The Daughter’s Sonnet (A Father’s Day Tribute)

Posted on June 21, 2015 by angelacarolebrown

if by thy brow a simple sweat doth bleed

a countenance of noble toil hence laboured

then bounty borne god wouldst baptize the seed

to harvest rich the terra to be savoured

much have i pondered on the whole of thine

existence, footmen of the earth thou art

thou’st tilled the ground to ripeness, intertwining

labour and love for thy children’s start

the waxing of an oak from seed to tit’n

accords the span of seasons thou hast trod

through wars of men. thy battle doth enlight’n

a stalwart vigor ‘neath thy shield and rod

wisdom environs thine autumnal year

a gift i quest to conquer in my youth

but make myself a showy sonneteer

whilst thou with simpler words discourse in truth

yielding must be my grant, that i might learn

to recognize that wisdom is a page

from thy books i ought read, instead of spurn

the heart of thou who art the truest sage

o weary dotards, weak only in frame

thy wizened visage resting on the world

a yore of life abundant thy sole claim

whilst greater words ne’er from a mouth unfurled

growth and a shaping yet have i to mold

to learn from thee thy lessons, men of old

Angela Carole Brown is the author of three published books, The Assassination of Gabriel Champion, The Kidney Journals: Memoirs of a Desperate Lifesaver, and Trading Fours, is a recipient of the Heritage/Soulword Magazine Award in poetry, and has produced several albums of music and a yoga/mindfulness CD. Bindi Girl Chronicles is her writing blog.

MINDFUL EATING : Letting Go of a Bad Relationship To Forge a New Loving One

Posted on June 12, 2015 by angelacarolebrown

“To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint,
all things are friendly and sacred,
all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

It has lately occurred to me that food, and one’s approach to food, even the enjoyment of it, would be greatly enhanced by looking at the whole affair from a sacred, spiritual standpoint. It’s hardly a new idea. Religions the world over have historically had rituals regarding the consumption of food. From the Holy Communion of Catholicism to the Kosher Laws of Judaism to the spiritual fasting observed by many religions, food and the consumption of food have played a pivotal role in the development of the soul.

I have struggled with food my whole life. I’ve either seriously dieted and lived in grumpy privation, or I’ve emotionally eaten and found myself in food stupors, blocking out some deep pain body, or I’ve thrown hands up, not cared, and gotten real depraved with it. Actually “not cared” isn’t exactly accurate. I’ve always cared, always been preoccupied, always been obsessed, always felt the pressure from society, boyfriends, even colleagues (because I happen to be in a business where what I look like matters greatly), to look a certain way and to maintain that, in no uncertain terms. I was pretty successful at maintaining a look and a weight for most of my adult life, but not without the help of a lot of compulsive behaviors. When menopause hit and I gained nearly 50 pounds, and then kept that on for the better part of the last ten years, making the new weight my body’s new set point, efforts to get back to where I’d mainly been my whole life were proving insurmountable, and really only succeeded in enhancing what was already a fairly dysfunctional relationship with food. I’ve never starved myself, or binged/purged; my issues surrounding food have been a lot subtler than that, making the whole panorama of eating and body dysmorphic issues much more complex and nuanced than popular media ever gives us to understand.

That’s my eating background, in a brief nutshell. Nothing devastating, just the nuanced struggles of a middle-class American girl pressured by a quintessentially middle-class American pastime – dieting. And so now to this recent dawning. I’ve been on a spiritual road for some time now, some of it documented on this blog, some of it hinted at in the various memoir I’ve put out there, some of it, as well, remaining deeply private, and all in the service of bettering who I am, healing what has ailed me, and coming closer to the divine and to an internal peace in the realm of higher consciousness. I made a recent decision to start approaching the ritual of eating from a sacred standpoint. So now, what exactly does that mean?

To begin with, the world is filled with far too many people who are without food, who would give their right arm for a bowl of porridge, and would consider that bowl sacred, because it is so rare. How can I possibly continue to live in this life where I have never once had to go without, and not value the privilege that I have been given? And so, a new commitment is beginning for me. It is my effort to heal what is sore between food and me.

I want to rise above my animal self, the hungers, the desires, that root chakra governance that is primal and is all about brute survival by any means, and instead appeal to that higher seventh chakra state of grace that is beyond the limited senses. I wonder if that isn’t what’s behind the spiritual practice of fasting. The idea of denying those base urges in us, in order to push through a veil to experience what’s on the other side. When we’re stripped of our animal nature, what’s left? What are we? What are we capable of? What are our limitations? Our possibilities? Fasting is not an easy thing to do, and this essay isn’t about that, but I think we can make that same journey by deeming the act of feeding ourselves a sacred one, like baptism or the Eucharist. It’s a wacky thought perhaps; this largely social covenant (think of the countless meals portrayed on Sex and the City) reduced to a stodgy sacramental rite. Yuck, you may be thinking. “Taking the joy right out of eating, Angela . . . gee thanks!” Well, maybe. Bear with me for a minute. Because for me, the way things have been for awhile now is that there are far more meals I consume than the number of them that I actually enjoy and have a wonderfully epicurean experience with. I am moved by this idea that the experience can be so much more, and consistently so, and at the same time achieve a transcendence in consciousness. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. And, for better or for worse, I am moved by it just as compellingly as it is also my belief that this will be incredibly difficult for me to adopt. But I’m giving it a go. Have already begun so, in fact. And I’ll let you know how it works out. Here’s the basic game plan.

Blessing each meal. It’s such an old-fashioned notion. My childhood always involved grace at the dinner table, usually done by my father, or my grandfather if the meal included extended family. But once adulthood hit, I sort of never really thought about it again except for those occasions of Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner with the family, where it’s a ritual that’s still employed. My brother Mike is usually the designated grace-giver, because he is the one person who never gave up the practice. Privately from me was always a reaction of, “isn’t this charming?” And yes, I admit, there has been a bit of condescension, as well as actually being charmed, in the thought. But at a recent family gathering, I found myself reacting very differently for the first time to my brother’s bowed head and earnest mutterings. The word charming never entered my head. Powerful, meaningful . . . these were the words that hit me this time, and I couldn’t possibly tell you why, so out of the blue, but it actually re-purposed the experience of eating the meal that was in front of me. Gratitude is the theme with this one. Many in the world go without. So, because I have never had to, the need to give thanks for the bountiful straw that I drew in this life suddenly became compelling. I talked about this very briefly a couple of articles back. I just need to be truly thankful every day, and putting that practice in a ritual form is the surest way to keep me always in grace (pun most definitely intended). When every meal becomes meaningful and cherished, it makes just grabbing a handful because you’re passing by the bowl, or grazing mindlessly and finishing the whole bag out of boredom or restlessness, increasingly meaning-LESS, even, dare I say it, disrespectful in the face of those for whom a meal is a rare, momentous, and lifesaving gift.

Preparing as many of my meals as possible with my own two hands. There will be times when I go out with friends, and we commune over lunch or dinner. That is a ritual to cherish, for certain. There will be times when I’ve been invited to someone’s house for dinner. There are certainly times every week when I’m on a job, and I need to eat. But other than those examples, gone largely now is the choice to grab take-out when there’s only me, when the option to prepare my food at home instead exists. I’ll almost always choose the cooking. And I am choosing to cook and prepare my meals from a Zen perspective. Meaning to notice and appreciate every move, every moment, every flick of the wrist in mixing ingredients, every whisk, every rinse, every dice, every spice. Even the selection of ingredients, which means I am having to adopt a more mindful approach to grocery shopping.

Shopping local and organic (or growing my own!). I don’t presently have a living situation where I can grow my own, other than to try my damnedest to keep my apartment windowsill pots of mint and basil alive. But if the means exists, I can’t think of a more perfect way to cultivate a sense of the sacred than nurturing one’s food from seed, bulb, or stalk, to fruition with one’s own hands? I know more and more people who are growing or raising their own, and the practice has changed their lives. For me, for now, the very least I can do is make the commitment to finding stores in my neighborhood that promote and support local farmers, so that what goes in my body is clean, and is no longer supporting the corporate machinery of factory food production, which is dubious at best. I’ve been nutrition-conscious for many years, actually. I’ve read every health guru from Andrew Weil to Gary Null, and have largely tried to live by whole food tenets (while, of course, veering recklessly enough whenever the emotional components to my eating would kick in). But this experiment marks the first time I’ve actually sought to minimize my participation in Food Incorporated, and support local and organic. This also means that if I have to go into a mainstream grocery market, I choose to shop on the end aisles where all the unprocessed, unrefined, LIVE foods reside. Everything in the middle aisles is boxed, canned, packaged, processed, and prefabbed, usually with far more than just the food itself inside, making it a very iffy proposition from a health standpoint. Our bodies deserve better.

Listening to my body. But also listening to my urges. Urges and cravings exist to compensate for something that is missing. It might be a nutritional lack. More often than not, it’s an emotional one. That’s the time to slow down, examine the urge, not judge it (also a challenge for me), and respond to it in a way that only supports the sacred nature of this experiment. If the answer I get from my soul is that I need to be addressing something, or letting go of something, then I need to do my best to go about that task, instead of burying it with nullifying food. Because here’s the thing: Food can be our greatest enemy OR our greatest ally; the trick is in determining exactly what our relationship with it is going to be. Abusive or cherishing.

Being done with “diets.” And punishment. And needing to answer everyone else’s call about how I’m supposed to look, with none of those pressures any more obnoxious than my own impatient, unforgiving self-demands. Instead, allow my eating in a mindful and sacred way to do the job of transforming my brain, my heart, and the rest of my body into a precious, godly vessel.

