Golden Apples of the Sun song by song
Tales of the Islander – This song is about Walter Anderson, a prolific artist who lived on and off the Mississippi Gulf Coast. He was known for spending weeks at a time on the islands just off the coast from Ocean Springs. When Anderson died, his family discovered that he had painted the interior of his cottage with beautiful murals. Each wall represented a time of day: sunrise, day, sunset, and night. I based my song on the progression of the cottage murals. Walter Anderson had a tremendous thirst for painting the natural world, and Mississippians revere him now, though throughout much of his life he was treated as an outcast.
A Turn upon the Hill – When my children had their photos taken last year by a friend of mine, I could tell that my daughter felt nervous in front of the camera. This song is about her dance with this experience, and about her growing into girlhood.
True Colors – At our first recording session, my producer David Goodrich suggested that I try a Cyndi Lauper tune, but I had no idea how to record one, much less play it. However, we both loved the lyrics of ‘True Colors’. As I was writing and rehearsing other songs, it kept coming back to me. Eventually I realized I could make this pop song my own. It’s moving, and so beautifully written, and I focused on the lyrics by slowing them down a bit.
Long Black Veil – I used to sing this traditional bluegrass tune with the band The Sincere Ramblers at our weekly radio show. This is another alternate melody that came to me one day when I was noodling around in the sunroom. I initially expected the song to sound more delicate, but Goody pressed for urgency, and he got it. He also put a banjo in my hands and let me play like a mad woman, while he played the diddly bo.
The Dozens – When I was a graduate student in Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, I read a book called Black Culture and Black Consciousness by Larry Levine. The book made a significant impact on me. In his book, Levine wrote about the dozens, an urban verbal game where people trade insults about each other’s mothers back and forth. The person who gets visibly angry first loses the game. Levine argued in his book that people played that game to steel themselves against the brutality of the larger world. I got to know Larry and his wife well when I lived in Washington D.C. a few years later, and I miss him and the real-life teacher that he was to me.
See See Rider – One summer morning in 2008 I was trying to figure out how to play Mississippi John Hurt’s The Angels Laid Him Away, when I let the CD run on and play See See Rider. I’ve heard both songs a million times. For some reason, the latter stuck with me, and the alternate melody just came on. I’ve often been intimidated by playing the blues, for many reasons, not the least of which is that I’m a white girl from Mississippi and blues music is the metaphor for African American injustice and brutality. But Mississippi John Hurt opened the door, and for me it seems more appropriate somehow that I play the song like I do.
Cactus Tree – This is one of the first songs I ever learned. Somehow I got hold of Joni Mitchell’s Blue as early as high school, and late in college my roommates and I spent many hours listening to Court and Spark, Clouds, Ladies of the Canyon, For the Roses, and Song to a Seagull, as well as Blue, of course. No music has impacted me more than Joni Mitchell’s has.
Abuelita – My grandmother was born in Texas and raised primarily in Costa Rica, where her father was a beekeeper. After college, grandmother went to medical school at Tulane University in New Orleans, which was quite a feat for a woman in the late 1920s. While finishing her residency at a hospital in Mississippi, she met my grandfather, who was also doing his residency. For different reasons, she did not become a doctor, and he did, and they moved to Hazelhurst, Mississippi where they spent the rest of their lives raising five girls. My mother never knew that my grandmother could speak fluent Spanish.
A Little Bit of Mercy – We all need mercy, and renewed opportunities to ‘breathe in mountains and breathe out sun, for ourselves and this race we run’.
Song of the Wandering Aengus – The Song of Wandering Aengus was written by William Butler Yeats in 1899. I first heard Judy Collins’ version of this poem put to music, and I fell in love with it. Since that time I’ve heard other versions, and every version I’ve heard is different. Hearing the different versions taught me that one could play with new melodies set to already-established lyrics. That knowledge has served as the touchstone for this album.
The Great Unknown – A group of friends and I gathered every few weeks for a year to read The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. I based this song on Dante and Virgil’s descent into the depths of Hell, a scary place. At the bottom they have to climb over Satan’s body to exit. Because Dante, among others, thought that the world was flat, Dante and Virgil didn’t have to go far before they were out of Hell altogether, and their first post-Hell visage was a magnificent sky full of stars. I just love that image.
The Wild Rose – I compiled this song for a friend’s wedding. She sent me The Wild Rose by Wendell Berry. I love Wendell Berry’s work, and I love the poem, yet I thought, “You want me to sing this message at your wedding?” While working on it at a bookstore/coffee shop, I pulled a book of love poems by Pablo Neruda off the shelf, and read The Light Wraps You. The two poems are not dissimilar. The two poems and my compilation are below.
The Wild Rose by Wendell Berry
Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart,
suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose blooming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only shade,
and once more I am blessed,
choosing again what I chose before.
The Wild Rose – my compilation
When you are hidden from me
When I cannot feel
The beating of my heart
Walk me where wild things grow
Where grace and light surround me
There I’ll see my wild, wild rose
Ablaze in all her glory
Choosing what before I chose
The blessings of God’s bounty
Light wraps you as you stand
Oh sacred stem in mortal flame
Great roots of night they grow
The things that hide come out again
Come to me my wild, wild rose
Ablaze in all your glory
Choosing what before I chose
The blessings of God’s bounty
The Light Wraps You by Pablo Neruda
The light wraps you in its mortal flame.
Abstracted pale mourner, standing that way
against the old propellers of the twilight
that revolves around you.
Speechless, my friend,
alone in the loneliness of this hour of the dead
and filled with the lives of fire,
pure heir of the ruined day.
A bough of fruit falls from the sun on your dark garment.
The great roots of night
grow suddenly from your soul,
and the things that hide in you come out again
so that a blue and palled people
your newly born, takes nourishment.
Oh magnificent and fecund and magnetic slave
of the circle that moves in turn through black and gold:
rise, lead and possess a creation
so rich in life that its flowers perish
and it is full of sadness.