sheds dry up or be polluted, and essentially acquiesce to a world in which diversity is a dirty word. A real life version of the game we all played as children, Monopoly, is coming to a close and we're on the cusp of losing our opportunity to participate politically, unless we speak up AND stick together.
  Last Thursday at the University Of Berkley, California, students attached tents and protest signs to helium balloons in order to occupy the airspace above their campus. This, because they were beaten or arrested for protesting on their public ground space. Have we, the human race, really been cornered and controlled into merely occupying the air? And if those tents hadn't been tied to kite strings, what sort of airspace regulations would students have been violating? Would the tents have to be sent through security?

As you continue to deepen your understanding of Occupy Wall Street, I have four requests of you:

• #1 Read, watch and listen to independent media. 
  Corruption is complex. Don't get discouraged because the pitch can't be summed up in a 30 second sound-byte or twitter post. Investigate. Get your information from a variety of sources. 
  What I hope you'll find is that this movement is all about making the world a better place for you. We don't want you to have to eat toxic food because organic food is too expensive. We don't want you to pay loads of taxes while the richest corporations don't pay a dime. We want your children to have a quality education so that they know how to critically think. And we don't want you to live a life dominated by debt and fear.
• #2 Don't look at this as just a jobs problem.
  It's actually a lack-of-green-local-jobs-problem. Let me explain. In my own community of Golden, CO "economic growth" and "job creation" are still two magic phrases that push nasty ticky-tacky development projects through (projects that benefit the few, rich developers, often also politicians, at the expense of the larger citizenry in our loss of natural habitat, arable land, and breathtaking vistas, not to mention the taxation on our already scarce water supply.) But there's a major flaw in this logic. 
  More sprawl and more big box stores do not translate to more jobs, or even the growth of the local economy. In many cases (you've seen it) sprawl developments (cleverly named after the animals they've kicked out) stretch on for miles without a single commercial complex. By creating a space for a new flock of citizenry to live in, the ratio of citizens to jobs in a county does not change. In fact, the opposite occurs. With the sprawl development there then exist new citizens, but fewer jobs, and longer commutes. The construction work is over in a brief flash, and in the end we've traded our most precious natural resources for rows of overpriced homogenized houses and short term contract work. In the case where we do see commercial development integrated in with the residential, it is most often multinational corporate businesses that open up shop, an essential black hole in the American economy.
• #3 Forget high school psychology, particularly that of sports games.
  The first thing the news did to squash Occupy momentum was to simply portray it as uncool, or "fringe." Some have said hippie, some have said communist, I'm sure soon they'll say occupiers are unpatriotic, terrorists, or maybe even a throwback to my favorite label and example of word magic--witches. The point is--whether we're talking about the red scare, a high-school popularity contest, or the movement that will abolish greed and hunger once and for all--don't let an emotional stab overrule your logical mind. And besides, as it turns out the majority of us are uncool anyway. 
  The second thing the news has been doing is to convince us that it's a strictly liberal movement, inferring then that all right wingers out there ought not to play. I'd be willing to bet that your average Republican wants their vote to count in politics just as much as your average Democrat, but it turns out that we're used to choosing teams. That's because we're primed for that bullshit as early as we can throw a football or swing a bat. "There's a winner and a loser son, and you're on one side or the other."
• #4 Get the ego out, and get your hands in.
  Lastly, there is an odd demographic of people who support all of the above statements, all of the things that Occupy represents, and yet won't associate themselves with the mass of people coming out of the worldwide woodwork. Why? I've scratched my head for many hours trying to sort this out. I've concluded that some people would rather take credit for the birth of these ideas than help see them come to fruition.
  Historically, mainstream media hasn't represented the concepts Occupy endorses. It follows, then, that individuals who have lived by the Occupy principals before the Occupy movement emerged likely identify themselves as exceptions to the status quo. Now that the voices of the occupiers are being heard, heeded, and even screamed, those same folks are no longer "special." I agree, it feels different to be "joining in," and now that these ideas are gaining popularity, those of us that truly were fringe feel funny! "Hey!" we're thinking, "Those were our ideas first!" But that's when we have to remember that the tangible trend (as much as we abhore trends) that Occupy seeks--to get the corruption out of politics--is so much more important than the way it feels to be a rebel.

Solidarity!

Gabrielle Louise

P.S. My favorite Resources:

• The Story of Stuff Project
• Century of the Self
• Yes! Magazine

Friends!

