I’m uppin’ this date.

I have been away for a while working on details for releasing the album. Most likely I’ll start a new blog in the next few weeks with my name in the title to make it more searchable, but for now…please download some free tracks from my new album! Here’s the link:

jennygillespie1.bandcamp.mu
Also, if you’re in the Chicago area, please save the date for my CD Release Party at Uncommon Ground on Devon. I’ll play with a full band and my new album will finally be for sale! It will take place Saturday, January 17 at 8 pm.

Oh Martha

“There are days when the cage doesn’t seem to open very wide at all….” I love this lyric that opens Martha Wainwright’s new album I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too. I’m not having one of those days, but I definitely do have those days when no matter how hard I pry, I feel stuck. It’s so simply put, but so apt.

I remember hearing Matapedia, the record by her mother’s band The McGarrigles, whose music I grew up with as my mother is a huge fan. There’s a lyric that references Martha meeting an old lover of her mother’s: “He said, ‘Oh my god it’s Kate!’ /’No, I’m the daughter of Kate/My name is Martha, who are you?/Ma never told me about you. ‘ ” Martha ended up being one of my favorite musicians of the whole McGarrigle/Wainwright clan. I think she’s one the most interesting, daring singer/songwriters out there today. Her voice alone, which is full of aching spasms and heavenly crescendos, makes her brilliant enough. But then her risky melodic structures and direct, womanly lyrics send her over the edge of voice-alone brilliance. I still haven’t tired of her new album (though I did of her 1st one–I think this one is much better.)

I’m also listening a lot to Frightened Rabbit…their songs just send bittersweet pangs through me.  And make me want to go walkin’ in the Scottish rain.

The album is being mixed right now. I’m being patient. It might turn out to be an EP. I’d rather have all of the songs be polished gems than have some flab. We’ll see. Having a period just to write, play a few shows and enjoy the lazy, lilting summer has been really good for my spirit. I’ve been practicing with my sister, who sings and plays piano, and there’s nothing more fun than that.

Ipod love

My darling boyfriend got me an Ipod touch for my birthday. I have to say, it makes the music-listening experience even more fun. Just seeing that gorgeous, lucid graphic of the album’s art pop up is so satisfying! It’s so wonderful to walk in the morning, when the light is still new, under the green eaves of my neighborhood, with a beautiful tune in my ears. I remember my roommate in Paris telling me how much she loved walking through the city with Radiohead in her ears, and at the time (19) I couldn’t understand why she would want to block out the rich sounds of the town with Thom Yorke’s sad warble. But now I understand how it only adds another layer to the experience, not a shield but an illuminating screen. Today I listened to Tift Merrit’s “Something to Me”–the perfect bittersweet but positive morning tune–and some tracks from Habib Koite’s “Afriki.” It didn’t hurt that the weather has been absolutely stunning, cool and pure blue skies. I’m in love with my Ipod.

turning 28

i hope i’m headed towards some strange event at this age
hold me down like the warm jade in the ring’s setting, stay

in the last light of youth
we look around at our friends
some are trying to stay wild
others are building their shelter
so where are we

the roses you brought turned black as oil spills today
when i need your contours close you just seem to float away

in the last light of youth
we look around at our friends
some are wandering home to their mothers
others becoming their own

Image by Nancy Gillespie

Onward

I just mailed my hard drive off to the engineer in Austin, who will mix my album…whoohoo!

At this point I have let go–I feel pretty free, like I’ve struck this balance between ambition and surrender. I feel clear and energized, but also more immune to bouts of low self-confidence and the need for everyone’s approval surrounding the project. I’m just one drop of water in the ocean…I only would like to cool a few people’s brows with my music…but I’m not expecting to turn into a tsunami. (Pardon the late-in-the-workday cheesy metaphor.)

Lately I am getting excited to write again…I kind of want to write with a lightness of touch in the next batch of songs, not just in the music but in the lyrics. I want to work with more images, create atmospheres and tell stories about love. I feel like the songs on “Light Year” (my recent project) are pretty heavy–a few songs about loss and regret (though I try to keep the music grounded in lightness, for the most part.) And I also kind of ignored love for the most part in the songwriting…I think I was trying to prove to myself that I could write about experiences other than romantic love.