Eating without distraction. And instead, putting my focus on the ritual itself. Appreciating every bite, every swallow; once again, the Zen approach. As opposed to stuffing my mouth mindlessly while watching a movie, or checking email, or grabbing food on the hurried go, and juggling a jaw full of food and a steering wheel at the same time, and not even paying attention to my eventual fullness, or to the taste experience. That one is hard for me. I have such a restless, antsy brain that JUST sitting and eating, and doing nothing else except enjoying the sensory experience of a delicious meal goes completely against my life’s experience. I’ve always eaten while multi-tasking, if I’m eating alone. Doing nothing except eating my meal is essentially a meditation. And while I’ve been an ardent meditator for many years, this idea is easily the most radical of them all for me. And therefore the one I am most determined to accomplish.

I am a firm believer in food as medicine. Food can change our brains and our health, because it contains information that talks to our genes. It’s serious stuff. So, why have I lived my entire life regarding it sloppily and cavalierly at best? That’s the question I’m trying to answer even as I write this, and as I venture forward in this experiment with a new appreciation for every meal I’m blessed to partake in.

The first night that I tried shutting off the TV and the computer, and putting my phone away, and just cooking a meal . . . and then setting my table . . . and then putting on some music (actually the music was playing during the cooking . . . very peaceful evening this was), and then sitting down and eating my meal, it was a transplendent experience. I was truly in the moment. I blessed the food I was about to cook, and then I blessed it again as I sat down to eat. I took my time. I didn’t go back for seconds, because I didn’t need to. I’m accustomed to going back for seconds. Usually because I’ve shoveled my food into the trough so fast, while watching some fast-paced movie or something equally agitating online, and so the rhythm of my external stimuli would be matched and mimicked by the fork-to-mouth action, and simply wouldn’t stop. Plus I’m a musician for my living; having a 15-minute break on a gig that’s designated for the meal they offer you has borne some very gastrically-abusing habits among my musician cohorts. I learned to be a fast eater, and then the habit stuck even beyond being on a gig. This first night in this new experiment, I ate slowly. I thoroughly enjoyed the taste sensations. I relished in the art of food pairing. And I let the world and the evening go by, as I luxuriated (yes, I can actually claim luxuriating) in the experience of my dinner. I also realize that not nearly every night, nor every meal, will be that magical. There will be the occasions when my mood is terse, perhaps my day has been a challenge, and I won’t feel like cooking, or I won’t feel like gracing, and all I’ll want to do is mainline the drug that food can be with the wrong infusion, into the gullet, and numb out. But I figure, it’s a one-day-at-a-time kind of thing, like AA. Like any program that attempts to repair something that is out of spiritual alignment. It’s a mountain. And I’ll need to be prepared to climb it daily.

During the formulating of this idea, and writing about it, I’ve had to ask myself (if my creed here is truly vigilant honesty, and that’s been my claim) if all of this isn’t just a new scheme, of the gaggle of them that I’ve tried, toward trying to lose weight. And while I can’t say that isn’t a factor, the truth is I am looking for something deeper. I’m in this whole thing for a spiritual revolution. An uprising from my innards, pulling at every thread in my sight lines and my insight lines, that will help to weave me right into the tapestry of interconnected consciousness and the frequency of infinite realms and possibilities. I know, I know, I’ve gone off the reservation a bit with the flower-child rhetoric. But I assure you it isn’t without focus or substance. And it’s already happening, this personal revolution, unfolding layer by layer by layer, a tiny bit each day.

I heard an anecdote recently about some Buddhist monks who, in an effort to protect their sacred Buddha monument from Burmese soldiers, covered their beloved statue in mud, knowing that the soldiers would find no material value in a statue made of clay, when what was hiding beneath its clay cloak was a monument made of gold. And the story was told in the context of the very fitting metaphor for this idea that our true value can often be hidden beneath layers of mud, or, in our contemporary parlance, baggage. And what that parable is meant to suggest is that the spiritual journey is really more about subtraction than addition. We are already complete beneath our wounds and our fears, and through the process of shedding layer after layer to reveal our sovereign splendor, we become lighter and lighter, freer and freer.

This new eating thing? It’s just a layer.

“Let food be thy medicine, and medicine thy food.” – Hippocrates

Spiritual Algorithm: A Prescription For What Ails In 8 Steps

Posted on March 31, 2015 by angelacarolebrown

If algorithm means a procedure or set of operations for solving a problem in a finite number of steps, then consider the following eight to be a kind of spiritual algorithm that I’ve recently devised for myself, and which is changing my life.

Though, even as I’m writing this, I must pause to tell you I am experiencing an emotional tug-of-war over the idea of sharing this “prescription” forward. Because on the one hand, I am genuinely excited by some new, and some merely renewed, experiences happening in my life recently, and the reality that actual tangible results of their impact are before my very eyes, and that those results are almost touching mastery, and this, mind you, from someone who tends to be gravely self-critical, and has come from a long, long arc of nuanced depression and irascibility and disappointment, built up over years and easily masked by a generally friendly disposition, and I am turning corners left and right, and I wanna wanna wanna share so badly, because I’m feeling extraordinary. On the other hand, in any piece that serves as a how-to (think MindBodyGreen, which I love and read regularly, and yet . . .), there is an assumed authority on said subject, and the implied self-importance of owning that you have something to show someone else. I have never fancied myself in the role of teacher to anyone; never been especially in touch with my Inner Deepak. Plus, as always seems to be my thinking, what if I fall? Here I’ve made this public pronouncement of some wisdom to impart, and now I’ve dared to go on with my life and be imperfect. Nothing pleases some people more than to catch you in your failures: “I thought you were giving up sugar?” smugly coming from that friend when you’ve been caught eating your See’s butterscotch square is always fun. So, I’m usually uncomfortable in this area. Even this blog, my beloved Bindi Girl Chronicles, is rife with pieces that are really tapestries of discord and imperfection and stumbles and growing pains and learning curves, as I navigate the turbid waters of self-discovery. Sometimes I have answers. Most times I’m just posing questions.

But something’s happening, something, as I said, nearly resembling mastery. There are more and more exquisite little grace notes in my life these days that have me in the perpetual state of wow and wonder than ever before. And I can only credit eight little rituals that I call my spiritual algorithm, or my prescription for what ails, and that I have only just recently put into daily practice. Visionary teacher Eckhart Tolle has often said that there are three words that encompass the secret to the art of living: One. With. Life. One with life. He is quite stunning in illustrating the importance of recognizing that we are all interconnected, of being here now, of having experiences for their own sake, and of seeing beauty in everything. The predicament for me, in truly meditating on this, is always, “of course, but how?”

Well, I have found it. At least for me. And I am champing at the bit to share. Without making assumptions that we’re all ailing, I simply offer that if you’re anything like me there’s always a spiritual nip and tuck and tweak that can be had in order to be more present and to maximize your experience here, to be truly one with life. I came up with my eight without even thinking of the eightfold path or the eight limbs (these are Buddhist and yogic references, for those of you not in the dharma know). That was purely a matter of coincidence. And so now, I like to think of this spiritual algorithm, this prescription for the art of living, as sort of my own personal eightfold path. It’s working for me, which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s meant for you. I tend to believe that everyone benefits best from a custom-made chariot for that road to enlightenment. But the chances are at least 50-50 that my prescription could indeed resonate with you. So here it is.

1. Turn away from the anxiety-fueling news programs that litter television and the internet.

Just refuse them. They are designed for one agenda only: to whip us into a distracted frenzy, and by virtue weaken us and our pocketbooks at the seams, because having an entire culture in panic mode is profitable, and is never about being in the public’s interest. Find your current events through more legitimate sources. Do the homework needed to figure out who and what those are.

2. Read for pleasure.

As a writer I want to encourage books. I want to encourage good books. I want to encourage literature. But hey, read a magazine, just read . . . for pure enjoyment and expansion. And try as often as possible to do it outside of the digital and electronic universe. Kindles and iPads are fun and convenient, but don’t let them be your exclusive source for reading. The brain needs a good chunk of quality time every day to be removed from electromagnetic energy and social media, and to be reminded of the world of imagination and connection that does exist beyond our digital screens.

3. Meditate. OR . . .

. . . at the very least find a way to simply be in silence and stillness for a few minutes every day. The more minutes a day you can find in that quiet, the better able you will be to heed the inner voice, and the better everything will be. Guaranteed. (Yes, I am actually being brazen enough to say guaranteed). I recently read the memoir of Sara Maitland on her experiment of withdrawing from the world, in pursuit of silence. There is a whole world of discussion to be had on the topic, and its impact on a society, and which is utterly fascinating. For now, for this, however, just allow yourself a few minutes each day to power everything down. And listen.

4. Connect with Higher Power.

This term is as wide a berth as the ocean, so even the most ardent atheist can find his or hers. Something that is greater than your pedestrian self, and that has something to teach you, offer you, feed you. Maybe it’s the collective unconscious. Maybe it’s art. Maybe it’s nature. Maybe it’s the source within. Maybe it is a source out there. Whether deity or principle, it will show up for every individual on the planet, and is that unquantifiable something that maneuvers us around the land mines and connects us to each other. There is no need to affix a label; simply be with it. Find yours, and plug in regularly.

5. Create, even if you’re not an artist.

Artist is only a label. We all have creativity and imagination in us, and it can show up in the most unexpected cloak, which is usually how it works anyway. Feed that. Promote that. The spiritual benefits are untold.

6. Be a child again (closely linked to the above, and which is not the same as being child-ISH).

There is so much obligation and commitment and management and planning and fortune-making that governs our adult lives that we can easily allow it to bog us down and collapse our spirits. Easy to get so caught up in building the life of our dreams that we kind of forget to actually live the life of our dreams. So, let it all go once in a while, regularly, and do what children do. Play fiercely and with joyous abandon.

Or the flip side of that same spirit . . . do nothing. The Italians have a delicious term for it: dolce far niente, literally translated as the sweetness of doing nothing. They have raised it to an art form, but in our ambition-worship culture, we have put the label of shame to it. THAT is the shame. We do not need to be in the constant state of planning, producing and consuming. Smile at nothing. Sit and gaze. Daydream. Decompress. It is the crucial yin to our workhorse-mountain-conquering yang.