I just found this video from an after show jam last spring...pardon us for having too much fun! This song is one of my new tunes that I will be putting on the upcoming record, "For the Brokenhearted," which I'm headed to New York next week to continue work on with Tim Mitchel! This project has secretly been in the works for years, and we are so excited to see it through to fruition!

In contrast to my last record, Mirror the Branches--in which we took pride in the minimilism--this project features many special musical guests, including (but not limited to!) Rob Jost on Bass and French Horn, Jefferson Hamer on guitar and harmonies, and Doug Yowell on Drums and Percussion. I'll keep you posted on progress once we get inside the studio!

For now, have a drink with us? :)

Gabrielle Louise

Two lovers on a rock
lying in the sun and the summer wind
she rests her head
near to the sound-hole of his guitar
like one listens to a stomach
with child.

weeds are pulled to and fro in the water
willows are pulled to and fro in the breeze
everything is pulled to something
though some of us are stubbornly resisting
and swimming upstream.

*

I am like a humming bird in the house
colliding with the glass of a bay window
because it sees the sun

I entered this mental cage
in haste again
because I saw that expression
inviting me in
and I am using old logic
to try and get out.

It's best not to drink the water from my words
take the truth directly from the well in our eyes.
I am warning you:
everything else
is a lie

*

Patience is the greatest form of grace.
you cannot construct a hill
to resemble the sloping waist that
nature makes
with patience...
sprinkled in meadow grass and wildflower jewelry.

Today I entered the shop
of the woman who taught me patience
like the spider taught the native Americans to weave
beautiful beads the size of sand
into tapestries.

She wore gray hair to her waist in a braid
- only the color had changed -
and lines that ten years
had traced around her mouth and eyes.

When my parents fought deep in the night:
I wove her patience.

And when the beads were knocked to the floor
because the careless limb of a child careened,
they mixed with dust and bugs into a multi-colored mess.

With a needle and time
I would sort them again
and hear no words in the house
but for hers.

*

I don't have to seduce you
the scent of the moon-vine seduces you
and we breath the same air.

I don't have to woo you
the stars do
and I will make myself a shadow
in the courtyard

expose your skin to the rain
and let a little bit of the world in!

To taste the difference in these lives,
you cannot share just one meal.

Stay on
and let the night air
feel your vulnerability.

Our quirks blend and blur
like the many particles in a good strong tea.

When we grow bitter
I'm not sure if it's you or I
that has flavoured the water.

Anyway it doesn't matter,
because even those ideas come from the same well.

When we are calm or joyful or reckless,
the seed germinates and grows
between our beings
in the soul soil.

It was once individual people
bone structures
facial features
flower arrangements!  

how trite they seem, those things
and the time when we spoke to each other with words.

Words only say so much--
a peeping Tom hole.

The body expresses more--
a window.

The mind reveals nothing at all--
a wall.

a wall that reasons us away from the real with the rational.

*

In your physical absence I am like the river without the river bed.
lacking inertia, buoyancy, turbulence.

I see a man in a car who has been engineered
into believing that separation and individualism
are the fashionable ways of being.

I see a man in line at the grocery store who is stuck inside the
LCD screen of his smart phone.
A screen keeps something outside
out.

There are more people inside screens every day.
I don't believe in little virtual rooms anymore.
They don't exist.

I remember when someone first told me about the aspen trees.
I grew dizzy with love!

Thinking of all those hands holding each other.

Nothing in nature is isolated. 
Pull out a weed--
it's roots are laden with a whole soup of antiques!

But a man pulls at the string of a chainsaw. It starts after a few tries-
chews at a log.
He is slicing into another world without even knowing it.

Birds call all around us. They cackle at our ignorance,
marvel at the rift--
whatever they have the whim to say won't be understood.
We get the gist of it even if we don't get the details.

*

In loving you I am more connected to the world.
I am reaching out my root threads to all the wriggling life--
to take hold and be aware
of our intrinsic intermixing.
To enjoy it and celebrate existence.

But they are a dying breed, the open curtain souls.
Most people are not so alive. They are like rocks.
no emotion tentacles to tangle with.

You have to lift them up to see the earth at work underneath.
And they are heavy! They don't come to you.
They wait for the wind to bring them a friend.

We are like two bay fig trees.
Pushing through the flaky earth to be tangled in each other.

Lovers.