I also want to make this blog a bit more interesting to read…it’s been a bit self-involved, mostly because I’m not writing in a real journal (and it’s helped me, symbolically sort of move myself along in the album-making process.) I just read my friend Allen’s blog and it’s so well-crafted and funny…so I will aspire to make this a bit zippier!

pseudo-poem for the end of the album

 

in my mind’s eye a white butterfly flashed on the shadows against the wall, like the afterimage of sun, when i heard the news she was gone

and later that afternoon one was trailing my sister and me

*

without you around, i took my friend and the dog to the lake. the sky pale violet, the water blue chiffon. duress of day crumbling like soft bricks of gold. and what should have been a romantic setting was a love setting. love for the world and the dog and the friend and for you not there.

a beautiful black woman and her three children all in orange-red, the color of my friend’s morocco

they screamed as they danced into the freezing water

a man looked up timidly from his perch on the dock, reading a book

volleyballs were dancing over nets like musical notes

and we sat in silence while the dog tried to eat flies

i thought of my grandmother and how she was in the water, in the clouds

and neither of us had a camera but we said it would be a memory

i don’t take enough photographs, i depend too much on the fragile substance of memory

*

we drank tea with fresh mint one night, the owner adored my moroccan friend

“why don’t you smile?” “Because I’m eating” she demurely replied

and one day we got locked out

for six hours, the dog ate helicopter seeds and got ill on the porch

we felt like refugees on a beautiful day–with no money, phone or indoors

we walked and walked until my sister came to pick us up

and we argued because it was out of her way but then we made up

while watching “the princess bride” a movie that calms all hearts.

*

today a man snapped a picture of a woman walking with his camera phone

and said to me “it’s for my collection of hotties”

today the air by the river was cool and i learned the french words for squirrel and fog

*

i let my music pour out from sunday morning to sunday night

a vigil and a trance

the engineer gently asked me to try that vocal again

and i did

the light came in through the glass block window of the old pinball factory

however people hear this music 

and hear out of tune strings or wonder why i didn’t use a click track

i know it came from a pure place, of devotion and delight

image by kamila kulik

Devotion

I usually have thoughts about my album a few times per hour. Lately the thoughts have been a rotating repertoire of:

 

I think this is a really good album.

I don’t know what I’m doing.

This is a project that I’ve done solely for my own gratification.

This is a project I want the world to know about.

I wish I had done this album all at home.

I wish I had a producer helping me on this album.

This album documents my growth as a musician.

This album documents how I can’t choose between styles (country, techno, folk-rock…what am I???)

 

I think the inconstancy of the mind can be interesting to observe, don’t you?

 

Wherever my thought needle lands, I continue to push my project into existence. I just emerged out of a break from it—which was entirely good for my spirit and sanity. Last night I feel like I fell in love with it again…all it took was spending about 4 hours to write an organ part.

 

A work of art can almost seem like a new country you are trying to form, or a child you are trying to raise. How do you know when it’s reached perfection? You don’t–you just nurture it the best you can, from a place of authentic surrender and passion towards expression until you can see it to completion. Not perfection, but completion. Like when the child grows up to be a somewhat sane twenty-something–and you let go. 

 

I went and saw my boyfriend’s old roommate perform last night—he’s a poet and wrote a surrealist fictional poetic narrative of Robert F. Kennedy’s life. It was wonderful and funny, and I admired how he’d created this entertaining, poetic entity out of such a random concept. My boyfriend told me he’d written at least 600 poems–he only performed around 60 maybe. It was heartening to know an artist can pour so much of himself into a project and not give a damn how obscure the subject matter is, or how sprawling, and it turns out to be a successful, universally appealing, mind-changing work of art. Can I ascribe the same focus and devotion to my own project? Sometimes I can, but it has to be in a place of joy and discovery, not self-inflicted pressure or the need for approval.

 

Image: Squeak Carnwath print

Housepainting Music

I attempted to paint my apartment back to white yesterday. I got through most of one wall.

I went through several CDs (Joanna Newsome, too intricate; Arcade Fire, too indignant) before I finally picked the right one to paint a wall to:

The Last Beautiful Day-New Buffalo

Because it’s cheery, weird, and spacious. You can squeegee in time to the beat.

Thanks, Sally.

 

The Third Thing

When my sister and her boyfriend visited me in the studio a few weeks ago, she said I looked completely blissed out, all flushed cheeks and smiles. And I was. Of course it reminded me of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s 1990 classic “Flow”, which explores how you reach this blissed-out state through losing yourself in a task, artistic project or mundane activity like washing the dishes. My mom lent me the book long ago and it’s still resting on my bookshelf. I’ve been meaning to dig into its very, very small type. But maybe I don’t need to read the book, because I already understand what it means to reach that zone. It seems a bit counterintuitive to analyze the state, although I’m sure there are eloquent nuggets in the book.