7. Create a daily gratitude ritual.

It can be a prayer, a journal log, a mantra, a meditation. Even in the various spells of my life of not feeling especially spiritual or connected, I always found such beauty in the tradition of blessing one’s food. What a lovely idea to express out loud, in a ritual, our thankfulness for the bounty on our plates, and not taking a meal for granted, but cherishing it for what it gives us. Especially considering how many don’t have that luxury. Now imagine employing that gratitude practice with everything. Just imagine.

And finally . . .

8. Be in nature.

Now, I honestly don’t think any more expounding on this one is necessary, except that I am compelled to share what’s happened to me with this one, because it seems to be the mother lode. I never truly got the phrase, “be in nature,” that spiritual directive, as I now view it, until I began the recent ritual for myself. Out of the blue, it seems, I began hankering for nature. And I think, at least in part, it’s because I’ve been a meditator for a good many years already, yet have been growing intermittently flustered (as business for me has gotten busier . . . knock on wood!) by the struggle to truly burrow deep, and my belief that it has had to do with the inability to remove myself from the world’s distractions. One truth about meditation is that doing it is possible even if the sky is falling all around us, but that’s a pretty hardcore level of meditation bad-assery that I have never achieved. I need an environment that promotes moving out of the world for a few chunks of time each day. Enter nature. Fortunately I live in a community that smacks right up against a set of mountain ranges, the ever sprawling Angeles National Forest, and its various canyons and parks. Although, I don’t believe there exists a community that has zero access to some brand of nature. We can all find some.

I’ve been hiking Aliso Canyon at the very north end of the San Fernando Valley, and which is nearly in my back yard. It’s part crest, overlooking wide sweeps of mountain, part enchanted forest, taking one into the bowels of nature with trees bridging overhead and creating a canopy. What I never saw coming was the way in which this daily ritual would become something I would crave, the way one craves coffee. Runners talk about the runner’s high. I even know gym nuts who are antsy if they miss a day of working out. That has never been me. But I crave this. And I have found that not only has it been working as a meditative pursuit, but it has begun to shift my whole health & wellness, it has brought literally more oxygen into my lungs and life, and it has, most profoundly, most surprisingly, opened my heart chakra in ways I couldn’t have predicted. Communing with creatures beyond our pets and other humans, listening to their concert, moving among the wise old trees (read Herman Hesse some time on trees….whew!…), or strolling along a shore, recognizing the cruciality of taking care of the earth, and understanding the dire consequences of continuing as we are, in promoting carbon footprinting and the decimation of the ozone. This daily experience has inadvertently made me live in and practice gratitude for what I have and where I am in life and what is precious. It has brought me to a manageable, even peaceful, mental place when life is challenging me or throwing roadblocks in my way. It has actually shifted my receptor paradigm, meaning that I feel myself being more open to receiving, or perhaps, and more pointedly, feeling worthy of, blessings; as well as nurturing the ability to see that blessings are flying all around us like gnats, and are in everything that happens to us. Not only in the stuff that feels good, and is about comfort, and is easy to see as a blessing. But even the stuff (or people) we consider bad news, because these are what serve as lessons and opportunities and teachers, and may actually be where the real gold lies. And it’s ours to either choose to recognize, or not. But why wouldn’t we? And this whole shift for me has been a direct result (I could be wrong, but the timing’s too uncanny) of my daily communing with nature.

It takes a great deal of courage to keep our hearts open. So much easier (maybe even irresistible) to clamp the heart down, to bear the armor of hurt, to be the suffering martyr, and to garner the quiet awe of others, because maybe we have no real clue who we are without our wounds. But keeping our hearts open is the greatest kind of surgery our bodies can undergo. And I dare say, for us ALL, that being in nature is quite remarkable at opening up that vessel within, for our daily access.

So, there you have it. My sacred eight. The prescription for what has been ailing me. The spiritual algorithm that has shifted me just ever so subtly, yet indelibly.

Navigating the murky waters of life is a job with tenure. All the enlightenment in this world, and for that matter all the prosperity in this world, won’t reprieve us of the task. Navigated with the right tools, however (and I offer this eightfold prescription as one tool of many), life becomes not merely a road to endure but an experience of riches beyond measure. Maybe my eight can offer you something as well. Or, hey, if you’re way ahead of me, please share your own discoveries back. I would love to hear of them. Remember, I get MindBodyGreen in my daily inbox. I’m THAT gal.

But for any who are searching, or feel lost, or even just looking for a top off, I encourage you to try it.

Costs nothing.

Big Pharma has no equity in this medicine.

Dedicated to my lovely friend Kelly Phillips,
who illustrates the prescription simply by living her beautiful life,
and allowing me the honor of observing it.

Photograph of ACB is by Holli Rae

Of His Many Legacies

Posted on January 19, 2015 by angelacarolebrown

January 19, 2015. Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

I woke up this morning and hastened to the computer to post my father’s portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. on all of my various social media accounts. It’s a portrait that became sort of famous in the 1970’s. The only one of my father’s paintings that he ever made reproductions of, so that it could be owned by many. The portrait could be found, in the years that followed its creation, in several city halls throughout the country, other civic buildings, schools, private homes. I even once opened an Ebony Magazine (I was a teen at the time) to an article about an Atlanta attorney. I don’t even remember who the attorney was, as what happened next is the only part of the story that was important to me. There, under the byline, but before the title of the article, was a photograph of the attorney in his Atlanta offices. And there in the background of the photo, hanging on a wall, was my father’s King. It counted as the only example of that kind of experience I’ve ever had regarding my father’s work, since he was an artist who never exhibited, never had reproductions made of his work, save the King, and almost never offered his works for sale. He was a peculiar artist in that way. He’d made his living as a graphic artist for the aerospace industry for his entire life, and so the fine art pieces he did were purely for love and personal reward, or sometimes on commission. All of his children have his works, and many other family members and friends. But otherwise, the King remains the only of his work that circulated the country a bit in its day. Sorry about the tangent. This post is not about “the King,” as we have always called his painting, but I’m a proud daughter, so there you go. And here it is, in its entirety.

Anyway, I posted my father’s painting on Facebook, Twitter, et al., along with one of my favorite quotations of Dr. King’s, as my contribution to paying tribute to this national holiday of the birth of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.

The quotation was: “Let us truly, deeply, authentically occupy the dream, the dream of a world that works for all life, where each and every one of us is a shining star in a constellation of love. Everybody can be great . . . because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”

There are so many of his wonderful quotations that it was hard to choose the one that resonated the most with my heart today. As all great men and women tend to inspire, on any given day a different aspect of Dr. King’s lifework might ring in my heart and the accompanying quotation in my ears. Because the many avenues of his life’s work extend far beyond civil rights and racial equality, as a friend of mine reminded in an email he sent out this morning to a handful of friends. Dr. King also fought for unions, supported labor strikes and better economic realities for the poor of all races, and lastly, but hardly least, he was passionately outspoken against the Viet Nam War, and against war period.

I made the post, and then went about the rest of my day, periodically checking back to see if any comments had been made. Isn’t that what we do? The rest of my day consisted of meeting up with friends for lunch and a bit of business, then working on some graphic jobs for clients, and then taking the afternoon to go see a movie, as this is the time of year that I and my ilk (a small circle of us) log in the requisite Oscar nominees. It’s our favorite time of year. I’ve seen some pretty wonderful movies this season, and today’s was going to be American Sniper.

As I sat through this well-crafted Clint Eastwood film, I found myself physically uncomfortable and fidgety in my seat. I am a movie buff (I guess there’s a range of buffness; so perhaps I’m just a semi-buff). I love movies for their honesty, their irony, their in-depth character study, and their unsentimentality. Just tell a story, and let the story, itself, do its job to move us, or anger us, or teach us, or make our hearts soar, or make us laugh, or confound us, or take us to the couch.

I honestly don’t know what I thought of this movie (I’m sure I’ll have a firmer grasp of my feelings on it a week from now, or a year from now). It yanked me in many ways. In the final frame, it was clearly making a statement about what war does to soldiers, and yet it also intended to lionize the protagonist, who is based on a real-life person. And from what I understand, the real-life person, whose autobiography the movie is based upon, was quite unrepentant about his killing credits. So, is he a hero? Or if the movie is not about heroes but about men, do we need for him to be depicted as remorseful? Or simply as someone indelibly changed by the circumstances of war, even if he is in denial of it? These are just questions. I have no answers to them. But what clearly made me restless in this movie experience was the juxtaposition of having chosen to see this film on a day that has been nationally designated as commemoration of the man who once said, “Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.”

I woke up this morning with Dr. King firstly on my mind. I woke up with his many, many words of great inspiration swimming in my head, because I am on his side in these matters. I do not believe in war. I’m sure my politically conservative friends and my military friends will have their issue with me on that. That’s for us to work out. But I can appreciate a depiction of war, which is why I was sitting in a movie theater this afternoon, seeing this film.

It’s the juxtaposition of having chosen this day to go, which didn’t even dawn on me until I was in it and committed, and which was most definitely the source of my restlessness, that puzzles me. What I found most poignant and most troublesome wasn’t even in the film itself (though I did find the film itself gravely problematic), but the audience’s various reactions throughout. There was hearty laughter when killings happened. Silly, immature laughter. There was universal jingoistic applause when a tension-moment in the movie ended in enemy-slaughter at its most brutal. This was the audience from a Rocky movie or a soccer game. Did the filmmakers have that kind of whipped up lust as their intention? Because propaganda, after all, was at the heart of this film, and that’s what propaganda is designed to do. Eastwood’s direct trajectory in the film from 911 to our invasion of Iraq, as though one had anything to do with the other, is why I charge him with propaganda. And yet, before I go any further down the rabbit hole of political polarities, that is not even the component of the film that left me in turmoil. That component I simply, disappointingly, chalked up to the Big Lie.

What left me divided, and it’s finally hitting me even as I write this, is that Eastwood, himself, was divided. I don’t believe he really knew what story he wanted to tell. Because while he most assuredly directed a very deliberate go-get-’em piece of patriotic frenzy-whipping, Eastwood also depicted a man wrecked by his experience over there, even as that man lived in denial of his distress. And those were the moments that had a human, thoughtful, nuanced, insightful element to it. Those were the moments that reminded me why I have always championed Eastwood as a director. But while I didn’t need for Chris Kyle to be a redeemed man, or to have some kind of awakening about his actions, it was extremely important for that to be inherent in the narrative, and it just wasn’t. It brought to mind, for me, Paul Schrader’s and Martin Scorsese’s powerful and chilling Taxi Driver. Here is a character so deeply troubled, and unredeemed even to the very end. But though Travis Bickle is never redeemed, his story, his narrative, IS, through its making a comment about society. American Sniper had every opportunity to do just that. And ultimately, because propaganda was allowed to prevail instead, it failed.

As I filed out of the theater with an audience that was more revved up than contemplative, my heart truly broke to see the fruits of a culture and a generation that I believe has largely fallen from grace, and grown numbed and desensitized. I don’t know if the blame belongs to movies like this, or to social media, or to the blitzkrieg-&-hysteria-style TV programming that calls itself news today, or to technology, which disconnects us far more than it connects us, or to a generation of parents and schools dropping the ball on guidance, or what. They’re all easy targets, and they’re probably all complicit. WE are probably all complicit. But whatever is the source, it’s happening. The deadening of the collective heart. Now, I’m not a dark and gloomy doomsayer. There’s always hope. I think that’s part and parcel to what this day stands for. But it requires action. I’m not always an action person. I can tend to be very insular in my life, and in my beliefs that being a creative artist, and putting thoughtful content out into the world, is enough. But maybe it isn’t enough. And so, this collective deadening of the heart was a pretty sobering bit of business to witness, and to be in the midst of, and to conclude, on this day, the national commemoration of a genuine peacemaker in our history. A man who said these many words:

“We must learn to live together as brothers, or perish together as fools.”

“Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.”

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

“Forgiveness is not an occasional act. It is a constant attitude.”

“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend.”

I don’t know why I chose to see this movie today of all days. It felt wrong, as soon as I was in it. Even though I think Mr. Eastwood did a skillful (if dishonest) bit of directing, and Mr. Cooper did a remarkable turn as Kyle. But I think that if I’d seen the movie on any other day, I might’ve had a very different experience, a different level of sensitivity, a different outlook on humanity. And so perhaps today was exactly as it should be. To force me inward. To contemplate. Not only King’s legacy, but how we citizens have been shaped (or not) by it. How I have been shaped by it. And what to do about that, if the answer turns out to be a less-than-proud one. Because, really, that’s what today’s movie experience was about for me –– a mirror. Which brings me to my favorite of all of Dr. King’s words: “The greatest sign of maturity is self-inquiry.”

I am chasing that maturity every single day. On rare days, I even catch the little fucker.

Portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. by Ted Brown

Our Senses Whispering . . . Or Is It the Dead? (A Year-End Thought)

Posted on December 31, 2014 by angelacarolebrown

Certain laws of the universe just seem to never fail:

That if we’re looking for something we’ll never find it;

then suddenly when all effort is abandoned, there it is.

The guarantee that if the appointment is conveniently close to home,

we WILL be late to it.

And the absolute assurance, when someone we love dies, that themes of living, truly living,

not just sleepwalking,

are suddenly as loud as sirens.

They say to be devil-may-care when you’re young, and cautious when you’re older,

but I have begun to maintain the exact opposite.

Young is when you should organize and plan,

so that effective longevity stands a greater chance.

It’s when you’re older, and with fewer days ahead than behind,

that the attitude of “what do I have to lose?” makes more sense.

The older I get, the bolder I get.

It didn’t used to be that way.

I used to grow increasingly conservative as the years went by

and the hairs on my head began to lose their color.

A little more cautious,

a little more nervous,

the sense of consequences ever larger and clanging in my head.

But in this past year, a shift of some sort has happened.

And, yes, I am indeed growing more into the “what do I have to lose?” category.

I believe the reason is that a personal record number of people in my life passed on this year,

and the sheer volume of it has dizzied me.

And perhaps with how untimely so many of them have been,

I’m simply being nudged to move with more deliberateness in my gait.

Because, after all, tomorrow could be my last,

as it was (too young!) for so many I knew.

And then what would’ve been the point in my hesitation?

This isn’t a gloomy thought.

On the contrary; it is fresh with hope.

Ripe and rife with possibility.

Inspiration to be gleaned from the seeming senselessness of death.

It IS senseless, that death,

unless we, the ones left behind in life, choose,

through it and because of it,

to be awakened.

“Be nobody’s darling:
Be an outcast;
Be pleased to walk alone
(Uncool)
Or line the crowded
River beds
With other impetuous
Fools . . .
Be nobody’s darling;
Be an outcast.
Qualified to live
Among your dead.”
― Alice Walker

“And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly.
Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.”
― Maya Angelou

We are not born only once,

but many times over, when someone dies,

to a better level of ourselves,

climbing studied rung by studied rung,

to reach a self worthy of that death.

. . . At least we should be.

The Scottish song Auld Lang Syne by Robert Burns

translates roughly to “times gone by,”

and was originally a commemoration song about loved ones past,

and never letting them be forgotten.

According to modern legend, Guy Lombardo popularized the song

when his band used it as a segue between two radio programs

during a live performance on New Year’s Eve in 1929.

Purely by coincidence, the song happened to play just as the clock struck midnight,

and a New Year’s tradition was born.

2014 was a rough year by just about all accounts of everyone I know,

and much of it had to do with death, for some cosmic reason.

So, as long as we’ve had to endure it,

it might as well not be in vain.

That’s up to us.

Van Gogh’s Ear

Posted on October 6, 2014 by angelacarolebrown

he stared at his blank canvas for hours.

frustrated.

couldn’t get a thing done.

finally he just doused his naked body with flat green house paint

and in a magic-mushroomed fog

threw himself against the elevator lift.

he picked himself up off the floor.

stepped back. stared. hmmm.

it was this perfectly contoured jade silhouette of his body

divided in sublime harmony and symmetry

right between two testicles by the parting of the

double steel doors.

from that day forth every time he yanked on the ropes and opened that thing to leave

he’d flash on the excruciating image of his

right nut soaring one way and his

left nut soaring the other.

was there a symbolic message somewhere in that image, he wondered?

that maybe castration was the true doorway to freedom?

as many women as there were who had messed with his head and therefore his art

he had to at least consider the possibility.

he got the hell outta there for the night and went to a neighborhood bar.

walked in and saw the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

kinda like an angel.

reminded him o’ that old joke :

man walks into a bar. sees the beautiful woman.

tells her he wants to make sweet love to her.

Sorry i can’t, she quips, i’m on my blue period!

he downed a couple of quick shots of Old Forester.

slapped his money on the bar like a cowboy.

decided against approaching his beautiful woman.

and sulked on back home.

thought to himself :

why’d that damned Vincent have to go and cut his ear off,

and raise the bar of brilliant suffering for all the rest of us?

Angela Carole Brown is the author of three published books, The Assassination of Gabriel Champion, The Kidney Journals: Memoirs of a Desperate Lifesaver, and Trading Fours, and has produced several albums of music and a yoga/mindfulness CD. Bindi Girl Chronicles is her writing blog. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & YouTube.

Wake Up Ophelia (The Song Series)

Posted on October 3, 2014 by angelacarolebrown

I jokingly call this the greatest love story I’ve ever written. I say it with tongue in cheek because it’s the only love story I’ve ever written. But also because it’s a seedy, salty, nasty little story, with pain, hurt, desperation, heartbreak, rage, violence, and passion as its main ingredients. But make no mistake, a love story it is. The story of Arthur and Ophelia is one that originated in my novel The Assassination of Gabriel Champion. The book is a modern fable and a meditation on violence and redemption. And Arthur’s and Ophelia’s story is only a small part of the overall landscape of the book, yet it’s a pivotal one. In writing the story, creating these characters, and then living with them over the years of refining and rewriting the book, I fell in love with them. They are the most imperfect people you could possibly conceive of, they are rich in pathos and pain, they are complicated, infuriating, and they are forever sewn to my heart.

Somewhere along the line, during the years of nursing this book into its rightful being, I was inspired to write a song about Arthur and Ophelia (not even the main characters). And of course, considering the source, the song HAD to be blues.

Wake Up Ophelia would end up debuting on my first album of original songs, Resting On the Rock, a few years later, although many years before the book itself would be published.

I thought the writing of the lyrics would be easy, because their story was already there. But in taking it on, I discovered that there were actually quite a few challenges ahead. First off, I needed to decide which angle would be the focus of the song, because Arthur and Ophelia are sort of epic within the scope of the novel, yet suddenly we’ve got 3 verses and a chorus in which to tell their story, not the luxury of an entire book. And that proved tricky. I eventually came to the conclusion that Ophelia’s death was the moment that merited a song written (yes, it’s a bit of a spoiler; but if you haven’t read the book yet, believe me nothing’s ruined . . . now, go read the book!). And so, the song would become Arthur’s plea to Ophelia after snuffing out her life. I needed to find a way to express the arc of their love, their substance addiction, their desperation for and violence upon each other, and finally the deed, all within the confines of five 4-line stanzas, two of which are a repeated chorus.

I knew that what would aid me would be to approach the whole thing as poetry. There’s a different palate for poetry than for prose. Prose begs linear detail and chronology (not always, but as a matter of standard), whereas poetry can, through the artful twist of a word or phrase, illuminate everything. For example, I think “he made his arms erupt” is all that’s really needed to capture the entire nature and scope of a man’s addiction. And I had an entire story to re-work in this way. To get it all in, within the space of few words. Poetry.