Make You Remember Lyrics:

You’re Italian, I’m American, you’re gay, I’m straight, you’re kissing and I’m staring. Strip away the identity, we’re all just breathing human beings! We’ve got these little boxes sorting out our minds by our color, our culture and our sexual pride, but hey, I’m just as guilty as the next guy. I’m just as guilty as the next guy!

When you think to yourself what a woman can do, do you limit yourself to what’s attractive to you? We affect our tone to satiny soft, I’ve never dreamed of letting it all out like Janis Joplin! Flat-out, being female, we’re raised to fear we might do something that’ll spoil our sex appeal. But when we aspire for more than aesthetic altitude some seem to think we’ve got an attitude! I know you think your hands are clean, but listen to me! I feel it! We’ve got a ways to go, we’re not equal yet. No, we’re nowhere near it. I’d love to express my needs like a dude, get right to the point without being called rude. For example: “Hey bitch! Go make me some food!” I bet that ruins your mood.

It looks two types of ways from two points of view, but I’ll humor you if you ask me to, so let’s contemplate the truth!

I want to make you remember you’re alive! I want to make you remember you’re inspired! I want to wake you up from the slumber. I want to wake you up!

Oh, the mundane, painful mediocrity when real life looks just like a movie scene, telling the same tired jokes that we learned on TV. I can’t seem to escape the Hollywood screen that’s homogenizing humanity, with all their products placed so cleverly, diggin’ another soul-hole to make you think you need another useless thing! And the cuisine we’re consuming, it all tastes the same. The only thing different is the packaging and names, SYSCO, MONSANTO, high-fructose glue: I bet that ruins your mood.

Pre-chorus and chorus

We’re so confident that we’ve corrected history, living in the time when it’s just like it’s supposed to be, but we’re not done purging the pervasive greed. Companies are the kings of this century! Modern day slavery assembles toys in factories overseas! Oh, “out of sight, out of mind!” but by choosing to be blind I’m just as guilty as the next guy! Make way, governments, for the modern day Monarchy--for the purposes of this game, lets call it a corpocracy (though some fancy it a democracy, the puppet boxing ring.) It sells you another useless thing to color up the garbage swirl, to clutter up this precious world. But hey, I’m just as guilty as the next girl.

Stakes are claimed with clever campaigns, a shell sign protrudes from the mountain range, like a flag conquering land. We now colonize with our ads and our brands. It clutters the open horizons of my youth, and fucking ruins my mood.

Pre-chorus and chorus.

Fear based legislation, fear based laws sell us into separation, makes fools of us all. Fear based legislation, fear based laws sell us into separation, makes fools of us all.

For some years we have heard the extravagant technological promise of housing at low cost. It has never come to pass. The answer to low cost housing, it seems to me, is to make a break with a "standard of living" that makes us slaves to centralized decision-making and control, to an economy whose values are the magnitude of production and consumption. The dollar is not a reasonable measure of the quality of life or the quality of place.

Yet, most of us are still children of that dollar, and of the institutions we grew up in--we are conditioned to their ways. For most of us have grown up sharing little real experience or work. We have few rituals that celebrate our unity of body, mind and spirit. We are trying to find our way back into the earth family and there are few guides to show the way.

Thus, one of our tasks is to repair the rift between our "objective" and our "subjective" selves, to unite the division between the inner and outer man, a division nurtured by the machine metaphor, by the separation of one's work from one's identity. A division aided by fragmentation of our time, and by the physical settings that support this split. Getting myself together started with getting my time and space into one place, with creating the possibility and essential conditions for that wholeness.

This day I chiseled four mortise joints to receive the tenoned posts that will be the frame of our sauna. In fourteen years of architectural practice I never designed a mortise and tenon joint because it was too much handwork and at carpenter's wages, far too expensive. So now I am learning to make them myself.

It is taking me a long time to get over the guilt of spending days hard at work learning to do the things I wasn't trained to do. It is taking a long time to accept simple satisfaction of doing what I am doing, living in the present.

