San Gabriel Mountains

"Anxiety, furthermore, always involves a reflection upon time, for I cannot be anxious about the present, only about the past or the future; but the past and the future, holding on to each other so tightly that the present vanishes." - Soren Kierkegaard

Layers of rock like waves of time. Quiet as if time stands still.

The more past-conscious, processed and future-aligned I am, the greater the wealth of autonomy I seem to have in the present. Fear has its origins in the past, but when it is imagined in the future, it presently taunts and consumes. The bodily sensation of fear is my experience of anxiety at its finest. Scrambling to smother the flame of fear puts the present experience on a pedestal while simultaneously robbing it of proper context. It’s as if present sensation actually becomes too prominent. It is still vanished in that balance and opportunity is void. The enantiodromia of neurotic suffering?

The mountains play a long game. From the top of them at sunset I see time stretched out around me. I know exactly where I am.

Leaving New York

Living in New York as an artist is sometimes like living with a painting you can’t finish. You’ve spent weeks staring at that canvas, perhaps months, perhaps years. What was once and still is filled with so much opportunity has become stale by the grinding down on us of life, like our teeth at night. But it still awaits your stroke, demanding your presence and attention. Sometimes people ask me what is the best part about living in New York and my answer is “leaving.” Leaving New York is like relinquishing your grip on the outcome of the painting. And coming back to New York is like knowing what to do next to the painting and moving just one step closer to some image you’ve been after your whole life.

Mercury

Mercury, I’ve thieved the wings off your sandals and
Rest my ear beneath your chin, waiting for your words like
Seaweed to dance around my ankles
I hold them like a lyre to my lap, Mercury

Charlestown

Fourth of July in Boston did feel rather colonial as I couldn’t help but imagine the harbor fireworks were a spray of cannons discharging. I sat on the edge of a wharf in Charlestown in a men’s Bugatchi shirt from the 90s I bought earlier that day. The butterscotch NY plates on my car gave me away; however, not long ago I was just another anonymous teenager in New England with an insufficient winter coat and an unmanageable caffeine addiction.

When I moved to Boston I realized I might never settle for a landlocked home again. Something about the blackness of the Atlantic ocean being an arm’s length away gave life on the coast a liminal undertone. To some degree, and I think as far as an individual pushes it, life holds endless liminal space. Liminality could be my last name.

It first occurred to me while on stage at The Burren the night before – Boston had never seen me this way. I’ve been to New York and back, so to speak, and New Yorkers are anything but nonchalant when they call their city “hell.” I felt like the same woman, but with bigger muscles, better battle gear, and so much more music.

I imagined my 18-year-old-self sitting beside me on the dock and remembered what she used to feel walking in Cambridge in the autumn, burrowed in the basement practice rooms on Commonwealth Avenue, waking up to the glow of the low winter sun on buildings and clouds through a North-facing window. After the fireworks her and I picked up sushi in Somerville and retreated to our victorian accommodation for a swim in the jacuzzi. So it goes and while it was truly not my plan, I returned to New York reunited with a few slivers of myself that got split-off while surviving 1 or 4 anxious winters in New England.

A city's song

Someone asked if I wished I was still in Italy on twitch on Friday. I loved it. So much so that I thought I might find myself treading waters of dissolution upon returning to clustered, exorbitant NYC. I instead found what has drawn me to New York since the moment I first stepped foot on its streets: it’s song. A song of pain and what to do with it. Of thrill. A song of loneliness and longing, of sacrifice and payoff. Sung by the momentum in the air, the ambition on people’s faces, the empty park benches at every riverfront. I don’t know, it’s now home. It’s change, challenge and excellence.

Peeling back

Eyes open in a field, palms up
Time is wind in my hair is sand in my fingers
The earth quakes, floods, rivers run
The paths they always have, like steam engines stop for no one
Time watches me watch it this time mouth shut
Like peeling an unripe orange with no fingernails

But worth it
The air is worth it

55 Christopher Street

It was mine in the way it was personal to everyone. Was?

The week I moved to New York I went to see Adam Rodgers’ DICE band at a bar downtown. I was living in Queens. Soon enough I was taking the train every other week downtown to a bar called The 55 Bar. I was a regular to see Mike Stern. I gave him my first record which had just come out. To my absolute honor, he listened to it and called me to tell me so. Several months later I thought, I should move downtown even if just to save time and money on the train I’m taking to The 55 Bar. I moved to E 9th St – which, when followed West, turns into Christopher Street, where the 55 lives.

The M8 crosstown. It was a Thursday. January 18th. I was steeping in melancholy and anxiety. Nothing abnormal. I forced myself out of bed after I had already resigned myself to it and walked to the M8 crosstown bus stop. I was going to see Wayne Krantz for the first time. At The 55 Bar, of course. As dramatic as it may seem and definitely was, life was never the same.

