Tree Song
If the trees could sing to us about how to live...
Goooood morning! Tree Song, song 2 of my EP Hands, comes out today:
While I was learning guitar, I was spending a lot of time sitting on the couch staring out the window in the morning. Tree Song was born one such morning in February ’23. We were having a number of oddly warm days, and I was noticing buds forming on some of the trees early.
Suddenly, thoughts of the !!APOCALYPSE!! flew into my mind like plastic bags in the wind and filled me with anxiety and hopelessness.
As a therapist and long time meditator I am prone to picking up my mental contents and examining them. I am a haggard crone wandering my inner landscape picking up cool rocks. Sometimes though I find trash!
Where did these come from?
There are a lot of factors nowadays contributing to a sense of pervasive instability and fear regarding the future. Climate change, fascism, techno-feudalism, the undying plagues of racism and misogyny. These are real threats.
But I don’t want to take the bait of fatalism. The thought that this will all only lead to some hopeless apocalypse functions like euthanasia administered by the elite. That is their fantasy, their orchestrated apocalypse. Not mine. It only functions to keep me from caring and acting.
So this song was a bit of mental weeding and clean up. There is a lot of power of what we imagine and allow to take root in our minds. This song is envisioning the slow growth of a new form of community. It’s a transformation of anxiety into anticipation, excitement, hope, informed action. Perhaps our pain and anxiety can teach us a way to love this world better. What could that world look like? Can we have the patience to build it? If the trees could sing to us about how to live I imagine they might point us toward the power and resilience in slow growth, interdependence, sky-bound hope married to rooted realism…
A couple of songwriting notes—I wrote this after learning some new picking patterns in the Adrianne Lenker School of Song class. I was having fun weaving melodies into my finger picking. I recorded the guitar/vocals live, overdubbed some harmonies, and re-amped bird song through a Mood pedal which you can hear as the backdrop of the whole song (highly recommend this as a fun meditative activity in and of itself—I pulled the bits for this song from 2-3 hours of drooling and knob twiddling). The harmonies are a bit experimental in parts—I have found that harmonies I like are a bit strange and crunchy and I attribute this to singing a lot of weird/intense choral music in college choir (shout out Gesualdo). I wanted the harmonies to sound like a trio (tree-o!) of forest spirits dancing around you and singing in your ear. Hope the song takes you somewhere like here:
