Spring Move and the Shedding of a shell...

Last week we moved into a new house. It happened very very fast and I’m still catching my breath. The new place is very lovely and I’m very happy about it but it was also a lot of stress to pull it all together. Currently living out of boxes and casually wondering where most of my things are. As a result, I didn’t make a cover song video last week. Once I get the studio back up and running here in the new house, I will get back on track. Luckily I had a video saved from a few weeks back just in case something happened where I might miss a week. It’s an original song called ‘Waycross’ which is the title track of an album I released back in 2012 when I lived in Brooklyn NY. I’m still really proud of that record and the songs on it. Waycross was written on an airplane (maybe the only song I’ve composed in full on a plane and all in my head) and I like to think I caught it up there in the clouds. I had just finished reading a biography about Gram Parsons called ‘20,000 Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and his Cosmic American Music’ by David Meyer and had just left the place he was last living (Joshua Tree) and the book moved me in a major way. I really was most interested in his early life with his parents, and the song actually turned into a tribute to his parents, Coon Dog and Big Avis. Jason and I did an arrangement of it a little bit ago and here is how it turned out:

‘Waycross’ is an homage to family life, and the uncertainty of what happens in every family situation. ‘No telling what the love’s gonna do, that suit is looking good on you.’

As I was preparing to move this week I was overcome with some sadness of leaving my house. It’s been a safe haven for me for the last 6 years, I’ve grown, healed, fallen in love, became a dog mom and gotten married there. I was very comfortable! But I also agreed we needed a little more space and that is was time to evolve. The first night being here I was relaxing on the couch after a fairly stressful week and I turned on planet earth to decompress. I watched this pod of crabs migrating. They gathered together to go through the process of shedding their shells, as they had grown out of them. And surprise surprise, it turns out they had another shell growing beneath the one that had to go, but it was vulnerable for those first few days so they needed each other for protection before resuming their loner crab existence. It turns out that I related to this metaphor quite literally. I’ve always been drawn to the crab, being a Cancerian, the ‘crab’ is our symbol, and at times, retreating into my shell has been my way to protect myself. And though I’d like to have retreated this week, I instead needed to grow and shed my shell.

So far I’m feeling pretty good about it. Once I get some of my boxes unpacked, I’ll be back to the music. May is coming and if you didn’t hear, I’ll be releasing a new song each week for 5 weeks. I can’t wait to share more about that as the weeks go by!