I am so excited to share that I have been recording my second album!
“a place to call home”
This 10-song album will release a single each month for the next 10 months.
I call this album my honey album. Filled with heart-felt, feel-good acoustic sounds and rhythms, it follows the people and places near and dear to my heart. With each song, story and photographs will accompany its release, communicating a multi sensory and dynamic landscape of home.
This album is a part of a continuous inquisition into belonging and place in the world. It asks the question of what home really means to me. And its answer is achingly simple, yet ever-becoming. Home is not stagnant. It is alive, as we are, as the earth is, and our understanding of it ebbs and flows, shifting and changing as we do. It is place, people, and mystery. It is more than our current story can hold, it goes all the way back to the beginning, stretching generations before and in front of us.
These songs are meant to be a balm in a broken world, reminding us of the sweetness in the small moments of everyday life, that, at the end of the day, make everything worth it.
A repost of an early Substack post most directly translates the quality of this album, what it means to me, and what it seeks to evoke in others.
The Footprints a Place Leave Behind
The imprint of our September arrival was still fresh in the late autumn air. It was November and this strange place was just starting to feel familiar. The western red cedar and ferns danced with open oak forests, like the ones we knew back home. Gushing rivers now replaced the once dry riverbeds, and the heat of a California fall was now a rain-soaked memory. When we first arrived the garden had not been tended to in months, yet the kale stood nearly three feet-tall and the tomatoes were ripe and dripping, ready for harvest. Back home this garden would not have flourished without someone's caring hands.
It was just past dusk. I had spent the better half of the day in the wonder of a miracle garden, picking everything I could before the first frost of the season. The cold came late that first year, and we made the most of it. The afternoon’s harvest lay on the kitchen counter, covered in dirt. I turned on the bathtub tap, listening to the warm well water against the sound of the rain. The windows were open in the bathroom and the smell of wet soil wafted in. This was my home now.
It’s funny how places are imprinted in us. Everywhere I have ever been must live inside me, for I see their reflections wherever I go. Sometimes the particular angle of basalt in the sun catapults me back to the granite in Arizona, or the scent of pine blows in on a westerly wind, bringing me back to those summers in the high desert of Colorado. Little things I see or smell return me to a place. I sometimes even remember places I’ve never been. It causes me to wonder if the memories of places from our ancestors are embedded into our genetic memory, like my hunger for rain. Perhaps it goes all the way back to a place and people living on a weather-ridden island in the Atlantic. Memory ignites, calling out to the lost places of flesh and spirit and seeks an open branch to build a nest.
There is a question now of belonging and what it means. I have no answer, and yet my quiet search does not waiver. Our belonging lies between worlds, not directly witnessed, but approachable with subtlety. It is part dream, part longing, and part devotion, reminiscent of the soils from all the lands and people I have once been.
Photo by Amanda Yeaman:
https://amandayeamanphoto.com/
Stay tuned for first single name & release date <3