Once I was able to figure out the basic prosody of the verse, the words began to fall into place, and so next came the music. Now, like I said, it couldn’t possibly be anything other than blues. And so inevitably the thought is: What’s there to write? The blues is the blues. The form is universal. Well, the lesson I would come to learn in the years that this song came into being, grew its legs, and was eventually recorded, is that the blues ain’t jes’ one thang. And as hardheaded as I have been known to be, it took some years for that to really sink in, but we’ll get to that.

At the time I was first conceiving of Ophelia’s story as a song, I had been listening nonstop to Tito & Tarantula, the stoner rock band out of East L.A. There’s a song of theirs called The Strange Face of Love that is this enigmatic, engine-revving shuffle that cannot be stopped! And I instantly thought, “Well, that’s it! That’s what I need for my song.” But it wasn’t only the feel that struck me. It was that their song was a minor blues. That’s certainly not unheard of. It’s just not the more common dominant seventh environment that’s so familiar to our ears. Wake Up Ophelia in a minor key would lend an even further dankness to the proceedings. Done. Decision made. Song written.

I sang it around town for a few years. It never even had a chart. I would just say, “blues in A minor,” tell the musicians it’s a shuffle, count it off, and go. And while it worked perfectly alright, I can’t say I felt especially connected to the story in the song, nor did I feel that it had the emotional heft of an opus, when in truth that IS how I felt about Arthur and Ophelia’s story in book form. And honestly I don’t even think I was aware of just how unsatisfying the song was for me. I just chalked it up to being “not one of my best,” and didn’t really feel any need to do anything about it. Or so I thought.

Fast forward to the year 2000, and it was, at last, time to start writing songs for Resting On the Rock, which I had conceptualized as a project that would take its inspiration from the folk vocabulary of other cultures, including America’s roots and blues movement. Wake Up Ophelia fit that bill, so I took it into the studio with some musicians to record, with the hope that it would jump start the rest of the canon for me. And I did exactly as I had done every time I’d ever sung it on a gig. I just called the key, said it was a shuffle blues, counted it off, and sang. We did a few takes. I got quick mixes. And I took all the takes home to study, and to determine which I liked best. It was sort of ZZ Top meets saloon music. And as I listened back, there was something unsatisfying about all of it. Every take. It wasn’t the playing. Let me be very clear about that. These guys, Ken Rosser, Ross Wright, David Arana, and Chris Wabich, are some of the best I know. They played their asses off. And had the subject matter of the lyrics been anything else (my baby done left me, blah, blah, blah . . . ) perhaps I would’ve dug it as I dig everything these guys play.

But in this case, I heard my song’s meaning and power just get lost in what sounded like nothing more than a romping bar blues, the kind you get up and dance to, not the kind you shudder to hear and to witness, and are forever changed.

Forgive my hyperbole. I do have visions of wanting to change the world in whatever tiny ways my talents can achieve. So, yes, I wanted shuddering.

I lived with the recording, and listened to it a hundred times, a thousand times, realizing that I’d been singing this song, played just this way, or close enough, for years, but not until locking it into recorded history, and actually having the luxury to study it did I realize how unrepresentative it actually was of Arthur and Ophelia’s dark tale. And then to try and figure out what exactly wasn’t working. And whatever that was, this much I knew, was my fault. Because I hadn’t bothered to take the time to actually compose. That’s the tricky thing about blues. You can dismiss it without even realizing you’ve done so.

The first thought that struck me, after so many listens that I’ve lost count, was that the driving shuffle was not right. Not exactly. It was precisely what was needed on the chorus, because the chorus is the plea. The begging, imploring plea. That energy is required. But the verses are expository. The verses describe their world. And their world is a place of sadness and despair, and begs sobriety. So, I decided that the verses should be played with a half time feel, and at a tempo of about 64. Very sparse, not note-y, not chops-y, but vibe-y. And that vibe needed to be messy, crunchy, grungy, but with texture, not with busy-ness. When I thought back to the Tito & Tarantula tune, I realized that that’s exactly what they do. I’d been so hypnotized by that burning shuffle of theirs that I hadn’t really noticed what they were doing on their verses. This would give the song some actual shape and dynamics. Places to go TO, places to come FROM. A meditation, to a full-on assault, back to a meditation, back again to the assault, and so forth.

Next were the chord changes. Something about what had been played didn’t sit right. I realized that clashes were actually occurring between chords and melody, because the melody I’d written didn’t resolve to the tonic by the end of a phrase, the way blues traditionally does, but instead to the dominant, and only resolved to the tonic once we were into the next verse, as opposed to the dominant merely being used as a passing chord. So, I dropped everything, and I just listened to a LOT of blues for awhile. Now, you can never go wrong with the brilliance of a Son House, or a Big Mama Thornton, or a Howlin’ Wolf. Those singers are special stars in the firmaments. Or even contemporary folks like Chris Whitley and Jack White. Yes, I was listening to everyone I could possibly consume from every walk of blues life. But the changes, the changes, were still driving me crazy. Of course, I was able to make sure a chart would resolve the verses to the dominant; I just wasn’t especially crazy about the traditional changes. I plucked around on the piano for weeks, trying to discover something different, when I just happened to find my answer in the most unlikely yard. I ran across a Daniel Lanois track called Blue Waltz, and my mind was blown by an absolutely simple set of chord changes on what was ostensibly the blues, and which were so left of the middle that I was stopped in my tracks, and knew that this chord progression was what my song was screaming for. What’s so funny to me is that it’s only the last four bars of a 12-bar blues that he does anything even remotely twisted with. So simple, and yet so profoundly odd.

Now, I have improved somewhat over the years, but at the time my ear was pretty poor for hearing changes and being able to transcribe them; what’s called a “take down.” So I asked Ross Wright, the bass player on this song, if he would listen to the Lanois track and help me jot down the changes, because, yes, he’d already been informed that we were going to redo this song. Those four bars are a set of changes that actually yank the Lanois track right out of the blues palate altogether for just an instant, to something more squared, if that makes any sense. No real blue notes. And yet there was still the issue of how to take the establishment of those changes, whatever modal construct they came from, and resolve them to the dominant. And this was where Ross was incredibly helpful.

So, finally I was starting to have a structure that was specific and fixed, and not just a case of calling blues, describing it as a shuffle, and having everyone play what they’ve played a thousand times on a thousand gigs.

I had called up Ken Rosser shortly after our session, in the midst of my song’s identity crisis. I confessed I wasn’t happy with how we’d done the song, and that a lot of it was in the structure . . . that there was none! Because I had not fine-tuned a specific set of mechanics. But that a good deal of it, as well, maybe even more crucially, had to do with concept and interpretation, which I hadn’t bothered to relay. I guess I thought the emotion could all come from me. That I wouldn’t need to communicate it to the musicians playing it. But that is so wrong. We talked very intimately about color and mood and shade and dramatic arc. He was SO on my wave length with this! We each discovered in that conversation how much a fan we both were of ambient tone and atmospherics, texture more than notes, manipulation of sound, all in the service of emotional connection. And as much as I like to talk (and have done so several times already in this song series) about Ken and me being musical soul mates, let me say here that this moment of discussing Wake Up Ophelia was truly the breakthrough moment for us, and would firmly establish the musical relationship we’ve now had for nearly 15 years.

As far as my own part in this, I had originally, and for years, sung the song in A minor, which is a perfectly comfortable key for this old alto. But as everything in the song was being revisited and re-envisioned, I decided to lower the key to where the first notes out of my mouth (which are the lowest notes in the melody) would be at my lowest possible register. It’s not the most attractive part of my register, and with not a lot of physical power there, but it does lend a quality of something intimate and fragile, almost struggling. Plenty of room to move up to the shouting chorus, but at least in the new key of F minor it would start off with a vulnerable simmer.

One of the final things I decided on, before we went back in to re-record, was to eliminate the keyboard. David Arana is a wonderful player; I’ve done countless gigs with him, the most prevalent of those being with The Orchestre Surreal for the past 18 years. But the presence of piano on this blues most definitely gave it its saloon vibe, which I realized only afterwards that I did not want. I wanted something sonically dense, where a piano really pierces sharply through any kind of texture. Plus I didn’t feel I needed two chordal instruments. The guitar was plenty on that front. And we’re talking Ken Rosser here! Known for texture and aural layers of richness, even within one single pass. He was all I needed. In fact, it was that decision about instrumentation that would set the tone for the rest of the songs I would eventually compose for Resting On the Rock.

On the day we were scheduled to re-record, Chris Wabich wasn’t available (he, the working-est drummer in town), and so our recording engineer, who also just happens to be a drummer, offered to step in and do double-duty. Michael Kramer has been my mixing engineer on every record I’ve ever helmed, but this song goes down as the only song of mine he’s ever played on. And he was great! Running back and forth from control booth to drum booth had to take a toll on his concentration, and yet both drumming and engineering that day were stellar.

We assembled at the same studio for round two. We’re talking months later, after all the soul searching I’d had to do. I had Ross bring in his F-Bass fretless instead of the Alembic fretted bass he’d used on the prior recording. I thought the new approach, the new texture, the new mood, really called for that quality. And my only instruction to him, a man known for very note-y, virtuosic playing, was to just simplify, leave space, yet without sacrificing pulse. And I handed everyone the chart of my (finally!) structured composition.

Here’s where I’d like to mention that Ken Rosser walked into the session with a fever of 102, and was, understandably, not in the best of moods. Oh boy! But what a trooper to still show up instead of asking if we could reschedule. He set up his gear in a corner, far away from everyone else, and had little tolerance for the chatting and laughing and all the things we do in the studio between takes. I think it’s safe to say we were all kind of afraid of Ken that day :). He used the house guitar amp, which was a beat-to-shit small vintage tweed Fender combo amp with a Deluxe Reverb, and he’d brought in a cheap Danelectro guitar, where one of the switches was intermittent and it wouldn’t stay in tune, which Ken confessed was a purposeful choice that, based on our talk, he felt would be perfect for the raw, urgent vibe. That conceptual idea, for Ken, translated into cranking up the amp until it was rattling and shaking, or as he has said, “It’s Hendrix at the Fillmore West, or Neil Young in full meltdown mode . . . there’s no way to get that sound and not endanger something or someone,” and with the plan to use reverse delay effects during the verses, and three fuzz boxes chained together at the same time during the choruses and solo. I just needed one last whispered caucus with the fevered lion before we did a take, to reiterate the concept, and at this point I simply said that since it was about a woman dying I wanted the guitar to sound like a man on his last manic leg in this life, and that I wanted the solo to sound like a woman wailing, like the cries of the damned.