Sim Van der Ryn,
The School of Architecture,
University of California, Berkeley
Published 1973

The weekend commenced with a clamour of symbols and a train wreck of a show at The Salida Cafe. Now, I've played this listening room about every six months since I was 12. It's my hometown gig, and it happens to be a good one, so it's been a more consistent presence in my life than most family members, band mates, or love affairs. I twitch as I type the name, Salida Cafe, because I still can't quite quit calling it Bongo Billy's, what it was originally christened. There have been so many evenings that I've chatted comfortably with the owner, Clark, by the register while he tallies up the proceeds. But this time, well, we hadn't been able to rehearse all that much before the show. David had been down South playing stompin' blues and roots music for two weeks, and I had to teach all the new stuff to Carl minus David. It was a Thursday night and the room was about half as full as it usually is. As Clark counted up the cash, I thought about how much I was looking forward to hitting the sack.

We loaded up the van and pulled out of the parking lot, successfully waking up any early-to-beders in the neighborhood with the loud knock of Vita's diesel engine. Back in Minturn where we'd stopped for lunch there'd been a nay-sayer walking by with a cane and ZZ-Top beard, "I hope you're not going over the pass in that thing! Sounds bad, little lady." I'm not really the type of girl that likes to be called "little lady," so I told him "mind your own business!" Ok...maybe I only said that with my eyes. Two blocks away from the Salida cafe the tick-tock knock slowed to a full stop, and Vita made it damn clear she wasn't inteding on starting again. We pushed her to the side of the main strip, right smack in front of the local bar, The Victorian Tavern, or, The Vic.

I sat behind the steering wheel, staring, for about five minutes. David and Carl grew increasingly curious and uncomfortable. "Nope, sorry mate, you're not dreaming, this is your life," I said to myself. "Deep breath," and opened the van door. We proceeded to unload all the speakers, stands and instruments from the back, the strewn clothing, coats, bags, books, loose change, motor oil containers, and oddly shaped tools until I found the vice grips and the spare fuel pump.



Ok, so it's time to confess. Vita's needed a new fuel pump about every two months for, well, her whole life. The WVO has to be wicked hot to flow easily through the fuel system, 180 degrees to be exact, and it's so hot that it melts the plastic components in the pump. I could just buy a new pump that has metal components (now wouldn't that be brilliant!) but instead I've personally exchanged the stock fuel pump in every damn NAPA in the country. Twice.

So I get to work fixing it, wishing to god that Chris were there to help. David and Carl are making me laugh at least, chalk full of that's-what-she-said jokes and having a smoke. But I still feel the tolerance timer ticking down, and as I hurriedly clamor with the tools like a drunk dentist in stage clothes, a coyboy squints into the street light and recognizes the nerdy girl from English class. "Gabby?!?"

"Well, here we are, at the height of our careers," David says. For the hundredth time.

That night I soaked in the hot tub and stared up at the stars. I had a headache from breathing the diesel fumes that I couldn't kick. I couldn't sleep. Half my brain was on repeat with a new song lyric, and the other half was bleeding air out of the fuel lines sans a flashlight. Either way, it wasn't tired, and it sure hurt bad. Clark had eventually ridden by on his bicycle, circa one a.m., and convinced me to give it up and try again in the morning. (But not after we try one more thing! Just...one...more...thing. And not after one more drunk cowboy offered to help while teetering on his feet and crashing into the curb, smelling like whisky.) Oye, Vay.

Chris, our beloved road manager, and Mandy, good friend and jazz singer who was lending her lovely voice to the next two gigs, arrived the next morning donning more tools and energy, and within a couple hours we were hitting the road again. "Chris could change the color of the moon if he wanted to." And that's what my roommate Art has to say about that.

The gig in Montrose came and went, the post-show festivities came and went, again with little sleep and plenty of raunchy humor. Standing on our host's porch at two a.m., staring at miles of pastures and city lights, a cow-gasm interrupted David and I's philosophical conversation about truth. Yes. a cow-gasm. I have to confess I've never really thought about whether or not those truthfully exist, but as it turns out--they do.

A downright paganism cellebration of decadence and abundance is what came the next day. Paonia, Colorado, home to many of the orchards and vineyards in the state, is a flash-back-to-the-60s with its music festival called "Mountain Harvest Festival." We'd been hired to play a set for the third year in a row, so I knew exactly what kind of ridiculous joy was about to descend upon us. The set went great, Paonia graciously gave us a standing ovation, and Carl wore a red boa while banging the drums like a toe-headed heathen. He had us all sinking into each downbeat like mud, trudging solidly and somehow, spiritedly all at once. David wore his usual stoic stage face and made a series of dry quips that had the audience chuckling between songs. The string of notes that he pulled from his guitar were so colorful and buoyant that I felt every song to be new. I love that. Mandy sang spot on harmonies despite a severe hearing loss she suffered at 19. Not to mention she looked stunning in the red dress she was wearing, and performed the most expressive version of sign language lyrics that I've ever born witness to. I left the stage very very proud of my friends.

Have you ever heard traditional Indian music? I hadn't. After our set we wandered into the venue next door where a woman named Beth Quist sang in a three octave, micro-tonal range on a stage outfitted with tie-dyed, trippy tapestry while playing the piano and the guitar AT THE SAME TIME. I felt like I was in Berklee, CA, 1965. I didn't know if we'd make it home the next day or not, (Vita was still coughing like she hadn't kicked the cold yet) but I was so happy in that moment that I popped a fuse in my head.

We loaded up at 8 am and she drove pretty smooth until we hit McClure Pass. Round the top the transmission started having trouble and we pulled over to absorb the view of patchwork-quilt fall aspens on the mountainside. I climbed up on the roof to take photos and Chris looked up at me in his trucker hat, us both figuring that whatever was about to happen was gonna happen anyway. No controlling it now. We coasted down to 1-70 and then hobbled up yet another pass at about 15 miles an hour, engine smoking, hogging the breakdown lane.

We're headed now to put her to sleep.  I don't know how we made it home safely after 6 cross continental tours and a lovely little jaunt up to Alaska.  But we did, and good old Vita has run her course. Besides, we've got a new pup now, "De Jefes," Mexican slang that we were taught to mean "For the Bosses!" De Jefes is a 40 foot Silver Eagle tour bus that we're remodeling to comfortably carpool with 4 other acts. Collectively, we're becoming what we'll call, "The Music Market," a touring music festival of great musical diversity and full of social consciousness. We're keeping the WVO method of fueling and will be hitting up 6 markets in the new year: Salt Lake City, Seattle, Portland, San Fran, Albuquerque and Denver.

I'll be posting photos of the progress as we go (The first thing that needs to change is the paint job--right now you feel like singing the national anthem when you go for a spin.) We bought the bus stripped and have many an hour to put in before it's the dream ride we imagine it to be. But YOU thought I'd give up after Vita's tranny gave out, didn't you? Hell no! Must...try...one...more...thing.

This is the journal entry from "behind the board"--my experience working on Mirror the Branches, due out sometime this summer.

The week before recording Chris and I were on tour in the Midwest. The schedule had us low on sleep, since each college was a decent drive apart, and our afternoons were accounted for with Earth week events, evenings with the concert performances, and mornings we'd venture forth again, dopey and drowsy, crawling into our lovely life: Vita, the veggie van.

It began raining right away- the second day on the road, relentlessly keeping time on the windshield. Our heater is broken, and we had foolishly packed for summer, so it didn't take long for us to get sick. I'd look at my calendar and hear it ticking at me like a clock, and every passing day my sinuses got more inflamed until the small amount of time allotted to sleep was spent focusing on trying to breathe in the stuffy night. My nightmares held all sorts of horrors, including but not limited to: Arriving at the studio, only to find myself suddenly nine months pregnant and having to deliver a child rather than cut the new CD. (Would I really tell my future child that could I have chosen differently, I would?!?); Or, routing to the studio by bus and losing all my teeth in a collision with a grip pole when the driver suddenly braked and tossed me forward into the steel bar. (Don't worry, I insisted on a refunded fare before proceeding, bleeding, to the hospital.)

We picked David Rynhart up at an Irish pub near Cheshire, CT, where he was scribbling in his sketchbook and drinking a pint--a very regular portrait of our dear friend. He'd been on tour 'round New England, sporting his broad brimmed hat and tweed sport coat, carting a guitar and his Irish Flute. He'd done his traveling by bus and train, told us he'd stayed up late for days on end with poets and songwriters, trad players and bus sharing buskers.

I walked dizzily into that dim pub on a bright afternoon, carrying enough goods to stock a natural food shop: vitamin supplements, tissues, tea and tinctures, all recommended by the great Joelle Moushati, our herbalist friend from Boulder, CO. Chris carried, as usual, his older-than-dirt laptop which had, for the hundredth time, broken and was in need of repair. We greeted Rummy (as we call him) and Chris promptly began to dissect his computer into a pile of screws, wires, and hardware, looking like the mad scientist that he is. And me? I began to compile a pile of pills hearty enough to feed the hungry, lining up the bottles like bowling pins on the table. Our waiter approached, immediately irritated, and we had to laugh at ourselves in such a sorry state.