Within days of that night the 55 and the musicians I observed there became my standard of how to approach music, my career, the world, and even love. I wrote many of my songs within those walls. I even played there 20 times completely by myself.

It was one of the only places in town that felt like it had anything to do with what I thought would be in New York: a thread connecting life now to the old bohemianism of the village, of Manhattan, of music. Grit. The evidence of this was dripping from each individual bulb on the string lights that lined the room. It was a place to watch people be stunned by what they’re hearing. A place to take your friend who’s in town to see something they never have. A basement in a towering city where people knew my name and I knew there’s.

My relationship with 55 is much shorter than many who’ve been playing and listening there for half or more of their lives. However, I feel its impact is no less significant in my life. If there’s one thing I know about dying its that it makes room. Things die and things are born which could not exist before. And nothing, no matter how great, has ever managed immortality in this town, yet New York is still New York.

Italy

I have just returned to NYC from two weeks in Italy. I saw 8 cities and towns spanning from Tuscany to Campania and walked well over 200,000 steps. When I got there my friend asked me how I was conceptualizing the trip. I told her that my venture to Italy was in acknowledgement of the ideas I’ve clung to about myself for a long time. Ideas that I’ve come to discover hanging on me like dead wood waiting to be pruned. Over the last two weeks those ideas bubbled up like little armies and at times like cloaked demons over my shoulder, as they daily did before, this time, angry at their starvation. If I let enough time pass while they fired arrow after cannon after gun, they would peel off me like the skin on my sunburnt chest.

One day I sat facing the pyramid of Cestius (a giant tomb from 12 BC). My anxiety felt as if it were dripping down from the gorgeous trees above me: a black tar melting in the hot Roman sun. I sat in pain and did not move. I had nowhere to be and no one to answer to except that tree. What was that tree to me?

Pain isn’t tar falling from the trees, as I realized I had no choice in the matter of packing it in my suitcase with the rest of my baggage. However, I came to observe that I could look in the 500-year-old mirror of my airbnb in Florence and stand still. I could accept my experience enough to subject myself to the tiffany-blue waves of the Tyrrhenian Sea, a water of gentle, intimate rocking. I could offer myself up like Michaelangelo’s half-carved marble figures to the evening winds of Rome saying ‘chip away at the job as you will.’

Loose change

Change
Breaks me into loose change
Yesterday folded me neatly in my wallet
Today I’m the clinking in my pocket
Just as easily scrambled as loose change

Change
Shucks me into phrases
Yesterday wrote me out like a novel
Today I’m a nod where I don’t speak the language
Just as fragmented as I fought not to be

✩

I'm in Italy. Reflecting on change. The part after you release your grip, but before the renewal. The degradation of structure. Maybe its the ruins in Rome.

So I hear the 55 Bar is closing in NYC. Talk about change, talk about loose change. These pictures are from Rome and Tivoli. Ciao x

matr(acr)imony

Candid and humorous. What lies behind those beautiful and illustrious, at other times petrifying moving pictures cast upon your skin? Who am I? Who are you? Oh, god. The caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland.

Expectations stack like buttermilk pancakes in a modular diner in Western Pennsylvania on Saturday morning. Bowl of foiled butter chips on the table in case the butter in the buttermilk pancakes oozing Mrs. Butterworth’s isn’t up to your fatty standards. Now, marry me.

How few! Two word parables. How few look into the mirror and see themselves. How few look across the table and see who sits across the table.

I’m so impatient for the veil to tear. My veil is a half-ton velvet stage curtain. Curtail the curtain! I’m also the one with a monocle and step ladder sewing patches to where my midnight werewolf claws have hacked away.

“I don’t bite.” Of course you do.

qualm for quell

Life’s earthquakes. Anxiety probes. Thought’s questions. Emotional winds.

I launch myself at the internet, books, elders in my life, seeking wisdom. I take in the philosophies of others, the results of their trial and error, the pillars of who they think they are or who they’ve learned they’re not. Often it overwhelms me, sometimes calms me, but rarely deeply quells any internal discord.

In stiller moments, not always but more frequently found, after a night of uninterrupted sleep, eating light and well, staying mostly sober of all kinds, I hear inner wisdom. It is the wisdom of where I am now. It speaks the language I digest because of who I am now. I extract nourishment.

Why do I leave the sage within to last resort? Why do I prance about and into any open door on Main Street? Wisdom comes from the depths, the echoing caverns of my soul – the same place from which the questions, anxiety, thoughts, and emotions spring. They are not my enemy, but how often do I treat them so.

Cart before the hearse

Two times in the last month I’ve gone to say “cart before the horse” and instead uttered “cart before the hearse.”

I’ve been known to like a guarantee. Despite a history of taking risks, only the lamppost sees the conditions of my vulnerability.

I thought of a coin. I thought of the moon. I thought of the side no one ever sees.

One who acts based on what that action will afford them retches their own liveliness. They hurry and scramble. And there is no risk in that trade.

My horse is the dark side of the moon. To neglect walking and tending those lands for clinging to face, light, is to burn, very much like an ant under a magnifying glass, in the relentlessness of guarantee.

Mourning

“Sounds like mourning.”
What, like, dove? They’re right outside the window.
”Mourning.”
As in sunrise? Its 1PM

Mourning knows no sleep
I know mourning
I also know sleep
And sleep that knows no morning

If I mourn, move on
If I move on, do I not return?
Returning is all I was looking forward to
I do not know forward

I cannot mourn her
I cannot lose her
Mourning does not stop for me
The day rounds its back

Far Corner

How many times must one make a bed before they learn to start the fitted sheet on the far corner instead of leaving it for last? You know, the corner that’s hardest to reach because its pressed against two walls or obstructed by a nightstand. If I had counted how many beds I’ve made before yesterday, I could tell you.

#evolving

God Only Knows

I’ll make you so sure about it
You are my sanctuary, where I worship
Where I know God exists
Though you are not he, he only knows
What I’d be without you

What I’d be without the breeze in fall
It probes the trees drop their year-long hands
Then it kicks them up into piles
On street corners and against brick building walls
Fall only knows I’ve walked them all

Angel's Share

Where pen meets paper
Visions melt into waking
We call that the Angel’s Share
Where spirit turns vapor
Under dusty, muted moonbeams
Oblivion becomes aware
(M. Weidinger - Angel’s Share)

I saw the news that one of my favorite bars and one of NYC’s original modern-day speakeasies is closing. I can still taste the iconic Speak Low cocktail – rum, sherry and matcha. I was last there this past fall to honor the head bartender, but most of my jaunts to Angel’s Share were pre-pandemic, with friends and alone. This is all bringing up a harkening back to a few years ago, our world, this city, forever changed since then.

More than half of my time in New York City has now been pandemic, and I’ll say, its flown by so much quicker than the first 2 years. While this time has been inwardly fruitful for many people including myself, beloved establishments are still in cahoots with landlords and gigs are still cancelling over exposures. The broad encouragement of isolation first came as relief, but over time, as a person who tends towards loner-ism I certainly fell into a deep(er than before) wallow in solitude. Many aspects of my artist’s life here are still as questionably structured as a 70-year-old beach shack.

Albeit, there seems to be a constant call to loosen my grip to the winds of change amid being a full-time artist, entrepreneur, bohemian anyway. Art keeps me listening, seeking, pushing. I’ve learned this creative energy can push someone off a cliff, and it certainly will, if they don’t know where to aim it.

With the backdrop of Angel’s Share, a high-voltage intersection of energy of the last 30 years, closing its second-floor Cooper Union doors, I remember the pillars of my social and creative life before this pandemic. I think this is all to say that grace is in order. Self-understanding is absolutely in order. While this has always been true, the pandemic is still proving to be a candid opportunity to look it all over again.

It was an accident

It was an accident 
Not precisely privy to how it happened
Partially cause I don’t remember if 
It was an accident 

Promise I’ll pretend I’m not pretentious 
Pouting my way past the picnic 
Preferring pontification
Presuming I have particularly a place to preach that

It’s all accident 

Ambivalence

Ambivalence is.

I woke up at 5am buzzing with “what is good for me? is it this?” as if there were one answer. My mind paced across the room with its crude bedside manner. My hopeless body tossed in bed. 6am. 7am. I sit by the window. New York. It’s my grungy, lonely, absolutely cruel and auspicious home. I hate it and I love it, just like music. Just like myself, really.

Polarity… potential for balance? Sleeping at night?

I’ve always prided myself on knowing what I want. What I fail to estimate is how much I don’t want it. What do we do with the voice who deviates from those of our passionate wishes? Opting blindly for one denies the other. I’ve watched myself garner concern for wholeheartedness, omitting the responsibility to know my ambivalence and to admit I have ambivalence towards nearly everything. Personality type, or are we all this way, whether we deny it or not? Could there be guidance in contradiction, should we dare to look? Personally, I’ve exhausted many other methods and this seems like a valid road to venture.

It's just so good

There is something about him I don’t like about me.

A Common Misconception

"The trick is if you listen to that music and you see me, you're not getting anything out of it. If you listen to that music and you see yourself, it will probably make you cry and you'll learn something about yourself and now you're getting something out of it, you know." - Joni Mitchell, CBC Interview (2013)

I often receive a message or comment from a listener who has taken a lyric or poem of mine literally. It happens so frequently that I decided to write this blog post. Joni says it all. While my experience does live and breathe in all of my art, my songs are stories of collective experience, written with imagination and empathy, adorned with my observations and memories. To look at a painting and only see the painter gives your eyes no new knowledge. Where George Harrison said to let out your heart from behind that locked door, I am saying that art is mirror and to let in the reflection of yourself who stares you back.