Well, folks, I don’t know what Ken Rosser was channeling that day, but I suspect all credit is owed to that 102° fever, and I, for one, thank God for it. It was some of the dankest, darkest, most connected, plugged in, tapping something ancestral, killer music I’ve ever heard created.

Which brings us to the ending of the song. The ending on this recording is such a far cry from that of our original. That one resolved with the typical blues tag ― the classic 12/8, triplet-y, descending, Robert Johnson turnaround sequence, that almost begs an “ohhhh yeahhhhh” on the ending fermata, with jazz hands! I know. I’m being facetious. And I truly do love Robert Johnson. It just was not the call for my song. Though in all fairness, because there are traditions, it’s what you’re likely to get when all you do is call some blues, and you haven’t bothered to architect it. The new ending was designed to be a vamp on the tonic, still in the full shuffle, and for everyone to play out in their momentum, which we would gradually fade in the mix, the dramatic metaphor being that life goes on even in the midst of death, even after “The End.” I liked the idea of a song about death having no ending.

And, on how we ended up doing it, a special note of credit needs to go out to Ross Wright.

We were recording live. No isolation booths (except for the vocals). No punching. No cutting & pasting. Yes, I did later overdub some harmonies on the chorus, and Ross did grab a Gretsch guitar off the wall after the session was officially wrapped (and Ken went home to sleep off his fever) and added a few wobbly chords at the beginning for mood. But otherwise this was live, so if we screwed up we started over. We were 98% through our first take, which was clearly a winner. And as we landed on the tonic for the ending cadence, there we were, just sizzling on the F minor, and on bar 5 of this vamp Ross suddenly went from the tonic to the sub-dominant, as if we were going back through the form changes (those wonderful Lanois-inspired changes). I had eye contact with everyone from my booth, and I shot a look at Ross, as in “No! Oh shit! You weren’t supposed to go there.” And he shot a look back at me that said, “Sorry! But now we’re here. It’s a great take. Let’s just keep going.” We all shot a look at each other ― all except for Ken, who was in this world of his own, curing the freaking common cold and uncovering the secret to eternal youth ― and we all agreed to just keep going. Well, progressing to that chord change, which Ken hadn’t expected, only propelled him into an even deeper, danker level of depth and depravity and marvel and wonder and amplifier overdrive. Even Ross had this crazy instant during that cadence of slowly sliding his fingers across the neck of his bass for this pedal-to-the-metal grunge moment that just exploded everything. And so, what had been instructed to be just this simple vamp-out became a whole second solo for Ken, with a second life, and which flung open the doors of Heaven and Hell both. MY GOD was it stunning. More hyperbole, yes. But this is how I think of Ken. He’s a transporter of souls, a deliverer. We eventually did settle on that tonic, which would be faded later in the mix, but the world was on fire by that point. And I smiled at Ross, shaking my head, who, instead of yelling “cut!” or “my bad!” had managed to remain calm and turn his little mistake into a stunning afterlife moment for all involved, and for the song. I defy you to tell me that you don’t hear Ophelia’s cries in that outro solo.

When the take was done, the general consensus was that it was a great take, “now let’s do a few more.” And my only response was “why?”

Quarter note = 64. The tempo of big, bad, tragic, Shakespearean pathos.

Click here to listen on Bandcamp

Wake up Ophelia. Don’t lay so still.

The sun’s goin’ down, and it’s time for a meal.

I’ve got the whiskey if you’ll bring the buzz,

and together, like in a story, we can fall in love.

With a tremble and a whisper he cried, I know you’re there.

I can see you hidin’ deep inside those dark eyes somewhere.

Where’s my feisty woman? Where’s my sweet honey bee?

Please, please, Ophelia, don’t leave me!

Wake up Ophelia. Don’t you dim your bright eyes.

Wake up Ophelia. Never listen to my lies.

Better get yourself away from danger, girl.

Please wake up and rise.

That man, oh how he begged. Pleadin’ hands around her throat.

“Wake up Ophelia” were the desperate words he spoke.

And he leaned into his whiskey, and he made his arms erupt,

as he begged his sweet Ophelia to please wake up.

Wake up Ophelia. Don’t you dim your bright eyes.

Wake up Ophelia. Never listen to my lies.

Better get yourself away from danger, girl.

Please wake up and rise.

Morning-glory: A Reluctant Aubade

Posted on September 25, 2014 by angelacarolebrown

That day one summer long ago,

my first here on this plane,

when snatched a glimpse did I the break of Morning

and watched him from my window,

a dazzling hue arrested my eyes. I saw him.

He crept upon the slumbering earth,

roving in quiet majesty.

That day in summer did I catch his dusty blush

and hold his secrets in my silence. He moved

before me in a grassland clearance

and smiled. And whereupon that smile stole

my heart, he paraded his progeny,

the vineyards and wheat beds,

the fields of heather.

Quite in his glory, onward did Morning creep like a

feline thief as I watched him that day in summer.

Conducted he the meeting of rays to rain on

rooftops. Morning knelt when he caught sight of the

ground below on which rested a wet leaf and a

chilly worm. Victim to an unusual cold was the tiny

creature, changing tempos of its journey, slowing

to decipher a warmer place.

And in his paternal clemency, Morning scooped

it up in his cradled palms and blew

a warming breath; the tiniest of treasures for a

journeyed worm.

And I wept for Morning’s uncommon gentleness

and called him God.

I clung to kind Morning that day in summer.

Swallowed him I tried, poured him over me

to lose myself within him, a baptism, a fornication.

He passed across my heart,

perched me on a high ridge

that I might watch him move through the trees

and provoke them to dance.

Morning sprinkled his sun

over the sea and me. And out of his

sun-drenched gourd

drank I, and became like a drunkard.

Till distorted Morning became and began to retreat.

Did my clinging turn him from me? I feared my part in this.

And all on earth stilled.

A whippoorwill sang, calling out to

the dusky mystery.

I gripped fast the hem of Morning’s garment,

pleading to be rescued from these coming terrors.

And Morning spoke, bidding me fear not

the illusory monsters of the dark.

“They are but reflections of your fears,”

he spoke. And Morning called himself not God.

“Merely a tilling limb,” he sang. “Night being the humble other.

Welcome her.”

And his sun was no more.

My heart ruptured an ulcer of grief.

I felt Morning’s treason,

and stood scorned and afraid.

So Night advanced, the temptress.

I recoiled and cursed Morning, seeking refuge

where I might amid blooming dogwoods

and blushing primrose.

Thus from beyond the clouds,

a curtain drawn for a diva,

sauntered her infamous moon,

the blood moon,

great and glorious, rendering ghost stories.

And my fear alighted in anticipation

of phantoms that walk the earth. Of fallen angels

and wraiths who haunt the body and gust the rivers.

Of skies so black as would harrow up the soul of

Proserpine herself, and make her a

crying worshipper of the light.

Treasonous Morning was wrong.

Night was nothing humble.

Strut was Night’s word.

And she snagged me. Setting ablaze the sky with

trinkets of opal and ice, Night worked

in her artful splendor,

sucking up the fugue of day, to spit forth a grand

suite for twilight.

Before me nocturnal creatures frolicked and showed me

her masterwork of intuition, vivid dreams,

and womanly magic,

all while rending each other to the bone,

a reptilian dance of survival that only Night’s drape occasioned.

The Dead of dark.

The Nameless apprehension of shadows.

Fireflies, which gave me the tiniest tease of light,

ornamented evergreens like a Christmas tree.

Night wrapped me in her lithe black stole,

— glamour queen! —

and caused me to fall in violet love.

There I indulged in the dark enigma of her,

drowned myself in her inky nectar

to wear her on me,

and thought no more on His Majesty the Morning.

Till, while in my reverie, a spell of time I could not name,

but seemed the blink of an eye,

Night’s tide began to abate, her moon to blanch,

and before my witness, faded

from her gaudy grandeur to a limp gray.

My spirit caved as I prophesied a second betrayal.

Night closed her eyes,

without goodbye, without balm,

and fell to her cycled quietus.

Serenely did sigh a swallow’s

sweet twitters and song.

Softly did burst into bloom the magnificent

morning-glory flower.

And whereupon the inconstant Night yielded to

Morning’s inconstant mien, leaving me

to endure the insufferable inconstancy,

once more did I weep,

for loved them both did I that day

in summer long ago,

and for the days to come,

of every season.

And sorrowed yet surrendered

that seize them each my prisoner

in selfish grip I could not,

and call them

my very

own.

Angela Carole Brown is the author of three published books, The Assassination of Gabriel Champion, The Kidney Journals: Memoirs of a Desperate Lifesaver, and Trading Fours, and has produced several albums of music and a yoga/mindfulness CD. Bindi Girl Chronicles is her writing blog. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & YouTube.

Refractions of Light: My Quandary with Memoir

Posted on September 15, 2014 by angelacarolebrown

Look in the mirror. And tell the story.

To write or not to write the memoir is a topic often bandied about; and usually what’s discussed or debated are the ethics of such an endeavor. James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces is probably the best-known controversy in recent publishing history. He created a national scandal, even involving Oprah, by pushing the envelope on the ethics of telling the truth. Lauren Slater purposely challenges our notions of truth versus embellishment versus downright deception, in her book Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, by questioning whether fact equals truth, or is just one by-product of many that delivers a truth. Charles Mingus’ Beneath the Underdog doesn’t read like memoir at all, but like the most artful turn of poetry, at once urbane and plebeian, which has begged the question: Just how “creative” is his memoir? Yes, loads have been written and discussed on the subject.