We still had two days before the studio, so we landed ourselves at a Motel 6 near to David's gigs. The time which we'd planned to rehearse could hardly be put to use, since I couldn't complete a song without a sneeze, so we went to work arranging French horn parts instead. (While in Argentina and writing the record I had called Mark Thayer at Signature Studios and asked if he knew a French horn player and upright bass player that we could rope into the session. He replied that he, in fact, knew someone who played both!)

Now, Signature Studios is located in an old barn in Pomfret, CT. This I knew from my investigation on their website. What I didn't know, though I had certainly hoped for, is that the setting is stunningly beautiful. There is a vineyard and quaint, fenced garden on the property, all enclosed by a curtain of wood that protects one's sense of space from the road and not so nearby neighbors. We discovered that the old barn and its adjoining apartments were once home to an artist's collective in the 70s--just my style.

When we pulled in the drive, Vita rumbling and trumpeting our arrival (yes, thank you Vita), I looked around a bit uncertainly- where to knock? A voice called down to welcome us from a top a set of stairs and behind a shadowed screen door.

Mirror the Branches was starting to spin on an old record player somewhere.

Still sick, but with above average adrenalin levels, we began tracking that first night. Strange Summer Snow and I'll Turn Myself in on Monday both happened fairly fast. (I chugged enough tea to trigger thirty bladders of bathroom field trips 'tween takes, a disco drip in the leaking sink faucet rushing my relief and sending me bolting back into the booth to try another take. hilarious!)

We very quickly settled into a routine of team work- Christopher cooking meals, David, Mark and I focused on the recording tasks. All hands and ears were well rehearsed, but plenty patient to hear one another's ideas (and there were many many wonderful ones.) Mark's temperament is so relaxed that my stress soon subsided, and I realized that one's job as an engineer must be much more psychologist than tech head!

The second day in Pomfret started off stormy- as though something lovely was brewing. David and I practiced this brooding instrumental piece I imagined would represent transition on the record, (a classical guitar study by Leo Brouwer that I've renamed The Breeze Took Life and Sang) and the sky shook drizzle and morning thunder while we wore sunglasses inside for kicks. Mark was visiting with his downstairs neighbor, and they called up to us from the lawn to take a look at what was breaking through the sky. A beautiful double rainbow that was ending, it seemed, in the garden before us. So, David ate it, naturally, and I grabbed it like a spear, and well, everyone agreed it must be an omen- a good one, that is.

We proceeded to track--live being our plan of attack--David and I both playing and singing at the same time, and on a handful of tunes overdubbing subtle things like rhodes or mandolin sparkles. The more time passed at the studio, the more relaxed and efficiently we worked. Sharing meals, sleeping there, waking up early to tiptoe toward the bathroom and hear my songs singing back at me from the control room--Mark was already hard at work! (Ok, yes, and I tend to sleep in later than most....)

On the evening of the third day Rob Jost, aforementioned bassist and French horn player, drove up from New York City and joined us to track Desiree and Jonathan Michaels. We also talked him into adding bass to Strange Summer Snow, which he played so beautifully.

Later that night when buckles clapped and uncapped the French horn from it's case and Rob played a few warm, round sounding notes to Jon Michaels in the control room I nearly DIED, or cried, or both. I literally jumped from the couch like a cheerleader and gave my new friend a large unsolicited hug. His parts give the record just the somber, and sea faring feel I had hoped for.

Quite ahead of schedule and with only one (planned for) song left to track, we began our fourth morning at Signature with confidence, and ok, a little hype. At the suggestion of Mark (He'd heard it during a rehearsal) we decided to add House Carpenter to the record. House Carpenter is the first song I can remember my mother teaching me. We were up round a Colorado campfire, I the barefoot child of hippies, and my mother and friend singing it in the smoke and stars. I asked her to teach it to me, and I used to cry every time we neared the sad ending. Anyhow, it's an interesting full circle feeling to have tracked it on my fourth studio record, ten years after learning it.

Truth be told, we had to twist David' arm into playing the part of the devil, yet again...but we finally convinced him after Mark mentioned the idea of adding (gasp) an electric guitar solo. It's really lovely to have David singing lead on something on the CD, and his voice sounds just gorgeous. After recording the basics for that 7 minute old English folk ballad, we then proceeded to overdubs.