I think I’m lucky in that my boyfriend also knows this “flow” state with his own work. When we are at home both working on our projects, and slip into each other’s zone to give a peck on the cheek then slip back to our own private worlds, I’m incredibly contented. It’s taken me a long time to realize that to have a ”third thing” in our relationship is a sanity-booster, whether it’s our own projects we discuss with each other, or tennis, or playing terrible versions of Billy Joel songs on the piano together, or even our obsession with the Wire. The poet Donald Hall coined the phrase and describes third things as “essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one. John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly.”

I’ve had to mature from too much dependency on my partner to fulfill my every need to knowing third things can bring us a shared flow, joy and sanity, and that also I have a ”secret garden” in my art and my other relationships, but a secret place that I can share with him because he is my family now. 

* Donald Hall writes on the third thing in his book The Best Day, the Worst Day, chronicling his marriage to Jane Kenyon–you can read the excerpt here.

A joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 1990

War and Music

On the train I looked over someone’s shoulder, reading a Red-Eye—one of those daily papers they hand out at stations only to be tossed into the trash once your destination is reached. The paper starts out with palatable snippets of hard news, then segues into your standard pop-culture fare—Britney’s breakdowns, American Idol triumphs. The headline “4,000 Dead” made me flinch as usual, and the guy reading it flipped to the next page quickly. Can I say I blame him? I myself have only read what’s going on with Barack and Hillary lately, having given up on any immediate withdrawal of troops or end to the suicide bombings, at least until a new presidency is instilled. I guess that’s my way of keeping hope alive—knowing that something of a fresh start (even Hillary would be fresh at this point, I think) could eventually make this madness cease. But is such a claim of patience (or is it more helplessness) a cop-out? Is a dependency on one figure to reverse our missteps just one more misstep?

I admire those who aren’t as emotionally fragile as me (as weak as it sounds, I can sometimes lose a whole day to sadness if I think too deeply on what’s going on in our world) who can face the ugliness and even stand up to it, in concrete or symbolic action, in expression. A group of protestors who call themselves “Catholic Schoolgirls Against the War” recently entered an Easter Sunday church service in Chicago to perform a “die-in,” squirting fake blood on themselves to elicit empathy for Iraqi citizens who have seen their holiest days marred by violence. While I agree with the cardinal that mass wasn’t the place to do this—parishioners were truly frightened and upset by the intrusion—the protestors in a statement announced they took the gamble “to reach both Holy Name’s large Easter audience—including Chicago’s most prominent Catholic citizens, who commonly attend Easter mass at the church—and the many more viewers and readers of the local press, which usually extensively covers their services.” Their goal was to remind the churchgoers that cardinal George and Daley met two months ago with the president, described as the “principal public figure responsible for initiating the carnage in Iraq.” It’s all so messy, heartbreaking, but fascinating too. One one side you have the protestors who took an extreme symbolic action to its end, which rouses complicated feelings of admiration and irritation, and then the parishioners and their children who just wanted to have a simple, peaceful Easter mass, but whose American bubble of false safety was pierced by the action. There is no black and white here, really.  

What of musicians who address the war? They don’t have to storm into a church to relay their feelings of rage, disappointment and frustration. Lyrics can suffice. But many critics and musicians look down on those artists who take it upon themselves to be political artists, as if art has no place in that realm. I greatly disagree. I think politically charged art is one of the most peaceful tools towards creating a global consciousness against war and for peace. When done right, it can not only rouse the listener to want something better for this world, but also completely rock. That’s why albums like “Hail to the Thief” by Radiohead and “In Our Bedroom After the War” by the Stars are underrated masterpieces.

 

Or from a jauntier viewpoint, but equally articulate, the amazing Nelly McKay. These artists are able to address global concerns through the universal connector of music, with passion and eloquence. And to connect others in consciousness against corruption, in hope for peace, is an act not to be disdained. It’s something I myself haven’t attempted on a grand scale with my music–relationships and human connection remain my greatest fuel– but I edge towards it in my writing, at least in thinking about the broken world’s effect on our psyches, our lives’ and love’s effect on the broken world.