I confess to being baffled at all the uproar Frey’s book created. I once wrote a novel, a piece of fiction, that was told in first person from a child’s standpoint. And at one juncture in its development I had toyed with the playful enough conceit of calling it a biography “as told to Angela Carole Brown.” And with, frankly, never the intent to genuinely deceive a public, as it would all, by design, come out in the wash, and just be this piece of fiction turned on fiction’s ear. But at the time I was considering it, the idea seemed harmless enough while achieving that sense of urgency that a true story intrinsically has on the psyche. It never even occurred to me that such a conceit could be somehow profoundly damaging to culture, as I am someone who believes that truth does not always equal fact. A universal truth can be unveiled in the very best of fiction. So, yes, I was a bit puzzled over the degree of James Frey’s “crime.” Yes, he exaggerated his story. What exactly did that take away from us?

One of the rumors I’d heard throughout this scandal was that Frey had originally submitted his manuscript to the publisher as fiction, because though it had come from his own experience he admitted to greatly embellishing, and therefore thought it was best to submit it that way, and that it was his editor who suggested it would be more marketable as a memoir. Whether or not that rumor is true, I think the greater point here is just how easy it is for a “true story” to be rendered true, false, real, deception, whatever, merely by the way in which it is framed. And that perhaps Truth isn’t subject to perception and window dressing, but is the oak beneath it.

I have my own quandary with the memoir, but it looks nothing like the above. Because though, as I’ve said, I never really saw the injury in James Frey’s “true” story, this article is not about to be some confession that I , too, have written a lie and called it memoir. No, I have not done so. And I’m not saying, by my take on the Frey scandal, that I’m a proponent of deception. He exaggerated some details. A memoir is supposed to be the truth. I get that. Only that perhaps Frey’s deception really didn’t merit the public slaughter it received. He wasn’t writing a history book. He was sharing his own personal experience for the greater purpose of the message it had to offer.

I only even bother to mention this particular avenue of the dialogue on memoir, and my take on it, because to write a piece on the memoir and not to acknowledge its most road-tread of avenues would be to plant an elephant right in this room. And no, I never did publish the “biography as told to Angela Carole Brown,” nor in its pre-published state have I remained with the idea of that conceit. To be honest, the reason I abandoned the idea (which was only a momentary entertaining anyway) is because such a gimmick would only distract from a story I believe is compelling on its own merits. Its day will come.

Here, finally, is my quandary. As a writer, I am primarily a novelist. It’s only been in recent years that I have even begun to entertain the notion of the memoir. And what I know about myself is that my issues with self-value have often created a twisted knot of identity assertion and confusion whenever I have entertained that notion.

Simply put, I’ve lived in the belief, for my entire writing life, that memoir was reserved for people in the public eye. After all, why would anyone’s story be interesting to a total stranger unless it was that total strangers already know who you are, and this is, after all, a culture of fame-worship? The irony here is that most of the memoirs I’ve read were written by writers who had not been especially well-known prior to a publisher finding something powerful in their story and taking it on. And yet, the belief in me seems to be gravely deep-seated, and likely more a reflection of my own self-worth than anything.

I’ve generally tended to journal. But I’ve never been that person who opens the notebook ritualistically at the end of every day lived, dates the log entries, and into the golden years can boast volumes upon volumes of my life on paper. No. It’s been erratic and sporadic at best. Something just hits me as worthy of documenting. And I may not be hit again for several years.

The first of those incidents in my life that I felt strongly enough about documenting, in a way that I could easily envision as a book, was the death of my mother. It was, however, almost a decade after her passing before I felt clear enough to unfold it in the written form. It’s a book that I’ve more or less finished, though I’m not quite ready to put it into the world yet, and the reasons are more personal than they are about marketing and pacing strategies.

What continues to fascinate me is that the entire time I was writing it, a balls-to-the-wall battle was going on between my two selves: the Left Self, we’ll call her, who argued that everyone has a story, and every story has value not only for the one living it, but in the written form to be shared with others; that every story has a lesson, a light bulb, a dawning, to offer, if written with authenticity and purity of goal. Every story has universality.

Right Self argued that no one cares about your story if you haven’t already made a name for yourself; that our present culture just doesn’t operate any other way. And who do you think you are, anyway, to think anyone should care about your story? That it’s only delusions of grandeur and self-importance that would make any writer think that her unknown life holds any interest for the average reader of books. So stop being so narcissistic and wallowing up your own ass, and write a great piece of fiction, instead, that will be universal enough to resonate with an audience.

Well, fiction IS what I’ve generally tended to write. And while I’ve always been a proponent of the idea that (though fictional) a great novel carries truth within it, just as I said above, I also believe that memoir is a very different animal indeed, and has a place. The question for me became, does it have a place documenting Joe Blow’s ordinary life?

While these two Selves warred, I trudged forward, anyway, with my first stab at memoir. Because something in me believed that my story had a message for the world. One about the layered complexity of the mother/daughter dynamic. One that examines grief in all its nuances and bumps.

Right Self, of course, just kept whispering, “self-indulgent. Who cares! You aren’t the first to write about grief. And only the grief of Joan Didion or Frank McCourt or Edwidge Danticat is going to fetch an audience. Go work yours out in therapy.”

Right Self had a point. But I kept on writing, kept on trying to defend Left Self’s creed.

Since the writing of my grief memoir, which still sits on the proverbial shelf, I’ve written one other, not counting all those journal entries over the years of isolated mini-stories and experiences, which has been published. I felt a little more qualified to write that one, though that idea discombobulates my brain because the fact is I am qualified to write about any part of my life. It’s my life. Who knows it better? Yet clearly I am still being influenced by Right Self in determining whether I have a worthy story, and by extension a worthy life. Isn’t that really what’s going on, Angela? So I guess what I mean to say is that I was finally writing about something that might count as sensational and unique in the eyes of a society that craves sensational and unique, whereas death and loss and grief is not especially.

I’m truly bothered that I allow myself to reduce my merits to that graph; but, well, there it is. The point of all this (all this being a good chunk of why I write) is to work that out. I’ve already been writing, already producing content. Now I’m just bobbing around in the waters of trying to get read, and trying to figure out the puzzle of how to get that done when I am not Joan Didion.

In any case, my unique story (the second stab at memoir) is that I donated a kidney to someone who might’ve died without it. I saved a life. This wasn’t done for sensationalism, but it was sensational, in every sense of the word, and in anyone’s book. Yet what I wrote about was not the “hair-raising” or “breathtaking” aspect of such a deed. All the adjectives any good sell-line MUST have these days. The real story is about how the deed managed to save my life too, as I had been living in a profound spiritual malaise at the time this need presented itself. And so it is the story of an ordinary and flawed human being struggling through the landmines of life. Not about heroism.

And that’s when I realized that I was writing a book, yet again, that had Right Self’s eyes rolling.

“Who cares about your self-exploration!”

Right Self is mean. But then so is the world.

I also now really understand my relatively new penchant for writing about myself, after years of writing fiction. Because when I look back on the grief memoir that sits on the shelf, waiting for polishing – and courage – I realize that my flaws as a human being are not only on parade in that one too, just like with the kidney book, but truly are the nucleus of all my stories, it seems. And it is suddenly clear to me that the gravity of my need to tell MY stories exists as a way of granting permission for my life to be made valid, and my flaws to be expunged if not transformed.

The act of storytelling, and my own stories specifically, may well be of no interest to anyone who doesn’t personally know me, but it is first and foremost, for me, an act of healing.

Now here’s where I will chest-spread. I also believe that such an act of storytelling requires a special kind of bravery. And I think what separates the women from the girls is the ability to resist self-aggrandizement in the writing, to look in the mirror, and to tell the story.

Of course, there are those who would say that the very instinct to write a memoir, in and of itself, is pretty self-aggrandizing. Well, that’ll have to be. It still requires walking a road many would shudder away from.

I read quite a bit of memoir when I was preparing for writing my first one, especially those dealing with grief. There were the ones I was floored by, like Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and the Lauren Slater book. These were examples of startling perspicacity, the very seed of the brave and gnarly self-reveal.

And then there were the ones that were so much “Isn’t my life blessed? Even with all its precious dilemmas? Don’t you wish it was yours?” that I could barely get through them without choking on the propaganda. I won’t name them; I’m not interested in being cruel. But they were such obvious cases of fear and inability to see the pearl in authentic confrontation with the shadow that I felt deeply for the writers, if not the writing.

William Giraldi speaks in a recent Poets & Writers issue, an article on Louise Gluck, of knowing oneself en route to becoming oneself. That “the facts of any life are impotent and ineffectual until literature intercedes, until it takes hold of those facts and twists them into the light, casting a refraction that allows us to glimpse them anew.”¹

From the same article comes a quotation from Stanley Kunitz: “The empty ones are those who do not suffer their selfhood.”²

I see both of these sentiments as revering the act of vigilant self-inquiry and the level of courage it takes to face Self, and to mean that only through that kind of bravery can any writing truly arrive at an important place.

So, my question is, could bravery possibly count as a worthy enough star in the memoirs of the unknown? Might that be my sole hope for believing that I could tell my stories to an audience that would bother with me?

Or is the better question: Should I care?

Maybe I should just be writing. And healing. And sharing the experience. Because the experience of leaping out from a prison of the internal through words is like nothing else I can describe. For all the criticism that both of these writers have received in their writing careers, I imagine that James Frey and Lauren Slater, both, understand that sense of liberation. And I suspect there are resonant ears and eyes out there, just waiting for me and others like me, hungry for a tale that could very well be their own, for what it might dare to examine. We just need to find each other.

And then, to be able to let go of all else.

Alas, my running theme in life.

* * *

Notes / Works Cited

1. 2. Poets & Writers, Sept/Oct 2014 Issue; Internal Tapestries by William Giraldi.