Overdubs are always my favorite part--watching, or hearing, your children turn into adults!!! Fully realized ideas, with a sense of personality and fashion taking shape. David was absolutely brilliant and breezy in his execution of his creative ideas, and Mark had so many wonderful suggestions to broaden the soundscape. Glockenspiel stars on Midnight Molasses, rolling thunder from a ceiling panel on House Carpenter. (My credits will read like this on the record: Gabrielle Louise -Songwriting, Voice, Guitar, Rolling Thunder.)

Once our work was done we had enough time left to beer and booze ourselves into goofiness. We made a series of music videos, from serious to extremely silly, that really captured our time at Signature Studios. We sabotaged Tom Waits' tunes, crooned Use Your Teeth, Pure Adrenalin, and Quantum Genius to a chicken perched on the piano, and eventually filmed some very moody one mic vids of I'll Turn Myself in on Monday, Pirates of Mental Space and Midnight Molasses a la Welch/Rawlings. This week I discovered a poem that I love. It reminds me of all these late night sing-a-longs that keep me alive and full of joy.

Everyone suddenly burst out singing,
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
...Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; -on - on - and out
of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted,
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears, and horror
drifted away...O, but everyone
was a bird; and the song was wordless,
the singing will never be done.

-Siegfried Loraine Sassoon 1919

We took about a week off of the project, dropping David off at a bus station in Hartford, CT, where he began this month's cross country journey. Chris and I went up to New Hampshire, where my grandmother Isobel maintains a beautiful blueberry farm. We spent the week recuperating in her colonial farm house, reading WWI poetry and having many a wonderful meal, chalk full of conversation and candlelight.

Now we're onto mixing, after a good day of cleaning house and tidying the tunes for clicks, pops, crackles, and a "garden variety" of cereal box nuisances. I'm finding that I have to live with a lot of imperfections--it's the nature of cutting a record in this style--you maintain the emotion but have to accept an out of tune note now and again. I try to remember Cohen, who wrote it so well...

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Overall, I'm just bursting with excitement about releasing the record, when that time comes. We have mastering, artwork, and printing yet ahead, so maybe midsummer? We’ll see…

A deer's walking in downtown Denver
cars are honking and yelling out
I know him, I know his dilemma,
everybody here has taken to shouting

for god's sake be more contemporary
write something you know that we can hum
mindless chatter topped with a cherry
give 'em a piece of that bubble-gum income

but I am not
trying to be a superstar
oh, I am just
hammering on my secondhand guitar
and I am not
part of the scenery
another creative casualty
begging someone with a big cigar
to make me, make me
a superstar.

jump on board, we're all moving
headin on toward an open landscape
Come on, life is for choosing
more than spoon-fed, friendly brand names
the whole country's been wearing chains

but we are not....
to make us, make us...

time- you can't buy it with your money
won't you try
the complementary kind
time- spent to buy amenities, accessories
and life's on loan.
Get the things you need from the dirt and seed and you won't be owned
no, you won't be owned.

cause we are not
a generation of superstars
oh, we are just
hammering on these second-hand guitars
and we are not
part of the machinery
another corporate casualty
begging someone with a big cigar to make us, make us
superstars.

is it for good or for greed? just the handmade version, etc.

It is the chasm in the beggar's mouth where the bread spews out,
the Monday church, a winter pool,
the stalemate of the jury in deliberation
of a dilemma that knows no rule--
a cleft in the face of the law.

The crescent beneath your fingernails, forgotten cells,
dilapidated cars of rust and sun bleached pastels,
skin between freckles...
and the place in the window where the ball passed.

It is the unmade, empty bed,
the permanent indent on his pillow,
the hollow between her collarbones,
a missing rib.

Abandoned wells,
incorrectly witched and drilled,
the singing cave inside a shell
and cracks where rodents dwell.

Retired subway tunnels.
Translation stutters...
it does not exist -
the word.

Dancers suspended in a sweaty step,
festering in tension 'till the lead takes the next
--it's the space between their chests.

Vacuous eyes in the man who forgets:
forgets a name,
forgets his brother,
forgets that he is living.
It's the loss of religion
like an auctioned off, foreclosed home,
ready to be filled again.
The depressed, the forsaken, the condemned.

The innards of the flute,
the void inside the noose,
the rests in the battering of the snare.

The nook between heavy breasts
or a set of elevated legs.

It's in the room of a child, grown and gone: a museum, gathering dust.
The room of the baby never born, play things dangling, decorations untouched.

And a middle child,
happily making a tent of his bed sheets,
while the oldest is applauded for his achievement
and the youngest is fed.

The square of pavement at an intersection when every light is red.

The standoff of armies on barren land
eyes flying across the pasture,
flitting from face to face.

The porous places in salt and spices,
gravel and worm-ridden grains,
hollow hearts and phantom pains,
missing limbs
and keyholes.

The distance between ants, connected through an invisible synapse.
Blank pieces of canvas.

Closed restaurants with chairs stacked on tables and shining, checkered floors.
The anticipation in the atmosphere just before it pours,
and sure,
it's the silence before the comment on the weather.

Cisco town, where nobody lives no more for a 100 miles 'round--
just an old general store, looks like it's been to war
bullet holes in the front door.
Stretches of long, dusty desert in every direction,
sandstone and sky,
without interruption--

just the quiet pause in conversation
between my mate
and me.

01.11.10 Studying Spanish is a tremendous joy for me. I am quite shy about it, but simultaneously enthralled. Putting together a sentence in another language, real-time, with a waiting, finger-tapping stranger raising their eyes in bored anticipation is a tremendous thrill. I am flushed and blushing and flooded with adrenalin, invigorated when I successfully say something as simple as "I'd like some coffee with cream, please."

Yesterday Chris and I walked around a craft fair market and had a picnic in the park. All the while, I'm clutching the dictionary like an "Oh Shit" handle and practicing a few important, rudimentary phrases. "The dogs run." "The cat swims." "I am hot," or "I am cold." Thank God they teach you how to regulate your body temperature right from the get go. This is imperative. Forget about asking where I can buy a sedative to calm myself down. I don't know those words.

Two nights ago our new roommate, Adrien, came home long after we'd gone to bed (we called it quits at 2 am!) with six Colombians in tow. They hollered and drank and generally made themselves merry on the terrace outside our bedroom window. I layed awake in a mixed state of infuriation for the inconsideration and, I must confess, some sort of envy. I jotted down a few lyric ideas in my journal as the light fully disrobed itself in front of the window, and the Spanish-speaking voices continued to gain volume and momentum with the beginning of the day.

I haven't had a wild night in quite some time,
where we drink til the dawn, propose a toast to the sunrise,
Oh I suppose that's really not the mode where I've been living.
And if you're up on the rooftop seeing stars,
not of gas and fire, but the kind you bought at the bar,
forgive me if I'm more accustomed to judging than joining in.

It's true that the Argentines are on a very late schedule. Around ten o'clock most of the businesses have rolled down their cortinas, metal curtains resembling garage doors, over the store fronts. The shops sleep with iron eyelids. There are significantly fewer lights and neon signs, so you don't have the 24 hour honeybee hive buzz of New York, at least not in our neighborhood. At the same time that the stores close, the restaurants open for dinner and several hours after that, the tangos begin.

At midnight last night we went to listen to a concert that featured a dear friend of mine, Tomas, an Argentine drummer. The club was called "Jazz y Pop" and Tomas whispers to me upon our arrival that "Chick Corea has played here!". The downbeat wasn't scheduled to fall until midnight, and by the time they actually started, it was nearly one am. A flock of open umbrellas swung from the ceiling and low hanging lights illuminated the stage. We ordered a bottle of wine while the band banged a brand of adrenalin-induced jazz and the wide-eyed audience members collided their hands in applause.

A new friend of mine, Lian, joined us at the table with her roommate, Branden. Both American, but indefinitely living in Buenos Aires, they have offered to trade Spanish lessons for guitar lessons. Lian is petite and brunette with focused eyes and an easy smile. She has one brown freckle on the tip of her nose that I adore. She is instantly comfortable to be around, and extremely excited to be living. Branden might be in love with her, and in my quick judgments they appear a perfect pair, but she is a bit coy and happily afloat in this new country. They call each other "B" and "Lee."

After being in Argentina for about a week, we taped this interview, hoping with all our glass-half-full-hearts that I'll speak fluently later, and look back at this to laugh. At the point of this taping I've figured out the words empanada and tango. By now I've added cabeza and borracho as well. Oh yeah, and cebolla (onion), which I confuse, from time to time at the grocery store, for caballo (horse.)