Angela Carole Brown is the author of three published books, The Assassination of Gabriel Champion, The Kidney Journals: Memoirs of a Desperate Lifesaver, and Trading Fours, and has produced several albums of music and a yoga/mindfulness CD. Bindi Girl Chronicles is her writing blog. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & YouTube.

Winter (The Song Series)

Posted on September 8, 2014 by angelacarolebrown

It’s been a while now since I contributed to the Song Series I’d begun. Life just took me in other directions for awhile with this blog. But the series is back. And this time, I’d like to tell you about the writing and recording of my one and only holiday song.

As I prepared for my very first holiday album, Winter, which came out two years ago, I knew automatically that it would be an album of covers. Who wants to hear an entire album of holidays songs of nothing they’ve ever heard before. Folks want the favorites. And of the faves, there are more to choose from than I could possibly count, and of course I chose an odd collection of songs both classic and fringy. Some old, some not so old. It was important to me that I cover the wide berth of the emotional spectrum that the holidays can bring. Christmas time is associated with joy. But there are plenty out there who anticipate the holidays warily, because they have no romantic partner, because they have no family, because it’s a holiday that plays up the virtues of family, romance, happiness etc, and for those without, it only plays up their failings. I swear, the last thing I want to do is to be a downer about this, because I LOVE the holidays. Always have. But I also have great empathy for those who find that time of year melancholy. And I really wanted to make an album that spoke to them too. So, while there are plenty of happy, jolly songs included on my holiday album, there are also somber and reflective ones. For example, I included the Pogues’ song Fairytale of New York, which is a sentiment about the homeless on Christmas Eve. Guess what folks? That reality exists. And it’s a song of such heart wrenching pathos and nostalgia. Just my kind of song.

A N Y W A Y . . . at the eleventh hour of recording, after having spent months culling through Christmas songs old and new, traditional and not so, and selecting just the right ones to tell Christmas as I wanted to tell it, I suddenly decided that while this needed to be a cover CD, I couldn’t resist the temptation to contribute at least one original. And so, I set about the task of composing my first ever holiday song.

In writing Winter (which became the title track), I wanted a song that rang of Christmas without being overtly Christmasy. Meaning it could be played any time of year and not seem out of place, in the same spirit as My Favorite Things (also on my album).

And then what to write about. A love song perhaps, about falling in love in winter. Love has often happened for me this way, so it seemed a natural to write about. What’s funny is that I’ve actually written very few love songs. That’s just never seemed to be a persistent subject in my consciousness. And even in this song’s case, I wasn’t in love when I wrote it. I’ve been single for a long time now. But, as all holiday songs seem to do, I was made nostalgic for loves of my past that seemed in many cases to have bloomed in winter.

I’m also a winter baby, so this felt very much at home . . . in spite of the irony that I sort of hate snow. But I had to let that hate go, release it for its irrationality, and embrace the magic of snow instead. It actually wasn’t hard to do, as I’d been absolutely mesmerized by a series of photos that my friend Jean Marinelli had recently taken at her folks’ home in Iowa of a hoar frost. I was so blown away by this sight that I HAD to work the term “hoar frost” into my lyric, and in fact, the whole song became shaped around that idea. And yes, in case it’s not obvious, I used one of those breathtaking shots of Jean’s as my cover art, which is also above.

When it came time to go into the studio, we recorded the song live, with the instrumentation of guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. I described to the musicians on the day of recording that I wanted a sort of 16th-note feel, but without it being R&B, that stylistically I wanted something a little floatier, and not backbeat-heavy at all. But that was pretty much the extent of my description, as I didn’t really have a firm grasp yet on the sound I wanted. Compositionally, it was a pretty simple form, simple changes. I’ve grown fond of simple folk ideas, and I envisioned folk for this song. So I just needed to hear something first, and shape or grow the song from there. And that’s exactly what we did, which means that even though the song is all my writing, the whole development of the bigger picture was most assuredly collaborative with my awesome trio of artists, Ken Rosser, Randy Landas, and Lynn Coulter.

On the day of recording, in the funky Boho studio of recording engineer John McDuffie, we laid down a track, did a few different takes, and I chose the strongest one. And I instantly knew that I was going to want Ken, the guitarist on this album, and my old pal and longtime musical soul mate, to layer and layer and layer.

Weeks later, the two of us met at his studio alone, a studio he has named Po’Tools (which tickles me; any studio guys out there will chuckle), and I proceeded to tell him what I was envisioning. Over Ken’s basic track, which was played on a Gibson ES-335, the first thing he added was a Jerry Jones electric 12-string “for maximum jingle-jangle, baby!” (Ken’s own words). And then, because one of Ken’s magnificent fortes is looping and texture and grunge and friction and these crazy, wild aural manipulations of his instrument, I asked him if he could give me a layer of something that sounded like snowfall or snowflakes. Now, snowfall doesn’t have a sound, unless you’re talking about a winter storm, and then that’s really just wind you’re hearing. But I had a sound in my head that sounded like snowflakes, and I swear (as I knew would happen!) Ken Rosser just understood what I meant perfectly.

And did he ever give it to me! He created this sound with a PRS McCarty, processed through an Eventide Pitchfactor effect. The only reason I can even articulate that is because I just asked him to recount it to me for this article. It’s all Greek to me. But it absolutely captured what I had intended.

And once that effect was in place, it changed everything else for me. Suddenly I heard the drums differently. The bass differently. But we’ll get to them in a minute.

Ken had taken a solo on the original live track with the Gibson. It was a notier, jazzier solo, something perfectly befitting how the song was originally played by the trio. But once these other layers began to shape the track in a very specific way, Ken felt that another kind of solo was really needed in place of the original.

KEN:
“The new solo was done on the PRS McCarty, roughly using Lindsey Buckingham’s solo on Fleetwood Mac’s Silver Spring as a model . . . because once we’d put all the layers on, I felt pretty strongly that the solo should just paraphrase the melody and then shut the fuck up. Lindsey’s influence was really just about sound and some articulation things . . . I doubt anyone else would get that without being told . . .”

We both remember it being really hot in the studio when we were doing this, thus giving the musical evocations of snowfall an ironic tinge.

Next I went into yet a third studio, with drummer Lynn Coulter and my mixing engineer Mike Kramer, and had Lynn replace his drum track. Actually, no, he didn’t replace it. He layered, also. Just added to what was there. I played him a Bon Iver track that I have loved for a long time, a song called Holocene. The drums on that song are very floaty and light. So, I had Lynn, whose drumming is just so special (I can’t wait to talk about him more when I write about my songs An Old Black Man Someday and Last Chance Mojo Eye for the Song Series . . . the special things he does with those two . . . whew!) . . . I had Lynn play an almost “train” feel with brushes, and to layer in some shakers, and other high-resonance percussion toys. I wanted everything to have a feeling of lightness and light. Not heavy, not barrelly, not thundering, not bass-drum-y, but floating, and sparkling, and light. I wanted to evoke a startling, blinding, white hoar frost. I wanted to capture Jean’s photographs. And it was slowly but surely starting to do exactly that.

I then sent the tracks over to Randy Landas, our bass player. I asked him if he thought he needed to do something different than what he’d originally played, since there was now so much else re-shaping the song at this point. He gave me back a track with a bass part that was much less percussive, and much more melodic and with elongated tones. It was absolutely lovely. In fact, if I recall correctly, his original bass track was done on a string bass, but the re-do was done on a fretless, which just fits the texture of the song perfectly.

I’d been talking about putting a glockenspiel part on the song, a tiny part I’d actually written for it. And I was just going to play it on the keyboard with a glock patch, but Lynn Coulter encouraged me to practice on his glockenspiel, and then record the real thing. Well, we did! I was so tickled to be able to give myself a glockenspiel credit. But I will confess here that I “helped it out” and strengthened it with a track on synthesizer as well, as my glock chops were pretty sad and pitiful. But still! They’re there! 🙂

Lastly, of course, were the vocals. They had already been cut, on the original live session, but as I lived with the song, and its growing, evolving, developing state, from a bare-bones pop song to a fully thick, rich, textural invocation of snowfall and hoar frosts and white Christmases, I took a page from one of my deepest hearts, the late Elliott Smith. He has this doubled vocal effect on most of his tracks, and I thought that might be a really cool thing to do with Winter. But rather than trying a stereo delay on my original vocal ( I’m not saying that that’s how Elliott did it; I have no idea how he did it), I simply, literally, provided the doubled part . . . I sang along with myself. Two Angelas in unison.

I must say, the song actually sounds like winter. Ambient, washy, and spritely, it evokes snow on the ground, and bobsleds, and snow fights, and down jackets. I don’t exactly hate the snow anymore. Funny how that can happen.

Please enjoy Winter.

Click here to listen on Bandcamp

I always fall in love in winter
More than any other time
There’s just something about snowfall
And the scent of Christmas pines

I always fall in love in winter
A time of goodwill and peace
There is just no season better
For inspiring a little heat

It can have its reputation
For bleak and dreary days
But the first glimpse of a hoar frost
Will set any heart ablaze
It will set your heart ablaze

I tend to fall in love in winter
when the merry songs of children start
There is just no season greater
To inspire the romantic heart

Angela Carole Brown is the author of three published books, The Assassination of Gabriel Champion, The Kidney Journals: Memoirs of a Desperate Lifesaver, and Trading Fours, and has produced several albums of music and a yoga/mindfulness CD. Bindi Girl Chronicles is her writing blog. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & YouTube.

	angelacarolebrown on Little Grateful Earthquakes
	angelacarolebrown on Little Grateful Earthquakes
	Margo on Little Grateful Earthquakes
	Zimmerly on Little Grateful Earthquakes
	angelacarolebrown on No Regrets (well, maybe a few…

Share this:

“To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Let food be thy medicine, and medicine thy food.” – Hippocrates

Share this:

Photograph of ACB is by Holli Rae

Share this:

Portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. by Ted Brown

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

“To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint,
all things are friendly and sacred,
all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.”